Abstract
In the previous two chapters, I described the act of application and compared or contrasted it with some other actions or processes thought to occur when literature is read and experienced. In this chapter, I look more closely at the act of reading as a whole and attempt to explain how application enters into that more comprehensive context.
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Notes
Simon Garrod and Meredyth Daneman, “Reading, Psychology of”, in Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, ed.-in-chief Lynn Nadel, vol. 3 (London, New York, and Tokyo: Nature Publishing Group, 2003), pp. 848–54; here, p. 848.
Jhumpa Lahiri, “Unaccustomed Earth”, in Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth (New York and Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), pp. 3–59 (at p. 3).
Teun A. van Dijk and Walter Kintsch, Strategies of Discourse Comprehension (San Diego: Academic Press, 1983), pp. 11–12.
The term and the concept are still current in the psychology of reading; see, e.g., Isabelle Tapiero, Situation Models and Levels of Coherence: Toward a Definition of Comprehension (Mahwah, N.J. and London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2007), esp. chapter 2.
Nadine Gordimer, The Pickup (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), p. 3.
See, e.g., Susan Lanser’s sophisticated account of the phenomenon: Susan Sniader Lanser, The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981).
The idea of a discourse mode is related to the pragmatic notion of an illocutionary force. Just as a one-sentence utterance can be said to have a certain illocutionary force according to classical speech-act theory, a whole discourse can be said to have a certain global illocutionary force, and the global illocutionary force would be a central constituent of the discourse mode. It is true that the idea of global illocutionary force has never become popular within linguistic pragmatics. It was introduced, or at least considered, by van Dijk in the late 1970s and early 1980s — see his “Pragmatics and Poetics”, in Pragmatics of Language and Literature, ed. Teun A. van Dijk (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1976), pp. 23–57 (at p. 36) and his Studies in the Pragmatics of Discourse (The Hague, Paris, and New York: Mouton, 1981), p. 254. However, I can find no references to pragmatic force at the discourse level in a work like The Handbook of Pragmatics, ed. Laurence R. Horn and Gregory Ward (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004). As I describe a discourse mode, it is, nevertheless, something richer and more individualized than a standard illocutionary force. It comes close to what I have elsewhere called a “communicational genre” and exemplified with Bachtin’s speech genres and genres in the sense described by E.D. Hirsch; see my article “Conclusion: A Pragmatic Perspective on Genres and Theories of Genre”, in Literary Genres: An Intercultural Approach, ed. Gunilla Lindberg-Wada (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2006), pp. 279–305, esp. pp. 291–93. In my present book, nothing hinges on the exact definition of the concept of a discourse mode, and I do not enter into a deeper explanation of the notion.
Franz Kafka, “The Transformation” (1915), in The Transformation and Other Stories: Works Published during Kafka’s Lifetime, trans. and ed. Malcolm Pasley (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1992), pp. 76–126, at p. 76.
Philip Roth, Everyman (London: Vintage Books, 2007), p. 171.
Paul Auster, Travels in the Scriptorium (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), esp. pp. 1–3, 50–54, and 126–29.
The situation is exactly the opposite in analytical aesthetics, where it is more or less undisputed that the real author has a role to play for the constitution of meaning. See, e.g., Robert Stecker, “Interpretation”, in The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, ed. Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 239–51;
Paisley Livingston, Art and Intention: A Philosophical Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005).
Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, 3rd edn (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2009), pp. 15–16.
For the concept of relevance to the addressee, see esp. Mats Furberg, Saying and Meaning: A Main Theme in J.L. Austin’s Philosophy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1971), pp. 93–94. Cf. Chapter 9, note 7.
Robert Stecker, Interpretation and Construction: Art, Speech, and the Law (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2003), p. 59.
Umberto Eco, “Intentio Lectoris: The State of the Art”, Differentia: Review of Italian Thought 2 (1988), pp. 147–68, at p. 160; emphasis Eco’s.
Jerrold Levinson, “Intention and Interpretation in Literature”, in Levinson’s The Pleasures of Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 175–213, at pp. 176–77.
E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1967), p. 8.
E.D. Hirsch, Jr., The Aims of Interpretation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 8.
Walter Kintsch, Comprehension: A Paradigm for Cognition (Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 3.
Marcel Adam Just and Patricia A. Carpenter, The Psychology of Reading and Language Comprehension (Boston etc.: Allyn and Bacon, 1987), p. 18. I supose that Just and Carpenter would regard automatic processes as processes of which readers are unaware.
See Howard Shevrin, “Unconscious Processes”, in Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, ed.-in-chief Lynn Nadel, vol. 4 (London, New York, and Tokyo: Nature Publishing Group, 2003), pp. 441–48.
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© 2012 Anders Pettersson
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Pettersson, A. (2012). Application and the Act of Reading. In: The Concept of Literary Application. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137035424_3
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