Understanding Misreading / Intertextual Pragmatics

martes 30 de marzo de 2010

Understanding Misreading / Intertextual Pragmatics

He subido al Social Science Research Network este viejo artículo sobre crítica y retrospección: "Understanding Misreading: A Hermeneutic-Deconstructive Approach". Una versión preliminar en español está aquí: "Understanding Misreading: Hermenéutica de la Relectura Retrospectiva".

Abstract:
This paper puts forward a conception of specialised literary criticism, more specifically deconstructive readings, as a mode of communicative interaction which can be described through a pragmalinguistic account. Schleiermacher’s conception of the hermeneutic circle provides an adequate bridge between literary criticism and speech production, once we attend to the possible developments of the theory of the hermeneutic circle understanding it as both a temporal process, and an interactional one. This paper, therefore, presents for the purpose of comparison several critical conceptions originating in different schools and dealing with a range of objects of study in criticism. The comparison yields a common element whose outline becomes gradually visible as we proceed, as each of these conceptions (hermeneutics, deconstruction, modernist aesthetics, pragmalinguistics...) brings out aspects which are implicit in the others. This exercise might be compared to the drawing of lines between stars to form a constellation, allowing us to see a previously invisible figure. The lines in constellations may seem too insubstantial as a term of comparison, but the paper will go some length towards the deconstruction of the clear-cut opposition between what is substantial and what is constructed by the imagination, at least as far as the field of interpretive theory is concerned. The thread connecting the critical approaches examined here is the retrsopective rereading of a narrative and its hermeneutic consequences. These consequences might be summarized by saying that the passing of time alters everything, even the past itself, once so safely stored.

Keywords: Criticism, Interpretation, Pragmalinguistics, Pragmatics of literature, Interaction, Hermeneutics, Hermeneutic circle, Eliot, Borges, de Man, Wilde, Hillis Miller, Schleiermacher, Interpretation, Interpretive theory, Deconstruction, Retrospection, Hindsight bias.

También he subido la versión inglesa de este otro artículo: Speech Acts, Literary Tradition, and Intertextual Pragmatics—cuya versión en español estaba aquí. Este es el abstract en inglés:

Abstract:
There is a potential kinship between some central concepts of classical literary criticism (such as tradition, genre, originality, allusion) and some more recent ones developed by formalist/structuralist criticism (intertextuality, defamiliarization) and by linguistic pragmatics (illocution, indirect speech acts, pragmatic principles and communicative maxims). Reflecting on the common ground shared by these notions may shed some light on the relationship between linguistics and literary theory. This paper discusses, as one among a wide range of pragmatic constraints on literature, the intertextual relationship between a work and the tradition it belongs to and which helps define it. It is argued that intertextual signals do not have to be overt even when deliberate, and that deliberate signals do not exhaust a work’s intertextuality (since, for one thing, it will itself give rise to new links).

Keywords: Literature, Literary pragmatics, Pragmalinguistics, Speech acts, Speech act theory, Fictionality, Tradition, Intertextuality, Semiotics of literature, Literary theory.

Últimamente voy subiendo todos los artículos por triplicado a dos sitios además del SSRN: Academia y Zaguán. Allí van estos también. (Observo, por cierto, que en Zaguán, el repositorio digital de la Universidad de Zaragoza, soy uno de los usuarios más activos de esta universidad, si no el que más... con diferencia).

Objects in the Rearview Mirror May Appear More Solid Than They Are