Style
Home
Current
Issue
Singluar Text, Multiple Implied Readers
Lisa Zunshine
Why Jane Austen Was Different, And Why We May Need
Cognitive Science to See It
Lindsey M. Jones
Chaucer’s Anxiety of Poetic Craft: The Squire’s
Tale
Gunther Martens and Benjamin Biebuyck
Writer’s Digest: On the Narrative Function of Metonymy
in Chapter XIV of Heine’s Ideen. Das Buch Le Grand
It is generally believed that most narratives are directed to a single implied author. Some works, however, are clearly addressed to two or more distinct implied readers. Children’s literature regularly does this, and authors working under conditions of political censorship are frequently forced to address both an overt and a covert implied reader. A similar duality can inform African American, gay, and feminist works. Other opposed implied readers are often constructed by modernist texts. A complete account of multiple implied authors also includes those addressed by works written by multiple historical authors, as well as hypertext users, private audiences, and rereaders. Aspects of some genres and odd passages within a text can be illuminated by the concept of multiple implied readers. In many cases, the different audiences can be arranged hierarchically, as one group of readers knows what the other knows, as well as that which it is unaware of. In other cases, establishing such a hierarchy is very difficult since no single group of readers is clearly privileged. The essay concludes with a theoretical model of multiple implied audiences.
back to top
Lisa Zunshine. “Why Jane Austen Was Different,
And Why We May Need Cognitive Science to See It” / 275
Taking as my starting point George Butte’s reintroduction of Maurice
Merleau-Ponty’s discourse on phenomenology into contemporary literary and
film studies, I Know That You Know That I Know: Narrating Subjects from
Moll Flanders to Marnie (2004), I demonstrate how we can complement his
innovative analysis of “deep intersubjectivity” in Austen with recent research
from cognitive psychology. Specifically, I draw on studies in Theory of
Mind that deal with the ways we process multiply-embedded subjectivities
(along the lines of “I know that he wants her to think that she believes
that . . .”). As I analyze several examples of such multiply-embedded subjectivity
in Etherege, Hume, Richardson, Sterne, and Austen, my larger question is,
whether aided by research in Theory of Mind, a literary critic might be
compelled to consider issues that she would not have otherwise and trace
new connections between different cultural discourses of the late seventeenth,
eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries.
back
to top
Lindsey M. Jones. “Chaucer’s Anxiety of Poetic
Craft: The Squire’s Tale” / 300
This essay examines Chaucer’s use of prosody in the Squire’s Tale and
argues that the tale approximates the characteristics of a narrative while
simultaneously dramatizing the process by which a poet may come to poetic
and prosodic mastery. It considers Chaucer’s use of rhyme, enjambment and
caesura as deliberate rhetorical constructions designed to emphasize the
Squire’s anxiety as an author and thus views the Squire’s Tale as a self-reflexive
commentary on the development of poetic composition. It also examines the
prosody of the Knight’s Tale as an example of successful poetic maturity.
back
to top
Keiko Arai. “Who Controls the Narrative?: A Stylistic
Comparison of Different Versions of Raymond Carver’s ‘So Much Water So
Close to Home’” / 319
In studying Raymond Carver, the problem of revision has been one of
the most significant issues, often related to the problem regarding his
hallmark style as a “minimalist.” Several critics, paying attention to
different versions of Carver’s works, have seen “development” or “evolution”
from minimalism to realism; others disagree with this idea. In this article,
I address the problem of revision in Carver by exploring the difference
in narrative control in different versions of Carver’s “So Much Water So
Close to Home.” Closely examining such stylistic aspects as the discourse
structure and speech presentation, this article investigates how stylistic
revisions serve to make different agencies of narrative control as well
as to construct different types of implied reader in different versions.
This stylistic analysis may shed new light not only on the narrator-text—and
reader-text—relationship but also on the nature of Carver’s “revision,”
which can be regarded as his continuous experiment on textual representation.
back
to top
Gunther Martens and Benjamin Biebuyck, “Writer’s
Digest: On the Narrative Function of Metonymy in Chapter XIV of Heine’s
Ideen. Das Buch Le Grand” / 342
This article discusses the extended figurative inventory to be detected
in Heine’s prose and addresses its narrative function both through a close
reading and through a delineation of the frameworks in which it can be
situated. Extensive usage of tropes like metaphor and metonymy tends to
be seen as either a strong signal of interpretative authority or as an
inherent aspect of the reader’s activity of reception. The figurative network
can also be seen, however, as an indicator of a certain hermeneutic openness,
prefiguring and requiring the reader to reflect the process of metadiscursive
denomination. In Heine’s Ideen. Das Buch Le Grand, the prominent narrator
takes up a number of common tropes denoting polemic communicative procedures
(‘stigmatising’, ‘executing’, ‘digesting’, ‘slaughtering’ one’s opponent).
Those alienating appellations are filtered through a sequence of metonymic
operations that relates their seemingly inherently persuasive effect to
situations of reciprocity and cooperation. The analysis tests the assumption
that Heine’s prose is digressive, amorphous, eclectic, and witty at best.
This widespread impression is refuted by pointing out the overt rhetoricity
of the text, which constitutes a peculiar form of comment on the performance
of the narration.
back
to top