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Second person : a point of view? The function of the second person pronoun in narrative prose fiction

机译:第二人称:观点?第二人称代词在叙事散文小说中的作用

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摘要

This thesis looks at the functions and effects of the ‘second-person’ pronoun in narrative prose fiction, with particular focus on the fluidity and ambiguity of the mode that I will call Protean-\u27you.\u27 It is a mode in which it is unclear whether the ‘you’ is a character, the narrator, a reader/narratee, or no-one in particular—or a combination of these—so that readers find ‘second-person’ utterances at once familiar and deeply strange. I regard the ‘second person’ as a special case of narrative ‘person’ that, at its most fluid, can produce an experience of reading quite unlike that of reading traditional ‘first-‘ and ‘third-person’ narrative. Essentially, this unique experience comes about because Protean-‘you’ neglects to constitute the stable modes of subjectivity that readers expect to find within narrative textuality. These stable modes of subjectivity, modelled on what I will refer to as Cartesianism’s hegemonic notion of the self, have been thoroughly formalised and naturalised within the practices of ‘first-‘ and ‘third-person’ narrative. The Protean-‘you’ form of ‘second-person’ narrative, conversely, is a mode of narrative discourse that puts readers in a place of doubt and uncertainty, its unsettling equivocations forcefully disrupting accustomed, mimetic explanations of narrative and denying us access to the foundational, authorising subject of classical Cartesian thought. Rather than founding a notion of ‘second-person’ narrative and narrative ‘person’ generally on Cartesianism\u27s ‘self-ish’ logic of unified, privatised identity, I turn to C.S, Peirce\u27s notion of the semiotic self and to developments in post-structuralist thought. Essentially, the conception of subjectivity underpinning my arguments is Peirce\u27s proposition that the self is to be conceived of not as a cogito, but as a sign by which the conscious entity knows itself. It is a sign, moreover, that is constantly being re-read, reinterpreted, so that identity is never self-complete. This reconception of subjectivity is necessary because 1 will argue that the effects of Protean-‘you’ arise in some part from a tension between Cartesianism\u27s hegemony and what philosophical pragmatism and post-structuralism glimpse as the actual condition of the human subject—the subject as dispersed and contingent rather than unified and authoritative. Most discussions of ‘second-person’ narrative conceive of the mode in terms of implicit communicative relations, in some measure instituting Cartesianism\u27s notion of the intentionalist self at the centre of literary meaning. I contrast the paradigmatic address model that arises from this conception against a model that approaches the analysis of ‘second-person’ narrative modality in terms of a referential function, that is, in terms of the object or objects referred to deictically by the ‘second-person’ pronoun. Two principal functions of ‘second-person’ textuality are identified and discussed at length. The first is generalisation, which is rarely dissipated altogether, a situation that contributes to the ambiguities of the pronoun\u27s reference in much ‘second-person’ fiction. The second principal function is that of address, that is, the allocutionary function. Clearly, although stories that continually refer to a ‘you’ can seem quite baffling and unnatural, not all ‘second-person’ narratives unsettle the reader. In order to make the ‘second person\u27s’ outlandish narratives knowable and stable, we bring to bear on them in our habits of reading whatever hermeneutic frames, whatever interpretive keys, come to hand, including a large number of unexceptional forms of literary and ‘natural’ discourse that employ the ‘second-person’ pronoun. These forms include letter writing and internal dialogue (i.e., talking to one\u27s self), the language of the courtroom, the travelogue, the maxim, and so on. In looking at the ways in which the radicalising potentials of ‘second-person’ discourse are contained or recuperated, I focus on issues of vraisemblance and mimesis. Vraisemblance can be described as the ‘system of conventions and expectations which rests on/reinforces that more general system of ‘mutual knowledge’ produced within a community for the realisation and maintenance of a whole social world’. All of the forms of the vraisemblable are already instituted within social, cultural relations, so that what vraisemblance describes is the way we fit the inscriptions we read-that is, the way in which we naturalise what we read-into those given cultural and social forms. I also look at the conventionalising and naturalising work done by notions of mimesis in explaining relations between the world, our being in it, and texts, proposing that mimesis provides a principle buttress by which the good standing of the metaphor of ‘person’ is preserved in traditional and pre-critical modes of analysis. Indeed, the critic’s recourse to ‘person’ is in some measure always an engagement with mimesis. Any discussion that maintains that mimesis is in some way productive of meaning-which this thesis in fact does-must identify mimesis as a merely conventional category within practices of reading and semiosis more generally, and at the very least remove that term from its traditional position of transparent primacy and authority. Some of the most interesting and insightful arguments about ‘second-person’ narrative propose that the ‘second person’s’ most striking effects derive from the constitution of an ‘intersubjective’ experience of reading in which the subject positions of the ‘you’-protagonist, reader-narratee and narrator are combined into a fluid and indeterminate multiple subjectivity. Notions of intersubjectivity frequently position themselves as liberating the reader from Cartesianism\u27s fixed, authoritative modes of subjectivity, Frequently, however, they tend implicitly to reinstate Cartesianism\u27s notion of the self at the centre of textual practice and subjectivity. I look at Daniel Gunn\u27s novel ‘Almost You’, at length in this context, illustrating the constant overdetermination of the ‘you’ and the novel\u27s narrating voice, and demonstrating that this overdetermination leaves the origin of the narrative discourse, the identity of the narrator, and the ontological nature of both principal protagonists utterly ambiguous. The fluidity and ambiguity of Protean-‘you’ in ‘Almost You’ is discussed in terms of ‘second-person’ intersubjectivity, but with a view to demonstrating the indebtedness by the notion of intersubjectivity to Cartesianism\u27s hegemony of ‘person’. I then turn to a discussion of what might be a more ‘old fashioned’ if perhaps ultimately more far-reaching approach to the ‘second person’s’ often startling ambiguities. This is Keats\u27s notion of negative capability, a capacity or quality in which a person ‘is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’ I suggest that Protean-‘you’ texts will license all of the readings of ambiguity and fluidity proposed in my discussion of ‘Almost You’, but conclude that the instances of indeterminacy illustrate no more than that: the fluidity and deep ambiguity, and thus, finally, the lack of coherence, of Protean-‘you’ discourse. This has particular implications for how we are to consider readers’ experiences of narrative texts. More fundamentally, it has implications for how we are to consider readers as subjects. I suggest that unstable, ambiguous instances of ‘second-person’ narrative can tear the complex and systematic embroidery of ideological suture that unifies Cretinism’s experience or sense of subjectivity, leaving the reader in a condition of epistemological and ontological havoc. I go on to argue that much of the deeply unsettling effect of Protean-‘you’ discourse anises because its utterances explicitly gesture towards Cretinism’s notion of self. Protean-‘you’ involves a sense of address that is much more pronounced than we are accustomed to facing when reading literary narrative, alerting us to the presence of inscribed anthropomorphic subjects. At the very same time, protean-‘you’ leaves its inscribed subjects indeterminate, ambiguous. This conflict generates a tension between the anticipation of the emergence of speaking and listening selves and our inability to find them. I go on to propose that Protean-‘you’ narrative\u27s lack of coherence is also to be understood as the condition of narrative actuality generally, but a condition that is vigorously mediated against by dominant practices of reading and writing, hocusing my discussion in this respect on the issue of narrative ‘person,’ I argue that narrative ‘person’ is constituted within texts as an apparent unity, but that it is in fact, produced as unitary solely within the practice of making sense, that is, Within our habits of reading, and so is never finally unified. I propose that this is the case for ‘first-‘ and ‘third-person’ modes no less than for the ‘second.’ Where ‘second-person’ narrative at its most radical and Protean differs from conventional ‘first-‘ and ‘third-person’ narratives is the degree to which each has been circumscribed by practices of tantalization, containment and limit, and, in particular, Cretinism’s hegemony of ‘person.’ It may be that the most significant insights ‘second-person’ narrative has to offer are to be found within its capacity to reveal to the engaged reader the underlying condition of narrative discourse, and more generally, its capacity to reveal the actual condition of the human subject-a condition in which, exactly like its textual corollary of narrative ‘person,’ the self is glimpsed as thoroughly dispersed and contingent.
机译:本文着眼于叙事散文小说中“第二人称”代词的功能和效果,特别关注我称之为Protean- \ u27you模式的流动性和歧义性。目前尚不清楚“您”是人物,叙述者,阅读者/旁白者,还是特别是没有一个人(或两者兼而有之),从而使读者立刻发现“第二人称”话语既熟悉又十分陌生。我认为“第二人称”是叙事“人”的特例,它在最不稳定的情况下可以产生阅读体验,这与阅读传统的“第一人称”和“第三人称”叙事完全不同。本质上,这种独特的体验之所以产生,是因为Protean(“您”)忽略了读者期望在叙事文本中找到的稳定的主观性模式。这些稳定的主观性模式,以我称之为笛卡尔主义的自我霸权主义概念为模型,已经在“第一人称”和“第三人称”叙事的实践中得到了彻底的形式化和自然化。相反,“第二人称”叙事的Protean-“ you”形式是叙事话语的一种模式,使读者处于怀疑和不确定的境地,其令人不安的模棱两可力强力地破坏了对叙事的习俗性,模仿性解释,并拒绝了我们使用古典笛卡尔思想的基础,授权主题。与其在笛卡尔主义的统一的私有化身份的“自私”逻辑上建立“第二人称”叙事和叙事“人”的概念,不如说我转向CS,皮尔士的符号学自我概念和发展。在后结构主义思想中。本质上,作为我论证基础的主观性观念是皮尔士的命题,即不应将自我构想为可卡托,而应将其视为有意识实体认识自身的标志。而且,这是一个不断被重新阅读,重新解释的标志,因此身份永远不会自我完善。这种对主体性的重新认识是必要的,因为1会认为,Protean-'you'的影响在某种程度上是由于笛卡尔主义霸权与哲学实用主义和后结构主义瞥见人类主体的实际状况之间的紧张关系而产生的。主题是分散和偶然的,而不是统一和权威的。关于“第二人称”叙事的大多数讨论都是从内隐的交往关系出发,以某种方式将笛卡尔主义的意向主义自我观念置于文学意义的中心。我将这种概念所产生的范式地址模型与一种通过参照功能(即“第二人称”指的是一个或多个对象)进行分析“第二人称”叙事方式的模型进行对比。人称代词。 “第二人称”文本性的两个主要功能被确定并详细讨论。首先是泛化,这种泛化很少完全消失,这种情况导致了很多“第二人称”小说中代词所指代的歧义。第二个主要功能是地址功能,即分配功能。显然,尽管不断提及“您”的故事似乎让人感到困惑和不自然,但并非所有“第二人称”叙述都使读者感到不安。为了使“第二人称”的古怪叙事变得可知和稳定,我们在阅读习惯上采用了惯用的诠释方式,包括诠释学的框架,解释的关键,包括大量的非常规形式的文学作品和文学作品。使用“第二人称”代词的“自然”话语。这些形式包括写信和内部对话(即与自己的谈话),法庭语言,旅行记录,格言等等。在研究遏制或恢复“第二人称”话语激进潜力的方式时,我将重点放在歧义和模仿方面。随意性可以被描述为“基于惯例和期望的系统,它基于/加强了在社区内部为实现和维护整个社会世界而产生的更普遍的'相互知识'系统”。可变符的所有形式都已在社会,文化关系中确立,因此可变符所描述的是我们适合所读铭文的方式,也就是说,我们将所读内容自然化为给定文化和社会意义的内容形式。我还研究了模仿论的概念在解释世界,我们所处的世界与文本之间的关系时所做的常规化和归化工作,提出模仿论提供了一个原则支柱,通过它可以保留“人”的隐喻的良好信誉。在传统的和关键的分析模式下。确实,评论家诉诸“人”在某种程度上总是与模仿有关。任何主张模仿的讨论都在某种程度上产生了意义(本论文实际上确实如此),必须将模仿作为更广泛的阅读和符号学实践中的常规类别,至少应将该术语从其传统位置中删除。透明的首要地位和权威。关于“第二人称”叙事的一些最有趣,最有见地的论点表明,“第二人称”的最显着影响源于阅读的“主体间”体验的构成,其中“你”主角的主题位置,读者叙事者和叙事者融为一体,不确定多个主观性。主体间性的观念常常使自己从笛卡尔主义的固定,权威的主观性模式中解放出来,然而,它们经常隐含地将笛卡尔主义的自我观念恢复为文本实践和主体性的中心。在这种情况下,我仔细看了丹尼尔·冈恩(Daniel Gunn)的小说《几乎你》(Almost You),说明了对“你”和小说叙事声音的不断确定,并表明这种过度确定留下了叙事话语,叙述者的身份以及两位主要主角的本体论性质都完全模棱两可。 Protean-“ you”在“ Almost You”中的流动性和歧义性是根据“第二人称”主体间性来讨论的,但目的是通过笛卡尔直觉主义的“人”霸权的主体间性概念来证明债务。然后,我将讨论如果“第二人称”通常最终会令人吃惊的含糊之处,如果最终采用更深远的方法,那可能会是一种“过时的”。这是济慈的消极能力的概念,即一种能力或品质,即一个人“能够在不确定,神秘,怀疑的情况下,在事实和理由之后不至于烦躁。”我建议千变万化的“你”文本将许可我在“几乎你”的讨论中提出的所有模糊性和流动性解读,但得出结论,不确定性实例仅说明了这一点:Protean的流动性和深层模糊性,因此最终缺乏连贯性-“你”的话语。这对于我们如何考虑读者的叙事文本体验具有特殊意义。从根本上说,它对我们如何将读者视为主题具有影响。我建议,“第二人称”叙事的不稳定,模棱两可的实例可能会撕裂意识形态缝合线的复杂而系统的刺绣,从而统一克雷丁主义的经验或主观意识,使读者处于认识论和本体论的混乱状态。我继续指出,Protean(“您”)话语茴香的许多深深令人不安的效果是,因为它的话语明确地指向了克丁顿主义的自我概念。千变万化的“你”所涉及的一种称呼感比我们在阅读文学叙事时所面对的要明显得多,这使我们警觉到存在拟定的拟人化主题。同时,千变万化的“你”让题词的主题不确定,模棱两可。这种冲突在预期出现口语和听力自我与我们无法找到他们之间产生了张力。我继续提出,Protean-'you'叙事的缺乏连贯性也应被理解为叙事现实的条件,但这种条件被主要的阅读和写作实践所强力抵制,从而使我的讨论成为焦点。在叙事“人”问题上的这种尊重,我认为叙事“人”是在文本中构成表面上的统一性,但实际上,它是纯粹在有意义的实践中(即,在我们内部)统一形成的。阅读的习惯,所以永远不会统一。我建议,“第一人称”和“第三人称”模式的情况不亚于“第二人称”模式。“第二人称”的叙述最激进,而Protean则不同于传统的“第一人称”和“第三人称”。第三人称叙事是通过诱惑,遏制和限制的实践,特别是克汀丁斯主义对“人”的霸权来限制每种叙事的程度。也许,第二人称叙事中最重要的见解具有可以在提供给参与的读者揭示叙事话语基本条件的能力的范围内找到要约,更一般地说,可以提供人类主题的实际条件的能力-与叙事的文本推论完全一样“人”将自我瞥见为完全分散和偶然的。

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    Schofield, Dennis, 1960-;

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  • 年度 1998
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