“See Things My Way”: Conveying and Critiquing Consciousness in Contemporary Screen Adaptations of Jane Austen

Free indirect discourse (FID) is a widely studied mode of speech and consciousness representation in narratives. One aspect of analysis and debate is the combination of the characters' stream of consciousness and the narrator's voice. Various ideas about the effects FID might have on readers have been formulated. Some of these hypotheses are contradictory, which makes them an excellent starting point for reader response studies. More in particular, there seems to be disagreement whether FID increases or decreases readers' empathy for story characters. Also, there is no consensus concerning the effect on the transparency of the narrator's stance toward the story character, nor on the clarity of the implied author's intentions. Rather than adding theoretical arguments, historical evidence, or exegeses of textual examples, the present contribution attempts to explore the empirical validity of FID hypotheses in a series of reading experiments.

Free indirect discourse (FID) is a literary, or narrative device which allows access to the thoughts and feelings of a protagonist, from his or her own perspective. FID is formally viewed as lying on the scale between indirect discourse (ID) and direct discourse (DD). It is non-embedded, consisting of a blend of features, few intrinsic to ID, while the rest are associated with DD. The paper aims to discuss the nature of the FID phenomenon in North Eastern Neo-Aramaic, based on folktales told in the Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialect of Zakho, while paying close attention to the wider context, and more specifically, to the discourse type surrounding FID.

Introduction:Revisiting Dialogue William A. Cohen (bio) and Laura Green (bio) OVER the past half-century, discussions of characters' speech in fiction have been dominated by the category of free indirect discourse (FID), which is often described as blending the point of view of a character with that of a narrator. Ann Banfield influentially argued that FID has been the most distinctive formal achievement of literary writing in the modern period.1 Following Banfield, critics have provided innumerable accounts of the origins and functions of FID in fiction, not only to analyze the complexities of its formal features, but also to understand the psychological, political, and aesthetic effects of its use. While disagreement persists among critics about the characteristics and boundaries of FID, this particular way of representing characters' speech and thought has received so much attention that it leads us to wonder about what alternatives may have been neglected for it to become so salient. FID is distinguished, on the one hand, from a narrator's discourse, whether in the service of exposition, reporting, interpreting, or evaluation of events. It contrasts, on the other, with both direct and indirect discourse. Direct discourse purports to quote a character's speech ("She said, 'I have to get out of here'"); indirect discourse reports on it ("She said she had to get out of there"); and FID incorporates the character's speech within the language of the narrator ("She had to get out of there"). What critics find most interesting about FID are its many forms of mediation: it conveys meaning through some words that belong to the character and some that belong to the narrator—and sometimes through some words whose ownership is not so clearly marked. Different accounts of FID may address characters' speech, thoughts, or both, and these differences can lead to conflicting understandings of what FID is as well as reveal the complexity of the phenomenon itself.2 [End Page 129] By contrast with FID, dialogue in fiction is often understood to represent the utterances of characters unfiltered through any intermediary frame. Dialogue is easily recognizable—and distinguished from other narrative elements—by the typographical and phraseological conventions that were stabilized in English in the first decades of the nineteenth century.3 Dialogue shares these features with quoted speech as represented in nonfiction: quotation marks ("inverted commas" in British English) or other typographical indicators, paragraph or line breaks, and speech tags such as "she said," often qualified by adverbs of manner ("loudly," "curtly"). This marked discourse is a familiar feature of fictional narrative at all levels of literary ambition. As Lewis Carroll's Alice wonders, "What is the use of a book without pictures or conversations?" (9). While contemporary adult readers have mainly left pictures behind (or relocated them to the subgenre of the graphic novel), it is hard to imagine a novel that contains no conversation—no exchange of character speech—at all. In addition to its promiscuous familiarity, the critical view of dialogue as a relatively self-evident, uninteresting feature, by contrast with FID, arises from the persistence of the illusion it creates—namely, that it plainly represents characters' words. Some accounts of direct speech explicitly assign it the function of mimetic reproduction. Patrick O'Neill, for example, distinguishes FID from both indirect speech and direct, quoted speech. He identifies quoted speech as "the maximally mimetic option . . . where the narrator elects to show what happened rather than tell about it[;] we hear . . . only [the character's] voice, as if we were physically present ourselves" (59). Most theorists in principle acknowledge the artificiality of this mimesis. Gérard Genette, for example, while agreeing with O'Neill that fictional dialogue is optimally mimetic because it refers to nothing but itself, also distinguishes it from nonfiction dialogue by virtue of its doubled artifice: "History, biography, autobiography are supposed to reproduce speeches that were actually made; epic, novel, story, novella are supposed to pretend to reproduce them. . . . Supposed to: Those are the generic conventions, which of course do not necessarily correspond to reality" (Narrative Discourse Revisited 50; emphasis original). Yet such is the power of what Meir Sternberg calls the "direct speech fallacy" ("Point of View" 68) that this mimetic...

In free indirect discourse (FID), the narrative discourse of a text incorporates the language and subjectivity of a character, including emotional coloring, deictics, judgments, and style, without an introductory attributing frame like “she thought that” and without shifts in the pronouns or the tense sequence to accord with the character’s perspective. By combining the immediacy of direct quotation and the flexibility of indirect discourse, FID allows for the seamless integration of a character’s thought or speech, with all of its distinctive markers, into the narratorial discourse. Because FID occurs in the context of narratorial discourse and allows for a fluid movement back and forth between narratorial and figural subjectivities, it characteristically entails a mixture or interplay of two voices—the narrator’s and the character’s—in the same utterance, as in parody or mimicry. The evocation of a character’s thought or speech through FID and its relation to narratorial commentary and report can be subtle and nuanced, and identifying and making sense of FID sentences requires significant interpretive activity on the part of the reader. FID has been a crucially important technique for the representation of consciousness in the English novel, particularly in the tradition which runs from Jane Austen through George Eliot to Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce, which concerns itself increasingly with the imagined thought-lives of characters. Depending on the context, FID passages can be presented sympathetically, inviting the reader to immerse herself or himself unreservedly in the character’s thought or speech, or ironically, with the language of the character creating a dissonant effect against the background of the narrator’s discourse and the novel’s design. FID is also sometimes referred to as style indirect libre, free indirect style, represented speech and thought, or narrated monologue.

The choice of the perspectival center of a stretch of discourse is crucial for the interpretation of certain phenomena such as free indirect discourse. It has been argued that the protagonist that is most prominent compared to competing protagonists gets to be the perspectival center. In this paper we discuss grammatical function and referential expression as prominence-lending cues and their impact on perspective-taking. We take the anchoring of free indirect discourse as the indicator for a shift in perspective as free indirect discourse can only be processed correctly if the reader is able to ascribe the utterance or thought to a protagonist. Identifying the perspectival center is particularly crucial for the interpretation of a thought or utterance in free indirect discourse mode that can potentially be ascribed to different protagonists, since in contrast to direct or indirect discourse the respective speaker or thinker is not explicitly marked as such in free indirect discourse. In a series of acceptability rating studies, we tested if anchoring of free indirect discourse to the less prominent of two competing referents is perceived to be unnatural. Further, we take a closer look at the role of subject and object as well as the choice of referential expression (proper name compared to indefinite noun phrase). We find that a protagonist referred to with a proper name in subject position is highly preferred as the anchor for free indirect discourse compared to a protagonist referred to with an indefinite noun phrase in object position. Building on these findings, we present evidence that the prominence of the referent that is established in the sentence preceding a sentence in free indirect discourse mode can be overridden by discourse prominence. That is, a referent that is repeatedly mentioned in a short discourse is preferred as the perspectival center regardless of the prominence of a competing referent in the sentence preceding a sentence in free indirect discourse mode.

Jane Austen is generally acknowledged to be the first English novelist to make sustained use of free indirect discourse in the representation of figurai speech and thought.1 Unfortunately, however, the theory of free indirect discourse (FID) in Eng lish has not been congenial to Austen's work, often obscuring the way the technique functions in her novels.2 Two theoretical tendencies, in particular, have contributed to this confusion. First, the most influential accounts of FID in English have tended to stress the autonomy of FID representations of speech and thought and to contrast them with authoritative narrative commentary: FID is, on this account, the preemi nent technique of objective narration, in which the narrator supposedly withdraws or disappears in favor of impersonal figurai representation.3 Second, FID has often been characterized as innately disruptive and destabilizing?a technique that allows other voices to compete with and so undermine the monologic authority of the nar rator or the implied author.4 Whatever their relevance to later fiction, these character izations of FID are inadequate and misleading when applied to Austen's novels, which deploy FID in conjunction with a trustworthy, authoritative narrative voice and which repeatedly intertwine FID with narratorial commentary, sometimes inside of a single sentence. Indeed, much of the aesthetic pleasure in Austen's FID passages comes from subtle modulations among narrative registers, as the prose moves in and out of a complex array of voices, including that of the narrator herself. In this essay, I will examine Austen's use of FID in a series of passages from Emma, emphasizing the narrator's role in an effort to provide a more accurate picture of Austen's practice than has been available in criticism influenced by the prevailing theoretical accounts. In Emma, I will argue, FID is best seen not as a representation of autonomous figurai discourse but as a kind of narratorial mimicry, analogous to the flexible imitations of

In this contribution we will address the main puzzling empirical issues that have been formulated around Free Indirect Discourse (FID): the constraints on the use of first person pronouns and of proper names (as well as of definite descriptions), the reasons why different grammatical features (person, gender, number) give rise to presuppositions that must be resolved at different levels of interpretation in FID, the factors that account for the observation that person and tense behave similarly in FID. At the same time, we will also discuss the main controversies to which the ongoing debate on FID has given rise in the literature, showing that Schlenker (Mind Lang 19(3):279–304, 2004)’s distinction between a Context of Thought (CT) and a Context of Utterance (CU) still provides a fundamentally valid insight into the nature of FID, in spite of many qualifications that are necessary and some well-motivated criticism. However, our main task here is more ambitious than simply taking a stand on the many unsettled controversies surrounding FID. In fact, we claim that Schlenker’s split between CU and CT can be derived in a principled way from the inner nature of FID as a linguistic process of ‘phenomenal identification’, whereby a Higher Experiencer attempts at reproducing (at a distinct time) the phenomenal experience proper to a Lower Experiencer. This distinction between qualitatively identified but numerically distinct experiences provides the conceptual basis for the derivation of virtually all remarkable properties of FID (including its somehow intermediate status between Direct and Indirect Discourse), while connecting, at the same time, with some intriguing semantic properties of first-person pronouns, such as the different varieties of de se readings.

Free Indirect Discourse and the Problem of the Will in Two Novels by William Godwin Thomas Salem Manganaro (bio) In his discussion of emma (1815) in jane austen; or, the secret of Style, D. A. Miller draws our attention to an essential quality of free indirect discourse. By focusing on a single sentence repeated before and after the chapter break of volume 2, chapters 2 and 3—“She could not forgive her”1—Miller observes that the repetition of this sentence allows us to see the two ways in which it may be read: as “the indirect and impersonal performance of Emma’s consciousness” and as “the mere matter-of-fact notation of that thought.”2 It is able to “perform” what Emma would think about Jane Fairfax, in the sense that she might say “I cannot forgive her,” and is also able to denote a fact about Emma’s state of mind as part of a third-person omniscient narrative. This is possible because the sentence emulates the character’s “direct speech” without leaving the perspective of the narrator, and so it can also be read as the narrator’s simple description of the character’s mind or plain “indirect speech.”3 Miller’s observation draws from standard accounts of narrative perspective in Emma; as Wayne C. Booth has written, there is a “double vision that operates throughout the book: our inside view of Emma’s worth and our objective view of her great faults.”4 In its “double vision,” or what Roy Pascal later called “the [End Page 301] dual voice,”5 free indirect discourse then stands out as a privileged strategy in allowing us momentarily to embody the protagonist’s consciousness as well as stand apart from it and judge it. However, there is an added dimension to this sentence from Emma that has received less attention in standard accounts of free indirect discourse. This becomes apparent when we focus in closer detail on the words “She could not,” and the difference in meaning they convey when considered from an “inside” and from an “outside” perspective. These words attract our attention because they express something peculiar about Emma’s volition and her capacity to exert herself: when we read them as vocalized by Emma herself on the one hand and as third-person matter-of-fact notation on the other, we simultaneously register two very different conceptions of the will. This becomes clearer when we consider a separate but similar example from Emma. Here, immediately before Emma lets loose her infamous unkind remark to Miss Bates in the company of Mr. and Mrs. Weston, Mr. and Mrs. Elton, Harriet Smith, Frank Churchill, Jane Fairfax, and Mr. Knightley, we are given a paragraph break comprising a single sentence: “Emma could not resist.”6 Unlike the previous example, this sentence is not delivered in the midst of a narrator’s discussion of Emma’s train of thought, but rather in an extended quoted conversation. For this reason, we are not likely to read it as free indirect discourse, but strictly as a notation of Emma’s mind. Yet if we pause over the sentence, we can recognize that it can also be read, like “She could not forgive her,” in two different ways: as a “performance of Emma’s consciousness” and as a “matter-of-fact notation of the thought,” and the difference is significant. If we read the sentence as a mere notation, we understand Emma as being sincerely unable to act any differently, taking the words “could not” literally: it was not within the range of available possibilities for her mental capacity at that point and time. Alternatively, when we read the sentence as a “performance of her consciousness,” we discover quite the opposite: if “I cannot resist” were a sentence spoken privately in Emma’s mind, we would understand instantly that Emma can resist. It is as though one were to say in passing, “I cannot resist having one more chocolate,” meaning something more like “it is very hard for me to resist”: the implication would be exactly that “I can resist,” with the added qualifier that I say I cannot resist so as to...

This article argues for a logophoric analysis of Free Indirect Discourse (FID). FID is descriptively a hybrid between Direct Discourse (DD) and Indirect Discourse (ID). Recent studies largely agree on a DD-based analysis of FID by relying on bicontextual dependency (Schlenker in Mind Lang 19:279–304, 2004, Eckardt, The semantics of free indirect discourse: How texts allow us to mind-read and eavesdrop, Brill, Wiley, Leiden, 2014, i.a.) or mixed quotation (Maier in Mind Lang 30:345-373, 2015, i.a.). Instead, the article defends an ID-based, logophoric analysis of FID on the basis of overlooked properties of FID such as (anti)licensing of (anti)logophoric elements and recursive embedding of FID, which strengthen some previously discussed arguments such as de se and de te readings or sequence of tense phenomena (see Sharvit in Linguist Philos 31:353–395, 2008); the new observation that time and location adverbials are in fact not systematically indexicals anchored to the protagonist (but can be anaphoric or anchored to the speaker) further supports ID-based against DD-based analyses. The hypothesis that FID is outscoped by a logophoric operator not only derives the mixed properties of FID, but also treats FID as a case of an independently motivated linguistic class—the class of logophoric contexts.

Perspective taking has been proposed to be impaired in persons with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), especially when implicit processing is required. In narrative texts, language perception and interpretation is fundamentally guided by taking the perspective of a narrator. We studied perspective taking in the linguistic domain of so-called Free Indirect Discourse (FID), during which certain text segments have to be interpreted as the thoughts or utterances of a protagonist without explicitly being marked as thought or speech representations of that protagonist (as in direct or indirect discourse). Crucially, the correct interpretation of text segments as FID depends on the ability to detect which of the protagonists “stands out” against the others and is therefore identifiable as implicit thinker or speaker. This so-called “prominence” status of a protagonist is based on linguistic properties (e.g., grammatical function, referential expression), in other words, the perspective is “hidden” and has to be inferred from the text material. In order to test whether this implicit perspective taking ability that is required for the interpretation of FID is preserved in persons with ASD, we presented short texts with three sentences to adults with and without ASD. In the last sentence, the perspective was switched either to the more or the less prominent of two protagonists. Participants were asked to rate the texts regarding their naturalness. Both diagnostic groups rated sentences with FID anchored to the less prominent protagonist as less natural than sentences with FID anchored to the more prominent protagonist. Our results that the high-level perspective taking ability in written language that is required for the interpretation of FID is well preserved in persons with ASD supports the conclusion that language skills are highly elaborated in ASD so that even the challenging attribution of utterances to protagonists is possible if they are only implicitly given. We discuss the implications in the context of claims of impaired perspective taking in ASD as well as with regard to the underlying processing of FID.

In this contribution we report on the results from two psycholinguistic experiments investigating the processing of Free Indirect Discourse (FID). We conceive of FID as a linguistic means that cues comprehenders to take over the perspective of a protagonist in third-person narrations. Using both on-line and off-line measures, we tested the hypothesis that the referent of the protagonist receives a higher activation status during reading if his or her thoughts are related through FID. The FID cues we used were questions and discourse particles. In addition, we compared different inferential statistic procedures in the analysis of the results. Although the cues that were employed as FID markers in the experimental materials had an influence on the perception of narrative perspective, no indication was found for the hypothesis that narrative perspective mediated through FID influences the salience of the protagonist during reading. We discuss the implications of this null result and point to some more general methodological problems arising in the investigation of processing of literary text.

This paper delves into the phenomenon of subjectivity, with a particular focus on one of its components – perspective taking. It explores two linguistic cues categories: verb tenses in their perspectival usages and Free Indirect Discourse (FID). In this paper, we experimentally test how readers process sentences in which the French Passé Simple is employed in a perspectival manner within two types of subjective contexts: those with FID and those without FID markers. In addition, we consider whether the processing is influenced by the type of emotion expressed in these subjective contexts, whether it is positive or negative. We find a facilitation effect exclusively in FID contexts and only when the emotion expressed is positive. This could suggest that it is not the verb tense itself which is a cue for speaker’s subjectivity, but rather its occurrence in contexts such as FID. To interpret the results, we build on an array of empirical results found on connectives, verb tenses, and FID to put forward a comprehensive pragmatic model of subjectivity.

Free indirect discourse (FID) is an enunciative configuration which appears in early modern texts and indeed much earlier in mediaeval and classical writing, well before it acquired a semiotic status in mid-nineteenth century novels. Indeed, as far back as we can investigate, FID figures among strategies of reported speech, and in this respect it constitutes a mode of representation within the discourse of another enunciative act. However, FID is not limited to representation, for its specific configuration means that it questions the enunciative alterity it represents. This raises the question of who is in fact speaking with this voice, and whether FID is merely the reporting of words, and it calls into question the act of enunciation which is presupposed by the very concept of reported speech. In this paper I seek to identify common ground across forms of FID in order to stabilise its principle, and to define an illocutionary value which permits a transversal function for FID.

Some Stylistic Considerations of Free Indirect Discourse in Film Adaptations of Flaubert's Madame Bovary Colin Gardner (bio) Variously known as style indirect libre or erlebte Rede, free indirect discourse has always been of particular interest to both literary and film theorists because of its identification with the modernist innovations of Gustave Flaubert and the nineteenth-century bourgeois novel as well as the narrative properties of traditional Hollywood cinema. Gilles Deleuze, for example, ties it directly to his discussion of what he calls the "perception-image." In film, a perception has two poles, subjective and objective. Thus, "a subjective perception is one in which the images vary in relation to a central and privileged image; an objective perception is one where, as in things, all the images vary in relation to one another, on all their facets and in all their parts."1 However, it is important to note that the narrative film's scopic economy is not a simple binarism between subjective point of view and objective rendering on-screen (expressed most economically, for example, in shot-reverse-shot editing), but also behaves in accordance with a free indirect discourse that is able to express characters' inner states via the mise-en-scène, while the character is also present within the mise-en-scène. The free indirect discourse therefore suggests the possibility of expressing a first-person focalization (inside), while continuing to present the character in the third person (outside). This complication of the subjective-objective duality is acknowledged by Deleuze in his analysis of Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Cinema of Poetry"2 and its relation to the free indirect in Cinema 1: The Movement Image. Here, Deleuze argues that the perception-image is often able to override the intentionality of bodily motility (the vectorial space of Deleuze's "action-image") via a form of camera self-consciousness. "We are no longer faced with subjective or objective images," notes Deleuze; "we are caught in a correlation between a perception-image and a camera-consciousness which transforms it (the question of knowing whether the image was objective or subjective is no longer raised)."3 Deleuze calls this "a very [End Page 587] special kind of cinema" because it makes the presence of the camera both felt and palpable.4 In this way, the perception-image takes on the guise of a free indirect subjectivity as soon as it manifests itself through an autonomous camera-consciousness. Consequently, the free indirect allows us to get a clearer idea of how a pure perception-image—with its specific roots in bodily affect—might work when freed from the subjective baggage of suturing film language. Earmarked as a direct advance on, and contrast to, the all-seeing, God's-eye objectivist realist novels of Balzac and Stendhal, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857) is often cited specifically as the prototypical text of this hybrid subjective / objective style, although Pasolini has traced a variation of its use as far back as Dante.5 Given this general hermeneutic regard for the free indirect as a historicizing, ideologically motivated textual practice, the paucity of discussion concerning its application to film is all the more surprising, especially given the import of Deleuze's analysis in both Cinema 1 and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. With that in mind, this essay thus posits the following questions: What is free indirect discourse? How does it work in the literary context of Flaubert in general and Madame Bovary in particular? Does it translate directly into cinematic terms? If so, how has this affected film adaptations of Madame Bovary, specifically those of Jean Renoir, Vincente Minnelli, and Claude Chabrol? If not, and this constitutes the crux of this essay's thesis, is there an indirect filmic substitute that can generate equivalent stylistic effects? The short answer to the last question is yes, and it lies, as we shall see, in film's ability to foreground the body's performative ability to express inner states as an outward form of affect or gest. First, let us clear some semantic ground and try to establish a terminological consensus via some specific definitions. In A Dictionary of Narratology, Gerald Prince defines "direct discourse...

This chapter investigates sentences that can never be interpreted as free indirect discourse. Specifically, it looks at imperatives and vocatives. Both constructions are banned from both (free) indirect thought and indirect speech. The chapter surveys the data and illustrates this ban for either case. It discusses how they relate to utterance context. In each case, the aim is to provide an explanation for the observed prohibition. The proposed analyses remain sketchy in respects orthogonal to the topic and are not designed to comprehensively cover all possible observations for the constructions in question. However, the chapter uses the present account for rigid and shiftable reference to contexts as our background for investigating the indexical nature of imperatives and vocatives. It reviews data showing that imperatives and vocatives are prohibited in free indirect discourse. The chapter illustrates the prohibition for the imperative in English and German.Keywords: English; free indirect discourse; German; imperatives; indexical nature; indirect speech; observed prohibition; utterance context; vocatives