This paper proposes an understanding of literary narrative as a form of social cognition and situates the study of such narratives in relation to the new comprehensive approach to human cognition, enaction. The particular form of enactive cognition that narrative understanding is proposed to depend on is that of participatory sense-making, as developed in the work of Di Paolo and De Jaegher. Currently there is no consensus as to what makes a good literary narrative, how it is understood, and why (...) it plays such an irreplaceable role in human experience. The proposal thus identifies a gap in the existing research on narrative by describing narrative as a form of intersubjective process of sense-making between two agents, a teller and a reader. It argues that making sense of narrative literature is an interactional process of co-constructing a story-world with a narrator. Such an understanding of narrative makes a decisive break with both text-centered approaches that have dominated both structuralist and early cognitivist study of narrative, as well as pragmatic communicative ones that view narrative as a form of linguistic implicature. The interactive experience that narrative affords and necessitates at the same time, I argue, serves to highlight the active yet cooperative and communal nature of human sociality, expressed in the many forms than human beings interact in, including literary ones. (shrink)

Experiences with art have been of longstanding concern for phenomenologists, yet the psychological question of the appearing of art appreciation has not been addressed. This article attends to this lack, exemplifying the merits of a phenomenological psychological investigation based on three semi-structured interviews conducted with museum visitors. The interviews were subjected to meaning condensation as well as to descriptions of the first aesthetic reception, the retrospective interpretation, and the “horizons of expectations” included in the meeting with art. The findings show (...) that art appreciation appears as variations in experiential forms comprised of gratifying experiences of beauty, challenges to the understanding, and bodily-informed alterations of the emotions. The phenomenological psychology of actual, lived experience can embrace the phenomenological theories of art appreciation by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, yet highlight the psychological importance of experiences with art. (shrink)

This article examines the complex intertwinements of feminism, anti-colonial Marxism and imperialism in the work of the recent Literature Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing, particularly in her writings on colonial Africa and the travelogue African Laughter. The article outlines the implications of these intersections for the representation of Zimbabwe against some political, aesthetic and epistemological developments in Lessing's oeuvre. Through a reading of African Laughter, the article argues that a crucial tension is at stake between Lessing's political project of giving (...) voice to black Zimbabweans and the western female protagonist as the authoritative subject of this project. The aim is to render an innovative perspective of Doris Lessing's status as a feminist icon, which she gained in the wake of her acclaimed novel The Golden Notebook, by proceeding from postcolonial feminist scholarship. (shrink)

There has been a longstanding and acrimonious debate in the human sciences over the role played by classic texts. Advocates of the classic insist its value is timeless and rests on the intrinsic superiority of its cognitive insights and aesthetic virtues. Critics, by contrast, argue that the respect accorded the classic is spurious because it conceals the ideological assumptions, tensions and discontinuities of tradition. This paper seeks a solution through the account of ‘the classical’ brought by Hans-Georg Gadamer in Truth (...) and Method, which acknowledges a text’s ‘eminence’ as well as its ‘historicity’. Following the introduction, the paper divides into four sections. Section one, notes that the hermeneutic account of tradition describes it as being open to challenge rather than closed and unchangeable, and that the classic, as grounded in tradition, will conserve difficulty as readily as comfortable certainty. Section two focuses on the idea that in the classic we find matter ‘properly portrayed’, while section three notes the importance of ‘application’ for an understanding of classic texts. It is noted that both ‘proper portrayal’ and ‘application’ depend on recognising the role of the fusion of historical horizons in generating classic texts. The final section challenges the criticism that the classic is no more than a reflection of the institutional power wielded by the canon, arguing instead that the classic and the canon are different entities, and conflating them in favour of the latter, misleadingly reduces classic-ness to being no more than an effect of canonicity. (shrink)

In this article, Paul's use of the Old Testament in 1 Corinthians 10:1-4 comes under scrutiny. In contrast with the theory of some modern scholars that Paul uses, 'fanciful analogies', 'startling figurative claims' and metaphors that 'should not he pressed', in reaching his conclusion that 'the rock was Christ', in 1 Corinthians 10:4c, it is indicated that Paul is indeed taking the original text, the Old Testament's interpretation of the text, and the Jewish tradition of the interpretation of the text, (...) seriously, in the light of the Christ-event. To prove this claim, research of the text, that Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 10:1-4, is followed by research of the 'world in front of that text'.CONTRIBUTION: The conclusion that is reached indicates that Paul established within the context of contemporary Jewish practices, a true dialogical relationship between an intertextual handling of the text, and his interpretation thereof in the light of the relevance of the Christ-event for the conflict in the Church of Corinth. (shrink)

"Lenaia vases" is the traditional title given to a group of some seventy fifth-century Attic vases, black- and red-figure. These vases have in common that they show a cult-image of Dionysos, consisting of a mask or masks on a column, in combination with the conventional Attic imagery of the revelling ecstatic female worshippers usually called "maenads." The vases are important and their meaning much debated because they seem to hold out the promise of providing otherwise unavailable information about historical bacchic (...) religion. There is no consensus on the character of the historical information of these scenes. In an older view the imagery records the appearance of enacted ritual; in a newer view, the imagery "discusses," in a fashion analogous to language, concepts about Dionysiac religion. This paper proposes a reinterpretation of a coherent subset of the "Lenaia vases," based on a linguistic reading of the imagery. This subset consists of twenty-eight red-figure stamnoi, a group that has traditionally been the focus of studies of the "Lenaia vases." I analyze the vases as describing, in conventional visual terms of reference, a rite of theoxenia celebrated by ecstatic female worshippers. The imagery says that these worshippers perform a thysia, offer Dionysos a banquet of meat and wine, and celebrate a symposion and komos. It also comments on the practice of such rituals by women, saying that they derive honor from these actions. These rituals find parallels in historical evidence for Dionysiac theoxenia and banquets; the scenes thus may provide additional evidence that Dionysiac celebrations took this form. The scenes, however, are not about the historical enactment of such rituals, and still less a visual record of such enactments. Rather, their message, conveyed by the interweaving of mythical and social references, is that for the worshipper of Dionysos the worlds of myth and of the polis are one. (shrink)

This thesis explores the ethical impact of literary narrative fictions on the reader. It does so by focusing mainly on the reading experience since one of the main claims of the thesis is that literary narrative fictions are co-products of the author and the reader. In that sense the aforementioned impact cannot be understood without taking into account the creative acts of the reader. The exploration is carried out by focusing on three scholars whose investigations on the problem of literary (...) experience can be read as complementary works. In the first chapter I descriptively lay out Roman Ingarden’s investigation on the ontological and structural character of the literary work of art along with his phenomenological inquiry into the cognition of this work. By examining his basic claims about the nature of the literary work of art and its cognition, I discuss the ontological incompleteness of these works which necessitates the active role of the reader in giving the work its final shape. In the second chapter I focus upon Wolfgang Iser’s reader-response theory. Iser’s theory goes parallel to Ingarden’s in the sense that they both accept the openness of the work to the creative acts of the reader. Iser, however by his notions of depragmatization, negation and negativity suggest us a two-way traffic between the fictional work and the reader. Through the reading proses, by virtue of the negations and de-pragmatizations, the work invites the reader to reflect on the familiar norms it represents and suggest to her a new model to understand the real world. In this way, while giving a shape to the work, the reader is also shaped by it. The third chapter addresses the phenomenological hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur. By exploring his notion of “narrative identity” as a mediator between the ipse and idem identities, my aim is to show the influence of the literary fictional narratives in understanding the identity of the individual subject as a temporal, historical, and intersubjective being. It is only through this understanding that we can construe the subject in her ethical identity. I will also focus on Ricoeur’s notions of “emplotment,” and “threefold mimesis,” which implies the active role of the reader in realizing the literary narrative fiction, so that I can reveal how fictional narratives enhance the notion of narrative identity. (shrink)

Biblical reception history is a rapidly expanding area of biblical studies that concerns itself not only with how biblical texts have been received historically and traditionally but also with how they are received in the contemporary era and in diverse cultural contexts. My interest is in how the biblical text is received within the prevailing cultural shift towards the visual. One area of visual culture that is frequently overlooked when describing art that illustrates the Bible are those graphic designs that (...) appear in liturgical books such as Lectionaries and Missals, and the primary worship books found in the pews of different congregations. Lectionaries offer a curated selection of biblical texts, oriented around a Christocentric focus within the annual and cyclical structure of liturgical seasons. These books bring the biblical text into the liturgical domain where they perform the semantic and iconic authority of the Bible. This makes the books themselves already a very particular and interesting site of the reception of Bible. This study sets out to explore the artistic interpretation of the biblical lections found in these iconic liturgical books. Focused on graphic designs found in Christian liturgical books this study seeks to understand how religious images function semiotically in the reception of selected biblical texts. Furthermore, it considers what theoretical discourse might be used to analyse this and describe how meaning is made visually. A Social Semiotics of the Visual, an emerging methodology developed by Gunter Kress and Theo van Leeuwen shall provide the framework for this exploration of the relationship between the Bible and contemporary graphic design. (shrink)

The thesis contends that education and literary studies can make a valuable contribution to ethics and ethical development of persons, their relations with others and with the world. It promotes an approach to ethics education through dialogic enquiry based on theories and practices associated with comparative literature and philosophical enquiry. These involve students sharing experiences and meanings as they participate in interpretive communities and communities of philosophical enquiry. There are two main components to the research: ethically focused studies of literary (...) texts and the design, implementation and evaluation of a module in Ethics Education using literature and film as stimuli for Dialogic Enquiry. The literary analyses are influenced by reader-response theory. While recognizing the importance of the author or the contexts of production and receptions of texts, reader-response theory focuses on the experience of the reader as she/he responds to literary texts, and on her/his role in actively co-authoring the meaning of texts. Readers may form or join interpretive communities that share an ethos of practice. The literary narrative fictions studied include fairy tale, contemporary European cinema and neo-Western crime drama, each of which offers a valuable way of thinking about education. The module in ethics education, designed for Transition Year students, is based on movements in Philosophy with Children. Students formulate and explore ethical questions raised in response to themes or issues of literary texts. Dialogic communities of ethical inquiry may emerge from this. Students, participating in these dialogic communities of ethical inquiry, get to test out and develop their moral sense, understood in terms of reason, feeling, memory and imagination. The literary analyses demonstrate the ethically educative promise of literary texts, and the responses of students to this course and the growth of their ethical engagement suggest that this is a promising approach to ethics education. Such an educational experience may be ethical in matter, theory and practice and continue to find expression as praxis beyond the covers of books and walls of classrooms. (shrink)