Literary Form and Mentalization

2018 ◽  
pp. 494-512
Author(s):  
Elisa Galgut
Keyword(s):  
Jane Austen ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Book Reading ◽  
Mind Reading ◽  
Free Indirect Discourse ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Indirect Discourse ◽  
Psychological Engagement ◽  
Literary Techniques

This chapter argues that literature—or at least certain kinds of literature—facilitates mentalization. Book reading shares some of the same features as mind reading. Psychoanalysis, via the work of Hanna Segal and others, has been interested in the differences between escapist literature and literature that encourages genuine psychological engagement. This chapter engages that issue via the lens of mentalization. It focuses specifically on literary form rather than on content, and examines the ways in which some kinds of literary form facilitate mentalizing capacities. More narrowly, it shows how different kinds of literary techniques—the free indirect discourse employed by Jane Austen, the tight structure of the sonnet form—enable different mentalizing abilities and develop our capacity for self-reflection.

Sympathy and Empathy

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rae Greiner
Keyword(s):  
Prosocial Behavior ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Moral Sense ◽  
Fair Share ◽  
Mental Processes ◽  
Free Indirect Discourse ◽  
Indirect Discourse ◽  
Human Difference ◽  
Literary Techniques

Sympathy and empathy are complex and entwined concepts with philosophical and scientific roots relating to issues in ethics, aesthetics, psychology, biology, and neuroscience. For some, the two concepts are indistinguishable, the two terms interchangeable, but each has a unique history as well as qualities that make both concepts distinct. Although each is associated with feeling, especially the capacity to feel with others or to imaginatively put oneself “in their shoes,” the concepts’ sometimes shared, sometimes divergent histories reveal more complicated origins, as well as vexed and ongoing relations to feeling and emotion and to the ethical value of emotional sharing. Though empathy regularly is considered the more advanced and egalitarian of the two, it shares with sympathy a controversial role in historical debates regarding questions of an inborn or divine moral sense, prosocial behavior and the development of human communities, the relation of sensation to unconscious mental processes, brain matter, and neurons, and animal/human difference. In literary criticism, sympathy and empathy have been key components of aesthetic movements such as sentimentalism, realism, and modernism, and of literary techniques like free indirect discourse (FID), which are thought (by some) to enhance readerly intimacy and closeness to novelistic characters and perspectives. Both concepts have also received their fair share of suspicion, as the capacity to feel, or imagine feeling, the emotions of others remains a controversial basis for ethics.

Temporal relations of free indirect discourse events

Linguistics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jakob Egetenmeyer
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Structure ◽  
Temporal Relations ◽  
Free Indirect Discourse ◽  
Indirect Discourse

Abstract In this article, we investigate the role free indirect discourse (FID) plays in temporal discourse structure. In contrast to the most widely accepted account of FID, which compares the content of FID to the surrounding content (two voices or two contexts), we take FID as a discourse entity and, thus, focus on the FID event. We follow a prominence-based approach to temporal discourse structure, through which we are able to describe the temporal relations the FID event maintains to the preceding and the following discourse in a precise manner. We can also account for the temporal developments that may be brought about by FID events. This becomes especially interesting in longer passages where FID events alternate with non-FID parts of discourse. The interaction involves the three levels which together make up our account of temporal discourse structure.

scholarly journals Precedent Names in the Text Field of Marina Tsvetaeva from the Perspective of Free Indirect Discourse

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (7) ◽  
pp. 142
Author(s):  
Daniya Abuzarovna Salimova ◽  
Olga Pavlovna Puchinina
Keyword(s):  
World Wide ◽  
The Other ◽  
Specific Character ◽  
Free Indirect Discourse ◽  
Personal Names ◽  
Text Field ◽  
Indirect Discourse ◽  
Marina Tsvetaeva ◽  
The World ◽  
The One

The present study is complied with the topical theme “name in the text” and devoted to the problems of how precedent names as the text-forming elements function in the poems and prose works of Marina Tsvetaeva within the framework of free indirect discourse. The authors study various methods and functions of personal names. The authors make conclusions concerning the frequency of precedent names and the specific character of intertextual elements in Tsvetaeva’s text, which, on the one hand, complicates the perception of the text, but on the other hand, promotes including both the poet and the reader into the world-wide cultural and spiritual environment. The ways of introducing the name and the persona, especially within free indirect discourse, specifies the further existence of the name / or its absence in the text.

scholarly journals Features of Discourse Presentation in Translation: Literary and Narratological Insights into Translation Universals

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Päivi Kuusi
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Free Indirect Discourse ◽  
Crime And Punishment ◽  
Indirect Discourse ◽  
Represented Discourse

Several translation scholars have recognised translation as a form ofdiscourse mediation or discourse presentation (see, for example, Mossop 1998). In line with this, ‘universals’ of translation have also been re-framed in the larger context of discourse mediation, as mediation universals rather than something strictly translationspecific (Ulrych 2009). In the present article, this line of enquiry is developed by comparing some of the alleged universals of translation, namely standardization and explicitation, with insights from literary and narratological studies on the nature of discourse presentation. The notion of reportive or interpretative interference (Sternberg 1982) and Fludernik’s (1993) claim that all represented discourse is typical and schematic in nature seem to bear curious resemblance to the notion of standardization or normalization, posited as a possible universal of translation (Mauranen & Kujamäki 2004). Drawing on the results of my earlier research (Kuusi 2011), I present examples of free indirect discourse (FID) used in Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment with their translations into Finnish. Analyzing the translations, I demonstrate how intranslations, the narratological and literary-theoretical notions of reportive interference and typification/schematization coincide with the translation-theoretical notions of explicitation and standardization.

scholarly journals Wordplay, mindplay: Fan fiction and postclassical narratology

2014 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Veerle Van Steenhuyse
Keyword(s):  
Jane Austen ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Reading Experience ◽  
Postclassical Narratology ◽  
Literary Techniques

Recent narrative theories on story worlds, or the worlds evoked by narratives, call attention to the process of fan reading and the role which the canon plays in that process. This paper posits that such theories can help us understand literary techniques that make a difference on the level of the reading experience that is implied by fan fiction texts. This is illustrated with a close reading of Naguabo's "The Mother of All Marriage Proposals," a Jane Austen fic.

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