Volume 33, Issue 2

This article examines the question of when inferences we make from a text apply to a conceptual subdomain and not the main conceptual domain of the text. In the process of understanding a text, we make these determinations all the time, easily, intuitively. This would suggest underlying principles, rather than ad hoc judgments or a wide set of disparate factors. It is such underlying principles that this article investigates. The framework proposed here allows us to account not only for instances in which a space builder is crucial to assigning propositions to subdomains, but also for cases where there is no such explicit mechanism. It allows us to account in a systematic way for the fact that certain linguistic terms can function as space builders at certain times but not at others, as well as providing ways of understanding more complex phenomena related to metaphor and equivocation.

This article is concerned with the moment-by-moment unfolding of the text as we might suppose the reader to experience it; in addressing one aspect of this reading experience, I propose a definition of the episode, and of episode structure, in literary narratives. To do so, I draw on insights from Ingarden, Iser, Barthes, Eco, Jim Rosenberg, and Ed Tan, but have found most useful the discussion of narrative structure in a 1922 essay by the Russian Formalist A. A. Reformatsky, which includes an analysis of Maupassant's story “Un Coq Chanta”. Reformatsky's essay is analyzed in detail. In a final section, I review responses to a short story (Kate Chopin's “The Story of an Hour”) and consider the evidence for episodes in readers' responses. To the number of convergent criteria used for characterizing episodes I add the role of the narrative twist occurring at or near the end of an episode, serving to intensify or redirect the issues raised, and itself characterized by a distinct development in readers' feeling. Episodes provide the phases during which issues of concern to readers are managed and developed, and the analysis of the episodes of a story may thus provide a valuable framework for identifying the key developments in the responses of readers.

In this paper, I explore the notion of lost time in critical accounts of narrative fiction. The paper begins by briefly exploring the work of the representative New Critics Brooks and Warren on the description of past time. I then move to consider the story/sequence distinction in the work of narratologists such as Genette, Chatman and Bal. As a bridge to the major discussion, I introduce Michael Toolan's Narrative (2001 [1988]) which attempts to explore how aspects of the narrative are revealed through key lexicogrammatical choices. I attempt to build on Toolan's basic insight about the importance of thematically marked sentences in a brief re-reading of the narrative discourse of Joyce's “Eveline”. In order to resolve a central difficulty in Toolan's analysis, I put forward a theory of narrative territory – the creation within the narrative discourse of a differentiated spatiotemporal continuum for the story events. Within the conceptual framework provided by the concept of the narrative territory, I then contrast the distinct functions of lost time in James Joyce's unmarked order fiction “An Encounter” and his marked order narrative “The Sisters”.

Sensus communis is originally a Roman notion of the shared ‘communal sense’ that facilitates communicative understanding. The most important philosophers of the modern age who have discussed it at length are Giambattista Vico, Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury (as the basis for wit and humor), Immanuel Kant and Hans-Georg Gadamer. The different ways they (and others) have discussed it might help literary scholars to explore the common ground in literary interpretation. Since there is much disagreement on the very notion of sensus communis , this paper takes its cue from Shaftesbury by briefly examining the relation between understanding humor and agreeing on a particular literary interpretation. Its test case is the American writer Ogden Nash and his rather misanthropic view of various others (wives/husbands, children, old people, various animals, etc.) in his comic poetry. The claim is advanced that readers are amused by Nash's poetry because they too harbour misanthropic sentiments and are well aware that it is taboo to let it show. Hence, despite its apparent misanthropy Nash's poetry is based on and most likely strengthens a kind of sensus communis . This paper also argues that the incongruous combination of satirical and literary techniques is crucial for the effect of comic poetry and that incongruities are often unresolved in ironical and satirical texts.

I discuss the late nineteenth century emergence of the expressions guilt and guilt feelings (to denote a complex emotion, and not the established idea of culpability), across several European language-cultures. I nominate a specific spot in time as having prompted one of the earliest appearances in print of the German expression Schuldgefühl and its associated complex reflexive sense (that others – one's community – may hold you culpable for some transgression or impropriety, but you yourself know that any manifested remorse conceals a deeper absence of remorse). This is the occasion on which Nietzsche returned to his friend Paul Rée from a mountain hike with the irresistibly captivating and unchaperoned Lou von Salomé (a “summit experience” precise details of which are unclear.) As Nietzsche well knew, Rée was equally smitten with the delightful Lou: and here Friedrich had taken flagrant advantage (of Rée, ill-fatedly absent from the mountain adventure). In response to Rée's censure, Nietzsche feels in himself a complex reaction: not of remorse, exactly, and not at all of repentance, but Schuldgefühl (feeling of guilt), a new formulation for a newly-identified (or newly-invented) condition. Thereafter I chart what seems to be the spread of the phrase and concept (denoting the emotion) in some representative English literature Victorian fiction, in Freud, Kafka, and current non-literary usage. A final point of orientation is Vronsky's (or is it Tolstoy's?) projection of guilt feelings, avant la lettre, in Anna Karenina .