The goal of this article is to offer a new model for the study of ocularization in film grounded in the semiotic pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce. We first present a literature overview addressing the state of research regarding the theorization of ocularization in film studies. Second, we discuss Peirce’s three universal categories (Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness) on which our model will be based. Third, we argue how the theme of ocularization in film, as outlined in the first part, can (...) be theorized anew through these categories. This will result in the introduction of a nine-field matrix that will allow us to systemize all kinds of instances of subjectivity in cinema. Lastly, we will demonstrate the empirical usefulness of this model by illustrating each of the matrix’ nine categories through a discussion of Steven Soderbergh’s film Kimi (2022). (shrink)

This paper criticises the current orthodoxy that people who engage with fiction fils are exercising their imagination.

John Searle argues that fictions are constituted by mere pretense—by the simulation of representational activities like assertions, without any further representational aim. They are not the result of sui generis, dedicated speech acts of a specific kind, on a par with assertion. The view had earlier many defenders, and still has some. Stefano Predelli enlists considerations derived from Searle in support of his radical fictionalism. This is the view that a sentence of fictional discourse including a prima facie empty fictional (...) name like “Emma Woodhouse” in fact “is not a sentence, and it encodes no proposition whatsoever.” His argument is broadly abductive; he claims that this view affords compelling explanations of features of fictions he finds well-established, among them that fictions without explicit narrators nonetheless have covert ones. Here I take up his arguments, in defense of the dedicated speech act view. I thus address pressing issues about the status of fictional names and the nature and ubiquity of narrators in fictions. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss a framework for the analysis of media discourse – the ‘analytics of mediation’ – that takes into account the embeddedness of media texts both in technological artefacts and in social relationships and, hence, seeks to integrate the multi-modal with the critical analysis of discourse. On the methodological level, the analytics of mediation applies a multi-modal discourse analysis onto media texts in order to study their visual and linguistic properties: camera/visual; graphic/pictorial or aural/linguistic. On the social (...) theory level, the analytics of mediation addresses critical concerns on the ethical and political role of television and other media in our ‘global village’. Can television foster a cosmopolitan consciousness or does its ‘fake proximity’ alienate the spectator from the rest of the world? Can we talk about the media as agents of global citizenship or do the media lead to compassion fatigue – a Western denial of humanitarian problems? I illustrate such questions by drawing on one concrete example of television news. (shrink)

It is widely held in theories of narrative that all works of literary narrative fiction include a narrator who fictionally tells the story. However, it is also granted that the personal qualities of a narrator may be more or less radically effaced. Recently, philosophers and film theorists have debated whether movies similarly involve implicit audio-visual narrators. Those who answer affirmatively allow that these cinematic narrators will be radically effaced. Their opponents deny that audio-visual narrators figure in the ontology of movies (...) at all, and many have argued that the ‘effaced’ literary narrator is an illusion as well. In this paper, I attempt to sort out the central issues that arise in these debates, defending the existence of effaced narrators in both literature and film. (shrink)

George Wilson has defended the thesis that even impersonal third-person fictional narratives should be taken to contain fictional narrations and have fictional narrators. This, he argues, is necessary if we are to explain how readers can take themselves, in their imaginative engagement with fictions, to have knowledge of the things they are imagining. I argue that there is at least one class of impersonal third-person fictional narratives—thought experiments—to which Wilson’s model fails to apply, and that this reveals more general problems (...) with his argument. I further argue that there is no good reason to think that Wilson’s account applies more restrictedly to those impersonal third-person fictional narratives that feature in standard works of literary fiction. (shrink)

Recently, bioethics has become interested in engaging with narrative, but in this engagement, narrative is usually viewed as a mere helpmate to philosophy. In this precis to his book The Fiction of Bioethics, Tod Chambers argues that narrative theory should not be simply a helpful addition to medical ethics but instead should be thought of as being as vital and important to the discipline as moral theory itself. The reason we need to rethink the relationship of medical ethics to narrative (...) is that ethicists test their ideas by applying them to cases, and cases are a narrative genre. Recognizing the importance that cases have for the way medical ethicists do ethics is essential in order to appreciate the field as a form of applied philosophy. Like other forms of representation, narrative has distinct and defining features, which ethicists, in order to understand the data of their field, must learn to recognize and differentiate. Ethicists need to attend to the way decisions about the discourse of a narrative influences the kind of moral theories judged relevant to it. The author briefly examines six features of narrative discourse that rhetorically condition the way we understand medical ethics cases: filter, reportability, closure, characters, chronotope, and gender. (shrink)

Geraldas Prince’as remiasi tokiu naratyvo apibrėžimu: objektas yra naratyvas, jei jis yra logiškai nuosekli bent dviejų asinchroninių įvykių, kurie nesuponuoja arba nenumano vienas kito, reprezentacija. Atkreipdamas dėmesį į svarbius klausimus apie naratyvo pobūdį, jo formą ir funkcionavimą, Prince’as pastebi, jog reikia mėginti aiškintis ir kokia yra mūsų suvokimą veikianti santykių sistema, galinti paaiškinti naratyvo semiozės pobūdį ir jos bruožus, naratyvų ir atskirų naratyvinių momentų reikšmę bei prasmingumą. Kalbėdamas apie naratologijos ateitį ir aptardamas įvairias jos šiuolaikines atmainas, jis iškelia keletą uždavinių (...) būsimiems naratologams. Pirmasis jų yra, pasitelkus naujus įrankius, įtraukiant naują tyrimų medžiagą ir naujausias pasakojimo moduliacijas, mėginti atpažinti arba ištirti kuo įvairesnius naratyvo aspektus, juos apibrėžiant, aprašant ir užbėgant už akių galimiems nenuoseklumams teorijoje. Antrasis uždavinys įpareigoja imtis naratyvo tyrimų ir naratologijos empirinių pagrindų. Prince’o nuomone, pats svarbiausias, trečiasis, naratologijos uždavinys yra aiškaus, išsamaus ir realistinio naratyvinės kompetencijos modelio plėtra. (shrink)

In the cognitivist paradigm, metaphor's conceptual nature is investigated almost exclusively in its verbal manifestations. Research on nonverbal expressions of conceptual metaphors is still surprisingly scarce. Although some pioneering work has been done in the area of pictorial metaphor, the work has hitherto focused on specific instances of isolated metaphors. For better insight into the nature of conceptual metaphors, it is necessary to examine if they can be rendered pictorially and mixed-medially, and if so, what forms they could take. In (...) this case study, a structural metaphor from Ian McEwan's novel The Comfort of Strangers is analyzed and compared to its counterpart in the film that Paul Schrader based on the book. The article ends with suggestions for generalizations across different media, including a distinction between explicitly and implicitly signaled metaphors. (shrink)

Can literature make it possible to represent histories that are otherwise ineffable? Making use of the Deleuzian concept of “the powers of the false,” Doro Wiese offers readings of three novels that deal with the Shoah, with colonialism, and with racialized identities. She argues that Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish, and Richard Powers’s The Time of Our Singing are novels in which a space for unvoiced, silent, or silenced difference is created. Seen through (...) the lens of Deleuze and his collaborators’ philosophy, literature is a means for mediating knowledge and affects about historical events. Going beyond any simple dichotomy between true and untrue accounts of what “really” happened in the past, literature’s powers of the false incite readers to long for a narrative space in which painful or shameful stories can be included. (shrink)