Wayne Booth

Expongo aquí mi punto de vista sobre dos figuras textuales estrechamente relacionadas en la ficción narrativa: el autor implícito y el narrador no fiable. Son dos conceptos narratológicos que surgieron asociados a la obra de Wayne Booth, y que han tenido suertes diferentes en narratología: el autor implícito se bate en retirada en tanto que concepto teórico, en tanto que el narrador no fiable, adquiere un protagonismo casi imperialista, aun a costa del que podría parecer su correlativo necesario. Con alguna nota histórica intentaré mostrar que no es tan fácil librarse del autor implícito—y reiteraré su necesidad para una definición adecuada del narrador no fiable.

In The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), Wayne Booth first proposed the critical concepts of the reliable and unreliable narrator. Booth suggested that the notion of reliability was best defined in terms of its underlying relationship to the implied author. But this attempted linkage was never a truly secure one; and in the intervening years, a protracted debate has persisted regarding this central issue. This paper suggests that the key to resolving this debate is the formulation of a more secure definition of narrative reliability. The linguistic concept of markedness provides the critical means for doing this. Using the test case of Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, five determinants of a reliable narrator in first-person fiction are suggested: a secure speaking-location back home; the use of the classical middle style of standard English; observer-narrator status; ethical maturity; and a plot structure which involves the retrospective re-evaluation or Aristotelian anagnorisis of a character other than the narrator. If this much is accepted, unreliable narration may be defined in terms of a range of departures from this basic model.

Die hier vorgelegte Arbeit versucht im Wesentlichen zwei Forschungs-desiderate aufzuarbeiten und Asymmetrien in der bisherigen Auseinander-setzung mit diesen Bereichen auszugleichen:
- Es lässt sich ein markanter Kontrast beobachten zwischen (a) den Be-mühungen, Rezeptionsforschung und -theorie als wissenschaftlichen Ansatz theoretisch zu fundieren, und (b) der Situation, dass bis heute kein grundsätzlicher Versuch unternommen wurde, die aus diesen Po-sitionen (und nahezu allen anderen literaturtheoretischen Positionen) hervorgehenden Lesermodelle systematisch zu erfassen und hinsicht-lich Vergleichbarkeit herstellender Kategorien in Relation zueinander zu setzen.
- Darüber hinaus zeigt sich ein nicht geringeres Ungleichgewicht zwi-schen (a) dem Aufwand, mit dem die Editionsphilologie eine metho-disch standardisierte oder zumindest explizit reflektierte Sicherung von Primärtexten als Vorbereitung der Textinterpretation betreibt, und (b) der philologischen und editionsphilologischen Aufmerksam-keit, die Sekundärtexten eingeräumt wird, wenn es sich um einen ebensolchen Umgang mit ihnen handelt.
Während im Kernbereich dieser Dissertation Lesermodelle verglichen und hinsichtlich ihrer Funktionalisierbarkeit für eine historisierende Literatur-wissenschaft geprüft werden, formuliert der diesen Kern umschließende Teil der Arbeit eine theoretische Begründung und einen methodischen Entwurf der historisierenden Rezeptionsanalyse selbst. Diese soll als sys-tematische Quellensichtung, -sicherung und -reflexion verstanden werden und Rezeptionszeugnisse realer Leser für hermeneutische, aber auch im weitesten Sinne empirische Ansätze der historisierend ausgerichteten Lite-raturwissenschaft vorbereiten und fruchtbar machen.

Tomando como marco teórico la pragmática literaria y tras delimitar los conceptos de ficción y de poética y los diferentes estilos de narrar, se aborda la investigación de la poética subyacente en esta novela, a través del análisis del narrador, los personajes, el espacio y el tiempo; descubriendo como su rasgo más característico una estructura de mundos interactuantes que configuran un espejo múltiple del pacto de ficción. / 

In the frame of Literary Pragmatics, this paper analyses the concepts of fiction, poetics and styles of narrating. Afterwards, it applies such concepts in order to discover the poetics lying under that novel, studying its narrator, characters, time and space; concluding with the presentation of a structure of interactive worlds which configures a multiple mirror of the fictional pact.

Although Wolfgang Iser is one of the most influential literary theorists of the twentieth century, there is no authoritative study about his oeuvre. The present work remedies that problem by analysing Iser’s German and English writings in detail. Apart from being the first comprehensive account of his work, this study also modifies the established view of Iser’s theory. In contrast to the idea that his only contribution to literary studies is the reception theory of the 1970s, this account demonstrates the importance of Iser’s work on history and anthropology from the 1950s and 1990s. Instead of exclusively focusing on familiar terms such as ‘indeterminacy’, this analysis also discusses Iser’s view of modernity, fiction and culture. As this discussion shows, his writings develop a consistent theory of the novel and the way in which it allows its readers to articulate new views of reality. To situate this theory, Iser’s institutional and intellectual background is described as well, paying special attention to the Poetik und Hermeneutik-circle and thinkers like Blumenberg and Kermode. The continued relevance of his theory is demonstrated via comparisons with recent research on the novel and memory as well as examples from contemporary novelists like Juli Zeh and Hilary Mantel.

La fiction peut-elle mentir occasionnellement ou est-elle
d'emblée un mensonge? Aborder cette question pose des problèmes complexes, car nous nous situons devant un abîme creusé par le statut illocutif propre aux énoncés fictionnels. Cet article examine deux nouvelles de Borges (La Forme de l'épée, Le Livre de sable) pour définir les conditions du "bluff" fictionnel et de l'éventuelle "vérité" que peut transmettre un récit de fiction.

Drawing from its author’s experience as Wayne Booth’s archivist, this essay explores the rhetorical and performative relationship between an archive and its subject’s legacy. Archives are fixed collections of historical artifacts that preserve an evidentiary ‘‘truth’’ about their subjects; meanwhile, they are unstable and dynamic spaces where the past is only imperfectly reanimated through a researcher’s rhetorical invention. Using Booth’s archive and autobiography, My Many Selves (2006), this essay suggests Booth’s life and scholarship make an especially salient case for theorizing the archive as a performative dialogue wherein a plausible harmony can be achieved among archive, subject, and researcher.

Le voyage est incontestablement l'objet d'une tradition immémoriale qui s'établit fermement dans le contexte particulier du XVIII e siècle. Le temps des Lumières, c'est le temps des conquêtes ; conquête du Nouveau Monde, conquête du progrès, conquête du savoir et de la raison. Par ailleurs, le voyage poursuit une conquête nouvelle : celle d'un public. Les éditeurs, les voyageurs qui se muent en écrivains (et inversément) sont de plus en plus nombreux à répondre à l'enthousiasme d'un public devenu friand des relations de voyages. Avec l'essor de de cette littérature se pose diverses questions sur la mise en récit de pareilles entreprises. Le voyageur peut-il être écrivain ? L'écrivain peut-il être voyageur ? On se rappelle Lapérouse lorsqu'il disait : « Ils [les philosophes] font leurs livres au coin du feu et je voyage depuis trente ans ». La difficulté de cette mise à l'écrit n'est pas nouvelle, mais combinée avec l'essor du roman au XVIIIe siècle - et particulièrement de l'écriture à la première personne - de nouveaux enjeux concernant le statut énonciatif, la voix narrative ou encore le contrat de lecture apparaissent. Nous proposons d'étudier à travers ces quelques pages les mécanismes narratifs propres à cette littérature viatique et les problèmes qu'ils soulèvent. Les premiers écueils qui émergent concernent le versant (fictionnel ou référentiel) dans lequel s'inscrivent les relations de voyages. S'ensuit logiquement un souci concernant la réception et l'horizon d'attente de cette littérature. A travers un corpus défini, nous proposons d'aborder quelques notions relatives à cette problématique. La présente étude s'articule en quatre points. Les trois premiers se focalisent respectivement sur les textes de Lapérouse (1785-1788), Prévost (1741) et Lady Montagu (1717).  Le dernier point vise à élargir le corpus afin de proposer une vue englobante des formes que peut prendre la voix narrative, notamment au travers des notions de pacte de lecture et de statut du voyageur.

A Bakhtinian/rhetorical commentary on the cult classic TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000. As part of an effort to view rhetoric and poetics as more of a mutually constituting continuum than a binary, I discuss how the interplay of voices in MST3K allows certain rhetorical relationships and disallows others.

En Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism (1979), Wayne Booth introduce la dicotomía comprensión/superación para marcar la diferencia entre la interpretación positiva de la obra literaria y aquellas sobreinterpretaciones que, a diferencia de las lecturas abusivas y forzadas, son susceptibles de alcanzar el consenso crítico. Tal es el caso de la interpretación realizada por Rafael Lapesa con motivo de la significación alegórica del mar presente en Oda a la vida retirada en Fray Luis a la luz de los acontecimientos históricos que se viven en la España del siglo XVI. Tomando como referencia la singular interpretación que brinda el reputado hispanista de los versos de Fray Luis, abordaremos en este artículo la problemática discusión en torno a los límites de la interpretación y analizaremos los principales avatares concernientes a la hermenéutica actual tras la consolidación de la crítica deconstructivista, cuyo modelo aboga por el relativismo interpretativo en virtud de la ambigüedad e inestabilidad esencial del significado literario.

In Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism (1979), Wayne Booth introduces the dichotomy understanding/overstanding to establish the difference between the positive interpretation of the literary work and all those overinterpretations which are susceptible, unlike the forced and abusive readings, to reach a critical consensus. Such is the case of the Lapesa’s interpretation about the allegorical meaning of the sea in Fray Luis’ Oda a la vida retirada in the light of the historical events occurred in the Spanish 16th Century. From the point of view of this singular reading given by the renowned Hispanist, this article will focus on the troublesome argument upon the interpretation’s limits and the main changes concerning Hermeneutics today, after the consolidation of deconstructive criticism, whose model claims the hermeneutical relativism as a result of literature’s essential ambiguity and instability.

Burke's pentad and McKeon's quartet both generate philosophical orientations. McKeon's quartet also distinguishes philosophical orientations characteristic of different historical periods, including the twentieth-century's "linguistic turn." This historical dimension provides the basis for a McKeonist defense of Burke's foundationalism in his "Our Attempt to Avoid Mere Relativism," the concluding section of his well-known "Terministic Screens."

The purpose of this study is to explore the author-text-reader trichotomy, by analyzing previous theories on the subject, and to introduce the concept of continuum of authorship/readership. The continuum contemplates points of convergence among various accounts of the same text and encompasses similar and dissimilar interpretations. The reader has a central role in the “contract” that is established in the trichotomy cited above, and any interpretation that arises out of this interaction will be seen as a refracted account. The idea of the perception of the self is discussed in this paper, in terms of understanding how this view of self interacts with the implied subjects that are pictured by every reader upon reading any text, and how it refracts meaning. Several literary theories and methodologies are cited throughout this study, in order to better understand the interaction between author, text and reader, thus covering all tiers of the trichotomy.
The study of meaning and how it affects the understanding of a text is also explored throughout this paper, with citations from previous works also highlighted when necessary. The quest for meaning becomes a quest for literary convergence.
Mathematical concepts were used sparingly as a means of abstracting patterns to a more general view of the topic.

KENNETH BURKE AND HIS CIRCLES consists of original papers focusing on the intellectual circles in which Burke participated during his long career. Instead of concentrating on Burke himself, as most recent scholarship has done, this book considers Burke as one participant in a host of important overlapping intellectual movements that took place over the course of the twentieth century. Burke is considered as "in conversation" with a host of important principals who influenced Burke and were in turn influenced by him.