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Abstract: This is a review of Ian McEwan's novel Atonement (2001), with special attention to its narrative structure, and of the 2007 film Atonement directed by Joe Wright, discussing some issues specific to the filmic adaptation of this novel's metafictional structure.
Literature, English novel, McEwan, Atonement, Adaptation, Reflexivity, Metafiction,
Abstract: A review of Cormac McCarthy's The Road (Pulitzer Prize 2007), with a special focus on its Modernist rewriting of apocalyptic science fiction, its connections to Hemingway and Beckett's style and themes, and its autobiographical investment.
Cormac McCarthy, The Road, Hemingway, Beckett, Science fiction, Nuclear war, Apocalypse
Abstract: This paper deals with those dimensions of narrative which define it as such (i.e. narrativity). It examines some current conceptions of narrativity, and puts forward an emergentist theory of narrativity, one which takes into account the narrative structuring effected by narratological analysis itself as a distinct cognitive activity.
Literary theory, Narrative, Narratology, Narrativity, Emergence, Consciousness, Cognition,
Abstract: This paper undertakes an analysis of the narrativity of a form of discourse which has appeared recently (blogs) within the framework of an emergentist theory of narrativity and its discursive modes. The narrative/discursive characteristics of blogs emerge from a preexistent ground of more basic or less specific communicative practices; and narrative discursivity itself is an emergent phenomenon with respect to other cognitive and experiential phenomena. A number of formal and communicative characteristics of blog writing and of the blogosphere are discussed as emergent modes of experience within the pragmatic context of computer-mediated communication.
Blogs, Narrative, Narrativity, Narratology, Experience, Time, Processes, Communication, Discourse, Emergence, Interaction, World Wide Web, Internet,
Abstract: A critical exposition, in Spanish, of Erving Goffman's theories on the semiotic organization of social reality and on the structure of subjectivity and subjective experience (two sides of the same coin) through a detailed analysis of the conclusion to Frame Analysis (1974). Goffman's insights into the interactional nature of subjectivity are related to other theorists' conceptions of the role of reflexivity in perception, consciousness and the structuring of semiotic artifacts (language, narrative, art).
Goffman, Reality, Frames, Expectations, Subject, Subjectivity, Interaction, Communication, Cognition, Reflexivity
Abstract: This paper provides a pragmatic framework for the analysis of argumentation and written interaction in computer-mediated communication (e.g. in forums or blogs). Grice's maxims are supplemented with a theory of linguistic politeness derived from Leech, which is in turn subordinated to a strategic theory of interaction and finally to a theory of aims and action, as defined in ideology and philosophy. Netiquette, politeness, strategy and wisdom are therefore structurally subordinated to each other in the overall theory of human action which includes computer-mediated communication.
Netiquette, Politeness, Strategy, Wisdom, Action, Communication, Interaction, Pragmatics, CMC, Grice, Leech, Goffman, Forums, Blogs, Conversation, Rationality, Aims
Abstract: This is an extensive review and commentary of J. Hillis Miller's book "Speech Acts in Literature", a major theoretical and critical book which discusses the speech act theory and practice of J. L. Austin, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and Marcel Proust. Hillis Miller's insights are discussed in the light of the pragmaticist theory of communicative interaction and of critical interpretation expounded elsewhere by J. A. García Landa. The discussion is relevant to students of linguistics and to those interested in hermeneutics, reader-response criticism and the ethics of literature and criticism.
Speech_acts, Pragmatics, Hillis_Miller, Austin, Derrida, de_Man, Interaction, Hermeneutics, Criticism, Interpretation
Abstract: This paper offers a perspective on the Internet and literature interface, with a special focus on the issue of intertextuality, in an attempt to delimit those issues specific to networked literature, as against digital or hypertextual literature. I will focus on literature as a family of medium-conditioned discursive practices, and examine the consequences of digital networks for a redefinition of these practices. These consequences will be approached from four viewpoints: a perspective on the Internet as literature, and of literature as an Internet: together with an examination of literature in the Internet, and of the Internet in literature. Among the topics addressed will be issues of interactivity, the blogosphere, postmodernist fiction, and the cyborganization of social communication.
Internet, Literature, Publishing, Media, Intertextuality, Links, Hypertext, Blogs
Abstract: A review of James Torio's Blogs: A Global Conversation, on the communications revolution of blogs, social networking and the Web 2.0, and its implications for marketing strategies, most notably the availability of new marketing niches in the long tail economy and the transformation of public relations.
Blogs, Marketing, Economy, Internet, Long tail, Public Relations
Abstract: This is a review of Steven Pinker's article "Toward a Consilient Study of Literature", which is itself a review of and a response to the sociobiological theories expounded and applied in the collective volume THE LITERARY ANIMAL, edited by Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson. Some insights and limitations of cultural darwinism are here examined from the point of view of emergentist philosophy, anthropology and philology, complementing Pinker's psychological critique of cultural sociobiology.
Evolution, Pinker, Consilience, Fiction, Narrative, Sociobiology
Abstract: This paper is a commentary of William Gibson's novel Pattern Recognition (2003) with special emphasis on the ideology of postmodernity and networked globalization, on issues of symbolism and on the reflexive dimension of pattern recognition in the narrative semiotics of the novel and its aesthetic project.
Gibson; Postmodernity; Apophenia; Reflexivity; Globalization;
Abstract: This paper argues the relevance of narratological concepts developed in literary analysis for the study and representation of personal life experience and narrative psychology. The findings of narrative psychology give new insights into the hermeneutic feedback between life and literature, or life and narrative. Several varieties and dimensions of personal life stories are sketched, and the importance of narrative anchoring, as well as of transformations, crises and turning points, is emphasized.
Narrative, Life, Personal development, Character, Crisis, Experience, Autobiography
Abstract: This paper focuses on the notion of the time between the winter solstice and the beginning of the year as a time with a special status, a time out of time as it were, rooted in a tradition of folklore and popular calendrics. The notion of a time that stops, associated in Twelfth Night to a lull, a time of waiting, and of mourning, is combined in Shakespeare's play with the interruption of practical time during a theatrical performance or a festival. This no man's time is shown to have gender-specific connotations rooted in the mismatch of the lunar and solar calendars. Shakespeare's play with generic confusion in the play is characteristic of the suspension of the normal order of time, before the reassertion of renewed time and accepted gender roles when the new cycle of time begins for good.
time, calendar, Shakespeare,Twelfth Night, solstice, gender, lunar cycle, mourning
Abstract: A review of John Battelle's book "The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture" (New York: Portfolio, 2005).
Internet;Search;Google;Hypertext;WWW;Cybernetics;Computers;Economics;Business;Communication;
Abstract: Oscar Wilde's The Critic as Artist is shown to foreshadow some key concepts of poststructuralist interpretive theory - such as the necessary interplay of blindness and insight in criticism (Lacan, Paul de Man), or the retroactive effect of interpretation in the construction of the work. More specifically, Wilde's reading of the riddle of the Sphinx in a passage of this work both theorizes and dramatizes the paradoxical relationship between blindness and insight, in the shape of an ironic prophecy which can be read as Wilde's announcement of his own tragic downfall - in which there is an element of compulsive acting out that has been noted by a number of previous critics. That is, Wilde's Sphinx is used as the vehicle of a riddle about Wilde himself, and is an emblem of his own ambivalent attitude toward the public revelation of his homosexuality.
Wilde, Sphinx, Hermeneutics, Interpretation, Lacan, Criticism
Abstract: This paper expounds a symbolic interactionist theory of consciousness as an emergent phenomenon. It relates Michael Arbib's theory of the origin of language and Erving Goffman's frame analysis, especially as it bears on our understanding of the subject and of personal experience. Reflexivity and fictional mimesis are shown to be inherent to the origin of language and to the continuing emergent creativity of human communicative action. The emergent aspect of consciousness is also dealt with from the perspective of a narrative theory of subjective experience and of human temporality which can usefully complement and relate Arbib's and Goffman's views.
Subject, Consciousness, Interaction, Communication, Language, Psychology, Frames, Arbib, Goffman, Reflexivity, Representation
Abstract: This is a review of Umberto Eco's novel La misteriosa fiamma della regina Loana (2004) with a special focus on its portrayal of the self and memory, and reflections on the way the novel's treatment reveals the intertextual makeup of personal identity and of ideology, and their grounding in a specific cultural and discursive environment.
Intertextuality, Self, Memory, Eco, Identity
Abstract: A review of Ian McEwan's novel Saturday (2005) understood as an allegorical portrait of Western middle-class everyday experience and life-stories within the historical and cultural context of the early 21st century.
Novel, McEwan, Saturday, Everyday life
Abstract: This paper theorizes critical readings from an interactional / argumentative point of view, situating them on a scale going from consonant, "friendly" criticism, to dissonant, confrontational or "unfriendly" criticism. Some key critical notions (by Oscar Wilde, Stanley Fish, Paul Ricoeur, Judith Fetterley and H. Porter Abbott) are examined in the light of this conception of criticism, and situated within the framework of interactional pragmatics.
Criticism, Pragmatics, Dialogism, Wilde, Fish, Ricoeur, Interaction, Emergence, Ideology
Abstract: This is a review essay on narrative phenomena in conversation, structured as a commentary and critique of Neal Norrick's book, Conversational Narrative (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2000). Written in Spanish.
Narrative, Discourse, Conversation, Analysis, Norrick, Narratology
Abstract: The first section of this paper explores an analogy between the generic characteristics of essay-writing and those of blogging, as modes of tentative, processual textual practice. Blogs open up a new age for essay-writing, in a medium well suited to develop some characteristics of the genre. The second section of the paper puts forward some parameters to gauge a number of dimensions of originality and relevance in blog posts, some of them specific and some non-specific to the medium.
Blogs, Essays, Process thought, Originality, Relevance, Networking
Abstract: An analysis of Shakespeare's Sonnet 77 from the point of view of the hermeneutics of rereading and the poetics of temporality. Análisis del Soneto 77 de Shakespeare desde el punto de vista de la hermenéutica de la relectura y la poética de la temporalidad.
Shakespeare, Sonnet 77, Sonnets, Rereading, Hermeneutics, Experience, Time,
Abstract: This paper is a narratological reflection on repetitive narrative, dealing with matters of point of view, narrative time, ontological status, and the role of retrospection in narrative structuring in storytelling and narrative discourse, in drama and in film, going back to the discussion in Aristotle's 'Poetics' and using the animated feature film 'Hoodwinked!' as a case study.
Narrative, Retrospection, Order, Storytelling, Drama, Aristotle, Poetics, Hoodwinked
Abstract: This paper points out the technological continuum between information and communication technology (ICT) and narrative structuring, which is defined as the original multimedial technology of temporal manipulation. Its interdisciplinary perspective on the semiotics of temporal representation will be of interest to narratologists, communication theorists and bloggers.
Time, Narrative, Media, Technology, Semiotics, Structuring, Communication, Experience, Film, ICT, Blogs;
Abstract: This paper theorizes critical readings from an interactional / argumentative perspective, providing a semiotic and phenomenological analysis of the scale ranging from consonant, "friendly" criticism, to dissonant, confrontational or "unfriendly" criticism. A number of key critical theories (by theorists such as G. W. F. Hegel, Oscar Wilde, Jacques Lacan, Erving Goffman, Norman Holland, Jacques Derrida, Stanley Fish, Paul Ricoeur, Judith Fetterley, John Muller, Alan Sinfield, and H. Porter Abbott) are examined in the light of this conception of criticism, and are situated within the framework of interactional pragmatics, of the dialectics of communication, and of a semiotic theory of truth and of consciousness.
Criticism, Interpretation, Argumentation, Hermeneutics, Dialectics, Interaction, Hegel, Lacan, Goffman, Derrida, Ricoeur, Pragmatics
Abstract: This paper is a reading of Oscar Wilde's essay The Rise of Historical Criticism, analyzing Oscar Wilde's conception of critical historiography, with a particular focus on the issues of hindsight bias, on the hermeneutics of retrospection and on Wilde's position within the tradition of emergentist theory and cultural evolutionism.
Wilde, Polybius, Vico, Emergence, Hindsight, Hermeneutics, History, Criticism, Interpretation, Historiography
Abstract: This paper offers an analysis of one of King Henry's speeches to his troops in Shakespeare's Henry V. The analysis focuses on the sexual imagery and symbolic association of war and aggresion, and on the reflexive, metadramatic dimension of this passage and of Shakespeare's theory of self and drama thus drawing some further implications of the world as a stage metaphor, in the light of a theory of performativity, as developed by J. L. Austin and J. Hillis Miller.
Shakespeare, Henry V, Theatricality, Performativity, Self; Semiotics, Metadrama
Abstract: This is a review of Viviane Serfaty's landmark study of personal online diaries and personal blogs, with special attention to the micropolitics of self-representation in computer-mediated communication, the transformation of intimacy in the age of Internet, and the American tradition of individuality.
Serfaty, Internet, Blogs, Individuality, Intimacy, Diaries, Virtuality, Computer-mediated_communication
Abstract: William Gibson's novel Spook Country (2007) is analyzed with reference to contemporary discussions of the impact of technology on everyday life and on the articulation of reality and of subjectivity. The stylistic analysis of the novel is related to its conception of technologically mediated perception and thought.
Cyberspace, Technology, Interiorization, William Gibson, Topsight, Perception
Abstract: This is a review of César Vidal's novel La noche de la Tempestad (The Night of The Tempest, 2007), a biographical fiction centered on Shakespeare's relationship with his daughter Susanna (cast here in the role of Miranda) and with his wife Anne Hathaway, who is suspected of adultery. The review points out some historical inaccuracies, improbabilities and biases of Vidal's interpretation of Shakespeare's life.
Fiction, César Vidal, Shakespeare
Abstract: This paper proposes a reflexive reading of the authorial attitude and the autobiographical dimension of Shakespeare's Sonnets, with special reference to the concluding poem of the 1609 edition, "A Lover's Complaint", frequently neglected by critics of the Sonnets. The poem provides some additional evidence for a metapoetic dimension in the Sonnets' representation of authorial involvement and writing.
Shakespeare, Sonnets, A Lover's Complaint, Reflexivity, Speaker, Lyrical voice
Abstract: This paper reflects on "prophetic" elements in literature, analyzed from a psychoanalytic viewpoint in Pierre Bayard's book, "Demain est ecrit." Bayard's perspective is complemented with a critical analysis of the hermeneutics of temporal perspective, hindsight bias and retrospection from an interactional stance. Downloadable article is in Spanish.
Literature, Prophecy, Bayard, Wilde, Hermeneutics, Hindsight, Retrospection
Abstract: This paper is a commentary of Robert Graves's THE STORY OF MARIE POWELL, WIFE TO MR MILTON (1943), a historical novel set in the English Revolution. Special attention is paid to the implied authorial evaluations and to Robert Graves's personal investment in the story. There is an ambivalence in the figure of Milton both as a villain, the emblem of egolatry and authoritarian patriarchy, and as an abject self-portrait of the author.
Graves, Milton, Powell, Novel, Puritanism, Abjection, Narrator, Implied author, Patriarchy
Abstract: The Gospel of Judas from Codex Tchacos (2nd century, pub. 2006) is set in the context of resistance to incipient structures of ecclesiastical power in Christianity, and in the tradition of anticlerical spirituality often associated to political resistance. In this discursive context a battle for reality often takes place: gnostic texts, like the resisting texts of other historical contexts, assume the ideological function of redefining public reality and rejecting the metaphysical assumptions of dominant groups along with the authority of their religious and political institutions.
Gospel of Judas, Gnosticism, Church, Orthodoxy, Resistance, Reality, Matrix, Jones Very
Abstract: A review, in Spanish, of Peter Ackroyd's biography of William Shakespeare ("Shakespeare: The Biography." London: Chatto & Windus, 2005).
Shakespeare, Ackroyd, Elizabethan, Drama,
Abstract: This paper reflects on the concept of the implied reader in narrative fiction, with special reference to Walker Gibson and Wayne Booth's original conception, and to Brian Richardson's recent work on multiple implied readers. The fuzziness of the concept of the implied reader, and its tendency to multiply, is shown to be related to the diverse interactional and interpretive uses of the texts. Este artículo reflexiona sobre el concepto de lector implícito en la ficción narrativa, con referencia especial al concepto originario de Walker Gibson y Wayne Booth, y al reciente trabajo de Brian Richardson sobre la multiplicidad de lectores implícitos. Se muestra cómo los límites difusos del concepto de lector implícito, y la tendencia del mismo a multiplicarse, son fenómenos relacionados con los diferentes usos interaccionales y hermenéuticos de los textos.
Literature, Literary theory, Narratology, Fiction, Reading, Implied reader, Hermeneutics, Reception, Interpretation, Discourse
Abstract: This paper addresses the institutional context and academic practices related to the production and use of literary theory and criticism in the Spanish universities, with a special focus on the role of theory in Spanish Anglistics in recent years. The paper assesses interdisciplinary communication, the impact of new theoretical paradigms (feminism, postcolonial Studies, etc.) in a specifically Spanish setting, and the disciplinary transformations and new publishing opportunities associated to the new media ecology. Close attention is paid to issues of cultural colonization, disciplinary marginality and the contextual roots of academic praxis.
English, Anglistics, Publications, Spanish University, Literary theory, Criticism
Abstract: A review (in Spanish) of the novel This Thing of Darkness (2005) by Harry Thompson (1960-2005), a historical fiction on Darwin's Beagle voyage and the life of Captain Fitzroy. Special attention is paid to the novel's narrative anchoring of its events within a grand narrative of modernity and imperialism, of scientific and cultural development, and of human evolution at large.
Novel, Narrative, Narratology, Harry Thompson, Darwin, Evolution, History, Fitzroy
Abstract: This is a review of "We, the 'Other Victorians': Considering the Heritage of 19th-Century Thought," a volume edited by Silvia Caporale Bizzini (Alicante, Spain: Publicaciones de la Universidad de Alicante, 2003. 215 p.). The volume sets out to read a number of contemporary cultural phenomena through the distorting lens of their analogues or forerunners in the nineteenth century, and on the whole manages to do it quite admirably. In this sense, it will be of interest not just to cultural critics working on issues such as modernity, consumerism, drugs, body technology, historical fiction and metafiction, etc.: it is also an interesting contribution to the postmodern critical genre of "retroactive rereading".
Victorianism, Retrospection, Cultural studies, British culture, Cultural critique, Modernity,
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