Journal of Literary Theory最新文献

{"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}

{"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}

{"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}

{"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}

{"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}

{"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}

{"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}

{"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}

{"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}

{"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}