The role of Vorstellung in literary semantics
-
Horst Ruthrof
His research interests include philosophy of language, phenomenology, semiotics, narrative, Kant, and poststructuralism. His recent publications include
Pandora and Occam: On the Limits of Language and Literature (1992);Semantics and the Body: Meaning from Frege to the Postmodern (1997);The Body in Language (2000); ‘The fourth critique’ (2004); and ‘Modernity:Vernunftspaltung ’.
Abstract
In spite of the current panoply of approaches to literary semantics, this paper argues that the discipline suffers from one scandalous absence: the theorization of Vorstellung, or ‘perceptual modification.’ The paper traces the trajectory of the elimination of Vorstellung in language semantics from Frege to Saussure and to the demise of the signified in the post-Saussurean tradition. Alternative perspectives are introduced that promise the rehabilitation of the perceptual ingredients of language, such as cognitive linguistics (Lakoff) and corporeal pragmatics (Ruthrof), approaches that could be used to revive literary semantics by granting Vorstellung its proper role in the theorization of literary meaning.
About the author
His research interests include philosophy of language, phenomenology, semiotics, narrative, Kant, and poststructuralism. His recent publications include Pandora and Occam: On the Limits of Language and Literature (1992); Semantics and the Body: Meaning from Frege to the Postmodern (1997); The Body in Language (2000); ‘The fourth critique’ (2004); and ‘Modernity: Vernunftspaltung’.
© Walter de Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Preface
- Diagramming narrative
- The new literary semiotics
- The contributions of Peirce's philosophical disciplines to literary studies
- Literary practice on the immediate horizon of the elaboration of semiotics: Peirce's meetings with a few great authors
- The making of the literary symbol: Taking note of Langer
- A semiotic definition of literary discourse
- Semiosis, art, and literature
- Story (first order predicate) logic
- Narrative self-reference in a literary comic: M.-A. Mathieu's L'Origine
- Recontextualizing character: Role-theoretic frameworks for narrative analysis
- Universal minds
- Reconsidering the unreliable narrator
- The cognitive import of the narrative schema
- The story turned upside down: Meaning effects linked to variations on narrative structure
- The role of Vorstellung in literary semantics
- Action between plot and discourse
- Perception already stylizes: On phenomenological semiotics
- Literary semiotics and cognitive semantics
- The representation of consciousness in language and fiction: A cognitive theory of enunciation
- Laughing brains: On the cognitive mechanisms and reproductive functions of mirth
Articles in the same Issue
- Preface
- Diagramming narrative
- The new literary semiotics
- The contributions of Peirce's philosophical disciplines to literary studies
- Literary practice on the immediate horizon of the elaboration of semiotics: Peirce's meetings with a few great authors
- The making of the literary symbol: Taking note of Langer
- A semiotic definition of literary discourse
- Semiosis, art, and literature
- Story (first order predicate) logic
- Narrative self-reference in a literary comic: M.-A. Mathieu's L'Origine
- Recontextualizing character: Role-theoretic frameworks for narrative analysis
- Universal minds
- Reconsidering the unreliable narrator
- The cognitive import of the narrative schema
- The story turned upside down: Meaning effects linked to variations on narrative structure
- The role of Vorstellung in literary semantics
- Action between plot and discourse
- Perception already stylizes: On phenomenological semiotics
- Literary semiotics and cognitive semantics
- The representation of consciousness in language and fiction: A cognitive theory of enunciation
- Laughing brains: On the cognitive mechanisms and reproductive functions of mirth
