Textual Phenomena Research Articles

Rabelais et la question du sens

This volume originated in a symposium held in Cerisy-la-Salle in August 2000. Some of the ideas presented here have since been developed by their authors; yet the book feels fresh because of its reflexive approach. In opening and closing remarks respectively, Jean Céard and Marie-Luce Demonet hint at what specialists of Rabelais can gain by taking a step back to scrutinize their own hermeneutics. In her contribution, Demonet warns, for example, that our infatuation with ‘higher meaning’ should not dispense us from exploring the literal level, of which much remains unknown; similarly, Louis-Georges Tin prefaces his exegesis of the ‘pantagruelion’ by a catalogue of the premises inherent in any interpretation. As a result of this self-awareness, the volume is not plagued by polemics — even as it remains rife with contradictions. Thus Frank Lestringant, drawing on cartographic models, argues that the episode of the ‘physétère’ in the middle of the Quart Livre is devoid of much sense and functions as a decoy; by contrast, Stéphan Geonget's views on the ‘Y’ figure buttress the case made by Edwin Duval, in 1998, for the beast's central importance. Myriam Marrache-Gouraud, studying the ‘cornes’ and ‘cornemuse’ motif in the Tiers Livre, values Panurge's acrobatic denials over Pantagruel's predictable sermonizing; whereas Gilles Polizzi emphasizes Panurge's indignity by following an allegory borrowed by Rabelais from Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia to its final degradation at the end of the Quart Livre. According to Barbara C. Bowen, the Tiers Livre's Judge Bridoye is a farcical fool and as much the target of satire as Gargantua's Janotus de Bragmardo; but for Emmanuel Naya, Bridoye is a figure of the Pyrrhonian suspension of judgement that Rabelais's fiction calls for. It does not follow that all approaches are welcome: while Jean-François Maillard, arguing that Rabelais was no kabbalist, dismisses the assumption that his message is encrypted according to the laws of an outside system, contributors also reject the opposite idea — that meaning, as a textual phenomenon, cannot be nailed down. Most of the essays practise a kind of revised textualism: they combine a historical approach, drawing concepts from Renaissance rhetoric and philosophy (see Naya's encyclopedic use of scepticism, or Claude La Charité's instructive confronting of Pantagruel's Thaumaste dispute with contemporary theories on the language of signs), with a tendency to infer meaning from patterns (syntagms, figures, motifs) provided by the text; these patterns, however, lack the architectural rigour championed by Edwin Duval, whose method and results are cautiously challenged by several of the articles. Also exploring this shifting terrain are Jacques Berchtold's variations on the ‘mouche’ and ‘mousse’ motifs in Panurge's proposal regarding the walls of Paris; Pierre Johan Laffitte's assessment of the evolving François Villon persona in the ‘theatre’ of the Quart Livre; Oumelbanine Zhiri's dialectical analysis of the Tiers Livre's conflicting narrative temporalities; and Véronique Zaercher-Keck's tracking, across several books, of the Pantagruelists' ritualistic declarations of allegiance and preparations for battle. Much of what is shown is thought-provoking, often persuasive; most convincing are Paul J. Smith's clever identification of the ‘Andouilles’ as the English (this is one case in which a local meaning seems firmly established) and André Tournon's brilliant use of the myth of Baubô (who consoles Demeter by exposing herself) as ambiguous key to the strange behaviour of the ‘Sibylle de Panzoust’.

Jennifer Summit, Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern EnglandMemory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England. Jennifer Summit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Pp. x+343.

<i>Jennifer Summit</i>, Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England<i>Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England</i>. Jennifer Summit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Pp. x+343.

Museos para todos: la traducción e interpretación para entornos multimodales como herramienta de accesibilidad universal

Audiovisual Translation (AVT) has a scientific responsibility to develop analytical methodologies for the textual phenomenon of multimodality, and for the translation strategies associated with it. At the same time, it should aim to provide studies of universal accessibility with a powerful tool for facilitating access to knowledge. This article offers some reflections on the theoretical foundations of AVT and considers how these are projected in the creation of new professional profiles, with specific application to universal accessibility in the museums.

Le Langage de l'implicite dans l'œuvre de Crébillon fils (review)

Reviewed by: Le Langage de l'implicite dans l'œuvre de Crébillon fils Olivier Delers (bio) Émeline Mossé . Le Langage de l'implicite dans l'œuvre de Crébillon fils. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2009. 475pp. €88. ISBN 978-2-7453-1867-1. In her book, Émeline Mossé argues that the figure of the implicit can help us delineate a unified "système crébillonien" and thus reconciles two antithetical aspects of Crébillon fils's work: the propensity of his characters to engage in libertine behaviour and the underlying moral tonality of his novels. In Mossé's study, the implicit is a versatile and ever-evolving notion that accounts for a wide range of textual phenomena: silences, detours, ellipses, vague and ethereal characterization, or the narrator's willingness to let the readers fill the margins of the text with their own thoughts and interpretations. The loose conceptualization of the book's major theme is both a strength and a weakness. On the one hand, it allows Mossé to insist on the rich juxtaposition of social, stylistic, and generic questions in Crébillon fils's novels. She shows, for instance, that the necessity for noble characters to conceal the true nature of their feelings turns language into a "magical art" (161) that only some can decipher and explains the parodic nature of novels like Le Sopha or Les Égarements du cœur et de l'esprit. On the other hand, the implicit remains under-theorized throughout, in spite of references to Bernadette Fort's Le Langage de l'ambiguité dans l'oeuvre de Crébillon fils (1978) and a reliance on L'Implicite by Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni (1986) to provide a theoretical framework. With each new chapter, the implicit gains new meanings and variations as it is used to explain different [End Page 148] characteristics of Crébillon fils's novels. In the end, it becomes equated with the practice of literary interpretation itself, revealing the internal coherence behind Crébillon fils's body of work and thus defining an elusive "poétique crébillonienne." This is perhaps most visible when Mossé links the implicit to what she calls Crébillon fils's "laboratory of generic research" (169). The implicit is both a way of analyzing the different novelistic forms employed by the author but also a specific mode—parody—meant to diffuse possible criticism of his generic experimentations. Still, Mossé manages to claim for the oft-forgotten Crébillon fils a central and unique place in the development of eighteenth-century French fiction: the length of his career (from Le Sylphe in 1730 to Lettres Athéniennes in 1771) and the variety of novels he published show the extent to which he tried to tame a still anarchical genre and to propose a comprehensive theory of the novel. Mossé convincingly argues that metatextuality lies at the heart of Crébillon fils's prose fiction by showing how theoretical reflections parallel the main narrative lines and create a dialogue with the text as it unfolds. The Crébillonian narrator is looking for allies, that is, for an informed readership that can decode his implicit references and playful, ironic comments and laugh with him, even when the riddles he poses are hard to decipher. In doing so, the narrator is asking the reader to become aware of the act of reading itself: neither the characters nor the narrator are the sole bearer of truth, and readers should be able to extract their own moral conclusions from the text. It is not a surprise, then, that Crébillon fils's novels should read as a never-ending language game with wide-ranging implications for characterization, style, and the production of textual meaning. The implicit explains the author's tendency to stage mysterious and secretive characters and to let readers piece together coherent portraits from scattered elements in the narration. In fact, Crébillon fils rarely focuses on the physical quality of his characters, as if they were solely constituted by language and by the verbal exchanges they have with one another. Generic pronouns are often used, indicating that language itself can not solve the communication breakdown that characterizes polite society in the...

RewritingMoby-Dick: Politics, Textual Identity, and the Revision Narrative

The study of textual evolution, or revision as a textual phenomenon, requires a form of fluid-text editing that not only gives readers access to the textual identities that constitute the versions of a work but also makes the revision process witnessable by generating revision sequences and revision narratives for every revision event. Traditional editorial approaches that mix versions in the editing of a work compromise the integrity of textual identities, and the problem of mixing versions is demonstrated in three examples of the way editors and critics (in the context of orientalist and colonialist discourses) have changed the text of, or rewritten, Herman Melville'sMoby-Dick: Edward Said's mistaking John Huston and Ray Bradbury's film ending for Melville's, the British expurgations that modulate Queequeg's homosexuality to preclude the idea of homosexual domesticity and marriage, and the British editors' conversion of Queequeg's Christianity (and modern editors' perpetuation of the unwanted conversion). These historical and modern cases show that readers, sometimes despite themselves, revise texts materially in ways that mirror their desire and the ways of power. Editing the rewriting of a text likeMoby-Dickin a digital critical archive would preserve all versions and generate revision narratives that textualize the otherwise invisible dynamics of revision in a culture. With its capacity to edit fluid texts, digital humanities scholarship is well situated to expand the discourse on the dynamics of textual evolution into the literary and cultural criticism of the twenty-first century.

Reading Law: On Law as a Textual Phenomenon

In contrast to recent German debates stating that jurisprudence should transform itself from a hermeneutic science of texts into a practical science of decision making, this essay proposes a return to the text. Text, however, will then have to be understood no longer as merely a written form of language. Rather, we should attempt to conceive of the legal system itself as a specific form of textuality. I try to develop and elaborate this idea by regarding law from the various perspectives of Paul de Man’s literary criticism, John Austin’s discussion of performative utterances, Roland Barthes’ deconstruction of hermeneutics, media theory, and an ex negativo approach based on Carl Schmitt’s scorn for normativism. Finally, I ask for possible practical consequences that the newly designed textual understanding of the legal procedure might have.

Sacred Attunement: A Jewish Theology. By Michael Fishbane

Michael Fishbane's Sacred Attunement is fascinating not only in what it says explicitly, but also in what it does not say. On one level, he presents a series of innovative insights into the parallels between modes of textual interpretation and modes of spiritual–ethical “interpretation” of the concrete details of lived human existence. In laying out such parallels, he succeeds—in a way that will engage both specialists and nonspecialists—in translating into a contemporary idiom the classical rabbinic notion that engagement in the study of scripture can function as a self-transformative practice. At the same time, though, we might also understand his project as implicitly putting forth a fundamental reconception of the very idea of “doing theology”—whether Fishbane himself consciously intends such a challenge or not. Prior to presenting the “Jewish” side of his project, Fishbane's first chapter lays out his understanding of “theology” in a general sense. He thus explicitly frames the chapters that follow as a specifically Jewish instantiation of a humanly universal “attempt to speak of the reality of God and direct the self toward this truth” (1). In this account, a Jewish theology does not entail claims of exclusive access to divine truth; rather, a theology is Jewish insofar as it engages in the human theological endeavor by means of close readings and constructive re-readings of the particular traditions and textual sources of Judaism (44). In this opening chapter, he emphasizes that his primary concern as a writer lies not with abstract theoretical constructions of God's being, but rather in an attempt to stimulate the reader's sensitivity to the easily overlooked depths and ethical demands that are inherent in the particulars of earthly life. For Fishbane, God is precisely in the details. The second chapter of Fishbane's book constitutes the core of his project and is where he truly breaks new ground. Taking his cue from four traditional Jewish modes of interpreting scripture, he lays out a striking account of the ways in which different ways of reading texts can serve as spiritual exercises. The same practices that make for careful interpretation can, Fishbane asserts, shape a person's mode of viewing existence as whole, train the reader's mindfulness to the details of the created world, and enhance one's ability to make active and conscious judgments in response to the choices and responsibilities that confront us in each moment. Thus, for instance, he notes the way in which the mode of peshat (plain sense) interpretation helps attune a reader to scripture's contextual particularities. Through its demand for close attention to the fine points of the written text, engagement in peshat reading counteracts the tendency to skip over the text's details in an attempt to arrive too quickly at one's own desired interpretation. In requiring care and concern for scripture's syntactical configurations that exist independently of our interpretive will, this mode of reading is “an exercise in attentiveness to the details of the text and its modes of presentation; and it is an exercise in the patient subordination of the self to the otherness of the language which has been selected by the author, but which requires one's readerly engagement to come alive” (71). After leading the reader through a peshat interpretation of Jacob's dream of the “stairway to heaven” in Genesis 28, Fishbane shifts our lens from a reading of textual phenomena to a reading of the phenomena of nature and of existence. The development of attunement to the alterity of scriptural words and phrases, he argues, will better enable a person to respond with ethical responsibility and patience to the alterity of things and persons that one encounters in daily life.

Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik. Das Projekt »LiLi« aus heutiger linguistischer Sicht

Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik. Das Projekt »LiLi« aus heutiger linguistischer Sicht

Soziologische Fachtexte aus Korpusperspektive. Zum Auffinden indirekter Rede in den Annali di Sociologia/Jahrbüchern für Soziologie

This paper deals with the question of which search strategies are adapted to corpus analysis when trying to point out textual phenomena such as, for instance, indirect and direct speech. My study investigates the quantity and the various forms of direct and indirect speech used to make references to others' research. It draws upon the corpus of the German originals published in the Annali di Sociologia from 1991 to 2002, a journal edited in German and Italian (originals and translations in both languages) by the University of Trento, Italy.

&lt;i&gt;Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play&lt;/i&gt; (review)

Reviewed by: Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play Yung-Hsing Wu Jennifer DeVere Brody. Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2008. xi + 221 pp. The opening “For(e)thought” to Jennifer DeVere Brody’s Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play includes a note of regret. “I regret,” Brody writes, “that my coursework for the doctorate degree in literature did not require courses on the history of language, let alone classes in linguistics, paleography, typography, or printing” (23–24). As disciplinary as it is intellectual, this sense of disappointment, of an opportunity lost, offers a way into Brody’s wide-ranging argument about punctuation, its variable contexts and significations, its mundane operations, and whimsical performances. For in her attention to a host of punctuation marks—dots as periods and ellipses, colons and semicolons, question, exclamation, and quotation marks, even the unremarkable hyphen—Brody insists that punctuation matters, that these marks on (and off) the page are not only readable, but necessarily so if one is to account for the meaning-making that takes place in and around language. Brody’s statement of regret suggests an investment in what Jerome McGann has, since the publication of The Textual Condition, called the bibliographic. A term ripe with bookish resonance, McGann’s bibliographic describes those features that comprise the material conditions of textuality. Writing in 1991, McGann declares that We must turn our attention to much more than the formal and linguistic features of poems or other imaginative fictions. We must attend to textual materials which are not regularly studied by those interested in “poetry”: to typefaces, bindings, [End Page 318] book prices, page format, and all those textual phenomena usually regarded as (at best) peripheral to “poetry” or “the text as such.” (13) The physical facts of textuality: these demand illumination precisely because their contributions to textual meaning are significant. If McGann’s point was to begin to provide such illumination, or to suggest how that illumination might occur, Brody seeks to demonstrate that punctuation, so often invisible—and incidental—to the reading eye, is no less crucial to the material life of language. When she observes of punctuation that “it may be neither here nor there and yet somehow . . . is everywhere,” Brody’s turn to location for the (omni)presence that goes unmarked is not surprising. The air of revolution that suffuses McGann’s claims underlies Brody’s rhetoric as well. To mark punctuation is to demystify the naturalization of print that punctuation has all along afforded. The scope of this demystification is apparent in the diversity of Brody’s analyses. Methodologically, Brody claims cultural, literary, performance, and visual studies as the purview in which Punctuation works. For her, the “body shows” of Yayoi Kusama, whose works feature human bodies painted with dots, and the three-dimensional sculptures of Richard Artschwager, whose pieces include stand-alone question marks, have counterparts in the poetry of Harryette Mullen and the performances of Victor Borge. To the extent that the punctuation marks displayed on full-page spreads in Adbusters magazine recall advertising and the practice of texting, they perform the significance of global connectivity. A moment from a Samuel Taylor Coleridge essay embodies the insight that emoticons now suggest: affect resides in punctuation. Or, as Brody puts it, “human ‘being’ leaps off the page when we see a question mark, a period, or exclamation mark” (6). Meanwhile, Truman Capote’s comment that stylists obsess over “the placement [sic] of a comma, the weight of a semicolon” (5) weighs quite differently in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, where literalized punctuation—marks are rendered as words—captures “the struggle for speech” that Cha’s displaced protagonist must undergo (16). And Ralph Ellison, whose repeated ellipses in Invisible Man index the uncertainty of time and identity, becomes a dissenting voice to the “assimilationist” stance Strunk and White take in predicting the “steady evolution” of hyphenates into unified words (89).1 And yet Punctuation is not only a treatise, a subversive guide to the propriety endorsed by manuals like Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. As her subtitle suggests, Brody is as invested in play as she is in [End Page 319] politics, and...

Studying Textual Studies:Problems and AgendasModiano, Raimonda, Leroy F.Searle, andPeter Shillingsburg, eds.Voice, Text, Hypertext: Emerging Practices in Textual Studies

VOICE. TEXT. HYPERTEXT. EACH TERM REPRESENTS A DISTINCT moment in the development of textuality, from orality to literacy to digitization. But each is also the scene of considerable dispute, a point not at all lost on the editors and contributors of the volume under review. How distinct are these moments? How momentous? What threads of human consciousness connect them? What technologies advance them? For that matter, in what ways are this book's featured transmission technologiesspeech, inscription, print, pixel-at all relevant to the phenomenon of textuality? The subtitle's focus on the practices of textual study indicate problems articulated for some future disciplinary agenda. How might we study these transitional, evolutionary textual phenomena, edit them for critics and students, and bring them and textual criticism to center stage in current critical thinking and pedagogy? Voice, Text, Hypertext is at times ungainly, but a gamesome and thoroughly engrossing field book that should inspire cosmopolitan research, critical editing, and interpretation. Of the three organizing principles, the least accessible and hence most compelling is Voice. The age of the voiced text was an age of memory, performance, and textual evolution. Authority resided not so much in the text as in its singer, an individual of demonstrable memory, spiritual depth, and theatrical skill. What must it have been like when singers developed written aids to prompt their memory; or when full performances were first transcribed; or when transcriptions simply replaced singing: when agency was transferred from singer to writer, and authority was lodged, indeed sacralized, in words not sung but written? Reflecting on these imagined moments of transition deepens our appreciation of both the substance and insubstantiality of textuality. Despite the efforts of Walter J. Ong and others, the

Parodies en scène

Parody is usually described as a textual phenomena, a comic travesty of written and well-known authorities. The strong mental frames of Western Medieval Culture designate this period as especially favourable to this posture. But, between Middle Ages and Renaissance, new genres use parody, and among them, the drama. Our understanding of parodic plays implies the knowledge of textual but also contextual structures. Pierre de Lesnauderie’s plays, performed in Caen in 1493 and 1496, are not only an example of academic performance in France. They both show a complex parodic style, based on the usual ironic pastiches of classical mythology and religious literature, and on satirical imitation of the theatrical structures themselves. The public debate is on stage: an academic riot against the central power; the epidemy of French disease in Europe. Giving new perspectives to parody, the humanistic french drama aims to constitute himself as a political and cultural authority.

On Proving Too Much: Critical Hesitations about Richard Bauckham's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses

AbstractRichard Bauckham's book, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, while breaking new ground in many details, sets up an a priori approach to the Gospel traditions which has difficulty in coping with the textual phenomena which form the basis of an a posteriori approach. Discussion of selected examples suggests the vulnerability of the hypothesis and the necessity of a less trusting, more critical and firmly tradition-historical perspective.

Googling for ‘opposites’: a web-based study of antonym canonicity

This paper seeks to explain why some semantically-opposed word pairs are more likely to be seen as canonical antonyms (for example, cold/hot) than others (icy/scorching, cold/fiery, freezing/hot, etc.). Specifically, it builds on research which has demonstrated that, in discourse, antonyms are inclined to favour certain frames, such as ‘X and Y alike’, ‘from X to Y’ and ‘either X or Y’ (Justeson and Katz, 1991; etc.), and to serve a limited range of discourse functions (Jones, 2002). Our premise is that the more canonical an antonym pair is, the greater the fidelity with which it will occupy such frames. Since an extremely large corpus is needed to identify meaningful patterns of co-occurrence, we turn to Internet data for this research. As well as enabling the notion of antonym canonicity to be revisited from a more empirical perspective, this approach also allows us to evaluate the appropriateness (and assess the risks) of using the World Wide Web as a corpus for studies into certain types of low-frequency textual phenomena.

New textualities

This article introduces EJES, vol. 11, issue 2, New Textualities. It briefly outlines the relation between theoretical and technological changes that has led to a re-examination of textual forms in the digital age. Texts as both social text and technotext are tentatively explored in the context of remediation and proliferation of textual materialities that defines contemporary culture. The six articles contained in this issue deal with specific aspects of this linguistic and literary context, in which texts, metatexts and tools for analysing texts are fostering a new critical awareness of textual phenomena and textual representation.

Textual Subjectivity: The Encoding of Subjectivity in Medieval Narratives and Lyrics by A. C. Spearing

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER the new magnetic field that Simpson has created. The book is hugely well informed, genuinely illuminating, full of sharp aperçus, and challenging in inspirational ways. His thesis, however, does not seem to leave any possibility for the Elizabethan reflorescence of literature to happen: his surprise at the long survival of the cycle plays, for instance, is witness to a reluctance to allow that multiformedness had not become extinct by 1547, and according to this account romance died out with Henry’s censorship of the press. That was not how Spenser and Shakespeare experienced their English literary history—though that would require another volume to explore. Helen Cooper Magdalene College, Cambridge A. C. Spearing. Textual Subjectivity: The Encoding of Subjectivity in Medieval Narratives and Lyrics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. vi, 273. $95.00. A. C. Spearing’s new book revises, develops, and collects a series of articles published from 1992 to 2001 into a general theory about who is addressing the reader(s) in medieval narrative and lyric poetry. Twentieth -century criticism, following the influential readings of Chaucer by G. L. Kittredge and E. T. Donaldson, has sought to identify and interpret a unique spoken voice in the text such as ‘‘Chaucer the Pilgrim’’ in the Canterbury Tales, a fictional persona whom the perceptive reader supposedly distinguished from ‘‘Chaucer the Poet.’’ Spearing sets out to show how, in search of supposed irony at the expense of a ‘‘fallible narrator ,’’ such readings often distort and diminish the richness and subtlety of medieval narrative. Spearing begins by defining his title, which refers not to the way ‘‘poems express or represent individual subjectivities, whether of their writers or of fictional characters, but how subjectivity is encoded in them as a textual phenomenon’’ (p. 1). The introductory chapter introduces readers unfamiliar with ‘‘the theoretical landscape’’ (presumably these include most of the subscribers to SAC). Following Derrida, Spearing challenges Saussure’s dictum that ‘‘writing is nothing but the representation of speech’’ (p. 5) and the assumption that any ‘‘narrative’’ necesPAGE 548 548 ................. 16596$ CH13 11-01-10 14:08:48 PS REVIEWS sarily presupposes a ‘‘narrator.’’ Medieval authors, he reminds us, are constantly referring to old stories told or written by storytellers in a distant and indefinite past. A chapter on ‘‘Romances’’ demonstrates convincingly that nothing in King Horn, where the storyteller’s ‘‘I’’ addresses the audience only at the beginning and end, ‘‘serves to individualize any narrating person as part of the poetic text’’ (p. 45). The more frequent interventions of the first person in Havelock reveal ‘‘less a single narrator than a series of narrating ‘I’s enacting a variety of different roles’’ (p. 52). Troilus and Criseyde, of course, has inspired a vastly larger body of criticism following E. T. Donaldson’s influential writings. With respectful attention to Donaldson’s own nuanced readings of the ‘‘narrator,’’ Spearing effectively demonstrates through close readings of the poem that ‘‘we find not a single shaping subjectivity but the traces of many different centres of consciousness’’ (p. 95). To reduce these to the fallible consciousness of a single ‘‘narrator’’ is to weaken and diminish Chaucer’s work. The Canterbury Tales is primarily represented by The Man of Law’s Tale, one that, Spearing suggests, some Chaucerians do not much care for and have sought to salvage by arguing that the tale conveys the shortcomings of its narrator. Spearing points to the textual evidence that ‘‘Chaucer had not settled on a pilgrim teller’’ for the tale, which he ultimately assigned to the Man of Law. And he demonstrates that critics spoil one of Chaucer’s better tales of ‘‘moralitee and hoolynesse’’ by forcing upon it ironies found in the Sergeant of the Law’s portrait. In an aside, Spearing mentions that ‘‘Chaucer was truly interested in the possibility of connections between stories and their tellers, and voiced narratives and unreliable narrators are the ultimate outcome of the process he set going’’ (p. 120). A reader might wish Spearing had analyzed at least one such voiced narrative, say The Miller’s Tale or The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale. To what extent were these texts told in...

The Book Unbound: Editing and Reading Medieval Manuscripts and Texts (review)

Reviewed by: The Book Unbound: Editing and Reading Medieval Manuscripts and Texts Nicholas Watson (bio) Siân Echard and Stephen Partridge, editors. The Book Unbound: Editing and Reading Medieval Manuscripts and TextsStudies in Book and Print Culture. University of Toronto Press. xxii, 238. $50.00 This collection of eleven essays is a product of the twenty-ninth of the University of British Columbia's series of Medieval Workshops, one of the mainstays of Canadian medieval studies. Editing is a topic of lively interest to medievalists, and a topic to which Canadian medievalists have made signal practical and theoretical contributions over more than a century. Written before the invention of printing and for the ear as much as the eye, medieval texts offer a varied challenge to the assumptions moderns bring to issues of authorship, textual integrity, and hence editorial theory, and an equally varied technical challenge to editorial practice. Several essays in this volume are preoccupied with the issue of how to represent medieval textuality, making it available for modern readers and scholars, either in print or in digital form, without fundamentally compromising its integrity. Editing is, indeed, a field of literary scholarship in which theory and practice are unusually intertwined. As the field has become more self-conscious over the last four decades it has also become more openly pluralistic, to the point that almost every editorial encounter with a next text now seems to involve a new theorization of editing, one responsive (as Tim Machan put it a decade ago) to the way a particular text 'asks' to be edited. This is frustrating for those who think editors should work behind the scenes and not trouble readers with minutiae, as it is for those who like their theories to be as comprehensive as Paul Zumthor and Bernard Cerquiglini's theory of mouvance and variance, around which (as Siân Echard and Stephen Partridge point out in their helpful introduction) many of these essays move. But editors have to deal with more kinds of textual phenomena than any other literary practitioner, and the heterogeneous discipline of their intellectual and practical solutions deserves the respect and attention it here demands. Several contributors offer retrospective accounts of their own editing practice or preview prospective editions. Anne L. Klink defends the edition of the southern version of Cursor Mundi she completed for Ottawa University Press after the death of Sarah Horrall; Meg Roland, Peter Diehl, and Stephen Reimer make the case, respectively, for a parallel-text edition of parts of Malory's Morte Darthur, an eclectic edition of Zanchino Ugolini's [End Page 238] inquisitorial manual, the Tractatus super materia hereticorum, and a richly contextualizing hypertext edition of Lydgate's Lives of Ss. Edmund and Fremund, a text which absolutely requires its manuscript images. The successes and failures of earlier editors elsewhere come under scrutiny: Julia Marvin offers a particularly sensitive analysis of the late Victorian editor of the Anglo-Norman Year Books of Edward ii, F.W. Maitland; Andrew Taylor asks why editors continue to ignore the acoustic properties of medieval texts, despite all the attention now paid to minutiae of layout; Carol Symes explores the special difficulty of editing a medieval play, The Boy and the Blind Man, whose manuscript tells a complex and partly untraceable story of successive medieval rewriting and performance. Two more technical essays explore the uses of digital media, in one case in the deciphering of a nearly unreadable text (William Schipper on fragments of a fourth-century manuscript of the epistolary of St Cyprian of Carthage), in the other in Web publication (Joan Grenier-Winther on her edition of one of the minor poems in the fifteenth-century Querelle des femmes corpus, La Belle dame qui eut mercy). One essay expresses suspicion of the indefinite expansion of material and readerly choice seductively promised by hypertext: Will Robins's learned argument for a 'disjunctive' editorial practice, in which facing-page editions of a text juxtapose contrasting editorial theories so that the consequences of editorial decision-making and scribal intervention are made visible. Read alongside Echard and Partridge's introduction, Robins makes the best case for a volume such as this, whose mix of methodological reflections...

TV commercials for prescription drugs: A discourse analytic perspective

Background The US Food and Drug Administration has called for research that may assist in developing standards for risk/benefit messages in the promotion of prescription drugs. Linguistics-based models of meaning and inference, though frequently applied to advertising, have not hitherto been used in this arena. Objective This study was intended to illustrate how discourse analysis, a methodology for microanalysis of texts in context, can elucidate the workings and interplay of promotional, informational, and other functions of direct-to-consumer drug advertising, anticipating threats to “fair balance” and pinpointing textual phenomena and issues suited to empirical study. Methods The text and visuals of a small corpus were analyzed along several dimensions, using theoretical insights of linguistic pragmatics and ethnography of speech to ask what the advertisement is seeking to do and what messages a viewer is likely to derive. Results The linguistic and rhetorical features include an intense switching and fusion of styles and modalities: the traditional advertising distinction between personal and impersonal, “company” and “consumer”, was ostentatiously flouted. The role of spokesperson was assigned to characters in a real or virtual narrative. The narrative portion of the text and images often struck an ironic or postmodern note, eg, by mixing science with science fiction. The overall functions of the commercials (promotional, informational, and aesthetic) were themselves frequently blended. The text deployed several linguistic or rhetorical strategies to send a double message for promotional advantage, including syntactic-semantic ambiguity, voice-over risk messages at odds with upbeat visuals, and a vagueness of certain words in particular contexts. Conclusions Findings contribute to our understanding of how TV commercials convey meaning with respect to drug benefits and risks, with implications for advertisers, regulators, and patient education. They also suggest new foci for empirical study.

Self-Consuming Narrative: The Problem of Reader Perspective in "La fuerza de la sangre"

La fuerza de la sangre can be summarized as a tale of rape, recognition, and redemption. In some measure, discussion as to the story's meaning has revolved around the unsettling fact that the story's protagonist, Leocadia, a victim of rape, ostensibly finds justice in marriage to her rapist, Rodolfo.' The heroine's redemption of her honor is the culmination of a series of recognitions, with Rodolfo finally recognizing his victim and their biological son born of rape. As the tale's title suggests and as its final sentence reaffirms, the force of blood is what will in the end bind together the estranged members of this family. Yet, the fact that the happy ending is contingent upon successful recognitions becomes rather perplexing when we realize the epistemologically tenuous, sometimes contradictory, and also anachronistic circumstances of recognition itself. This thwarting of recognition's smooth move from ignorance to knowledge,^ is inscribed within a more generalized problematization of the tale's whole internai epistemology, or basis for establishing knowledge within the tale. The effects of this are felt by the reader who, only by suppressing his own knowledge of certain problematic details, can make sense of a story that tends to self-consume at particularly crucial junctures.^ Consequently, Cervantes' reader is often left in a State of interpretative uncertainty, as a coherent reading of the tale is steadily undermined by certain curious and insoluble interpretative problems. What follows is not a solution to these exegetical problems, but rather an analysis of how these textual phenomena give rise to a reading experience which Stanley Fish would describe as progressive

Theme in discourse

Fries (1981) hypothesises that the textual phenomena of ‘thematic progression’ (TP) (Danesˇ 1974) and ‘method of development’ (MOD) provide discourse evidence for the function proposed by Halliday (1967) for Theme, in particular that ‘initial position in the sentence, or sentence-level Theme, means “point of departure of the sentence as message”‘. This paper discusses the theoretical basis for this hypothesis, in particular the relation between TP and MOD, and reviews previous empirical research. Further research conducted by the author is described, into global proportions of TP, TP patterning, and the relation between TP and rhematic progression (RP) in a small corpus of 80 short argumentative texts. It was found that only small proportions of either argumentative text, or high-quality argumentative text could be considered as having a MOD. It was also found that texts had comparable levels of TP and RP. It is concluded that MOD is not a universal feature of discourse organisation, and therefore not conclusive evidence for Fries’s original hypothesis.