Narrative and ontology in Hesiod's Homeric Hymn to Demeter: A catastrophist approach
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James Carney
His research interests include narrative theory, Romantic literature, Anglo-Irish literature, and mathematical approaches to literary modelling. His publications include ‘The buzzing of B: The subject as insect in Beckett's
Molloy ’ (2007); and ‘“Gifts of heaven — things of earth”: Haunting and exchange in Conrad's “Karain: A Memory”’ (in press).
Abstract
This article develops a model of narrative reference by showing that the organization of meaning in narrative is congruent with the structure of space and time. In making this connection, the article's principal methodological tool is mathematical catastrophe theory. Specifically, it is shown that narratives like Hesiod's Homeric Hymn to Demeter can be construed as hypersurfaces that permit a number of critical transformations between stable regions of thematic value. It is argued that this approach is superior to cognitivist theories of reference because it avoids the vicious circle of displacing the referential function of narrative on to psychic schemas that have themselves a narrative structure.
About the author
His research interests include narrative theory, Romantic literature, Anglo-Irish literature, and mathematical approaches to literary modelling. His publications include ‘The buzzing of B: The subject as insect in Beckett's Molloy’ (2007); and ‘“Gifts of heaven — things of earth”: Haunting and exchange in Conrad's “Karain: A Memory”’ (in press).
© Walter de Gruyter
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Articles in the same Issue
- Plant names and folk taxonomies: Frameworks for ethnosemiotic inquiry
- Towards a grande paradigmatique of film: Christian Metz reloaded
- Umwelt, milieu(x), and environment: A survey of cross-cultural concept mutations
- Bridging theories: A logical-functional perspective on languages
- The ‘handles’ and ‘sides’ of metaphor
- Here is the author! Hyperlinks as constitutive rules of hypertextual communication
- Race, pigskin, and politics: A semiotic analysis of racial images in political advertising
- The serpent's egg: Communication and the bio-semiotics of image making
- Semiotic interpretations of biological mimicry
- Symbol-intertextuality-deconstruction (on the dialectic of stability and variability of concept and symbol)
- Analyse paradigmatique d'un corpus de proverbes à l'aide des matrices de concepts
- Semiotic silence: Its use as a conflictmanagement strategy in intimate relationships
- Peirce on categories: Towards a metaphysical foundation of pragmatics
- Narrative and ontology in Hesiod's Homeric Hymn to Demeter: A catastrophist approach
- Traveling and family in the 1970s British circus
- Structures and semiotic systems
- Eye on Picasso
