Emergent Narrativity

Emergent Narrativity
 
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.

Keywords: Literary theory, Narrative, Narratology, Narrativity, Emergence, Consciousness, Cognition,

Linkterature: From Word to Web: Or, Literature in the Internet - Internet as Literature - Literature as Internet - Internet in Literature

Abridged version published in "The Texture of Internet: Netlinguistics in Progress". Ed. Santiago Posteguillo, María José Esteve and M. Lluïsa Gea-Valor. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007.

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.

Keywords: Internet, Literature, Publishing, Media, Intertextuality, Links, Hypertext, Blogs

Los blogs y la narratividad de la experiencia

Blogs and the Narrativity of Experience
   
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.

Keywords: Blogs, Narrative, Narrativity, Narratology, Experience, Time, Processes, Communication, Discourse, Emergence, Interaction, World Wide Web, Internet,

Expiación y adaptación (Sobre "Atonement", de Ian McEwan y Joe Wright)

Atonement and Adaptation (on Ian McEwan's Novel and Joe Wright's Film)
   
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.

Keywords: Literature, English novel, McEwan, Atonement, Adaptation, Reflexivity, Metafiction,

Hemingway Meets Beckett: "The Road", de Cormac McCarthy

Hemingway Meets Beckett: Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road'
   
A review of Cormac McCarthy's novel "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.

Keywords: Cormac McCarthy, The Road, Hemingway, Beckett, Science fiction, Nuclear war, Apocalypse

Netiqueta, Cortesía, Estrategia y Sabiduría

Netiquette, Politeness, Strategy and Wisdom
   
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.

Keywords: Netiquette, Politeness, Strategy, Wisdom, Action, Communication, Interaction, Pragmatics, CMC, Grice, Leech, Goffman, Forums, Blogs, Conversation, Rationality, Aims

Actos de habla en la literatura: Reseña de la obra de J. Hillis Miller

Speech Acts in Literature: A Review of J. Hillis Miller's Work (Actos de Habla en la Literatura: Reseña de J. Hillis Miller)
 
This is an extensive review and commentary of J. Hillis Miller's book "Speech Acts in Literature", a major theoretical and critical work 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.

Note: PDF is in Spanish

Keywords: Speech_acts, Pragmatics, Hillis_Miller, Austin, Derrida, de_Man, Interaction, Hermeneutics, Criticism, Interpretation

A Blogal Conversation (Reseña de J. Torio, "A Global Conversation")

A Blogal Conversation
   
A review of James Torio's thesis "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.

Note: Downloadable document is in Spanish.

Keywords: Blogs, Marketing, Economy, Internet, Long tail, Public Relations

Wilde y el enigma de la Esfinge

Wilde and the Riddle of the Sphinx
   
Oscar Wilde's essay "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.

Note: Downloadable document is in Spanish.

Keywords: Wilde, Sphinx, Hermeneutics, Interpretation, Lacan, Criticism

Goffman: La realidad como expectativa autocumplida y el teatro de la interioridad

Goffman: Reality as Self-Fulfilling Expectation and the Theatre of Interiority

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 Goffman's  "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).

Note: Downloadable document is in Spanish.

Keywords: Goffman, Reality, Frames, Expectations, Subject, Subjectivity, Interaction, Communication, Cognition, Reflexivity

"Pattern Recognition", de William Gibson: El presente presentido con jet-lag

William Gibson's "Pattern Recognition": Jet-Lagged Intimations of the Present
 
This paper is a commentary of William Gibson's novel "Pattern Recognition" (2003), with a special emphasis on the ideology of postmodernity and on networked globalization, on issues of symbolism and on the reflexive dimension of pattern recognition in the narrative semiotics of the novel itself, and in its aesthetic project.

Note: Downloadable document is in Spanish.

Keywords: Gibson; Postmodernity; Apophenia; Reflexivity; Globalization;

Ficción narrativa y Evolución

Narrative Fiction and Evolution
   
This is a review, in Spanish, of Steven Pinker's essay "Toward a Consilient Study of Literature", which is itself a review of and a response to the theories expounded in the collection on literary sociobiology "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.

Keywords: Evolution, Pinker, Consilience, Fiction, Narrative, Sociobiology

Crítica acrítica, crítica crítica

Acritical Criticism, Critical Criticism
   
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.

Keywords: Criticism, Pragmatics, Dialogism, Wilde, Fish, Ricoeur, Interaction, Emergence, Ideology

The paper is in Spanish.

13 lunas, 12 noches: Calendarios, ciclos, tiempos muertos y diferencia de género (a propósito de Twelfth Night).

13 Moons, Twelve Nights: Calendars, Cycles, Time Out of Time and Gender Difference (A Note on 'Twelfth Night')

This paper focuses on the notion of the time between the winter solstice and the beginning of the new 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.

Note: Downloadable document is in Spanish.

Keywords: time, calendar, Shakespeare,Twelfth Night, solstice, gender, lunar cycle, mourning

John Battelle, "The Search" (Reseña)

A review, in Spanish, 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).

Soneto, espejo, reloj, bloc y libro

An analysis, in Spanish, 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.

La identidad intertextual: La misteriosa llamada de la reina Loana

This is a review, in Spanish, 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.

Out of Character: Narratología del sujeto y su trayectoria vital

Out of Character: Narratology of the Subject and Personal Life Stories
   
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.

Note: Downloadable document is in Spanish.

Ensayando el blog—Qué aporta tu post

Essaying the Blog - Your Post's Contribution
   
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.

Note: Downloadable document is in Spanish.

Keywords: Blogs, Essays, Process thought, Originality, Relevance, Networking

Benefit of Hindsight: Polibio, Vico, Wilde y el emergentismo crítico

Benefit of Hindsight: Polybius, Vico, Wilde, and Critical Emergentism

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.

Note: Downloadable document is in Spanish.

Ian McEwan, SATURDAY

A review, in Spanish, 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.

La Noche de la Tempestad (Sobre la novela de César Vidal)

The Night of 'The Tempest' (On César Vidal's Novel)

This is a review, in Spanish, 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.

Be Copy Now: Retroalimentación y dialéctica de la vida y el teatro en Shakespeare (Henry V, 3.1)

Be Copy Now: Dialectics and Feedback of Life and Theater in Shakespeare, Henry V, 3.1
 
This paper (in Spanish) 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.

Keywords: Shakespeare, Henry V, Theatricality, Performativity, Self; Semiotics, Metadrama

Hoodwinked by Aristotle

Hoodwinked by Aristotle
   
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.

Note: Downloadable document is in Spanish.

Keywords: Narrative, Retrospection, Order, Storytelling, Drama, Aristotle, Poetics, Hoodwinked

Tecnologías de manipulación del tiempo

Technologies of Temporal Manipulation

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.

Note: Downloadable document is in Spanish.

Keywords: Time, Narrative, Media, Technology, Semiotics, Structuring, Communication, Experience, Film, ICT, Blogs;

Review of Viviane Serfaty's the Mirror and the Veil: An Overview of American Online Diaries and Blogs

Published in Atlantis 27.1 (June 2005): 117-22.

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.

Keywords: Serfaty, Internet, Blogs, Individuality, Intimacy, Diaries, Virtuality, Computer-mediated_communication

Sobre la narración conversacional

On Conversational Narrative
   
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.

Keywords: Narrative, Discourse, Conversation, Analysis, Norrick, Narratology

Deep-brained Sonnets

Deep-brained Sonnets
   
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.

Note: Downloadable document is in Spanish.

Keywords: Shakespeare, Sonnets, A Lover's Complaint, Reflexivity, Speaker, Lyrical voice

Husband to Mrs Milton

Husband to Mrs Milton
   
This paper is a commentary of Robert Graves's historical novel The Story of Marie Powell, Husband to Mr. Milton, 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.

Note: Downloadable document is in Spanish.

Keywords: Graves, Milton, Powell, Novel, Puritanism, Abjection, Narrator, Implied author

Acritical Criticism, Critical Criticism: Critical Interaction, Reframing, and Topsight

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 situated within the framework of interactional pragmatics, of the dialectics of communication, and of a semiotic theory of truth and of consciousness.

Keywords:
Criticism, Interpretation, Hermeneutics, Dialectics, Interaction, Hegel, Lacan, Goffman, Derrida, Ricoeur, Pragmatics

Mañana habrá sido escrito

Tomorrow Will Have Been Written
   
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.

Keywords: Literature, Prophecy, Bayard, Wilde, Hermeneutics, Hindsight, Retrospection

Cyberspace Everting: "Spook Country", de William Gibson

Cyberspace Everting: William Gibson's "Spook Country"
     
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.

Note: Downloadable document is in Spanish.

Keywords: Cyberspace, Technology, Interiorization, William Gibson, Topsight, Perception

La Visión del Templo: Espiritualidad Antieclesiástica en el Evangelio de Judas y la Batalla por la Realidad

The Vision of the Temple: Antiecclesiastical Spirituality in the Gospel of Judas and the Battle for Reality

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.

Keywords: Gospel of Judas, Gnosticism, Church, Orthodoxy, Resistance, Reality, Matrix, Jones Very

Ackroyd's Shakespeare

A review, in Spanish, of Peter Ackroyd's biography of William Shakespeare ("Shakespeare: The Biography." London: Chatto & Windus, 2005).

Keywords: Shakespeare, Ackroyd, Elizabethan, Drama,

Harry Thompson, THIS THING OF DARKNESS: Anclaje narrativo

Harry Thompson, This Thing of Darkness: Narrative Anchoring
   
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.

Keywords: Novel, Narrative, Narratology, Harry Thompson, Darwin, Evolution, History, Fitzroy

Review of WE, THE OTHER VICTORIANS: CONSIDERING THE HERITAGE OF 19TH-CENTURY THOUGHT

Published in Atlantis, Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 111-15, June 2005

    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".

Keywords: Victorianism, Retrospection, Cultural studies, British culture, Cultural critique, Modernity,

El centro ausente: EL INNOMBRABLE de Beckett

Published in Atlantis 12.2 (1991): 45-64.

Análisis desconstructivo de la voz narrativa y de las estructuras metaficcionales y reflexivas en la novela de Samuel Beckett L'INNOMMABLE / THE UNNAMABLE.

Review of Recent Trends in Narratological Research, ed. John Pier.

Published in Miscelánea 22 (2000): 215-22.

A review, in English, of "Recent Trends in Narratological Research: Papers from the Narratology Round Table ESSE 4, September 1997, Debrecen, Hungary, and Other Contributions." Ed. John Pier. (GRAAT - Groupe de Recherches Anglo-Américaines de Tours, 21). Tours: Groupe de Recherches Anglo-Américaines de l'Université François Rabelais de Tours, 1999.

Keywords: Semiotics, narratology, narration, pragmatics

Sobre la competencia del narrador en la ficción

Published in Atlantis 19.2 (Dec. 1997): 77-102.

Mediante un estudio semiótico del concepto de competencia narrativa, este artículo propone tender un puente entre la narratología y la pragmática. Haciendo uso de diversos conceptos desarrollados por la pragmalingüística, además de la teoría de la modalidad de Greimas, se reexaminan nociones como las de enunciación narrativa, voz, y persona, y se propone una reinterpretación de las teorías clásicas de la narración. Las herramientas semióticas válidas para el análisis de la acción y los agentes en general se contemplan aquí como igualmente válidas para el estudio de la ficción narrativa.

Palabra(s) clave: Semiótica ; Narratología ; Competencia comunicativa ; Enunciación ; Voz narrativa ; Persona narrativa ; Acción ; Pragmática ; Pragmalingüística ; Narrador

'The Enthusiastick Fit': The Function and Fate of the Poet in Samuel Johnson's RASSELAS

Published in Cuadernos de Investigación Filológica 17.1 (1991): 103-26.

This is an essay on eighteenth-century literary theory and on Samuel Johnson's novel THE HISTORY OF RASSELAS, PRINCE OF ABYSSINIA (1759). Johnson's literary theory as reflected in RASSELAS is examined in the light of other pronouncements on poetics by this author, and of aesthetic reflection in this period. Johnson's relationships both with classicism and with pre-Romanticism resist interpretations which disregard the tension between the author's lucidity and his dogmatism. The paper addresses the issue of the interpretation of authorial levels of intentionality, and of the traces they leave on the textual structure. In the last analysis, two different modes of textual coherence are found in Johnson's work, which result from the author's ideological and emotional conflicts.

Stanley E. Fish's Speech Acts

Published in Atlantis 12.2 (1991): 121-39.

Stanley Fish is the major American theorist of post-structuralist reader-response criticism, and contributed to the extension to literary studies of the pragmalinguistic theory of speech acts. His critique of formalist linguistics has also been influential. This paper criticises Fish's theories on the arbitrariness of literary meaning, starting from the shortcomings of his linguistic theory, and more specifically of his notion of the structure of the speech act. This critique includes a discussion of the concepts developed by Austin and Searle in their theories of speech acts.
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Stanley Fish es el máximo exponente norteamericano de la estética de la recepción postestructuralista, y se cuenta entre quienes extendieron a la literatura la teoría pragmalingüística de los actos de habla. También es célebre su crítica de la lingüística formalista. Este artículo critica sus teorías sobre la arbitrariedad del significado literario tomando como punto de partida las insuficiencias de su teoría del lenguaje, y más en particular la interpretación que hace Fish de la estructura del acto de habla, en una discusión de los conceptos desarrollados por Austin y Searle.

Review of Giambattista Vico's THE ART OF RHETORIC

Published in Miscelánea 19 (1998): 224-29.

This is a review of the English language edition of Vico's THE ART OF RHETORIC (INSTITUTIONES ORATORIAE, 1711-1741).  From the Definitive Latin Text and Notes, Italian Commentary and Introduction by Giuliano Crifò. Ed. and trans. Giorgio A. Pinton and Arthur W. Shippee. The review discusses the relevance of rhetoric in Vico's overall thinking, and more specifically the (limited) presence in this early treatise of the tropological theory of cultural development formulated by Vico in the SCIENZA NUOVA. There is also a commentary on the retrospective fallacy, already pointed out by Vico himself, which may make us read into an early text concepts which would be developed only later. In this sense, this paper is also related with my emphasis on the interpretive function of retrospection, expounded in other papers.
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Reseña de la edición inglesa de la retórica de Vico: The Art of Rhetoric (Institutiones Oratoriae, 1711-1741). Se discute en la reseña la relevancia de la retórica para el conjunto del pensamiento de Vico, y más concretamente la (limitada) presencia en este tratado temprano sobre retórica de la teoría tropológica del desarrollo cultural que formuló Vico. También se comenta la falacia retrospectiva, ya señalada por el mismo Vico, que nos puede hacer leer en un texto temprano conceptos que sólo se elaborarían más adelante. En este sentido, este trabajo también está relacionado con el énfasis en la función interpretativa de la retrospección que desarrollamos en otros trabajos.

Retroactive Thematization, Interaction, and Interpretation: The Hermeneutic Spiral from Schleiermacher to Goffman

Published in BELL (Belgian English Language and Literature) ns 2 (2004):  155-66.* (Special issue, "The Language/Literature Interface).

This paper examines some common concerns of hermeneutics, Bakhtin’s dialogism, American deconstruction and Goffman’s pragmatics of interaction, in order to provide a theoretical basis for literary criticism grounded on wider communicative processes, more especially on the retroactive dynamics of communicative interaction.

Adaptation, Appropriation, Retroaction: Symbolic interaction with HENRY V

In Books in Motion: Adaptation, Intertextuality, Authorship. Ed. Mireia Aragay. (Contemporary Cinema, 2). Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005. 181-99.

This paper approaches adaptation from a hermeneutic perspective, specifically from a post-structuralist hermeneutics of discourse informed by symbolic interactionism. The intertextual relationship between a cultural product (e.g. a play) and its screen adaptation(s) is analysed as a performative intervention on an existing discourse formation which includes both the original product or text and the discourses using it, originating it, deriving from it or surrounding it. This intervention amounts to both an interpretation and an appropriation of the original text. Like other intertextual modes (translations, critical readings), adaptations produce a retroactive transformation of the original, not in se, but rather as it is used and understood in specific contexts and instances of communicative interaction. These theoretical issues are explored with a special focus on Shakespearean film adaptations, more specifically on the major Henry V films, Laurence Olivier’s (1944) and Kenneth Branagh’s (1989), and their treatment of violence and war in a variety of contexts. A case for a ‘resisting’ approach to Shakespearean adaptation is put forward.

A comparison between the French and RP English vowel systems

Undergraduate paper (1983)

This is a paper in phonology which describes and compares the vowel systems of standard (RP, "received pronunciation") British English, and standard French (with some observations on regional varieties).
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Se trata de un trabajo de fonología comparada, entre los sistemas vocálicos del inglés británico estándar (RP, "received pronunciation") y del francés (estándar, con algunos apuntes sobre variedades regionales).

Reseña de LITERATURE AS COMMUNICATION: THE FOUNDATIONS OF MEDIATING CRITICISM, por Roger D. Sell

Review in Spanish, published in Miscelánea 25 (2002): 183-188.

Roger Sell has developed a theory of linguistic politeness applied to literary communication. His line of research is therefore similar to mine in his attempt to build bridges between literary criticism and linguistic pragmatics. The book advocates a theory of literary criticism as mediation: mediation between author and reader,  or mediation between different ages, readings and cultural contexts. This is a crucial function of literary criticism which Sell considers has been neglected by literary theory in the later decades of the 20th century, though not always by critical practice. The purpose of this book is to provide the theoretical foundation which is now missing for literary criticism understood as a mediating activity.

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Roger Sell ha desarrollado una teoría de la cortesía lingüística aplicada a la comunicación literaria, siendo por tanto su línea de trabajo similar a la nuestra en su intento de crear puentes entre crítica y pragmalingüística. El libro plantea la necesidad de una teoría de la crítica literaria como mediación: mediación entre autor y lector, o mediación entre diversas épocas, lecturas y contextos culturales. Es una función de la crítica crucial y que Sell ve desatendida por la teoría literaria de las últimas décadas del siglo XX, si bien no siempre por la práctica de los críticos. El propósito de este libro es proporcionar el fundamento teórico del cual carece en la actualidad la crítica literaria entendida como actividad mediadora.

Science and Literature: Some Critical Parameters

Published in "Science, Literature, and Interpretation", ed. Francisco Collado. Zaragoza: Universidad de Zaragoza, 1991.

This paper has a double aim: to draw a general outline or the critical reflection on the relationship between science and literature in the past, and to classify the possible modes of inquiry into this subject at present. The main focus falls on some representative discussions of the relationship between science and literature in mid-20th century theorists (I. A. Richards, Max Eastman, Aldous Huxley, Roland Barthes...). I conclude that no 'true' relation between science and literature can be defined once and forever, due to several reasons. The first is that the relationships that we effectively discern change with time. Therefore, a definition of the relationship between literature and science must be a history of the relationship between literature and science. Moreover, as both science and criticism develop, we manage to discern new kinds of relationships between both disciplines. And great writers constantly appear and modify through their work the panorama we tried to describe. The diverging channels of of science and literature are the result of the division and specialization of labour and discourse that we call 'progress'. New scientific perspectives on literature, new literature which takes scientific doctrine in stride, or new accounts of the way in which science is still 'poetic' are also the result of this division of discourses, and a further complication of their relationship.

Gender, I-deology and Addictive Representation: The Film of Familiarity

Introduction to the volume "Gender, I-deology: Essays on Theory, Fiction, and Film." Ed. Chantal Cornut-Gentille D'Arcy and José Ángel García Landa. (Postmodern Studies, 16). Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996.

The book "Gender, I-deology" is a collective volume of essays on the representation of gender difference, and on the ideological implications of the conventions or representational strategies used in texts. It includes essays on film, literatura, and critical theory, written from a number of perspectives associated to feminist criticism.  My contribution is the introduction to the volume, and deals with the guiding features of the discourse on genre. I examine a number of social contexts, institutions, practices and discourses which contribute to the discourse on genre: sexuality, essentialist and constructivist social theories, masculinity and femininity, individuality, the organization of work, the discourse of love, of family and marriage, the discourse of history, and last but not least the linguistic implications of generic difference and the ideological role of feminist criticism in the development of a critical awareness with respect to gender roles and stereotypes. I expound a theory of the role of stereotypes and of their unthinking use as a relevant element in the present economy of gender. The paper has a linguistic-semiotic dimension, as it relates aspects of the use and generation of discourse and aspects of critical discourse analysis, viewing both from the standpoint of a theory of social processes which contribute to the formation of gender as a cultural, ideological and discursive object. There is, thus, an analytic continuum linking critical discourse and the social construction of gender through semiotic practices.