Abstract The paper surveys two different functions that may be ascribed to unreliable narratives. Derived from the notion of technique (Russian »priëm«, German »Verfahren«), function is a key concept of literary theory, which relates textual properties to effects. One of the functions, in recent time related to unreliable narration, is deception. In order to appreciate the literary effect of deception, the reader must finally understand that s/he has been deceived for a certain time. In other words, in order to recognize that s/he has been deceived, the reader must find out what is the case in the narrated world, i. e. fiction, and distinguish it from what was told without being the case. Another effect will be introduced. It is related to narratives in which it is impossible to find out what is true in the fiction. In those cases, readers will be perplex or helpless. In the next step, these effects – that of deception and that of helplessness – being effects of reception shall be substituted by their hermeneutic counterparts. If one is deceived by an unreliable narration, one finally finds out what is the case in the fiction (with regard to the reason for the deception); if one is left helpless by an unreliable narration, one cannot find out what is the case in the fiction (with regard to the unexplained fact that is the reason for the helplessness). The first one of these hermeneutic counterparts of the reception functions will be called the closed function of unreliability, since a gap of explanation can be closed by an interpretation; the second one will be called the open function of unreliability, since a gap of explanation is left open and cannot be closed. The remaining parts of the paper deal with literary examples which show different cases fulfilling those functions. The first two examples are taken from stories by Stefan Zweig. In »The Fowler Snared« (»Sommernovellette«, 1911), the closed function is fulfilled because the trustworthy extradiegetic narrator finally corrects the unreliable intradiegetic narrator. The next example of Zweig, »The Woman and the Landscape« (»Die Frau und die Landschaft«, 1922), lacks an explicit correction, since the narrator deceives not only the reader but also himself. A thorough interpretation, however, shows that it is more plausible to assume that the narrator’s account referring to certain facts is not true than to assume that it is correct. In this case, the gap can be closed, too, although there are more assumptions required than in the first case as the second text gives no explicit trustworthy evidence. The evidence must be inferred by hermeneutic conclusions. In contrast to the closed function, the open function of unreliability is much more complicated to ascribe. The first case, the (very) short novel The Castle of the Brothers Zanowsky (Das Schloß der Brüder Zanowsky, 1933) by Paul Zech presents several contradicting versions of a fact of the fiction (narrated world). The narrator renders the
摘要本文调查了两种不同的功能，可能归因于不可靠的叙述。功能是文学理论的一个关键概念，源于技术的概念(俄语“priëm”，德语“Verfahren”)，它将文本属性与效果联系起来。最近与不可靠叙述有关的功能之一是欺骗。为了欣赏欺骗的文学效果，读者必须最终明白他/她被欺骗了一段时间。换句话说，为了认识到他/她被欺骗了，读者必须找出在叙述的世界里是什么情况。虚构，并将其与不真实的故事区分开来。另一个效应将被引入。它与叙事有关，在这种叙事中，不可能发现小说中的真实情况。在这种情况下，读者会感到困惑或无助。在接下来的步骤中，这些影响——欺骗和无助——作为接受的影响将被它们的解释学对应物所取代。如果一个人被一个不可靠的叙述欺骗了，他最终会发现小说中的情况(关于欺骗的原因);如果一个人因为一个不可靠的叙述而感到无助，他就无法发现小说中的情况是什么(关于无法解释的事实，这是无助的原因)。第一个与接收函数相对应的解释学上的函数将被称为不可靠性的封闭函数，因为解释的缺口可以通过解释来弥补;第二个函数将被称为不可靠性的开放函数，因为解释的空白是开放的，无法关闭。本文的其余部分处理的文学实例，显示不同的情况下履行这些职能。前两个例子摘自斯蒂芬·茨威格的故事。在《捕虫人的圈套》(《索默中篇小说》，1911)中，封闭功能得以实现，因为值得信赖的超叙事叙述者最终纠正了不可靠的超叙事叙述者。茨威格的下一个例子，“女人与风景”(“Die Frau und Die Landschaft”，1922)，缺乏明确的纠正，因为叙述者不仅欺骗了读者，也欺骗了他自己。然而，一个彻底的解释表明，假设叙述者关于某些事实的叙述是不真实的比假设它是正确的更有可能。在这种情况下，差距也可以缩小，尽管比第一种情况需要更多的假设，因为第二种文本没有提供明确的可信证据。证据必须由解释学结论推断出来。与不可靠性的封闭函数相比，不可靠性的开放函数的归属要复杂得多。第一个例子是保罗·泽克(Paul Zech)的(非常)短篇小说《扎诺夫斯基兄弟的城堡》(Das Schloß der br der Zanowsky, 1933)，它呈现了小说(叙事世界)中一个事实的几个相互矛盾的版本。叙述者把它们呈现出来，但并不偏爱其中一个。他甚至无法解释，更不用说承认这些版本相互矛盾的事实了。因此，似乎不可能确定这些版本中哪一个是真实的。叙述者相信的那个版本可能是真的，也可能不是。一方面，叙述者显然是不可靠的;另一方面，他的不可靠不是故事的重点。它的要点是，叙述者告诉我们的东西不可避免地是模糊的;他说谎或不能发现他的世界里什么是真实的，这不是重点。最后一个例子来自恩斯特·韦斯1936年的小说《可怜的挥霍者》(Der arme Verschwender)。在这种情况下，叙述者的话语充满了单一的矛盾和遗漏。有些差距是可以弥补的，有些则不行。然而，没有任何解释可以解释叙述者在法庭上的误报和少报。叙述者在他的话语中表现出的自我意识的缺失，使得叙述者假定的不可靠性的整体设置是开放的。文章最后对不可靠叙事的封闭功能和开放功能在文学/诗学上的区别作了简要的展望。填补叙述者不可靠造成的空白的文本，比留下叙述者不可靠造成的空白的文本显示出其他文学属性。另外，由于不可靠的叙述而产生开放空隙的文本与具有类似空隙但不是不可靠叙述的文本之间的差异很难解释。
{"title":"Offenheit und Geschlossenheit als Funktionen des unzuverlässigen Erzählens. Mit Interpretationsbeispielen anhand von Texten von Ernst Weiß, Paul Zech und Stefan Zweig","authors":"Matthias Aumüller","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2018-0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2018-0008","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The paper surveys two different functions that may be ascribed to unreliable narratives. Derived from the notion of technique (Russian »priëm«, German »Verfahren«), function is a key concept of literary theory, which relates textual properties to effects. One of the functions, in recent time related to unreliable narration, is deception. In order to appreciate the literary effect of deception, the reader must finally understand that s/he has been deceived for a certain time. In other words, in order to recognize that s/he has been deceived, the reader must find out what is the case in the narrated world, i. e. fiction, and distinguish it from what was told without being the case. Another effect will be introduced. It is related to narratives in which it is impossible to find out what is true in the fiction. In those cases, readers will be perplex or helpless. In the next step, these effects – that of deception and that of helplessness – being effects of reception shall be substituted by their hermeneutic counterparts. If one is deceived by an unreliable narration, one finally finds out what is the case in the fiction (with regard to the reason for the deception); if one is left helpless by an unreliable narration, one cannot find out what is the case in the fiction (with regard to the unexplained fact that is the reason for the helplessness). The first one of these hermeneutic counterparts of the reception functions will be called the closed function of unreliability, since a gap of explanation can be closed by an interpretation; the second one will be called the open function of unreliability, since a gap of explanation is left open and cannot be closed. The remaining parts of the paper deal with literary examples which show different cases fulfilling those functions. The first two examples are taken from stories by Stefan Zweig. In »The Fowler Snared« (»Sommernovellette«, 1911), the closed function is fulfilled because the trustworthy extradiegetic narrator finally corrects the unreliable intradiegetic narrator. The next example of Zweig, »The Woman and the Landscape« (»Die Frau und die Landschaft«, 1922), lacks an explicit correction, since the narrator deceives not only the reader but also himself. A thorough interpretation, however, shows that it is more plausible to assume that the narrator’s account referring to certain facts is not true than to assume that it is correct. In this case, the gap can be closed, too, although there are more assumptions required than in the first case as the second text gives no explicit trustworthy evidence. The evidence must be inferred by hermeneutic conclusions. In contrast to the closed function, the open function of unreliability is much more complicated to ascribe. The first case, the (very) short novel The Castle of the Brothers Zanowsky (Das Schloß der Brüder Zanowsky, 1933) by Paul Zech presents several contradicting versions of a fact of the fiction (narrated world). The narrator renders the","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":"12 1","pages":"127 - 150"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2018-06-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jlt-2018-0008","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46683238","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract This essay asks whether the attribution of unreliability to the narrator of a literary text is always dependent upon interpretation. The bulk of narratological research answers with »yes«. Yet the content of the term »interpretation-dependent« is understood in radically different ways. As a minimal consensus, it is commonly accepted that the attribution of unreliability cannot be described as »interpretation-neutral«, in the way that, for instance, the statement »The narrator in text T is a homodiegetic narrator« is interpretation-neutral. Following a few preliminary explanatory remarks on terminology, I propose two arguments for why this majority opinion is false. I argue that the statement »Text T is unreliably narrated« is not always interpretation-dependent. Within the framework of the first argument, I attempt to show that the criterion of »interpretation neutrality« depends upon some meta-theoretical assumptions. If one assumes that basic linguistic characteristics are valid independent of their interpretation and argues that a sentence such as »Call me Ishmael« establishes a homodiegetic narrator because the word »me« signals that he belongs to the narrated story, then one implicitly excludes as inadequate certain idiosyncratic theories of meaning that would ascribe a different meaning to »me«. That is not problematic in and of itself. But it shows that there are conditions of adequacy for theories of meaning that are fundamentally negotiable. And the set of statements which can be attributed the attribute of being »interpretation-neutral« can vary depending upon how these conditions of adequacy are defined. In a corresponding adaptation of the conditions of adequacy for theories of meaning and interpretation, it is therefore inherently possible that even statements about the reliability of a narrator could be granted the status of being interpretation-neutral. The second argument focuses on the praxis of interpretation. I seek to reconstruct how exactly the qualification of a narrator as homodiegetic (an attribute that is usually considered as interpretation-neutral) and as unreliable (an attribute that is usually not considered as interpretation-neutral) can come about in a process of interpretation. There appear to be cases in which criteria commonly cited to qualify a statement as an interpretation-neutral description of a text are also applicable for the attribution of narrative unreliability. Such cases are literary texts like Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd or Ambrose Bierce’s An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, in which the unreliability of the narrator is apparent. The knowledge that the narrators in these texts at least temporarily withhold facts relevant to the plot, tell lies, make mistakes, hallucinate, etc. can just as much be attained on the basis of an unreflective understanding of the linguistic meanings of words as can the knowledge that the narrators are part of the stories they tell. If one wishes
{"title":"Warum die Aussage »Text T ist unzuverlässig erzählt« nicht immer interpretationsabhängig ist. Zwei Argumente","authors":"Thomas Petraschka","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2018-0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2018-0007","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay asks whether the attribution of unreliability to the narrator of a literary text is always dependent upon interpretation. The bulk of narratological research answers with »yes«. Yet the content of the term »interpretation-dependent« is understood in radically different ways. As a minimal consensus, it is commonly accepted that the attribution of unreliability cannot be described as »interpretation-neutral«, in the way that, for instance, the statement »The narrator in text T is a homodiegetic narrator« is interpretation-neutral. Following a few preliminary explanatory remarks on terminology, I propose two arguments for why this majority opinion is false. I argue that the statement »Text T is unreliably narrated« is not always interpretation-dependent. Within the framework of the first argument, I attempt to show that the criterion of »interpretation neutrality« depends upon some meta-theoretical assumptions. If one assumes that basic linguistic characteristics are valid independent of their interpretation and argues that a sentence such as »Call me Ishmael« establishes a homodiegetic narrator because the word »me« signals that he belongs to the narrated story, then one implicitly excludes as inadequate certain idiosyncratic theories of meaning that would ascribe a different meaning to »me«. That is not problematic in and of itself. But it shows that there are conditions of adequacy for theories of meaning that are fundamentally negotiable. And the set of statements which can be attributed the attribute of being »interpretation-neutral« can vary depending upon how these conditions of adequacy are defined. In a corresponding adaptation of the conditions of adequacy for theories of meaning and interpretation, it is therefore inherently possible that even statements about the reliability of a narrator could be granted the status of being interpretation-neutral. The second argument focuses on the praxis of interpretation. I seek to reconstruct how exactly the qualification of a narrator as homodiegetic (an attribute that is usually considered as interpretation-neutral) and as unreliable (an attribute that is usually not considered as interpretation-neutral) can come about in a process of interpretation. There appear to be cases in which criteria commonly cited to qualify a statement as an interpretation-neutral description of a text are also applicable for the attribution of narrative unreliability. Such cases are literary texts like Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd or Ambrose Bierce’s An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, in which the unreliability of the narrator is apparent. The knowledge that the narrators in these texts at least temporarily withhold facts relevant to the plot, tell lies, make mistakes, hallucinate, etc. can just as much be attained on the basis of an unreflective understanding of the linguistic meanings of words as can the knowledge that the narrators are part of the stories they tell. If one wishes ","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":"12 1","pages":"113 - 126"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2018-06-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jlt-2018-0007","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44724618","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Heterodiegetic narrators are not present in the story they tell. That is how Gérard Genette has defined heterodiegesis. But this definition of heterodiegesis leaves open what ›absence‹ of the narrator really means: If a friend of the protagonist tells the story but does not appear in it, is he therefore heterodiegetic? Or if a narrator tells something that happened before his lifetime, is he therefore heterodiegetic? These open questions reveal the vagueness of Genette’s definition. However, Simone Elisabeth Lang has recently made a clearer proposal to define heterodiegesis. She argues that narrators should be called heterodiegetic only if they are fundamentally distinguished from the ontological status of the fictional characters: Heterodiegetic narrators are not part of the story for logical reasons, because they are presented as inventors of the story. This is, for example, the case in Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities (1809): In the beginning of this novel the narrator presents himself as inventor of the character’s names (»Edward – so we shall call a wealthy nobleman in the prime of life – had been spending several hours of a fine April morning in his nursery-garden«). Based on that recent definition of heterodiegesis my article deals with the question whether such heterodiegetic narrators can be unreliable. My question is: How could you indicate that the inventor of a fictitious story tells something which is not correct or incomplete? In answering this question, I refer to some proposals of Janina Jacke’s article in this journal. Jacke shows that the distinction between homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narrators should not be confused with the distinction between personal and non-personal narrators or with the distinction between restricted and all-knowing narrators. If you make such differentiations, then of course heterodiegetic narrators can be unreliable: They can omit some essential information or interpret the story inappropriately. Heterodiegetic narrators of an invented story can even lie to the reader or deceive themselves about some elements of the invention. That means: A heterodiegetic narration cannot only be value-related unreliable (›discordant narration‹), but also fact-related unreliable. My article delves especially into this type of unreliability and shows that heterodiegetic narrators of a fictitious story can be fact-related unreliable, if they tell something which was not invented by themselves. In that case, the narrator himself sometimes does not really know whether he tells a true or a fictitious story. Such narrators are unreliable if they assert that the story is true, although they are suggesting at the same time that it is not. I call this type of unreliable narrator a ›fabulating chronicler‹ (›fabulierender Chronist‹): On the one hand, such narrators present themselves as chroniclers of historical facts but, on the other hand, they seem to be fabulists who tell a fairy tale. This type
异叙事叙述者并不存在于他们所讲述的故事中。这就是格姆拉德·吉内特对异质性发育的定义。但是，这种“异叙事”的定义没有揭示叙述者“缺席”的真正含义:如果主角的朋友讲述了故事，但没有出现在故事中，那么他是异叙事的吗?或者如果叙述者讲述的是发生在他生前的事情，那么他就是异叙事的吗?这些悬而未决的问题揭示了吉内特定义的模糊性。然而，Simone Elisabeth Lang最近提出了一个更清晰的定义异发育的建议。她认为，只有当叙述者从根本上区别于虚构人物的本体论地位时，叙述者才应该被称为异叙事的:出于逻辑原因，异叙事的叙述者不是故事的一部分，因为他们是作为故事的发明者出现的。例如，在约翰·沃尔夫冈·歌德的小说《选择性亲缘》(1809)中就是这样的例子:在这部小说的开头，叙述者把自己描绘成人物名字的发明者(“爱德华——所以我们将称他为一个富有的贵族——在一个晴朗的四月早晨在他的托儿所里度过了几个小时”)。基于最近对异叙事的定义，我的文章探讨了这样的异叙事叙述者是否不可靠的问题。我的问题是:你怎么能证明一个虚构故事的发明者讲的东西是不正确或不完整的?在回答这个问题时，我参考了Janina Jacke在本刊文章中的一些建议。杰克指出，同叙事与异叙事叙述者的区别不应与人称叙述者与非人称叙述者的区别或受限制的叙述者与全知的叙述者的区别相混淆。如果你做出了这样的区分，那么当然，异质叙事的叙述者可能是不可靠的:他们可能会遗漏一些重要信息，或者不恰当地解释故事。虚构故事的异叙事叙述者甚至可以对读者撒谎，或者在虚构故事的某些元素上欺骗自己。这意味着:一种异质叙事不仅是价值相关的不可靠(“不协调叙事”)，而且是事实相关的不可靠。我的文章特别研究了这种类型的不可靠性，并表明，如果一个虚构故事的异叙事叙述者讲述的东西不是他们自己发明的，那么与事实相关的不可靠性可能是不可靠的。在这种情况下，叙述者自己有时也不知道他讲的是真实的故事还是虚构的故事。如果这样的叙述者断言故事是真实的，尽管他们同时暗示故事不是真实的，那么他们就是不可靠的。我把这种不可靠的叙述者称为“虚构编年史者”(“fabulierender Chronist”):一方面，这样的叙述者将自己呈现为历史事实的编年史者，但另一方面，他们似乎是讲述童话故事的虚构者。这种不可靠性尤其发生在叙述者讲述《圣经》中的传说或故事时。我的文章用两个例子详细说明了这一情况，即托马斯·曼的两部小说:《神圣的罪人》(1951)和《约瑟夫和他的兄弟们》(1933-1943)。我的文章还讨论了一些不合适或反直觉的情况，即称异质叙事的叙述者为“不可靠”。托马斯·曼的小说《魔山》(1924)和约翰·沃尔夫冈·歌德的小说《威廉·迈斯特的学徒》(1795/1796)的叙述者。一方面，这些叙述者表现出一些不可靠的特征，因为他们忽略了重要的信息。另一方面，这些叙述者几乎没有被塑造成人物，他们几乎是非个人的。然而，为了描述一个叙述者是不可靠的，在我看来，这是必不可少的，参考一些叙事人格的痕迹:叙述者的形象特征促使读者将叙事的所有描绘，描述和评论句子识别为同一个“精神系统”的话语(Niklas Luhmann)。只有能够被解释为这种“精神系统”的叙述者，才能激发读者扮演分析师或“侦探”的角色，他们可能会发现叙述者的不一致或不可靠。在我的文章中，叙述的不可靠性被理解为文学作品的组成和意义的一部分。我认为，叙述者不能被描述为不可靠，除非通过解释行为指定其构成的语义动机。因此，我的建议是，如果一种叙述不仅鼓励读者想象所讲述的故事，而且还鼓励读者想象一个不和谐或不可靠的说书人，那么它就应该被称为不可靠。
{"title":"Unzuverlässigkeit bei heterodiegetischen Erzählern: Konturierung eines Konzepts an Beispielen von Thomas Mann und Goethe","authors":"M. Löwe","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2018-0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2018-0005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Heterodiegetic narrators are not present in the story they tell. That is how Gérard Genette has defined heterodiegesis. But this definition of heterodiegesis leaves open what ›absence‹ of the narrator really means: If a friend of the protagonist tells the story but does not appear in it, is he therefore heterodiegetic? Or if a narrator tells something that happened before his lifetime, is he therefore heterodiegetic? These open questions reveal the vagueness of Genette’s definition. However, Simone Elisabeth Lang has recently made a clearer proposal to define heterodiegesis. She argues that narrators should be called heterodiegetic only if they are fundamentally distinguished from the ontological status of the fictional characters: Heterodiegetic narrators are not part of the story for logical reasons, because they are presented as inventors of the story. This is, for example, the case in Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities (1809): In the beginning of this novel the narrator presents himself as inventor of the character’s names (»Edward – so we shall call a wealthy nobleman in the prime of life – had been spending several hours of a fine April morning in his nursery-garden«). Based on that recent definition of heterodiegesis my article deals with the question whether such heterodiegetic narrators can be unreliable. My question is: How could you indicate that the inventor of a fictitious story tells something which is not correct or incomplete? In answering this question, I refer to some proposals of Janina Jacke’s article in this journal. Jacke shows that the distinction between homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narrators should not be confused with the distinction between personal and non-personal narrators or with the distinction between restricted and all-knowing narrators. If you make such differentiations, then of course heterodiegetic narrators can be unreliable: They can omit some essential information or interpret the story inappropriately. Heterodiegetic narrators of an invented story can even lie to the reader or deceive themselves about some elements of the invention. That means: A heterodiegetic narration cannot only be value-related unreliable (›discordant narration‹), but also fact-related unreliable. My article delves especially into this type of unreliability and shows that heterodiegetic narrators of a fictitious story can be fact-related unreliable, if they tell something which was not invented by themselves. In that case, the narrator himself sometimes does not really know whether he tells a true or a fictitious story. Such narrators are unreliable if they assert that the story is true, although they are suggesting at the same time that it is not. I call this type of unreliable narrator a ›fabulating chronicler‹ (›fabulierender Chronist‹): On the one hand, such narrators present themselves as chroniclers of historical facts but, on the other hand, they seem to be fabulists who tell a fairy tale. This type ","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":"12 1","pages":"77 - 92"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2018-06-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jlt-2018-0005","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44818673","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract This paper explores why unreliable narration should be considered as a concept not only applying to single works of fiction, but also to whole series of fiction, and why impersonal (›omniscient‹) narration can also be suspected of unreliability. Some literary genres show a great affinity to unreliable narration. In fantastic literature (in the narrower sense of the term), for instance, the reader’s »hesitation« towards which reality system rules within the fictive world often is due to the narration of an autodiegetic narrator whose credibility is not beyond doubt. Detective stories, in contrast, are usually set in a purely realistic world (in conflict with no other reality system) and typically do not foster any doubts regarding the reliability of their narrators. The only unreliable narrators we frequently meet in most detective stories are suspects who, in second level narrations, tell lies in order to misdirect the detective’s enquiries. Their untruthfulness is usually being uncovered at the end of the story, in the final resolution of the criminalistics riddle (›Whodunnit‹?), as part of the genre-typical ›narrative closure‹. As the new genre of detective novels emerged at the turn from the 19th to the 20th century, its specific genre conventions got more and more well-established. This made it possible for writers to playfully change some of these readers’ genre expectations – in order to better fulfil others. Agatha Christie, for example, in 1926 dared to undermine the »principle of charity« (Walton) that readers give to the reliability of first person narrators in detective stories – especially when such a narrator shows himself as being a close friend to the detective at work, as it was the case with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous Dr. Watson, friend to Sherlock Holmes. Christie dared to break this principle by establishing a first-person narrator who, at the end, turns out to be the murderer himself. Thus, she evades the »principle of charity«, but is not being penalised by readers and critics for having broken this one genre convention because she achieves a very astonishing resolution at the end of the case and thus reaches to fulfil another and even more crucial genre convention, that of a surprising ›narrative closure‹, in a very new and satisfying way. Fantastic literature and detective novels are usually two clearly distinct genres of narrative fiction with partly incommensurate genre conventions. Whereas in fantastic literature (in the narrower sense of the term), two reality systems collide, leaving the reader in uncertainty about which one of the two finally rules within the fictive world, detective novels usually are settled in a ›simply realistic‹ universe. Taking a closer look at a contemporary series of detective fiction, that is, the Dublin stories of Tana French (2007–), I will turn to an example in which the genre convention of ›intraserial coherence‹ provides evidence for the unreliability of the different narra
{"title":"Unzuverlässiges Erzählen als werkübergreifende Kategorie. Personale und impersonale Erzählinstanzen im phantastischen Kriminalroman","authors":"Sonja Klimek","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2018-0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2018-0003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper explores why unreliable narration should be considered as a concept not only applying to single works of fiction, but also to whole series of fiction, and why impersonal (›omniscient‹) narration can also be suspected of unreliability. Some literary genres show a great affinity to unreliable narration. In fantastic literature (in the narrower sense of the term), for instance, the reader’s »hesitation« towards which reality system rules within the fictive world often is due to the narration of an autodiegetic narrator whose credibility is not beyond doubt. Detective stories, in contrast, are usually set in a purely realistic world (in conflict with no other reality system) and typically do not foster any doubts regarding the reliability of their narrators. The only unreliable narrators we frequently meet in most detective stories are suspects who, in second level narrations, tell lies in order to misdirect the detective’s enquiries. Their untruthfulness is usually being uncovered at the end of the story, in the final resolution of the criminalistics riddle (›Whodunnit‹?), as part of the genre-typical ›narrative closure‹. As the new genre of detective novels emerged at the turn from the 19th to the 20th century, its specific genre conventions got more and more well-established. This made it possible for writers to playfully change some of these readers’ genre expectations – in order to better fulfil others. Agatha Christie, for example, in 1926 dared to undermine the »principle of charity« (Walton) that readers give to the reliability of first person narrators in detective stories – especially when such a narrator shows himself as being a close friend to the detective at work, as it was the case with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous Dr. Watson, friend to Sherlock Holmes. Christie dared to break this principle by establishing a first-person narrator who, at the end, turns out to be the murderer himself. Thus, she evades the »principle of charity«, but is not being penalised by readers and critics for having broken this one genre convention because she achieves a very astonishing resolution at the end of the case and thus reaches to fulfil another and even more crucial genre convention, that of a surprising ›narrative closure‹, in a very new and satisfying way. Fantastic literature and detective novels are usually two clearly distinct genres of narrative fiction with partly incommensurate genre conventions. Whereas in fantastic literature (in the narrower sense of the term), two reality systems collide, leaving the reader in uncertainty about which one of the two finally rules within the fictive world, detective novels usually are settled in a ›simply realistic‹ universe. Taking a closer look at a contemporary series of detective fiction, that is, the Dublin stories of Tana French (2007–), I will turn to an example in which the genre convention of ›intraserial coherence‹ provides evidence for the unreliability of the different narra","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":"12 1","pages":"29 - 54"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2018-06-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jlt-2018-0003","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48511298","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Research has shown that the present-tense novel poses significant logical problems of narrative mediation. For this reason, the current essay addresses the question of whether, due to these problems, the heterodiegetic present-tense novel is a case of unreliable narration. To this end, the essay first discusses the sustainability of the concept of unreliability. Its point of departure is the observation that researchers have created significant confusion by applying a characterological concept to literary phenomena. Despite an overwhelming amount of pertinent essays and monographs on the topic, the central questions raised by this concept are still highly contested: To which narrative instances can we plausibly apply the category of unreliability? Precisely which narratological aspects of the mediating instance can we account for using the category of unreliability? Using the example of Holden Caulfield, the narrating protagonist from J. D. Salinger’s novel The Cather in the Rye, this essay demonstrates which difficulties arise when we impute unreliability to a complex narrative instance. The lack of conceptual precision which comes to light in this novel not only leads – as in the case of Catcher in the Rye – to contradictory assignments of the category of unreliability in one and the same text but also to the constitution of a text corpus that is primarily characterized by its heterogeneity. This undermines the intersubjective use of concepts and, as a result, further literary knowledge. Therefore, this essay argues that we should abandon the concept of unreliability in favor of more precise analytic categories, instead of making the discussion of this category even more unwieldy than it already is by adding new definitions and thereby impeding agreement within the scientific community. In order to more precisely define the logical problems of narrative mediation of the heterodiegetic present-tense novel, the essay will first define the speech acts of narration, taking the temporal relation between the narrative procedure and the narrated events as the identifying feature. In the process, the use of the simple-past tense proves to be constitutive, not only because of experience in daily life with the speech act of narration but also and above all for logical reasons. Here, the preterit retains its deictic function of referring to the past. In terms of genre, the present-tense novel resembles drama, since there too the mediating instance makes use of the present tense as the marginal text does in drama. This is why we can also no longer refer to a narrative speech act in the case of the present-tense novel. Rather, the present-tense novel creates the same impression as the speech act of live reportage in daily life. Connected to this, however, are perspectival restrictions of the spatial and temporal type (predominantly zeitdeckende Vermittlung, where narrating time matches narrated time; uncertainty about the future, spatial fixity), b
{"title":"Der heterodiegetische Präsensroman – ein Fall von unreliable narration?","authors":"Andreas Ohme","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2018-0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2018-0006","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Research has shown that the present-tense novel poses significant logical problems of narrative mediation. For this reason, the current essay addresses the question of whether, due to these problems, the heterodiegetic present-tense novel is a case of unreliable narration. To this end, the essay first discusses the sustainability of the concept of unreliability. Its point of departure is the observation that researchers have created significant confusion by applying a characterological concept to literary phenomena. Despite an overwhelming amount of pertinent essays and monographs on the topic, the central questions raised by this concept are still highly contested: To which narrative instances can we plausibly apply the category of unreliability? Precisely which narratological aspects of the mediating instance can we account for using the category of unreliability? Using the example of Holden Caulfield, the narrating protagonist from J. D. Salinger’s novel The Cather in the Rye, this essay demonstrates which difficulties arise when we impute unreliability to a complex narrative instance. The lack of conceptual precision which comes to light in this novel not only leads – as in the case of Catcher in the Rye – to contradictory assignments of the category of unreliability in one and the same text but also to the constitution of a text corpus that is primarily characterized by its heterogeneity. This undermines the intersubjective use of concepts and, as a result, further literary knowledge. Therefore, this essay argues that we should abandon the concept of unreliability in favor of more precise analytic categories, instead of making the discussion of this category even more unwieldy than it already is by adding new definitions and thereby impeding agreement within the scientific community. In order to more precisely define the logical problems of narrative mediation of the heterodiegetic present-tense novel, the essay will first define the speech acts of narration, taking the temporal relation between the narrative procedure and the narrated events as the identifying feature. In the process, the use of the simple-past tense proves to be constitutive, not only because of experience in daily life with the speech act of narration but also and above all for logical reasons. Here, the preterit retains its deictic function of referring to the past. In terms of genre, the present-tense novel resembles drama, since there too the mediating instance makes use of the present tense as the marginal text does in drama. This is why we can also no longer refer to a narrative speech act in the case of the present-tense novel. Rather, the present-tense novel creates the same impression as the speech act of live reportage in daily life. Connected to this, however, are perspectival restrictions of the spatial and temporal type (predominantly zeitdeckende Vermittlung, where narrating time matches narrated time; uncertainty about the future, spatial fixity), b","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":"12 1","pages":"112 - 93"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2018-03-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jlt-2018-0006","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45001995","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Some theorists on literary interpretation have suggested a connection between Monroe C. Beardsley’s anti-intentionalism and hypothetical intentionalism based on an implied author. However, a full exploration has never been attempted. I undertake this task in this paper. A close reading of Beardsley reveals that he assumes something very similar to the implied author in interpretation. I distinguish five types of fictional works in terms of their narrative mode and show that my claim stands in at least four of the five types. The significance of my argument lies in exposing the above version of authorism in anti-intentionalism. Beardsley is generally perceived as advocating the irrelevance of authorial intention to literary interpretation. The common interpretation of his theory is that work-meaning is generated by linguistic conventions, with intention playing no role in meaning-determination. All the interpreter needs is knowledge of public, linguistic conventions in order to recover textual meaning. Nevertheless, when dealing with the problem of interpretation, Beardsley explicitly talks about attributing textual meaning to a fictional speaker. Although he does not elaborate on the nature of this speaker, clues scattered in his writings point to the striking similarity of this theoretical apparatus to an implied author. The key lies in his presumption that every fictional work must have an ultimate speaker to whom meaning inferred from the text should be attributed. This claim is almost the core of an implied author theory of interpretation. A difficulty in classifying Beardsley’s view as a version of the implied author position is that his characterization of the story’s presenter might apply better to the story’s narrator than to its implied author. To test this, I examine different types of narrative modes to see whether the fictional speaker merges with the implied author in each of these scenarios. The first factor to consider for classifying narrative modes is whether the narrator’s presence is explicit or implicit. The narrative scenario in which the narrator is implicit can be further divided into two sub-types: either the story is told from an omniscient viewpoint or centers on the experience of a third-person character. In either case, the story is not told by any of the characters in the story; rather, it is told by an implicit speaker whose words the work purports to be. It seems reasonable to identify this fictional speaker with the implied author, for both function as the subject to which textual meaning is attributed. As for the narrative mode in which the narrator is explicit, this involves first-person narratives. In these, either the narrator is reliable or unreliable. When the narrator is unreliable, a transcendental perspective is required in determining the text’s meaning, because what is said ultimately in the work is not equivalent to what is literally said by the unreliable narrator. It follows that an implicit
{"title":"Beardsley and the Implied Author","authors":"Szu-Yen Lin","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2018-0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2018-0010","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Some theorists on literary interpretation have suggested a connection between Monroe C. Beardsley’s anti-intentionalism and hypothetical intentionalism based on an implied author. However, a full exploration has never been attempted. I undertake this task in this paper. A close reading of Beardsley reveals that he assumes something very similar to the implied author in interpretation. I distinguish five types of fictional works in terms of their narrative mode and show that my claim stands in at least four of the five types. The significance of my argument lies in exposing the above version of authorism in anti-intentionalism. Beardsley is generally perceived as advocating the irrelevance of authorial intention to literary interpretation. The common interpretation of his theory is that work-meaning is generated by linguistic conventions, with intention playing no role in meaning-determination. All the interpreter needs is knowledge of public, linguistic conventions in order to recover textual meaning. Nevertheless, when dealing with the problem of interpretation, Beardsley explicitly talks about attributing textual meaning to a fictional speaker. Although he does not elaborate on the nature of this speaker, clues scattered in his writings point to the striking similarity of this theoretical apparatus to an implied author. The key lies in his presumption that every fictional work must have an ultimate speaker to whom meaning inferred from the text should be attributed. This claim is almost the core of an implied author theory of interpretation. A difficulty in classifying Beardsley’s view as a version of the implied author position is that his characterization of the story’s presenter might apply better to the story’s narrator than to its implied author. To test this, I examine different types of narrative modes to see whether the fictional speaker merges with the implied author in each of these scenarios. The first factor to consider for classifying narrative modes is whether the narrator’s presence is explicit or implicit. The narrative scenario in which the narrator is implicit can be further divided into two sub-types: either the story is told from an omniscient viewpoint or centers on the experience of a third-person character. In either case, the story is not told by any of the characters in the story; rather, it is told by an implicit speaker whose words the work purports to be. It seems reasonable to identify this fictional speaker with the implied author, for both function as the subject to which textual meaning is attributed. As for the narrative mode in which the narrator is explicit, this involves first-person narratives. In these, either the narrator is reliable or unreliable. When the narrator is unreliable, a transcendental perspective is required in determining the text’s meaning, because what is said ultimately in the work is not equivalent to what is literally said by the unreliable narrator. It follows that an implicit ","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":"12 1","pages":"171 - 192"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2018-03-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jlt-2018-0010","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66954030","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract In recent years, theories of rhythm have been proposed by a number of different disciplines, including historical poetics, generative metrics, cognitive literary studies, and evolutionary aesthetics. The wide range of fields indicates the transdisciplinary nature of rhythm as a phenomenon, as well as its complexity, highlighting the degree to which many of the central questions surrounding rhythm remain extraordinarily difficult even to state in terms that can traverse the disciplinary boundaries effortlessly transgressed by rhythm as a phenomenon. In particular, any theory of rhythm, whether in music, dance, sociology, or language, must grapple with two quandaries. First, the precise site of rhythm remains opaque: rhythms occur in, affect, and are produced by all of bodies, cultures, and universals (whether metaphysical or species-physiological). What is the relation between species-wide characteristic, individual body, cultural context, and the history of art making in the experience of rhythm? Second, rhythm is simultaneously a phenomenon of fixed, organizing form and one of dynamic, changing flow. How can rhythm encompass both the measurement of regular recurrences across time and the organizing of temporal phenomena as they unfold? In this article, I draw on Emile Benveniste and Henri Meschonnic to elucidate these quandaries or conflicts before turning to Friedrich Nietzsche’s work on rhythm. I argue that Nietzsche’s work with rhythm provides a historically situated model for how we might continue to take the questions and conflicts within rhythm seriously, rather than privileging an abstract and universally applicable theory of rhythm. This model is especially crucial for our own historical moment, when cultural-political emphasis on science and technology at the expense of aesthetics devalues all insights not presented in the form of countable data points or empirically testable facts. Nietzsche is, of course, one of the great critics of positivist-scientistic epistemologies, part of a long tradition questioning the naturalness of natural-scientific paradigms and alerting us to the metaphors at play even in the ›hard sciences‹. I use rhythm as one paradigmatic place to resist the importation of scientistic thought into discussions of language, literature, and culture. I show how Nietzsche’s writings on rhythm prove illuminating for contemporary understandings of rhythm because the tensions in his work are shaped by the quandaries inherent to rhythm that I have used Benveniste and Meschonnic to elaborate, namely the question of rhythm’s site as individual, cultural, or universal, and the conflict between rhythm as form and as flow. The question of the site of rhythm appears in Nietzsche’s discussions of Greek and Latin meters both in his philological works, in his aphorisms, and in his letters: on the one hand, he argues that Greek and Latin metrical and rhythmic resources are irrevocably lost to modern cultures (indicating that rh
{"title":"Towards a Philosophy of Rhythm: Nietzsche’s Conflicting Rhythms","authors":"H. Eldridge","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2018-0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2018-0009","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In recent years, theories of rhythm have been proposed by a number of different disciplines, including historical poetics, generative metrics, cognitive literary studies, and evolutionary aesthetics. The wide range of fields indicates the transdisciplinary nature of rhythm as a phenomenon, as well as its complexity, highlighting the degree to which many of the central questions surrounding rhythm remain extraordinarily difficult even to state in terms that can traverse the disciplinary boundaries effortlessly transgressed by rhythm as a phenomenon. In particular, any theory of rhythm, whether in music, dance, sociology, or language, must grapple with two quandaries. First, the precise site of rhythm remains opaque: rhythms occur in, affect, and are produced by all of bodies, cultures, and universals (whether metaphysical or species-physiological). What is the relation between species-wide characteristic, individual body, cultural context, and the history of art making in the experience of rhythm? Second, rhythm is simultaneously a phenomenon of fixed, organizing form and one of dynamic, changing flow. How can rhythm encompass both the measurement of regular recurrences across time and the organizing of temporal phenomena as they unfold? In this article, I draw on Emile Benveniste and Henri Meschonnic to elucidate these quandaries or conflicts before turning to Friedrich Nietzsche’s work on rhythm. I argue that Nietzsche’s work with rhythm provides a historically situated model for how we might continue to take the questions and conflicts within rhythm seriously, rather than privileging an abstract and universally applicable theory of rhythm. This model is especially crucial for our own historical moment, when cultural-political emphasis on science and technology at the expense of aesthetics devalues all insights not presented in the form of countable data points or empirically testable facts. Nietzsche is, of course, one of the great critics of positivist-scientistic epistemologies, part of a long tradition questioning the naturalness of natural-scientific paradigms and alerting us to the metaphors at play even in the ›hard sciences‹. I use rhythm as one paradigmatic place to resist the importation of scientistic thought into discussions of language, literature, and culture. I show how Nietzsche’s writings on rhythm prove illuminating for contemporary understandings of rhythm because the tensions in his work are shaped by the quandaries inherent to rhythm that I have used Benveniste and Meschonnic to elaborate, namely the question of rhythm’s site as individual, cultural, or universal, and the conflict between rhythm as form and as flow. The question of the site of rhythm appears in Nietzsche’s discussions of Greek and Latin meters both in his philological works, in his aphorisms, and in his letters: on the one hand, he argues that Greek and Latin metrical and rhythmic resources are irrevocably lost to modern cultures (indicating that rh","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":"12 1","pages":"151 - 170"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2018-03-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jlt-2018-0009","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44611931","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract The narratological concept of unreliable narration is subject to constant debate. While this debate affects different kinds of problems associated with unreliability, one of the central issues concerns the application area of ›unreliable narration‹. Here, theorists discuss, for example, whether there are certain types of narrators that cannot be unreliable, whether some kinds of narrators are necessarily unreliable, or in which way other characters apart from narrators can also be unreliable. It is the first one of these questions that I am addressing in this paper: Are there types of narrators that cannot be unreliable? As I lay out in the first section of my paper, my argumentative starting point is the observation that previous contributions to the application area discussion neglect two basic theoretical distinctions that are necessary to find robust and detailed answers to the relevant questions. The first of these theoretical distinctions will be addressed in the second section of the paper. It concerns the narrative phenomena that are usually referred to as »unreliable narration«. As I will argue, these phenomena are very heterogeneous, and we must distinguish at least five basic types of unreliability whose application areas partially differ:(1) fact-related utterance unreliability: the narrator’s claims about story world facts are false or in a relevant sense incomplete,(2) fact-related cognitive unreliability: the narrator’s beliefs about story world facts are false or in a relevant sense incomplete,(3) value-related utterance unreliability: the narrator’s evaluative utterances are in conflict with a relevant value system,(4) value-related cognitive unreliability: the narrator’s evaluative opinions are in conflict with a relevant value system, and(5) value-related actional unreliability: the narrator’s actions are in conflict with a relevant value system. In the third section of the paper, I will then proceed to show that four kinds of narrator types have been conflated or confused in the application area debate:(a) heterodiegetic narrators: narrators who are not part of the narrated story world,(b) non-personal narrators: narrators of whom we know no features apart from them telling a story, or narrators whom we are not invited to picture,(c) all-knowing narrators: narrators who have complete knowledge of the story world facts, and(d) stipulating narrators: narrators who generate the story world facts by narrating them. In discussions concerning the question of whether one or more of these narrator types cannot be unreliable, some theorists seem to assume that some or all of these types are necessarily connected. I will show, however, that there are hardly any necessary connections between them. After this preparatory work, I am showing in a step-by-step analysis in section four which of these narrators types can or cannot be unreliable in which way – and why. The results are as follows: Both heterodiegetic and stipulating nar
{"title":"Unreliability and Narrator Types. On the Application Area of ›Unreliable Narration‹","authors":"Janina Jacke","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2018-0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2018-0002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The narratological concept of unreliable narration is subject to constant debate. While this debate affects different kinds of problems associated with unreliability, one of the central issues concerns the application area of ›unreliable narration‹. Here, theorists discuss, for example, whether there are certain types of narrators that cannot be unreliable, whether some kinds of narrators are necessarily unreliable, or in which way other characters apart from narrators can also be unreliable. It is the first one of these questions that I am addressing in this paper: Are there types of narrators that cannot be unreliable? As I lay out in the first section of my paper, my argumentative starting point is the observation that previous contributions to the application area discussion neglect two basic theoretical distinctions that are necessary to find robust and detailed answers to the relevant questions. The first of these theoretical distinctions will be addressed in the second section of the paper. It concerns the narrative phenomena that are usually referred to as »unreliable narration«. As I will argue, these phenomena are very heterogeneous, and we must distinguish at least five basic types of unreliability whose application areas partially differ:(1) fact-related utterance unreliability: the narrator’s claims about story world facts are false or in a relevant sense incomplete,(2) fact-related cognitive unreliability: the narrator’s beliefs about story world facts are false or in a relevant sense incomplete,(3) value-related utterance unreliability: the narrator’s evaluative utterances are in conflict with a relevant value system,(4) value-related cognitive unreliability: the narrator’s evaluative opinions are in conflict with a relevant value system, and(5) value-related actional unreliability: the narrator’s actions are in conflict with a relevant value system. In the third section of the paper, I will then proceed to show that four kinds of narrator types have been conflated or confused in the application area debate:(a) heterodiegetic narrators: narrators who are not part of the narrated story world,(b) non-personal narrators: narrators of whom we know no features apart from them telling a story, or narrators whom we are not invited to picture,(c) all-knowing narrators: narrators who have complete knowledge of the story world facts, and(d) stipulating narrators: narrators who generate the story world facts by narrating them. In discussions concerning the question of whether one or more of these narrator types cannot be unreliable, some theorists seem to assume that some or all of these types are necessarily connected. I will show, however, that there are hardly any necessary connections between them. After this preparatory work, I am showing in a step-by-step analysis in section four which of these narrators types can or cannot be unreliable in which way – and why. The results are as follows: Both heterodiegetic and stipulating nar","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":"12 1","pages":"28 - 3"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2018-03-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jlt-2018-0002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42663502","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract When we think of the cognitive sciences and literature, we usually think of bringing expertise from neuroscience to literary texts. However, interdisciplinary projects of this nature usually focus on semantic fields or narrative patterns, marginalizing the literary quality of the texts that are examined. More recently, the opportunities that come with a focus on aesthetics and poetic form have been discussed following Stockwell (2009), who has argued that we need to go beyond semantics in the field of cognitive poetics. Experiments using fMRI scanners have shown that readers’ brains ›fire up‹ holistically but that engaging with poetry and prose activates different regions of the brain (cf. Jacobs 2015). So one task of cognitive poetics is to look more closely at the aesthetic experience of literary texts. The sonnet is arguably a suitable test case for a cognitive poetics that is interested in form. After all, received wisdom has it that the sonnet abides by a rigid formal pattern: »it is a fourteen-line poem with a particular rhyme scheme and a particular mode of organizing and amplifying patterns of image and thought […] usually [rendered in] iambic pentameter« (Levin 2001, xxxvii). Accordingly, matters of form should play a crucial part when sonnets are read. At the same time, due to its »particular mode« of organisation, the sonnet is often thought to be a poetic form that is prone to cognitive processes. Helen Vendler (1997, 168) claims, for example, that Shakespeare’s Sonnets reflect »the fluidity of mental processes (exemplified in lexical and syntactic concatenation)«. And according to Raphael Lyne (2011, 198), Shakespeare’s sonnets are an »ideal place« to investigate »thinking in a cognitive rhetoric«. Following Vendler and Lyne in their focus on cognitive processes when discussing the sonnet, I will challenge simplistic notions of poetic form that – in the case of the sonnet – are limited to structural features like the fourteen-line rule. Aberrations like the sonetus retornellatus, a sixteen-line sonnet, testify that the number of lines is not a decisive formal feature for the sonnet form. The poetic form, I will argue, is indeed brought to the fore when we focus on the particular internal organisation of thought, and I will point to Shakespeare’s »Sonnet 126«, a twelve-line sonnet, in order to highlight cognitive approaches to the sonnet form. Bringing Cognitive Literary Studies (CLS) to the sonnet form is thus a promising endeavour. We need to make sure, however, that CLS is mindful of rhetorical strategies and logical patterns that inform and form the sonnet. And CLS needs to take into account that mental processes and poetic form are locked into a dynamic process: form resonates with cognitive skills rooted in rhetoric and logic, and at the same time shapes those mental processes. If we accept that poetic form is not given but evolves while stimuli for cognitive processes and emotional responses are provided, research in c
当我们想到认知科学和文学时，我们通常会想到将神经科学的专业知识引入文学文本。然而，这种性质的跨学科项目通常侧重于语义领域或叙事模式，边缘化了所研究文本的文学质量。最近，关注美学和诗歌形式的机会在斯托克韦尔(2009)之后得到了讨论，他认为我们需要在认知诗学领域超越语义学。使用功能磁共振成像扫描仪的实验表明，读者的大脑会整体激活，但阅读诗歌和散文会激活大脑的不同区域(cf. Jacobs 2015)。所以认知诗学的任务之一就是更仔细地观察文学文本的审美体验。这首十四行诗可以说是对形式感兴趣的认知诗学的一个合适的测试案例。毕竟，公认的智慧是十四行诗遵循严格的形式模式:“十四行诗是一首十四行诗，具有特定的押韵方案和特定的组织模式，并扩大了图像和思想的模式[…]通常[以]五步格呈现]”(Levin 2001, xxxvii)。因此，在阅读十四行诗时，形式问题应该发挥至关重要的作用。同时，由于其“特殊的组织模式”，十四行诗通常被认为是一种易于认知过程的诗歌形式。例如，海伦·文德勒(1997,168)声称，莎士比亚的十四行诗反映了“心理过程的流动性(以词汇和句法的串联为例)”。根据Raphael Lyne(2011,198)的观点，莎士比亚的十四行诗是研究“认知修辞学中的思维”的“理想场所”。跟随Vendler和Lyne在讨论十四行诗时对认知过程的关注，我将挑战简单的诗歌形式概念——在十四行诗的情况下——仅限于结构特征，如十四行规则。像十六行十四行诗“sonetus retornellatus”这样的异常现象证明，行数并不是十四行诗形式的决定性形式特征。我认为，当我们关注特定的思想内部组织时，诗歌形式确实会脱颖而出，我将指出莎士比亚的“十四行诗126”，一首十二行十四行诗，以强调十四行诗形式的认知方法。因此，将认知文学研究(CLS)引入十四行诗形式是一项有前途的努力。然而，我们需要确保CLS注意到十四行诗的修辞策略和逻辑模式。CLS需要考虑到心理过程和诗歌形式被锁定在一个动态过程中:形式与植根于修辞和逻辑的认知技能产生共鸣，同时塑造这些心理过程。如果我们承认诗的形式不是给定的，而是随着认知过程和情感反应的刺激而演变的，那么认知诗学的研究就必须更加重视形式的各个方面。在她对诗歌形式的全面研究中。Angela Leighton(2007, 1)在《诗歌、唯美主义和一个词的遗产》一书中指出，对于任何想要在语言领域将形式概念化的人来说，任务是解决其“倾向于物质化，倾向于成为某物的形状或主体”。作为一个抽象名词，“形式”具有静态的性质，而根据莱顿的说法，它是一个过程，一种认知活动。雷顿声称，将形式概念化为一个过程，将“改变我们所说的认识的意义”(同上，第27页)，因为它不允许从这个过程中提炼出关于诗歌形式的知识。这与约翰·g·布鲁恩(John G. Bruhn)和斯图尔特·沃尔夫(Stewart Wolf)的《作为过程的心灵》(The Mind as a Process)非常一致，他们在书中认为，在心灵研究中，需要“医学方法”和“实验室方法”来发展“面向过程的研究”(Bruhn/Wolf 2003, 84平方英尺)。因此，在认知科学的帮助下，更系统地审视诗歌形式也有望帮助我们重新定义我们的认知概念。关注情感和情绪反应的令人兴奋的实验使美学在阅读诗歌的过程中起着重要作用的概念脱颖而出(参见l<s:2> dtke 2014)。这些实验表明，图式理论依赖于已有的有意义结构，未能将诗歌阅读过程作为审美过程来把握。因此，虽然模式识别，无论是在叙事层面还是语义层面，都是诗歌阅读认知过程的一个方面，但这个过程也涉及其他方面，CLS才刚刚开始解决这些问题。Vaughan-Evans等人(2016,6)可能提供了“第一个切实的证据，证明这种联系[在诗歌的审美欣赏和隐含反应之间]是可渗透的”。 他们认为，“对诗歌和谐的自发识别是一个快速的、亚词汇的过程”(同上)，在亚词汇层面为CLS开辟了一个竞技场，这一领域仍有待研究。同样，Hermann J. m<e:1>勒等人(2017)最近进行的一项关于英语俳句阅读方式的眼动追踪研究表明，读者在第二轮或第三轮与文本的接触中，对诗歌的个人参与变得更加多样化。这可能听起来微不足道，但它确实挑战了CLS将有助于建立普遍认知模式的概念。相反，CLS可能证实了一种解释学立场:每读一首诗，都会产生新的问题;诗歌永远不会被完全理解。因此，CLS可以帮助听取Bruhn和Wolf的感叹:“我们应该更多地关注个体作为个体的反应，而不是将个体平均到群体中”(Bruhn/Wolf 2003,85)。
{"title":"The Confines of Cognitive Literary Studies: The Sonnet and a Cognitive Poetics of Form","authors":"F. Sprang","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2017-0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2017-0022","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract When we think of the cognitive sciences and literature, we usually think of bringing expertise from neuroscience to literary texts. However, interdisciplinary projects of this nature usually focus on semantic fields or narrative patterns, marginalizing the literary quality of the texts that are examined. More recently, the opportunities that come with a focus on aesthetics and poetic form have been discussed following Stockwell (2009), who has argued that we need to go beyond semantics in the field of cognitive poetics. Experiments using fMRI scanners have shown that readers’ brains ›fire up‹ holistically but that engaging with poetry and prose activates different regions of the brain (cf. Jacobs 2015). So one task of cognitive poetics is to look more closely at the aesthetic experience of literary texts. The sonnet is arguably a suitable test case for a cognitive poetics that is interested in form. After all, received wisdom has it that the sonnet abides by a rigid formal pattern: »it is a fourteen-line poem with a particular rhyme scheme and a particular mode of organizing and amplifying patterns of image and thought […] usually [rendered in] iambic pentameter« (Levin 2001, xxxvii). Accordingly, matters of form should play a crucial part when sonnets are read. At the same time, due to its »particular mode« of organisation, the sonnet is often thought to be a poetic form that is prone to cognitive processes. Helen Vendler (1997, 168) claims, for example, that Shakespeare’s Sonnets reflect »the fluidity of mental processes (exemplified in lexical and syntactic concatenation)«. And according to Raphael Lyne (2011, 198), Shakespeare’s sonnets are an »ideal place« to investigate »thinking in a cognitive rhetoric«. Following Vendler and Lyne in their focus on cognitive processes when discussing the sonnet, I will challenge simplistic notions of poetic form that – in the case of the sonnet – are limited to structural features like the fourteen-line rule. Aberrations like the sonetus retornellatus, a sixteen-line sonnet, testify that the number of lines is not a decisive formal feature for the sonnet form. The poetic form, I will argue, is indeed brought to the fore when we focus on the particular internal organisation of thought, and I will point to Shakespeare’s »Sonnet 126«, a twelve-line sonnet, in order to highlight cognitive approaches to the sonnet form. Bringing Cognitive Literary Studies (CLS) to the sonnet form is thus a promising endeavour. We need to make sure, however, that CLS is mindful of rhetorical strategies and logical patterns that inform and form the sonnet. And CLS needs to take into account that mental processes and poetic form are locked into a dynamic process: form resonates with cognitive skills rooted in rhetoric and logic, and at the same time shapes those mental processes. If we accept that poetic form is not given but evolves while stimuli for cognitive processes and emotional responses are provided, research in c","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":"11 1","pages":"240 - 254"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2017-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jlt-2017-0022","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41737860","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Over the past two decades cognitive literary studies (CLS) has emerged as a new subfield of literary studies. Despite the success of cognitive theories in some areas of research such as in narratology, however, the impact of CLS on the academic discipline of literary and cultural studies as a whole has not been as profound as predicted. Major schools of research, e.g. postcolonial studies or gender studies, remain virtually untouched, and the vast majority of literary scholars are still sceptical or indifferent towards this area of research. Reasons for this scepticism include, for example, epistemological and methodological uncertainties concerning the interdisciplinary intersection of science and literature. But scholars have also begun to address another lacuna in contemporary research that may prove to be of equal or even more profound consequence: the lack of a solid and widely accepted conceptual and analytical bridge between cognitive approaches and the wide field of cultural studies. It is a well-known fact that the study of culture in its many theoretical guises has taken a lead role in philology departments around the globe. Though not every scholar welcomes this development, it would certainly be unwise to ignore the general impact of cultural studies on philology. For this reason, my paper argues that CLS not only needs to engage in a productive interdisciplinary dialogue between literary scholars and cognitive scientists but it also needs to incorporate cultural studies into this dialogue. In other words, an important challenge lies in making cognitive approaches relevant for cultural analysis. This paper engages with current attempts to face this challenge. It provides a survey of approaches that aim to build a conceptual bridge between culture and cognition and thus take a step towards extending cognitive approaches into the field of cultural studies. For this purpose, I adopt the distinction between so-called ›first‹ and ›second generation‹ approaches in order to group this research heuristically into two academic camps: (1) approaches that emphatically foreground so-called second generation cognitive science as their prime source of inspiration, i.e. approaches that engage with enactive, embedded, extended, and embodied aspects of cognition; and (2) studies which do not explicitly situate themselves within this paradigm and rather seek innovation by turning to more ›classical‹, foundational ›first generation‹ concepts of mental representation, information- and text processing. By discussing examples from both lines of research, including work by Kukkonen/Caracciolo (2014), Strasen (2013), Sommer (2013), and Hartner/Schneider (2015), my survey attempts to provide an impression of the wealth of creative thinking currently at work in CLS. In this context, the paper discusses some of the major challenges cognitive approaches are facing today; it traces a selection of current developments in the field, including work on the c
{"title":"Bodies, Spaces, and Cultural Models: On Bridging the Gap between Culture and Cognition","authors":"M. Hartner","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2017-0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2017-0020","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Over the past two decades cognitive literary studies (CLS) has emerged as a new subfield of literary studies. Despite the success of cognitive theories in some areas of research such as in narratology, however, the impact of CLS on the academic discipline of literary and cultural studies as a whole has not been as profound as predicted. Major schools of research, e.g. postcolonial studies or gender studies, remain virtually untouched, and the vast majority of literary scholars are still sceptical or indifferent towards this area of research. Reasons for this scepticism include, for example, epistemological and methodological uncertainties concerning the interdisciplinary intersection of science and literature. But scholars have also begun to address another lacuna in contemporary research that may prove to be of equal or even more profound consequence: the lack of a solid and widely accepted conceptual and analytical bridge between cognitive approaches and the wide field of cultural studies. It is a well-known fact that the study of culture in its many theoretical guises has taken a lead role in philology departments around the globe. Though not every scholar welcomes this development, it would certainly be unwise to ignore the general impact of cultural studies on philology. For this reason, my paper argues that CLS not only needs to engage in a productive interdisciplinary dialogue between literary scholars and cognitive scientists but it also needs to incorporate cultural studies into this dialogue. In other words, an important challenge lies in making cognitive approaches relevant for cultural analysis. This paper engages with current attempts to face this challenge. It provides a survey of approaches that aim to build a conceptual bridge between culture and cognition and thus take a step towards extending cognitive approaches into the field of cultural studies. For this purpose, I adopt the distinction between so-called ›first‹ and ›second generation‹ approaches in order to group this research heuristically into two academic camps: (1) approaches that emphatically foreground so-called second generation cognitive science as their prime source of inspiration, i.e. approaches that engage with enactive, embedded, extended, and embodied aspects of cognition; and (2) studies which do not explicitly situate themselves within this paradigm and rather seek innovation by turning to more ›classical‹, foundational ›first generation‹ concepts of mental representation, information- and text processing. By discussing examples from both lines of research, including work by Kukkonen/Caracciolo (2014), Strasen (2013), Sommer (2013), and Hartner/Schneider (2015), my survey attempts to provide an impression of the wealth of creative thinking currently at work in CLS. In this context, the paper discusses some of the major challenges cognitive approaches are facing today; it traces a selection of current developments in the field, including work on the c","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":"11 1","pages":"204 - 222"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2017-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jlt-2017-0020","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45318472","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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