Towards a pragmatic analysis of narratives in literature

Abstract

What are the current perspectives in research on literary narratives? Given the place of narration within literature, such a question is inseparable from a consideration of all problems of literary theory. Once a failure of semiology to define literariness within a system based upon a principle of immanence has been recognized, the orientation towards pragmatics imposes itself and one should ask what can a literary science based upon pragmatics look like? Work exists already within this domain, notably that of Schmidt. In this paper, the author attempts to justify an interactionist conception beginning with the hypothesis that a relative continuity exists between everyday communication and literary communication and that literary communication is specified through the orientation towards form within a process of institutionalization. It is posited that one can clarify traditional problems of literary narratology (i.e. genre, fictionality, narrator) through comparative analysis, which permits one to specify the differences and similarities of pragmatic and semantic macrostructures within the perspective of a classification of types of texts and to study the forms and functions of fictionality within the two types of communication. Even the problem of the narrator and of microstructures can be profitably treated within this framework.