Neorealism, Contingency and the Linguistic Turn

Claviez Claviez

doi:10.3390/h8040176

Abstract

Since the publication of Roman Jakobson’s famous 1956 essay “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances”, we have tended to read the relationship between metaphor and metonymy as a dialectical one. The essay argues that this approach stands in need of revision, since metonymy, as a trope—and as a trope, moreover, of contingency—undermines the dialectical relationship between the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic axes. This has far-reaching implications, specifically for the assessment of literature and its ethics. Since metaphor functions structurally analogous to dialectics itself, metonymy and its role in realism and neorealism might offer us a way to think an “ethics of contingency” that acknowledges the role of contingency, rather that suppressing it and its role in preventing closure through sublation.

Highlights

I would like to connect my first foray into neorealism—my introductory essay to the special edition of Amerikastudien/American Studies with the title Neorealism Between Innovation and Continuation to a more recent one that came out in the volume Literatur und Politische Philosophie, edited by Michael Festl and Philipp Schweighauser, with the title “Dramas of Mis(re)cognition: Critical
In order to do so, I will have to ask my readers to indulge in a kind of longer excursus in order to show where the ethical stakes as regards metonymy and contingency lie, and what both neorealism and recognition have to do with it
As far as the Poetics are concerned, Aristotle clearly favors metaphor over metonymy—an attitude attitude that he shares with about 95% of his colleagues to come, including Jakobson

Summary

Introduction

I would like to connect my first foray into neorealism—my introductory essay to the special edition of Amerikastudien/American Studies with the title Neorealism Between Innovation and Continuation to a more recent one that came out in the volume Literatur und Politische Philosophie, edited by Michael Festl and Philipp Schweighauser, with the title “Dramas of Mis(re)cognition: Critical. While evoking the distinction between metaphor and metonymy—the former of which Jakobson connects with the paradigmatic axis of selection, substitution and similarity, while the latter he relates to the aspect of contiguity and syntagmatic combination—he defines the two tropes as follows: While metaphor relies on an abstract ‘third’ (similarity is just that, since otherwise metaphor would not work) to establish the conjunction of tenor (that which should be expressed) with vehicle (that with which it is and figuratively expressed), metonymy relies on the concept of ‘contiguity in space’ He attributes metaphor to romanticism and modernist surrealism, and metonymy to the more prosaic forms of realism. De Man’s main objective in the essay is, in good old poststructuralist fashion, to show that metonymy plays an even more important role than Jakobson is willing to concede it, and to put into question the ‘tendentious’ opposition it is based upon All this in order to show—another well-known deconstructive move—that a clear-cut distinction cannot be drawn, and that Proust’s Swann’s Way, which de Man analyzes, deconstructs itself. The challenge would be to see through such pretentiousness, and not read literature as metaphoric, but to acknowledge that it might just offer the “chance of a mere association of ideas” that defy metaphorico-dialectical totalization.

Narrative and the Problem of Contingency

Findings

Towards an Ethics of Literature