There must be few philosophical projects more serious than Jürgen Habermas’s lifelong effort to realize the lofty universalist ambitions of the Enlightenment in his communicative theory of rational discourse and deliberative democracy.

Raquel Cascales and Luis Echarte focus on the development of practical wisdom and what they call ‘seeing with the heart’ for science students by means of reading science fiction literature. They argue that literature can bring the student into contact with the reality of moral life as moral dilemmas are made concrete by the characters and circumstances in a novel. They provide an analysis of how Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World can be read in the classroom and show how the (...) novel invites students to think about the role of science in society, the evolutionary paradigm, advances in genetic and psychological manipulation, as well as questions concerning human emotions,suffering, and friendship. (shrink)

Contemporary accounts on fictional emotions, i.e., emotions experienced towards objects we know to be fictional, are mainly concerned with explaining their rationality or lack thereof. In this context dominated by an interest in the role of belief, questions regarding their phenomenal quality have received far less attention: it is often assumed that they feel “similar” to emotions that target real objects. Against this background, this paper focuses on the possible specificities of fictional emotions’ qualitative feel. It starts by presenting what (...) I call the “phenomenological question” about the qualitative feel of fictional emotions (section 1) and by showing that this is irreducible to questions about their cognitive, intentional, evaluative, and embodied nature (section 2). Drawing on some insights from early phenomenologists, the next two sections elaborate criteria to distinguish between real and sham emotions on the one side (section 3) and between genuine and non-genuine emotions on the other (section 4). Finally, I apply this orthogonal distinction to the particular case of fictional emotions (section 5). The paper argues that fictional emotions are neither sham emotions nor quasi-emotions, but full-fledged emotional experiences, despite them displaying the distinctive phenomenology of emotions experienced as non-genuine. In the particular case of fictional emotions, they are non-genuine because our psychology is in fact in a state dominated by aesthetic enjoyment. (shrink)

Intersemiotic translation (IT) was defined by Roman Jakobson (The Translation Studies Reader, Routledge, London, p. 114, 2000) as “transmutation of signs”—“an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems.” Despite its theoretical relevance, and in spite of the frequency in which it is practiced, the phenomenon remains virtually unexplored in terms of conceptual modeling, especially from a semiotic perspective. Our approach is based on two premises: (i) IT is fundamentally a semiotic operation process (semiosis) and (ii) (...) IT is a deeply iconic-dependent process. We exemplify our approach by means of literature to dance IT and we explore some implications for the development of a general model of IT. (shrink)

This paper argues that Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutical philosophy attempts to reopen the question of human transcendence in contemporary terms. While his conception of language as self-transcending is deeply Husserlian, Ricoeur also responds to the analytical challenge when he deploys a basic distinction in Fregean logic in order to clarify Heidegger’s phenomenology of world. Ricoeur’s commitment to a transcendental view is evident in his conception of narrative, which enables him to emphasize the role of the performative in literary reading. The meaning (...) of the self in time provides Ricoeur with a discursive basis for distinguishing his own position from that of Kant and other philosophers in the transcendental tradition. (shrink)

In this paper, I demonstrate how the Passover Haggadah exploits certain features of conversational interaction in both the production formats of its texts and in its performance formats (or ways it indicates it should be performed) during the Passover Seder. Some conversational methods used include the use of dispreferred second pair parts which creates an impression that at least part of the Haggadah's text resembles a kind of conversational argument. Furthermore, as a recitable text, the Haggadah exploits the use of (...) and changes in footings in a manner reminiscent of how reported speech is used in ordinary conversation to introduce participant roles and virtual participants with their own commitments, orientations and positions which may not represent those of the animators of the recited text. While the Haggadah is not an actual argument in conventional terms, it is a script of ritual texts organized according to a logic similar to the one by which certain kinds of conversational arguments are organized. Participants are able to animate participatory roles and assess the positions, orientations and commitments such roles represent in a manner that rehearses how such positions, orientations and commitments might be accomplished in actual argumentation. (shrink)

Intermedial art, as it emerged in the 1960s and 70s, constituted a threat not only to the medium specificity of modernism, but to the artwork as self-contained autonomous object. Both supporters and critics of intermedia drew a contrast between, on the one hand, modernism’s aesthetic engagement with a medium-specific ‘object’, and on the other new non-aesthetic ‘practices’ engaging the ‘literal spectator’ within her own space, such that the space of the gallery is drawn into the situational encounter. In her 2003/12 (...) book Aesthetics of Installation Art Juliana Rebentisch challenges this binary characterization of autonomous/non-autonomous art. She argues that aesthetic autonomy is not something that can be guaranteed by production, but rather is explicable only with reference to the structure of the aesthetic experience. And for Rebentisch, while installation art has not led to fundamentally different conditions of reception, it has led to an ideological rejection of the notion of context-independent art. Aesthetic autonomy is here not abandoned, but rather reconfigured as a dynamic operational with respect to the ethical and political situation where we encounter the artwork. Sympathetic to the broad remit of Rebentisch’s argument, this article investigates the role of the beholder’s share within the context of such situated art. I draw specifically on Wolfgang Iser’s transformation of a negative aesthetics from binaries of negation/affirmation into an enabling structure where the organization of signifiers serve not the designation of a signified object, but rather designate instructions for the production of the signified. This requires work of the situated beholder, who must negotiate access to the work’s content by bringing her orientation into play. Installation art, thus conceived, constitutes a space that while virtualized – removed from functional imperatives – compels acts of imagination/ideation by problematizing our habitual dispositions. (shrink)

Ingarden’s phenomenology of aesthetics is characterised primarily as a realist ontological approach which is secondarily concerned with acts of consciousness. This approach leads to a stark contrast between spatiotemporal objects and literary objects. Ontologically, the former is autonomous, totally determined, and in possession of infinite attributes, whilst the latter is a heteronomous intentional object that has only limited determinations and infinitely many “spots of indeterminacy.” Although spots of indeterminacy are often discussed, the role they play in contrasting the real and (...) literary object is not often disputed. Through a close reading of Ingarden’s ontological works and texts on aesthetics, this essay contests the purity of Ingarden’s ontological approach and the ensuing disparity between real and literary object, particularly on the question of spots of indeterminacy. I do this by demonstrating the following five theses: 1) Ingarden’s claim that the real object has an infinitude of properties belies an epistemology, and we should instead conclude that ontologically the real object’s properties are finite. 2) Ingarden’s a priori argument that absent properties of real objects are ontologically determined is unsound. 3) The radical difference between the infinitude and finitude of givenness and absence of the real and the literary object ought to be relativised. 4) Indeterminacies within the novel are concretised in much the same way that absent properties of real objects are intended. 5) Literature makes claims that have a truth value that we can attribute to their author. (shrink)

Our purpose has been to illuminate questions surrounding the use of literature in medical education, and to propose criteria for selecting literature which is more likely to evoke readers to reflect on their personal and professional selves. We have suggested that literature promoting vicariousness and vulnerability may validate readers' questions, insecurities, and beliefs insofar as readers are willing to engage with the text cognitively and phenomenologically. This we call reader responsibility. Crucial to nurturing this responsibility are medical educators 2- ducators (...) in any context, for that matter – who are vulnerable themselves, who puzzle outloud, who admit their own incompleteness. Together as learners, teachers and students may come to realize that it is, in the end, the artist whopresses upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power... seizes our lives, and which reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered. (shrink)

There is a clear and controlling philosophical concern that governs Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays: freedom from limitation and self-reliance from external authority. What makes it difficult to understand his essays, however, is his style, which is characterized by disconnection, paradox, and negation. These rhetorical techniques make the meaning of his writings elusive and slippery. Though many scholars have analyzed Emerson’s style, none have approached it through the writings of Laozi, an ancient Chinese philosopher. There are two reasons I compare Emerson (...) and Laozi. First, in spite of their differences, there are important parallel themes and stylistic innovations in their writings. Second, attentiveness to a key figure in the Eastern philosophical tradition can help to explain how Emerson’s thoughts disappoint Western readers, precisely because they employ techniques beyond the method of habitual intellect in the Western frame. This essay tries to approach several features in Emerson’s writing style from a Daoist perspective to show that both philosophers purposefully use linguistic strategies such as disconnection, paradox, and negation to provoke readers into participating in understanding truth, instead of telling them directly what truth is. (shrink)

Dune, released in 1984 and directed by David Lynch, from his own adaptedscreenplay of Frank Herbert’s epic science-fiction novel, provides a rich examplefor a reception study on ideas of authorship. On the one hand, Herbert’s 1960scult bestseller has evolved into a franchise and is thus regarded by Duneenthusiasts as a sacrosanct text. From a Lynch perspective, though, the film isusually seen as his least personal work – an event movie no less – and as such itholds the rank of the (...) most uncared for text in his filmic canon. It is the goal ofthis paper to analyse Dune’s meanings in relation to critical writings foundedupon the tenets of early auteurism so we might explore its function as areception preference for the predisposed reader. But rather than simply dismissauteurism as humanist idealism , the outcome of this paper seeks to also take account ofthe writing pleasures the author might bring to the interpretation of filmed texts. (shrink)

In the ninth book of his Ἀτθίς the Athenian historian and religious expert Philochorus related an omen about which he had himself been consulted in the late fourth centuryb.c.e.(FGrHist328 F 67).When this year was done and the next was beginning, there occurred on the Acropolis the following prodigy: a female dog, having entered the temple of Athena Polias and made its way into the Pandroseion, got up on the altar of Zeus Herkeios, which is under the olive tree, and lay (...) down. It is an ancestral custom among the Athenians that no dog go up on the Acropolis. Around the same time, a star was evident for a while even in the daytime sky, when the sun was out and the weather was clear. And when we were asked about what the portent and the phenomenon meant, we said that both predicted the return of the exiles and that this would happen not as a result of a political change but rather in the existingpoliteia. And this interpretation actually came to pass. (shrink)

The difficulties faced in the recruitment and retention of nursing staff in nursing homes for older people are an international challenge. It is therefore essential that the causes of nurses’ reluctance to work in these settings are determined. This paper considers the influence that multiple‐source care funding issues have on nursing home nurses’ experiences and views regarding the practice and appeal of the role. The methodology for this study was hermeneutic phenomenology. Thirteen nurses from seven nursing homes in the North (...) East of England were interviewed in a sequence of up to five interviews and data were analysed using a literary analysis method. Findings indicate that participants are uncomfortable with the business aspects that funding issues bring to their role. The primary difficulties faced are: tensions between care issues and funding issues; challenges associated with ‘selling beds’; and coping with self‐funding residents’ changing expectations of care. The findings of the study suggest that multiple‐source care funding systems that operate in nursing homes for older people pose challenges to nursing home nurses. Some of these challenges may impact on their recruitment and retention. (shrink)

Defining “criticism” is a simple—but bedeviling—task. No less a critic and theorist than Edwin Black begins with the simple statement that “criticism is what critics do.” While he admits that this seems like an empty definition, Black does note that it has one redeeming feature—“It compels us to focus on the critic” (1978, 4). Criticism and those who engage in it are integrally connected, and any account of critical activity must deal with both the activity and its actor. In this (...) way, it is much like art—one could easily utter that “art is what artists do.” Criticism is often tied to art and its products, so this appears to be a fair way to proceed in an investigation of criticism. Yet I would argue .. (shrink)

This is a comment to Graham Harman’s 2019 response to an article by Þóra Pétursdóttir and Bjørnar Olsen (2018) in which they propose that a materially grounded, archaeological perspective might complement Harman’s historical approach in Immaterialism (2016). Harman responds that his book is indeed already more archaeological than historical, stipulating that history is the study of media with a high density of information, whereas archaeology studies media with a low density of information. History, Harman holds, ends up in too much (...) detail, while archaeology has the advantage of lending itself to the imagination. Hence, his reading of history had the aim of tempering the historical information overload, in effect making the book a work of archaeology. In this comment, I want to do three things: (1) critique the idea that archaeological and historical media are inherently different with regard to their densities of information, (2) discuss how archaeology and history approach their media, and (3) reflect on conceptualisations of “archaeology” outside the discipline itself. (shrink)

This essay examines Claudio Magris’s literary production from the point of view of European normative ethics by drawing on recently-proposed theories of negative empathy and the hybrid hero. A brief overview of Magris’s narratives and characters—from Illazioni su una sciabola (1985) (Inferences from a Sabre, 1991) to Croce del Sud) [Southern cross] (2020)—shows his peculiar interpretation of such theories and how he repurposes them for ethical goals. This is followed by a close reading of Un altro mare (1991) (A Different (...) Sea, 2017) which presents in detail the narrative and stylistic devices adopted by the author to establish an emotional connection with readers that can stimulate empathic identification together with critical thinking. Finally, the essay demonstrates the central role of Magris’s work in a European ethical framework with the support of empirical evidence in the study of reading experience, combined with theoretical claims of several modern philosophers and literary scholars, including, among others, Martha Nussbaum, Stefano Ercolino, Massimo Salgaro, and Benjamin van Tourhout. (shrink)

SÍNTESE - a característica adorniana de fogo de artificio revelada pela produção artística moderno- contemporânea é própria de todas as obras de arte de qualquer época. A permanência do fato artístico estará entregue à sua ordem de leitura e execução no tempo. Serão apresentadas as características da razão dominadora, o ponto de vista do Ersatz, a leitura da obra como execução e como recepção.

ABSTRACTDespite the huge interest in different philosophical questions surrounding literature, particularly analytic philosophers have had relatively little to say about literature’s specifically a...

This paper proposes an understanding of literary narrative as a form of social cognition and situates the study of such narratives in relation to the new comprehensive approach to human cognition, enaction. The particular form of enactive cognition that narrative understanding is proposed to depend on is that of participatory sense-making, as developed in the work of Di Paolo and De Jaegher. Currently there is no consensus as to what makes a good literary narrative, how it is understood, and why (...) it plays such an irreplaceable role in human experience. The proposal thus identifies a gap in the existing research on narrative by describing narrative as a form of intersubjective process of sense-making between two agents, a teller and a reader. It argues that making sense of narrative literature is an interactional process of co-constructing a story-world with a narrator. Such an understanding of narrative makes a decisive break with both text-centered approaches that have dominated both structuralist and early cognitivist study of narrative, as well as pragmatic communicative ones that view narrative as a form of linguistic implicature. The interactive experience that narrative affords and necessitates at the same time, I argue, serves to highlight the active yet cooperative and communal nature of human sociality, expressed in the many forms than human beings interact in, including literary ones. (shrink)

What do people consciously experience when they read? There has been almost no rigorous research on this question, and opinions diverge radically among both philosophers and psychologists. We describe three studies of the phenomenology of reading and its relationship to memory of textual detail and general cognitive abilities. We find three main results. First, there is substantial variability in reports about reading experience, both within and between participants. Second, reported reading experience varies with passage type: passages with dialogue prompted increased (...) reports of inner speech, while passages with vivid visual detail prompted increased reports of visual imagery. Third, reports of visual imagery experiences, inner speech experiences, and experiences of conscious visual perception of the words on the page were at best weakly related to general cognitive abilities and memory of visual and auditory details. (shrink)

Recent phenomenological research has picked up on the old claim that sometimes artworks seem to take possession of the perceiver. Simon Høffding and Tone Roald have argued that Edmund Husserl’s not...

Following the much-vaunted ‘death of the author,’ this article investigates the re-emergence of the author's subjectivity (and the relation of this to readers' strategies) in electronic texts. Specifically, it looks at the design of ‘hypertextual transpositions’ — a particular kind of information-intensive hypermedial application presenting a ‘classic’ literary text by providing an electronic version and a series of multimedial added materials that can be used in reading, enjoying, and/or studying the literary text. By closely analyzing a sample of ‘hypertextual transpositions,’ (...) the article seeks to demonstrate the ways in which design considerations in the creation of these electronic artefacts are tantamount to a re-emergence of the author's subjectivity. The technology of ‘hypertextual transpositions’ facilitates devices and reading strategies that are simply not available to traditional print texts. Nevertheless, it will be shown that hypermedial versions of ‘classic’ texts reinstate customary principles of authorship while also introducing some new facets of authorial subjectivity. (shrink)

My case study of Heart of Darkness analyzes the role of image schemas in shaping narrative macrostructures and in organizing literary metaphor systems. Assuming that we can reconstruct global story meaning from local image-schematic metaphors, I propose a model in which compound gestalts represent major aspects of the plot-defining macrostructure. It emerges as salient textual cues progressively add up to a scaffold of image-schematic elements that represent the event's overall texture, its "plot-gene". The rich metaphor system of Heart of Darkness (...) throws into relief the amazing range of literary functions rooted in this image-schematic plot-gene, including plot mnemonics, inference, metaphor networks, and clustering of propositional knowledge, megametaphor, focalizing and viewpoint effects, irony, as well as mood contours. Progressing toward a cognitive model of narrative, I will argue that reading involves a mental simulation of how image schemas interact topologically to produce emergent effects. I dub the imagistic substrate of this simulation the "mental (story) sketchpad," following Baddeley (1986). (shrink)

This deeply researched and beautifully crafted study takes as its subject a generation of women who came to maturity in America's Gilded Age. They were scientists and social workers, physicians and educators, and, perhaps most notably, Progressive reformers engaged in the pursuit of social justice. Claiming the newly available opportunities for higher education and professional employment, these women successfully pursued lives in uncharted territory. Barbara Sicherman introduces us to a less visible but equally salient factor in their journey to public (...) identities marked by achievement and acclaim—their sustained and sustaining engagement with reading. (shrink)

This paper investigates how the reader of prose fiction fills in the blanks regarding a fictional character’s membership category, action, and reason for the action. Aligning with an ethnomethodological approach to texts and appropriating membership categorization analysis (MCA), we analyze how the readers of J. D. Salinger, an author whose works are well known for their ambiguity and ambivalence, would grasp the unwritten identities of characters and the meanings of their actions. Our analysis specifies two types of methods deployed for (...) the reader to understand the fictional texts. First, in an at-a-glance way, the reader can supply the missing categories and sequence of actions by turning to the commonsense knowledge and social norms regarding the association between the category and the activity. Second, the reader can construct various interpretations regarding the recognizably ambiguous scenes of the text by turning to the conceptual knowledge of the relevant social phenomena, the maxims specific to the act of storytelling, and the writer’s techniques peculiar to the fictional texts. The findings demonstrate the vast applicability of an MCA approach to the analysis of the work of reading prose fiction and shed light on the detailed operations of the author’s maxims and techniques in the textual configuration of prose fiction, thereby indicating the possibility of ethnomethodological analysis including the interwoven consideration of the reader’s activity and the textual organization. (shrink)

In its attempt to respond to changing historical realities the university has undergone significant transformations, most of which, however, have focused on teaching material, tools, methods or practices adapted to the new demands. Taking as a case study the literary disciplines, this article focuses on the theoretical, mostly implicit, presuppositions that often underlie attempts at institutional innovations. To put the educational process at the center of attention has often meant that a certain view of the epistemic object itself has been (...) largely presupposed; this article attempts to unearth an unquestioned essentialism of the object, by showing how this has, to an extent, been constituted against a certain relativism of the processes that create it. Indeed, the educational setting and its space carry a set of implications for the object of study — that is, literature — that should not remain unaddressed. (shrink)

At the heart of our experience of literature is the idea that fiction can show us new possibilities for the world in which we live. I open up fictional worlds’ hermeneutic dimension by investigating the intersection of Roman Ingarden’s analytic phenomenology of the literary work with Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. Reading Ingarden together with Gadamer, I understand a fictional world as an orientation towards a fictional environment whose foundation is our capacity for language, showing how the reciprocal relationship in which (...) we discover its fictional objects and states of affairs is of the same kind that exists between language and world, so that fiction can be understood to orient us towards the happening of language. By thinking on the relationship between language and experience, I suggest that Ingarden and Gadamer propose to understand a fictional world as an orientation towards our very capacity to be otherwise and to exceed ourselves. (shrink)

In his discussions of life as narrative, and identity as narrative identity, Paul Ricoeur has claimed that we learn to become narrators and heroes of our own stories, without actually becoming the authors of our own lives. This idea, that we cannot be the author of our own life-story in the same way that the author of fictional narrative is the author of that story, seems at first incontestable, given that we are caught up within the enactment of the narrative (...) that is our life, unlike the author of a fictional story who also has an independent existence outside that story. This asymmetry leads Ricoeur to pronounce that an ineradicable difference exists between fictional and life narratives. But is this difference in fact ineffaceable, or is there a sense in which we can be said to be the authors of our own lives? In this article I suggest that there are more points of similarity than Ricoeur explicitly recognizes between what authors do in writing fictional narratives and what we do in figuring, prospectively, our lives. These similarities are brought to light by a revision of the naïve, received concept of author and, once acknowledged, serve to bridge the purportedly ‘unbridgeable gap’ between fictional narratives and life narratives. I then consider how bridging this gap — establishing ourselves as authors as well as narrators — has ethical implications with regard to creating our own lives: a creation which authoring implies, but which is — given the revised notion of author — limited, both by the reciprocity of the other as co-author and by those events in life which the life-author is not fully able to plot. (shrink)

Reader response literary theory dominates the study of literature in the K -12 school curriculum. Because this theory reflects the student - centered, constructivist orientation currently driving curriculum development, reader response literary theory is central to guiding the literary experiences of children in schools. Student readers creatively engage in a transaction with a text driven by their personal purposes and experiences that leads to the construction of new, alternative voices and perspectives. This study employs hermeneutic phenomenology to inquire into the (...) experiencing of the transactive space of literary engagement to understand more fully how the transaction is lived and felt. Phenomenology can allow a better understanding of the lived, embodied experiencing in the transactive space created between reader and text and provide a fresh and meaningful account of how literature "works.". (shrink)

Why focus on reading? Reading is one important human activity that is threatened by the knowledge economy in education. In this perspective, good reading tends to be fast reading. The objective for teachers is then to test pupils' reading skills according to how fast they read. In opposition to this, we think that good reading is a slow activity. A good text asks for a reading and a re-reading, again and again, because reading gives rise to thinking. Thus, you can (...) interpret our writing as a political act. We want to participate in education in a way that opposes the force of a knowledge economy. The aim of this article is to argue why prospective teachers have to train their capability [Ricoeur (2005. The Course of Recognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) refers to four basic capabilities. He distinguishes between: the capability to speak, the capability to act, the capability to tell, and a fourth capability called imputation. Reading in this respect is subordinate to these basic capabilities] to read and, based on this, why we insist on this being a matter of necessity in order to develop reading as a reflexive activity, through what we have called ?slow reading? (this expression is meant to oppose the instrumentalization of reading toward a skill characterized as fast extractions of information, for instance, as measured in various tests). This represents one part of the argument that we are going to elaborate. The other part of the argument is related more specifically to the place of reading in the training of teachers, more precisely asking where this ?place? is. This has led us to ask the following question: Where are teachers' understandings challenged in teacher training? As our argument is laid out, we say that the place of reading is where teachers' understandings are challenged. This entails that this ?place,? this somewhere, is not a permanent ?dwelling?; it is rather something which has to be created (repeatedly) in a dynamic relationship between reader (teacher) and text. (shrink)

This article presents the implications, objectives and initial results of a current ethnographic research project on music lovers. It looks at problems of theory and method posed by such research if it is not conceived only as the explanation of external determinisms, relating taste to the social origins of the amateur or to the aesthetic properties of the works. Our aim is, on the contrary, from long interviews and observations undertaken with music lovers, mostly in the classical field, to concentrate (...) on gestures, objects, mediums, devices and relations engaged in a form of playing or listening, which amounts to more than the actualization of a taste `already there', for they are redefined during the action, with a result that is partly uncertain. This is why amateurs' attachments and ways of doing things can both engage and form subjectivities, rather than merely recording social labels, and have a history, irreducible to that of the taste for works. (shrink)

Summary In the epistemic frame of the biocultural turn and of the neuroaesthetics, we have developed neurohermeneutics as an approach to literature that aims at contributing to the current debate about the linkage between literary, cognitive and neuroscientific studies, focusing on the relationship between mindbrain processes mirrored in the formal features of the text and the strategies activated by the author in a text in order to guide the reader in imagining, emotionally feeling and cognitively getting meanings out of the (...) literary experience. The aim of the neurohermeneutical approach is to grasp and describe phenomenologically the mirroring process between the two extremes of the literary experience, i.e. the writer’s creative process as it is mirrored in the formal features of the literary work and the reader’s imaginative reconfiguration of the text, and what they share in common. The reader revives the mental imaginative processes of the author by creating his/her unrepeatable individual experiences of the text and subjectively redesigning it in an endless loop of features that trigger the imagination and its creative potential both while writing and by reading literature. (shrink)

While Ricoeur wishes to relate the concept of narrative to identity and ethics, Girard sees the development of ethical conscience in myth. This paper examines this difference, arguing that the implicitly universal human nature that he posits, driven by mimetic desire, compromises subjectivity as narrative identity, as developed in Ricoeur's work. This paper attempts to read Girard alongside Ricoeur, in order to suggest that there is a problematic tension implicit in Guard's work between subjectivity and drive. To do this, I (...) describe Ricoeur's understanding of mimesis and how this is related to truth and narrative identity. Then turning to Girard, I show how his linking of violence to truth repudiates the possibility of the attestation of truth as subjectivity. (shrink)

Este trabajo parte de la concepción de la narrativa transmedia por parte de Henry Jenkins como el arte de making worlds, de construir mundos de ficción, para extender los fundamentos teóricos de esta definición al género documental. Si Bill Nichols indica que este género de no ficción tiene per se un gran poder persuasivo -por la naturaleza icónica de sus imágenes y sonidos y por el efecto psicológico de verosimilitud que suscita en el público-, aquí defendemos que este carácter se (...) potencia por medio de la narrativa transmedia. La inmersión, la extrabilidad y la performatividad de este tipo de narrativa lleva a la participación activa del usuario en el mundo transmedia, que coincide con su propio mundo, el real. Por esa razón numerosos proyectos activistas han visto en el documental transmedia una oportunidad tanto para el ejercicio del pensamiento crítico como para el cambio social. (shrink)

The implications of the transdisciplinary spatial turn are attracting growing interest in a broad range of areas related to education. This paper draws on a methodology for interdisciplinary thinking in order to articulate a new theoretical configuration of place-related identity, and its implications for a research agenda. The new configuration is created through an analysis of place-related identities in narrative theory, texts and literacy processes. The emerging research agenda focuses on the ways children perceive and represent their place-related identities through (...) reading and writing as inspired by and manifested in texts. (shrink)

The implications of the transdisciplinary spatial turn are attracting growing interest in a broad range of areas related to education. This paper draws on a methodology for interdisciplinary thinking in order to articulate a new theoretical configuration of place-related identity, and its implications for a research agenda. The new configuration is created through an analysis of place-related identities in narrative theory, texts and literacy processes. The emerging research agenda focuses on the ways children perceive and represent their place-related identities through (...) reading and writing as inspired by and manifested in texts. (shrink)

The article is an exploration of online reading from the perspective of theories of reading and interpretation based on literary theory and the phenomenology of reading literary text. One of its aims is to show that such theories can make a contribution to our understanding of reading and to our design of online reading spaces. The precursor of this stance is the form of hypertext theory originally proposed by George Landow, which predicted radical changes in reading practices with an impact (...) not only on literature but on education in general. The prediction has been slow to be verified and has been criticized by empirical and psychological studies. In this article, hypertext theory is compared to the phenomenology of reading linear literary text, with particular attention paid to the role played by the notion of a text, work or ‘whole’ which is constructed or produced during the course of reading. I show that the active and engaged reading predicted by hypertext theory is available in reading linear literary text, and to a higher degree than in reading hypertext, and consider ways in which the kinds of reading process which occur in reading literature can be generalized to reading for other higher education purposes. Finally, I speculate as to the range of online technologies that could be used to encourage these reading processes, and propose an alternative online reading space. (shrink)

After establishing its roots in basic forms of sensorimotor coupling between an organism and its environment, the new wave in cognitive science known as “enactivism” has turned to higher-level cognition, in an attempt to prove that even socioculturally mediated meaning-making processes can be accounted for in enactivist terms. My article tries to bolster this case by focusing on how the production and interpretation of stories can shape the value landscape of those who engage with them. First, it builds on the (...) idea that narrative plays a key role in expressing the values held by a society, in order to argue that the interpretation of stories cannot be understood in abstraction from the background of storytelling in which we are always already involved. Second, it presents interpretation as an example of what Di Paolo et al. ( 2010 ) have called in their recent enactivist manifesto a “joint process of sensemaking”: just like in face-to-face interaction, the recipient of the story collaborates with the authorial point of view, generating meaning. Third, it traces the meaning brought into the world by interpretation to the activation and, potentially, the restructuring of the background of the recipients of the story. (shrink)

How can providing less textual information about a fictional character make his or her mind more transparent and accessible to the reader? This is the question that emerges from an empirical study of reader response conducted by Kotovych et al. Taking my cue from this study, I discuss the role of implied information in readers’ interactions with characters in prose fiction. This is the textual strategy I call ‘character-centered implicature.’ I argue that the inferential work cued by implicature creates an (...) intersubjective dynamic analogous to what philosophers Zahavi and Rochat discuss under the heading of ‘experiential sharing.’ Effectively, readers complement the textual evocation of mind by drawing on their own past experiences, which leads to a distinctive first-person plural perspective—a sharing of cognitive resources that is responsible for the perceived transparency of the character’s mind. While this experiential sharing may result in empathetic perspective-taking, not all instances of empathy for fictional characters involve sharing. (shrink)

This essay describes some of the basic pragmatic tendencies at work in the world of working and then shows how the finite provinces of meaning of theoretical contemplation and literature act against those pragmatic tendencies. This analysis prepares the way to see how the religious province of meaning in a similar but also distinctive way acts back against these pragmatic tendencies. These three finite provinces of meaning make it possible to see the world from another center of orientation than that (...) of the ego agens and its proclivity to bring transcendences within reach, thereby freeing oneself to a degree from the fundamental anxiety and revealing the uniqueness of oneself and others, who are no longer subjected to working’s pragmatic imperatives. (shrink)