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The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett
01 Jan 1974-
TL;DR: Iser as mentioned in this paper analyzed major works of English fiction ranging from Bunyan, Fielding, Scott, and Thackeray to Joyce and Beckett, and provided a framework for a theory of such literary effects and aesthetic responses.
Abstract: Like no other art form, the novel confronts its readers with circumstances arising from their own environment of social and historical norms and stimulates them to assess and criticize their surroundings. By analyzing major works of English fiction ranging from Bunyan, Fielding, Scott, and Thackeray to Joyce and Beckett, renowned critic Wolfgang Iser here provides a framework for a theory of such literary effects and aesthetic responses. Iser's focus is on the theme of discovery, whereby the reader is given the chance to recognize the deficiencies of his own existence and the suggested solutions to counterbalance them. The content and form of this discovery is the calculated response of the reader -- the implied reader. In discovering the expectations and presuppositions that underlie all his perceptions, the reader learns to "read" himself as he does the text.
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TL;DR: The authors argues that precepts for cultivating the rational child, set forth by Maria and Richard Edgeworth in their handbook Practical Education, collide with fictional presentations of those precepts in Maria's novella The Good French Governess.
Abstract: This essay argues that precepts for cultivating the rational child, set forth by Maria and Richard Edgeworth in their handbook Practical Education, collide with fictional presentations of those precepts in Maria's novella The Good French Governess. The resulting gap between the novella's pedagogically driven narrative and a subtext that undermines the pedagogical agenda cannot be bridged by words. This ironically draws the reader to question the primacy accorded to words—to reasoned arguments and precise verbal articulation—that play such a significant role in the program for rational education. Further, the collisions between the demands of ideology and the needs of fiction invite us as readers to raise questions about genre, about our expectations of nonfictions and fictions pertaining to education.
2 citations
01 Jan 2003
TL;DR: This article argued that poetry offers learners a way to imagine (and to image) through sudden global insight, to organize their experience, and to connect new knowledge to other areas of knowledge; yet, their appeals for poetry's place in a full curriculum have been only rarely heard beyond the elementary school level.
Abstract: Although the writing-across-the-curriculum movement has demonstrated the effectiveness of expressive and transactional writing to assist subject matter learning, poetic writing remains nearly absent in classrooms and research studies. Yet, when the first theorists of discourse in composition— James Britton, James Moffett, and James Kinneavy–worked out the theoretical models for discourse that became, and remain, central for the research and teaching of writing, they included poetry (in its broad meaning of all literature) as a major mode and function of discourse. These and other theorists and researchers advanced arguments and evidence that poetry offers learners a way to imagine (and to image) through sudden global insight, to organize their experience, and to connect new knowledge to other areas of knowledge; yet, their appeals for poetry’s place in a full curriculum have been only rarely heard beyond the elementary school level. Why this neglect? In an essay published in 1983, “The Relation of Thought and Language,” Janet Emig demonstrated that even English curricula, as rhetoric and writing textbooks have given evidence since Hugh Blair’s first (1784) text, have suppressed creativity. She concluded that the problem was a view of language solely as a “vehicle of communication” (Emig 35). Since then, some degree of creativity has been restored to composition textbooks, but at the same time literature has become increasingly separated from the teaching of writing, research, and theories on composing. College English, for example, no longer publishes poetry or creative non-fiction.
2 citations
01 Jan 2014
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on the stylistic changes that exist in English-Arabic translation texts of the British Broadcasting Corporation's (BBC) political news and show how the differences in the order of sentence constituents and the points of grammars of the Source Texts (ST) and Target Texts(TT) contribute to stylistic and semantic changes.
Abstract: Leech and Short (1981, p.74) argues that every analysis of style is an attempt to find the artistic principles behind an author’s choice of language. Hence, this article focuses on the stylistic that exist in English-Arabic translation texts of the British Broadcasting Corporation‘s (BBC) political news. It attempts to find the nature of the stylistic changes as proposed by Vinay and Darbelnet (1995) and also to show how the differences in the order of sentence constituents and the points of grammars of the Source Texts (ST) and Target Texts (TT) contribute to the stylistic and the semantic changes. This paper deals with the sequences of the sentence constituents, some elements of grammar such as tenses, prepositions and adverbs, and the semantic changes that have consequently taken place in the Arabic translation. The paper makes use of the stylistic ideas of Ghazala (1995) as well as X’ Theory by Culicover (1997) to capture the syntactic changes. The analysis of the data shows the following: (a) The semantic changes are attributable to the differences on points of grammar (tenses, prepositions and adverbs) the differences in the weltanschauung (world-view) of the speakers of the ST and the TT arising from different cultural emphasis and differences in some socio-linguistics elements; and (b) The stylistic changes are essentially arising from differing language structures.
2 citations
TL;DR: This article explored a web of narrative-characterization centers in Ray Bradbury's story Cistern and shed light on the centers of point of view, dialogic narrative technique, and thematic concerns that include internal and external conflicts.
Abstract: In the light of the inevitable twinning of linguistic theory and literary critical interpretation and appreciation, Ray Bradbury's narrative techniques constitute his own thematic and aesthetic discourse. Bradbury’s stylistic narrative discourse evokes a set of narrative tools through which characters communicate ideas, thoughts, and feelings, creating aesthetic effects that appeal to readers. These blended artistic elements are interpreted in the light of theoretical fictional context of narrator-character, character-character, narrator-reader interactions. Exploring a web of narrative-characterization centers in Bradbury’s story Cistern, the paper sheds light on the centers of point of view, dialogic narrative technique, and thematic concerns that include internal and external conflicts. Meantime, the paper draws on Gerard Genette’s analytical method of study of narrative discourse, among others. Moreover, Bradbury's themato-narrative techniques offer a fresh interpretative community for understanding his narrative characterization centers and serve as a receptionist case study for scholars and critics of modern literary criticism. Article visualizations:
2 citations
Cites background from "The Implied Reader: Patterns of Com..."
...The narratee is concerned with the immediate narrator alone, they both constitute the momentum of the poetic narrative as “there is no narrative without a narrator—without the entity” (Iser, 1978, p.9)....
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20 Dec 2019
TL;DR: The results demonstrated that indeed even the smallest alterations of the visual representation of the text produced shifts in meaning; most of those shifts were pragmatic ambiguities, however, in certain instances there was a loss of semantic emphasis or narrative production.
Abstract: This article contributes to the multimodal investigation of comics translation, a highly semiotic activity. The author discusses the visual representation of the text as an image through a case study of the Lithuanian translation of Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel MAUS (translated into Lithuanian by Juskienė and Lempert, 2012). While viewing multimodality as a translation tool and a challenging area, he claims that the visual representation of the text is an integral part of the original multimodal event, whereby the meaning is conveyed through an intrinsic relationship between verbal and non-verbal elements, and that any distortion of those would result in alterations or losses in meaning. The results demonstrated that indeed even the smallest alterations of the visual representation of the text produced shifts in meaning; most of those shifts were pragmatic ambiguities, however, in certain instances there was a loss of semantic emphasis or narrative production. Comics translators and publishers are thus urged to fully comprehend the very dynamic and complex nature of multimodal texts and make every effort to ensure that translation would not result in any multimodal disruptions, if such preservation is technologically available.
2 citations