Hard direction, e.g.: Universalese to Organicese. Suggestion: ‘Some chairs wobble’ should become something like ‘If composition were universal, some chairs wobble’ or ‘Assuming that composition is universal, some chairs wobble’ or ‘According to the fiction that composition is universal, some chairs wobble’.

Through a discussion of the work of Marie Cardinal and Annie Ernaux, this article aims to problematize the anglophone academic world's tendency to associate French feminisms predominantly with avant-garde or highly theoretical texts. The work of Ernaux and Cardinal is presented alongside a discussion of its reception by readers and critics in France, and by academics in English-speaking countries. The first part of the article identifies aspects of Ernaux's and Cardinal's works which cannot be encompassed within a critical framework (...) based on the dichotomy between naïve realism on the one hand and the politically and linguistically radical text on the other. Ernaux's plain language, for instance, is clearly very unlike the linguistic experimentation of ‘feminine writing’; nonetheless the emphasis on social class in her writing constitutes a political intervention which is at least equally valid. The reception study in the second part of the article provides further evidence of the relevance to gender politics in France of Cardinal's The Words to Say It (1975) and texts published by Annie Ernaux in the 1980s and 1990s. The ambivalent response of critics seems to indicate the troubling nature of writing which combines the codes of realism and autobiography (or autobiographical fiction in Cardinal's case) with the depiction of taboo subjects such as menstruation, or a daughter's response to her mother's debilitating illness and death. The article also charts the widespread popularity of these texts in France, particularly with women readers, and gives some examples of the pleasures described in letters to the authors. In conclusion, we argue that the ambivalent space between popular and high culture occupied (albeit differently) by Ernaux and Cardinal may be particularly effective in terms of gender politics, and that even in the late 1990s, the personal may be as political as ever. (shrink)

Artur Blaim’s Gazing in Useless Wonder. English Utopian Fictions 1516–1800, the thirteenth volume of the esteemed Ralahine Utopian Studies series, has already received praises as a must-read monograph from such renowned utopian scholars as Lyman Tower Sargent and Gregory Claeys—and indeed it challenges anyone who would dare state otherwise. And even though such flawless pieces of research are not that common, Blaim’s book definitely has the potential to set a precedent in that regard, being a thorough and cohesive analysis (...) of rather sporadically interpreted utopian texts and novels from even less often studied historical periods.Already the book’s composition reveals a direct association between the emergence of... (shrink)

This chapter shows how and how far humanism has found expression in more recent fiction. If one has to consider whether the novel is humanistic, one must examine the values held by the people, which become clear despite their not being in the habit of articulating them. Accounts of post‐war immigrants coming into England can provide a basis for acute observation, in ways that cast light on our central concern. Material for thinking about humanism in the contemporary world is particularly (...) well provided by novels giving an overall account of society, often referred to as condition‐of‐England fiction. Perowne believes that the failure of political utopianism in the twentieth century has left most people, with ‘a queasy agnosticism’ about social justice and the distribution of wealth. The chapter concludes with the discussion of a piece of fiction, Philip Pullman's The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. (shrink)

Over time, we in English departments have resigned ourselves to prophecies of doom. Our discipline is said to be in terminal decline, and civilization with it. Usually, it is our own fault: the value of our work, so the story has gone, is threatened from within, whether by submission to esoteric theories on the one hand, or by dissipation into the banalities of cultural studies on the other. Our only hope, they tell us, is the immediate restoration of the (...) old pieties, as these were cemented in the nineteenth century: literature teaches moral values; poets redeem from decay the divine element in mortal beings; a knowledge of the best that has been thought and said makes us more humane.Moral panics come and go .. (shrink)

Nature has been widely represented in literature and culture as healing, redemptive, unspoilt, and restorative. In the aftermath of the First World War, writers grappled with long cultural associations between nature and healing. Having survived a conflict in which relations between people, and the living environment had been catastrophically ruptured, writers asked: could rural and wild places offer meaningful sites of solace and recovery for traumatised soldiers? In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918), (...) Nan Shepherd’s The Weatherhouse (1930) and Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song (1932), trauma severs emotional, social, and cultural relationships with the natural world. These interwar literatures offer counter-narratives to simplistic depictions of nature as a healing space and highlight the difficulties of returning to rural environments and ‘reconnecting’ with known and natural places. (shrink)

Nature has been widely represented in literature and culture as healing, redemptive, unspoilt, and restorative. In the aftermath of the First World War, writers grappled with long cultural associations between nature and healing. Having survived a conflict in which relations between people, and the living environment had been catastrophically ruptured, writers asked: could rural and wild places offer meaningful sites of solace and recovery for traumatised soldiers? In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier, Nan Shepherd’s (...) The Weatherhouse and Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song, trauma severs emotional, social, and cultural relationships with the natural world. These interwar literatures offer counter-narratives to simplistic depictions of nature as a healing space and highlight the difficulties of returning to rural environments and ‘reconnecting’ with known and natural places. (shrink)

This study investigates global properties of three categories of English text: canonical fiction, non-canonical fiction, and non-fictional texts. The central hypothesis of the study is that there are systematic differences with respect to structural design features between canonical and non-canonical fiction, and between fictional and non-fictional texts. To investigate these differences, we compiled a corpus containing texts of the three categories of interest, the Jena Corpus of Expository and Fictional Prose. Two aspects of global structure are investigated, variability and (...) self-similar patterns, which reflect long-range correlations along texts. We use four types of basic observations, the frequency of POS-tags per sentence, sentence length, lexical diversity, and the distribution of topic probabilities in segments of texts. These basic observations are grouped into two more general categories, the lower-level properties and, which are observed at the level of the sentence, and the higher-level properties and, which are observed at the textual level. The observations for each property are transformed into series, which are analyzed in terms of variance and subjected to Multi-Fractal Detrended Fluctuation Analysis, giving rise to three statistics: the degree of fractality () of the fractal spectrum. The statistics thus obtained are compared individually across text categories and jointly fed into a classification model. Our results show that there are in fact differences between the three text categories of interest. In general, lower-level text properties are better discriminators than higher-level text properties. Canonical fictional texts differ from non-canonical ones primarily in terms of variability in lower-level text properties. Fractality seems to be a universal feature of text, slightly more pronounced in non-fictional than in fictional texts. On the basis of our results obtained on the basis of corpus data we point out some avenues for future research leading toward a more comprehensive analysis of textual aesthetics, e.g., using experimental methodologies. (shrink)

Theorists of Orientalism and postcolonialism argue that novelists betray political and cultural anxieties when characterizing "the Other." Shameem Black takes a different stance. Turning a fresh eye toward several key contemporary novelists, she reveals how "border-crossing" fiction represents socially diverse groups without resorting to stereotype, idealization, or other forms of imaginative constraint. Focusing on the work of J. M. Coetzee, Amitav Ghosh, Jeffrey Eugenides, Ruth Ozeki, Charles Johnson, Gish Jen, and Rupa Bajwa, Black introduces an interpretative lens that captures the (...) ways in which these authors envision an ethics of representing social difference. They not only offer sympathetic portrayals of the lives of others but also detail the processes of imagining social difference. Whether depicting the multilingual worlds of South and Southeast Asia, the exportation of American culture abroad, or the racial tension of postapartheid South Africa, these transcultural representations explore social and political hierarchies in constructive ways. Boldly confronting the orthodoxies of recent literary criticism, Fiction Across Borders builds upon such seminal works as Edward Said's Orientalism and offers a provocative new study of the late twentieth-century novel. (shrink)

Marrying lyrical close reading with critical awareness, Novel Style argues for the ethical value of elaborate styles of writing and demonstrates that artistic excessiveness can provide dynamic responses to the moral complexities of our times.

The research is based on a study of short story collections by Israeli writer Ida Fink’s, All the Stories, and French writer Charlotte Delbo’s, Auschwitz and After, to reflect the impact of the Holocaust on autobiographical elements in their work. The authors are representatives of the first generation of Holocaust survivors, which means that the mass systematic genocide during World War II was a personal traumatic experience for them. The works of female writers are studied using the theory of (...) trauma at the genre level. Since autobiography has been considered a documentary genre with its own peculiarities, works about the Holocaust were seen as historical evidence of this event. However, based on the works of Juri Lotman and some principles of Philippe Lejeune’s “autobiographical pact”, we can conclude that autobiography is similar to fiction if it can meet certain aesthetic functions. Under the influence of trauma, the genre of autobiography can be modified in the literary text in such a way that the line between autobiography and fiction is blurred. Ida Fink and Charlotte Delbo write short stories with fictional narrators, but all the situations are certainly the experiences of the writers themselves, who turn to the autofiction and conventions of Philippe Lejeune’s “autobiographical pact” to transfer their memories to literary heroes. The aim of the study is to define the peculiarities of the autobiographical genre, analyze its functions in Holocaust literature, identify poetic elements of autobiography, and prove that there is no canonical form of narration about the Holocaust-Era, as the writers were searching for how to articulate their traumatic experience in experimental forms. (shrink)

This book argues for the ethical relevancy of contemporary fiction at the beginning of the 21st century. The writers discussed in Contemporary Fiction and the Ethics of Modern Culture pay close attention to the concrete realities of the everyday world, such as the feelings of isolation created in urban environments; the roles played by sports, drugs, advertising, and the media; and the widespread use of computer, telecommunication, and entertainment technologies. Through reading novels by such writers as David Foster Wallace, Richard (...) Powers, and Irvine Welsh, this book looks at how these works seek to transform the ways that readers live in the world. This book should appeal to scholars of contemporary literature, persons interested in cultural studies, critics interested in ethics, scholars of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, students of contemporary literature, and general readers of contemporary literature. (shrink)

Reading fiction from high and low culture together, Fiction, Crime, and Empire skillfully sheds light on how crime fiction responded to the British and American experiences of empire, and how forms such as the detective novel, spy thrillers, and conspiracy fiction articulate powerful cultural responses to imperialism. Poe's Dupin stories, for example, are seen as embodying a highly critical vision of the social forces that were then transforming the United States into a modern, democratic industrialized nation; a century later, Le (...) Carré employs the conventions of espionage fiction to critique the exhausted and morally compromised values of British imperialism. By exploring these works through the organizing figure of crime during and after the age of high imperialism, Thompson challenges and modifies commonplace definitions of modernism, postmodernism, and popular or mass culture. (shrink)

This essay examines the use of fictions in the reasoning of the House of Lords and United Kingdom Supreme Court in the context of two recent lines of authority on English tort law. First, the essay explores the relevance of counter-factual scenarios to liability in the tort of false imprisonment, in the light of the Supreme Court decisions in Lumba and Kambadzi. The second series of decisions is on causation in negligence claims arising from asbestos exposure. These cases have (...) revealed fundamental, ongoing judicial disagreement about the nature and extent of the exceptions made to general principles. The cases are also shown to lend force to Del Mar’s argument about the diachronicity of legal fictions. Overall, it is argued that such fictions play an important role in common law reasoning. (shrink)

Living in Words: Literature, Autobiographical Language, and the Composition of Selfhood pursues three main questions: What role does literature play in the constitution of a human being? What is the connection between the language we see at work in imaginative fiction and the language we develop to describe ourselves? And is something more powerful than just description at work -- that is, does self-descriptive or autobiographical language itself play an active role in shaping and solidifying our identities? This (...) adventurous book suggests that interdisciplinary work interweaving philosophy and literature can answer these questions. Main sections investigate the relational model of the self derived from American pragmatism, the sense of rightness that can attach to descriptions of ourselves and our actions, the analogy between interpreting works of art and the interpretation of persons, the special power of literature as a self-compositional tool and the "architecture" of self-narratives and the corresponding growth of self-understanding, what we can learn from cautionary tales concerning the tragic lack of self-knowledge, the possibility of "rewriting" and "rereading" the self, and overall, the assembly of real-life structures of self-definition through our reflective engagement with literature. Throughout, the book develops a model of active, self-constitutive literary reading that provides language for, and sharpens, self-individuation and sensibility. Conjoining a relational conception of selfhood to a narrative conception of self-understanding, Living in Words makes a powerful claim that aesthetic experience and our engagement with the arts is a far more serious matter in human life and society than it in some quarters is taken to be. (shrink)

This concise volume addresses the question of whether or not language, and its structure in literary discourses, determines individuals' mental 'vision, ' employing an innovative cross-disciplinary approach using readers' drawings of their mental imagery during reading. The book engages in critical dialogue with the perceived wisdom in stylistics rooted in Roger Fowler's seminal work on deixis and point of view to test whether or not this theory can fully account for what readers see in their mind's eye and how they (...) see it. The work draws on findings from a study of English and Dutch across a range of literary texts, in which participants read literary text fragments and were then asked to immediately draw representations of what they had seen envisioned. Building on the work of Fowler and more recent theoretical and empirical language-based studies in the area, Klomberg, Schilhab and Burke argue that models from embodied cognitive science can help account for anomalies in evidence from readers' drawings, indicating new ways forward for interdisciplinary understandings of individual meaning construction in literary textual interfaces. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in stylistics, cognitive psychology, rhetoric, and philosophy, particularly those working in embodied cognition. (shrink)

During the second half of the eighteenth century, the most powerful literary work in Britain was nonfictional: philosophy, history, biography, and political controversy. Leo Damrosch argues that this tendency is no accident; at the beginning of the modern age, writers were consciously aware of the role of cultural fictions, and they sought to ground those fictions in a real world beyond the text. Their political conservatism (often neglected by modern scholars) was an extensively thought out response to a world in (...) which meaning was inseparable from consensus, and in which consensus was increasingly under attack. Damrosch finds strong affinities between writers who are usually described as antagonists. The first chapter places Hume and Johnson in dialogue, showing that their responses to the challenge of their age have deep similarities, and that their thinking points forward in significant ways to twentieth-century pragmatism. Subsequent chapters explore the interrelationship of the fictive and the "real" in a wide range of works by Boswell, Gibbon, White, Burke, and Godwin. In its combination of literary, philosophical, and cultural criticism, this book will appeal to scholars in many fields as well as to nonacademic readers interested in intellectual history. (shrink)

David Hume's early philosophy appeals to fiction and artifice to explain several important features in our cognitive and social activity. In this dissertation, I develop a typology of Humean fictions and artifices to clarify and render his account consistent. In so doing, I identify a special class of fictions I divide into natural fictions and natural artifices. I argue that this special class of cognitive and social fictions represents a significant break with prior English-speaking philosophers, such as Francis Bacon (...) and John Locke, in so far as these fictions and artifices of the imagination are recognized as natural, irresistible, and pragmatically useful in human cognition and social activity. That fictions and artifices are naturally generated by the imagination in epistemic and moral contexts, I argue, is a watershed discovery in the history of philosophy. Indeed, it is a philosophical conclusion that poses serious, perhaps fatal, problems for philosophers who espouse thoroughgoing realist positions. More broadly, Hume's pursuit of applying the experimental method to the moral subject reveals that human nature is mightily governed by the imagination, and that fictions and artifices are ubiquitous across the domains of science, morality, theology, logic, mathematics, and philosophy. For that reason, I suggest Hume ought to be recognized as a central figure in the history of philosophical fictionalism. Specifically, via a comparative analysis of Hume and Hans Vaihinger, I make the case that Hume functions as a vital link between Hobbes, Berkeley, and Kant in the development of early modern fictionalism. (shrink)

A Linguistic Analysis of Prior, Quine, and Searle on Propositional Attitudes, Martinich on Fictional Reference, Taglicht on the Active/Passive Mood Distinction in English, etc.

Why have theorists approached narrative primarily as a form of retrospect? Mark Currie argues that anticipation and other forms of projection into the future are vital for an understanding of narrative and its effects in the world. In a series of arguments and readings, he offers an account of narrative as both anticipation and retrospection, linking fictional time experiments (in Ali Smith, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Graham Swift) to exhilarating philosophical themes about presence and futurity. This is an argument (...) that shows that narrative lies at the heart of modern experiences of time, structuring the present, whether personal or collective, as the object of a future memory as much as it records the past. (shrink)

This book considers the significance of this confluence through an examination of myths in the writings of H. G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick and Frank Herbert. Presenting fresh insights into their works, the author brings to light the tendency of science fiction narratives to reaffirm spiritual myths.

What so many readers—whether "sensitive and intelligent" and comprising "generations" I do not know—have found in Fiction and the Shape of Belief is sheer delight in the rigor and shrewdness of the argument. The most formidable part of Sacks' book is precisely what one would at first necessarily consider the soft spot: the relations of "belief" to fictional form. If one allows the assumptions about a stable and controllable language implicit in the argument and then perhaps substitutes a Boothian term (...) like "implied author" for "Fielding," the demonstrations are irresistible. Sacks sets himself the job of trying to "formulate a theory about a constant and necessary relationship between the ethical beliefs of novelists . . . and novels" . He works his way through various possibilities largely by means of eliminating the crude and the obvious. The question "What must Fielding have believed to have created such a character or devised such a situation?" is at first answered by "Almost anything." We can infer little directly about belief from "situation characters"; we must be very careful not to regard the speeches of paragon characters as "isolable topical essays" . While the model of a novel presented to us is "constructed," architectural, and therefore undynamic, it is also highly complex. The process of making inferences from the relations between parts and between the parts and the whole, of comparing signals with other signals, is delicate indeed. Sacks' method is to lead us gradually toward more and more complex formulations of belief, blocking easy answers and forcing us to take more and more into account. He is gracious toward but has little interest in historical or biographical evidence that would bear on the question of belief; his subject is relentlessly formal. The central concern—"How can any novelist embody his beliefs in novels?"—is focused on "how," on the manipulation of formal devices, not on the content of that belief. Once inside the system, one can do little but cheer. James R. Kincaid is professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The author of Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter, Tennyson's Major Poems: The Comic and Ironic Patterns, and The Novels of Anthony Trollope, he is currently writing a book on narrative structures and the question of coherence. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Coherent Readers, Incoherent Text" and "Pluralistic Monism". (shrink)

Steadman suggests that these poets, along with most other Renaissance poets, did not actually regard themselves as divinely inspired but, rather, resorted to a common fiction to create the appearance of having special insight into the truth.

I begin by asking an engagingly naive question that a layman would have every right to put to us - and often has. Why should we interest ourselves seriously in the once-upon-a-time worlds of fiction - these unreal stories about unreal individuals? It has been a persistent question in the history of criticism - ever since Plato called the poet a liar - and it is a question at once obvious and embarrassing. It is obvious because, for the apologist for (...) imaginative literature, it becomes a prolegomenon to all further questions; and it is embarrassing because merely to ask it threatens to put literature out of business and, with it, all those who treat it as a serious and world-affecting art. Why, then, should we interest ourselves seriously in fictions? However elementary, it is a question that is more easily asked than answered. Murray Krieger is the author of The Tragic Vision and The Classic Vision, which have recently been reprinted in the two-volume paperback Visions of Extremity in Modern Literature. He is University Professor of English and director of the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California at Irvine. "Poetic Presence and Illusion: Renaissance Theory and the Duplicity of Metaphor," another contribution to Critical Inquiry, appeared in the Winter 1974 issue. See also: "The Dismantling of a Marionette Theater; or, Psychology and the Misinterpretation of Literature" by Erich Heller in Vol. 4, No. 3. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.2 (2003) 133-134 [Access article in PDF] Fictional Beings J. M. Coetzee What Does It Mean, "To Understand"? A tennis coach is teaching a young player a forehand topspin drive. He does so with a mixture of demonstrations (nonverbal) and explanations (verbal), such as, "At the moment of impact you roll the wrist over like this" (demonstrates). The player tries the stroke again and again, (...) and each time the coach shakes his head and says, "You haven't got it yet." Then the player gets the stroke right. The coach says "Now you've got it! Now you understand! Now let's do it again!"Is this a legitimate use of the word understand? I think it is. The coach intends the following: At first you may have understood my words but from your actions—the practice strokes you played—I could not see that you had understood my meaning. Then, when you got the stroke right, and could repeat it, I saw that you had finally understood the meaning behind my words.Understanding is in this case the effective translation of words, or words plus demonstrations, into actions, where effectiveness can be easily measured. The translation is from a verbal, or mixed verbal, system into an entirely nonverbal system of electrochemical impulses.Conversely, one can picture an exhaustive analysis of forehand topspin drives by André Agassi, conducted by microphotography, implanted sensors, and so on, to issue in a mixed verbal and diagrammatic account of how Agassi plays the stroke. In this case the physiologic system of the stroke has been successfully translated into a (partially) verbal system. Again, it would be meaningful to say that the sports physiologist who does the analysis has come to understand how the stroke is played.Although in both these cases understanding is conceived of as a translation process, I concentrate from here onward on the translation process from the verbal to the nonverbal, exemplified by understanding how to play a particular stroke.The coach says X and the player tries to "do" X, but fails and fails, until finally he succeeds. When the player has at last "done" X, he has understood. Thereafter, by steps, the player ceases to depend on the coach and the coach's X: the player can do X by himself; he understands X in the sense that whenever he says X to himself he can do X. He has made X his own.I read The Sound and the Fury, the part devoted to Benjy. Benjy says X and I don't understand. I understand the words on the page one by one, many of the sentences I understand one by one in the sense that I can translate them into other English sentences, but I don't understand the logic that gets Benjy from one sentence to the next, I don't understand the references of many words that are usually referential, and sometimes I am baffled by the syntax.For whatever reason, I go on reading Benjy. In a few respects I begin to understand better. For instance, there are sentences that stop in midstride, and I begin to suspect that such sentences stop because Benjy does not want to think what [End Page 133] comes next—that is to say, that the Faulkner behind Benjy means me to understand that Benjy lacks the wherewithal to face what would naturally come next. Mainly, however, I remain in the dark.Then I begin to experience something interesting. I find that I am, in my mind, going through some of the movements of Benjy's language. I am, as it were, practicing the characteristic strokes of his game. Although I remain, for the most part, unable to translate his pages into connected discourse—that is, into a discourse in which the logical connection between one sentence and the next is, however faulty, at least clear—I am better and better able to "do" Benjy."Doing" Benjy in this case means more than parrot-like repetition of Benjy's words. I can now speak of "entering Benjy" in a way that makes sense. I... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 30.1 (2006) 299-309 [Access article in PDF] Conscious Fiction Mary Clayton Coleman Bard College Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays, by David Lodge; 320 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002, $24.95 boards, $16.95 paper. Fictional Minds, by Alan Palmer; 275 pp. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2004, $45.00. Radiant Cool: A Novel Theory of Consciousness, by Dan Lloyd; 357 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: The (...) MIT Press, 2004, $24.95 boards, $14.95 paper. What contributions can fiction make to the representation and investigation of conscious experience? Might fiction help us to develop and advance new theories about the nature of consciousness? And might such theories, in turn, inform our understanding of the process of reading fiction? Three recent volumes—one by English critic and novelist, David Lodge; another by literary theorist, Alan Palmer; and a third by philosopher and (now) novelist, Dan Lloyd—raise these important, genre-bending questions, and they offer challenging if not always convincing answers to them. More generally, these volumes make valuable contributions to the fruitful cross-pollination that has developed between philosophers, scientists, literary theorists, and novelists who are interested in the nature of consciousness.Lodge's new collection of essays is called Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays, and like all of the criticism he has written since the late eighties, this volume is intended for a general audience, not for [End Page 299] literary theorists. The title essay, "Consciousness and the Novel," is a revised version of the Richard Ellman Lectures in Modern Literature that Lodge gave at Emory University in 2001, and the other nine essays, all previously published, cover such topics as Howards End; the novels of Evelyn Waugh; The Letters of Kingsley Amis; Martin Amis's memoir, Experience; and the relationship between literature and criticism. I will focus on "Consciousness and the Novel."Lodge's thesis in this essay is that novels play an essential role in our exploration of the nature of human consciousness. This thesis is certainly true, but it is also entirely banal. Much more interesting is what Lodge says in support of it. He argues that because of the unique representative possibilities of the novel, conscious experiences can be represented more effectively in novels than they can be in scientific writing. Taken literally, as an assertion about the relative representational power of novels and scientific discourse, this is extremely implausible. However, taken more loosely—as an invitation to those of us interested in consciousness to take a closer look at the ways conscious experiences are represented in novels—Lodge's claim is sensible and appealing. I will consider the literal reading of Lodge's claim first and then turn to the looser one.It is undoubtedly true that, as a whole, novelists devote more energy to representing conscious experiences than writers of scientific discourse do. However, science writers can use whatever techniques best serve their aims, including the aim of describing conscious experiences, so there is no reason to think that conscious experiences can, in principle, be represented more effectively in novels than in broadly scientific discourse. Given that Lodge discusses such creative science writers as Antonio Damasio, Daniel Dennett, and Steven Pinker in the course of his essay, it is surprising and disappointing to find him caricature scientific writing in the following way: "science... is a third-person discourse. The first-person pronoun is not used in scientific papers. If there were any hint of qualia in a scientific paper... it would be edited out" (p. 11). Qualia are the supposedly subjective qualitative aspects of conscious experiences. How the plucked string of a cello sounds to you; how the rotting fish in the garbage smells to you; and how it feels for you to inch down into the smooth, almost-too-hot water of a perfect bubble bath—these are all (supposedly) examples of qualia. Lodge is simply mistaken when he says that there is no hint of qualia in scientific writing. There is no consensus about whether qualia can be explained scientifically. In fact, there is no consensus about whether they exist. [End Page... (shrink)

The author engages a question raised about theories of nonexistent objects. The question concerns the way names of fictional characters, when analyzed as names which denote nonexistent objects, acquire their denotations. Since nonexistent objects cannot causally interact with existent objects, it is thought that we cannot appeal to a `dubbing' or a `baptism'. The question is, therefore, what is the starting point of the chain? The answer is that storytellings are to be thought of as extended baptisms, and the details (...) of this response receive attention in the paper. Once the storytelling is complete, and the characters have been baptized, a priori metaphysical principles linking the storytelling with the realm of nonexistent objects provide the referential, non-causal connection between the names used in the storytelling and the objects denoted by such names. [This is the original English version of an article that first appeared in German translation, translated into German by Arnold Günther and published in the Zeitschrift für Semiotik 9/1-2 (1987): 85-95. The version that appears here is, for the most part, unaltered.]. (shrink)