Poetics Today, vol. 29, no 3 (automne 2008)

Poetics Today brings together scholars from throughout the world who are concerned with developing systematic approaches to the study of literature (e.g., semiotics and narratology) and with applying such approaches to the interpretation of literary works. Poetics Today presents a remarkable diversity of methodologies and examines a wide range of literary and critical topics. Several thematic review sections or special issues are published in each volume, and each issue contains a book review section, with article-length review essays.

Vol. 29, no 3 (automne 2008)

Duke University Press

Robert Appelbaum and Alexis Paknadel
Terrorism and the Novel, 1970–2001
Since 1970, terrorism has become a prominent subject for English-languagenovels. In an attempt to characterize the modern terrorism noveland the cultural work it has performed, the authors have deviseda typology of terrorism-infiction from 1970 through 2001. Overa thousand novels were documented, including both thrillersand mainstream works. A sample of twenty-five novels from theperiod was then selected for careful reading, analysis, andcomparison. Preliminary results establish that though thereis a great deal of diversity in terrorism novels, both in whatthey do with terrorism and why, they are by and large focusedless on politics than on sentiment and less on the perpetratorsof terrorism than on its victims. But novels introduce an innovationin what has been called the "mythography of terrorism" by introducingnew types of "controlling consciousnesses" through which terroristviolence is perceived.

David Herman
Description, Narrative, and Explanation: Text-Type Categories and the Cognitive Foundations of Discourse Competence

Description, narrative, and explanation can be viewed both ascognitive activities and as forms of communication, that is,text types embedded within sociocultural, institutional, anddiscipline-specific histories of practice. I relate these threetext-type categories to research on categorization processesmore generally, exploring what might constitute the "basic"level of a taxonomy of text types (i.e., the most cognitivelyfundamental level) and also what might be considered prototypicalfeatures of descriptions, explanations, and stories (i.e., thefeatures found fully realized in exemplars or standard casesof these types). Building on the taxonomy outlined in the firstthree sections of the essay, especially my account of core featuresof explanation, the final section constitutes a "coda" in whichI use the taxonomy to investigate how narrative relates to descriptionand explanation in contexts of scientific inquiry in particular.

Daniel Allington
How to Do Things with Literature: Blasphemous Speech Acts, Satanic Intentions, and the Uncommunicativeness of Verses
Literature has at times been theorized in terms of a messagepassing from author to reader, and this has often been doneby reference to general theories of language use: the work isthe vehicle of intentions that are realized (or not) in thereader's responses; the work is a "speech act" that operateson the reader and causes his or her responses. Although thisarticle argues that such theorizations mistake the role of communicationin literature, it suggests that they nonetheless reflect prevalentways of talking about literary texts, which should be investigatedas tactically useful techniques employed in discourse betweenreaders (and nonreaders) of those texts. Drawing on the workof a range of thinkers, notably Quentin Skinner and Jerome McGann,this article then proposes an alternative application of theconcepts of authorial intention and speech act to the genesisof literary works. This is followed by a study of early contributionsto the public controversy over The Satanic Verses, in whichLena Jayyusi's analysis of moral action descriptions is usedto draw attention to commentators' ideological attempts to structurethis novel as a speech-like action carried out by its authorSalman Rushdie.

Judith A. Deitch
Love's Hologram: Shakespeare, Ricoeur, and the Equivocations of Erotic Identity
Holograms are three-dimensional visual records capable of transmittingpeculiar and arresting special effects. A number of Shakespeare'ssonnets reveal particular holographic effects, in which scenesof looking and speaking are enhanced by the lyric "I's" creationof distorted composite images. These holograms of self and otherprovide visual signals which correspond to Paul Ricoeur's philosophyof "oneself as another." The crisis of selfhood prompted byentanglement with the other— something established inboth Shakespeare's poetry and Ricoeur's philosophy—isexplored and clarified by reading these holographic sonnetsthrough the application of three basic tenets: (1) the dialecticof idem-self and ipse-self, (2) temporality as a primary traitof the self, and (3) the dialectic of possession and dispossession.The implications of such a reading are wide-ranging, affectinghow we understand the peculiar interiority of the sonnets aswell as the radical challenge of Ricoeur's thinking.