In the ontology of the artwork and its regimes of existence, Gérard Genette gives but little room to the theory and practice of restoration. However, restoration is seen in relation to the identity of the work itself and to its material and pragmatic temporality and anachronism. In the wake of Nelson Goodman, it is also understood as a form of actuation and implementaion of the aesthetic experience. Starting from these premises, the present essay intends to examine the relationship between (...) Genette’s and Daniel Arasse’s reflections on restoration and the history of art, highlighting their similarities and differences with Cesare Brandi’s theory of restoration and, therefore, pointing out their as yet undischarged debts to Sartre’s phenomenology of image. (shrink)

In the ontology of the artwork and its regimes of existence, Gérard Genette gives but little room to the theory and practice of restoration. However, restoration is seen in relation to the identity of the work itself and to its material and pragmatic temporality and anachronism. In the wake of Nelson Goodman, it is also understood as a form of actuation and implementaion of the aesthetic experience. Starting from these premises, the present essay intends to examine the relationship between (...) Genette’s and Daniel Arasse’s reflections on restoration and the history of art, highlighting their similarities and differences with Cesare Brandi’s theory of restoration and, therefore, pointing out their as yet undischarged debts to Sartre’s phenomenology of image. (shrink)

Este artículo examina La ciudad y los perros (1963) de Mario Vargas Llosa para fundamentar cómo se logra la estratificación teórica de estilos y técnicas que se emplean para abordar la violencia en el texto. Sobre la epistemología, recurre principalmente a Todorov, Hamburger, Lotman y Genette. Y, para argumentar la manifestación de la violencia, considera las eventualidades que padecen los personajes del Colegio Militar Leoncio Prado; en especial, el Jaguar, el Poeta y el Esclavo. Esas acciones serán justificadas por (...) la instrucción castrense, la evolución humana, la necesidad de una conducta hegemónica idónea y la búsqueda del efecto perlocutivo en el lector. Para sistematizar esas peculiaridades, se opta por una metodología adscrita al cotejo de información teórica para que sea confrontada con el discurso literario. El análisis que se desarrolla es complementado con fragmentos representativos para que las formulaciones sean más directas y convincentes. Como resultado, se confirma esa correspondencia entre las teorías heterogéneas, la novela y la interpretación, por lo que el concepto de violencia adoptaría una multidimensionalidad que evidencia su existencia y su requerimiento esencial en los personajes. Con ello, se sustenta como conclusión que la violencia en ese contexto debería ser permanente e imprescindible para subsistir. (shrink)

This thesis is concerned with the ways in which meaning is generically mediated in the novel. In particular it addresses the productive diversity of meanings generated by critical interpretation and asks how, given this diversity, comprehension and consensus might be possible. I argue that the construction of subject, object, space and time is achieved in the novel through different manifestations of four key metaphors: voice, view, setting and event. These metaphors supply meanings that rely on a common experience of embodiment. (...) Embodiment supplies the basis for an intersubjectively established consensus which identifies subjects and objects in terms that correspond to the semiotic, syntagmatic and semantic uses of metaphor. I begin by surveying and reviewing certain constructionist accounts of language and meaning in order to establish the importance of metaphor in conveying meaning in rhetorical, rather than linguistic, terms. I then discuss two examples of continental philosophy on speech: Derrida on voice and Foucault on discourse. I demonstrate how meaning is rhetorically constructed according to the use to which metaphors are put—whether they denote formal, semantic, or functional aspects of meaning—through an explication of Foucault’s theory, reserving Derrida’s grammatology for my analysis of the stabilisation of meaning in the theory of certain narratologists (Gérard Genette and Marie-Laure Ryan). Voice and view are key terms in literary theory, and I examine refinements to these metaphors in Genette and Ryan. The insistence of these narratologists on restricting the rhetorical dimension of meaning undermines the value of the literary work, prompting me to argue for a relaxing of such constraints. I read Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang for its uses of voice and point of view, many of which expose the limitations of the narratological approach. This is a theoretical thesis, which engages a wide range of perspectives—constructionist, deconstructionist, sociological and structuralist—together with their various accounts of language, metaphor, speech and meaning. In terms of sociological approaches to genre and discourse, I employ the chronotope as a critical tool, examining it in the context of the theme of the country house to demonstrate the role of two of my key metaphors, setting and event, which are important for the construction of space and time in abstract terms. Focusing on novels by Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, and Kazuo Ishiguro, in which the country house defines the space and the temporality through which thematic and “material” elements are mediated, I reveal how the chronotope supplies an overarching coherence that unites thought and event in narrative. My readings of these novels describe a theory that is concerned with the rhetorical capacities of genre rather than with taxonomic constructions of form. To this end I argue that the metaphorical dimensions of narrative—voice, view, setting and event—be loosely drawn, according to the acknowledged mutability of genre. I also emphasise the constructive effect of metaphor whilst according it a rhetorical versatility consistent with the mutability and instability of genre as a semiotic tool, concluding that consensus is achieved in our readings of novels through the form’s reliance on these four key metaphors of embodiment. These metaphors have ordinary, everyday, widespread usage beyond narrative theory; in appreciating their rhetorical value, it must be noted nonetheless that any confusion that ensues is productive, for it results in the diversities of meaning and form celebrated in the literary work. (shrink)

The literary genesis of Einbahnstraße by Walter Benjamin represents a very special case of the use of the procedures of surrealism in the philosophical-literary production of the author. The process of evolution of thinking that ended up in the writing of this piece is unveiled throughout the present analysis. This is a sign of both waiver and restart; the opening for a new productive dimension in the career of one of the most important —and misunderstood— philosophers of the 20th century. (...) More than enlightening a small master piece of philosophy from a literary perspective, or analyzing a small master piece of literature from the philosophy, what is being problematized here is the division, cultivated or figured throughout the years, between both disciplines. This work is intended to recover what is insoluble from the philosophical-literary labor of Walter Benjamin, besides tracing a possible reconfiguration for an interdisciplinary field of work to come up and contribute in the understanding of the problem called The Retreat of Metaphor by Jacques Derrida. (shrink)

In this paper, I try to support Gerard Genette's conception of focalization, that was first proposed by him in his book Narrative Discourse (1980). Focalization is known as the perspective of the narrator in fiction. It includes a comparative study of layers of focalization in multicultural perspectives by analysing the narratological techniques in two of the most controversial novels. Those novels represent two worlds apart; one is AlaaAlaswany’sYacobian Building and the other is Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. In both (...) novels, the narrators are absent from the two stories told. These narrators are depersonalized and they are lacking definable personalities and opinions. (shrink)

In § 35 of Sein und Zeit Heidegger’s denunciation of Gerede, idle talk, is confident and scathing. It sounds so sinister and threatening. What could Heidegger be talking about? One could cite numerous fictional characters (e.g., Pecksniff, Mrs. Gamp, Skimpole, Podsnap – all in Dickens), characters whose speech is very nearly an idiolect of bad faith. And yet there is something so fascinating and creative in their speech, an exuberance in their dissimulation, that one wouldn’t want to miss them. Could (...) idle talk in Heidegger’s sense contribute to the theoretization of Bakhtin's idea of the dialogic and heteroglossia and to the notion of discours as it has been developed by Benveniste, Barthes, and Genette? In prose fiction language is valorized (often implicitly) in terms of meaning/nonsense, serious/non-serious, full/empty. When in fiction language that is deemed low, formulaic, or “empty”-- gossip, chatter, prattle, idiotismes – comes to the fore the narrative elements falters, “nothing much” is said. But a kind of speech as act and process is foregrounded. It is this kind of inadvertence in language, its “idling” state, that Gerede points to. (shrink)