Volume 45, Issue 1 -

Language and literature can stimulate the embodied resources of perception. I argue that there is a puzzle about why we experience sequences of these embodied responses as integrated and coherent, even though they are not anchored in space and time by a perceiving body. Some successions of embodied representations would even be impossible in real world experience, yet they can still be experienced as coherent and flowing in response to verbal texts. One possibility is that embodied responses to language are fleeting; they need not be integrated because they do not depend on, or relate to, one another as they would in perception. Yet it is the potential for embodied representations to linger and connect with one another which underlies new and persuasive embodied literary theories of vividness, narrative coherence and metaphor comprehension. Another possibility is that readers anchor their embodied representations in a notional human body, one endowed with superhuman powers, such as omniscience. But this account relies on implausible, post hoc explanations. A third possibility is that integrating embodied representations produced by language need be no more problematic than integrating the deceptively patchy information harvested from the environment by perception, information which gives rise to an experience of the world in rich and continuous detail. Real world perceptual cues, however, sparse though they might be, are still integrated through grounding in specific points in time and space. To explain the integration of embodied effects, I draw on sensorimotor theories of perception, and on Clark’s suggestion (1997, Being There . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) that language can be understood as an additional modality. In this light, the embodied simulations generated by literary texts can be integrated through patterning in a high dimensional, vector space neural architecture, a patterning which recalls real world experience but is specialised to the sustained experience of language itself. This account can help us understand what makes literary experience distinctive and unique.

In this article, we shall contribute to the theory of narrative closure. In pre-theoretical terms, a narrative features closure if it has an ending. We start by giving a general introduction into the closure phenomenon. Next, we offer a reconstruction of Noël Carroll’s (2007. Narrative closure . Philosophical Studies 135 . 1–15) erotetic account of narrative closure, according to which a narrative exhibits closure (roughly) if readers have a “feeling of finality” which in turn is based on the judgment that the presiding macro questions posed by the plot of the narrative get answered. We then discuss a number of questions raised by Carroll’s account, namely whether a definition of “narrative closure” based on his account is either too inclusive or too exclusive; whether narrative closure is a property of narratives or of plots; whether narrative closure comes in grades; whether “narrative closure” is a restrictive notion; and whether “narrative closure” should be ascribed online (incrementally) or on the basis of all-things-considered ex post interpretations. Our answers to these questions are couched in terms of refined definitions, for this allows us to keep track of the progress and facilitates comparisons between the different proposals developed. Finally, we offer a definition of “narrative closure” that summarizes our amendments to Carroll’s theory.

This study presents a semantically-oriented theoretical and descriptive study of tense backshift and its literary effects in FID. Based on Fludernik’s study (1993), the detailed linguistic indicators of FID are described in order to provide the criteria for data collection for this study. The data are FID passages collected from four canonical English novels: Austen’s Persuasion , Conrad’s Lord Jim , and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse . A theory of tense semantics underlying FID is explored, and the literary effects of tense backshift in FID are examined. The results of this study show that: (1) the mechanism of tense backshift in FID is tense backshift from absolute tense defined by the default temporal reference point t 0 in present time domain in the narrator’s intensional domain into relative tense defined by the central time of orientation in past time domain in the represented character’s intensional domain; and (2) the literary effects of tense backshift in FID, analysed in terms of relative past tense, relative lazy past tense, relative past progressive tense and relative past future perfect tense are shown to be effects of remoteness, terseness, close-up and irony respectively.

Following the theory of textual thematization at the level of fictional narrative discourse (Kikuchi 2001, Lose heart, gain heaven: The false reciprocity of gain and loss in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde . Neuphilologische Mitteilungen CII(4). 427–434; 2001, Unveiling the dramatic secret of “Ghost” in Hamlet . Journal of Literary Semantics 39(2). 103–117; 2012, O I just want to leave this place: Auden’s discourse of thematized self-alienation. Philologia 10. 61–72; 2013, Poe’s name excavated: The mediating function and the transformation of discourse theme into discourse rheme. Language and Literature 22(1). 3–8), this article examines how Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses are walking representations of “two candles” set at the head of a dying Dublin. This is one instance of a grand design which is repeated in many of his novels. In “The Sisters”, the first short story in Dubliners and the earliest work in which the grand design can be seen, the two candles are verbally placed at the head of the novel. Later in the story, this design reappears in the house of a dead priest where his two sisters, like the two candles, are holding a wake for him. In Ulysses , Dedalus and Bloom, after roaming through Dublin, stand side by side urinating outside Bloom’s house, like candles offered for one who has crossed the border from old life to new life. This scene presages Molly’s free flowing stream of consciousness in the last chapter, in which her thoughts flow across the syntactic demarcations between utterances, as if symbolizing the dissolution of borders. I shall discuss Joyce’s underlying intent in Ulysses by assuming that the stages in which Dedalus and Bloom roam through Dublin and then urinate together are the theme or topic, and that the demarcation-crossing of Molly’s stream of consciousness, namely, the resolution of the demarcation between the two distinct entities as represented by the two candles, is the rheme or comment on this theme.