scholarly journals The reader’s role in the fiction of Menán du Plessis

Literator ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. J. Daymond
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Reception Theory ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Wolfgang Iser

The reception theory’ of Wolfgang Iser is used to explore the effects of the differences in the narration of Du Plessis’ novels. The chief differences are the degree of consciousness with which the reader engages in meaning-making and the level at which the reader encounters the major enigma on which the larger interpretation of each novel rests. Also considered are some implications of the analogy, to which my interpretation leads, between narrative form and Du Plessis’ judgement of her world.

The Enduring Importance of Roman Ingarden for Reception Theory

2021 ◽  
pp. 63-82
Author(s):  
Michael Raubach
Keyword(s):  
Literary Theory ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Subjective Assessment ◽  
The United States ◽  
Reception Theory ◽  
Formal Reality ◽  
Literary Work Of Art ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Wolfgang Iser

There have been few philosophers in the 20th century more creative and profound and yet more obscure than Roman Ingarden. He anticipated many of the major philosophical questions that would dominate literary theory in the 1960s and 70s in Germany, France, and the United States. In this paper, I argue that his primary contribution to literary theory is an ontology that arcs deftly between the poles of idealism and realism with a nuanced way of upholding both the formal reality of the literary work of art and the subjective assessment of aesthetic value, all the while preserving the fundamental meaning-making function of language. It was this philosophical foundation that proved to be a fertile ground for later philosophers, like Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser, who wanted to push back on what they saw as analogous forces to idealism and realism in the rigidity of formalism and Marxist materialism and the ostensible epistemological nihilism of the psychological hermeneutics.

Strangers of Popular Culture – The Verbal and Pictorial Aesthetics of Mythological Metal Music

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-60
Author(s):  
János Fejes
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
Reception Theory ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Metal Music ◽  
History Of ◽  
Extreme Metal ◽  
Northrop Frye ◽  
Wolfgang Iser

AbstractExtreme metal music is held to be a destructive genre of popular culture, treated as a pariah for many. Being a seriously misunderstood genre, I would like to highlight that metal music is a result of conscious work process that cannot only be noticed on the level of the music but on the level of verbal and pictorial expressions too. In my paper, I would like to show the working mechanisms of the so-called “(neo)pagan/mythological metal” movement, focusing on the rhetoric side of its mentioned expressions, searching for the ways these bands rewrite ancient myths and legends.For my research, I will use three main threads: 1) history of religion (looking for the connections of the reception of ancient topics in contemporary society, e.g. New Age Cults and New Religious Movements); 2) reception theory, as the thoughts of Northrop Frye, Wolfgang Iser (1972), and John Fiske (2011) all should help to understand the general processes behind reading and producing texts; 3) subculture studies – e.g. the works of Richard Schusterman and Deena Weinstein (2002) to have a deeper insight to the genres standing on the edge of mass and high culture.After a general introduction, I would like to demonstrate the above mentioned through some case studies. The chosen mythological cultures are going to be the world of the ancient Middle East (Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Old Testament), the classical Roman world, and the Viking Era, also showing some Hungarian and Romanian examples in the last section. In each section, the following issues should be examined: band and stage names connected to the topic, album titles, lyrics, and album covers. All these together will show us many clear patterns from romantic nostalgia to allegoric concepts, all revolving around the essence of metal music: being a Stranger in a familiar society.

Developing a model of narrative analysis to investigate the role of social support in coping with traumatic war memories

2009 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen J. Burnell ◽  
Nigel Hunt ◽  
Peter G. Coleman
Keyword(s):  
Social Support ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Narrative Analysis ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Traumatic Event ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Male Veterans ◽  
The Social ◽  
War Memories

Within clinical and health psychology, narrative is used to understand how people make meaning of events that challenge one’s believes about the self and the world e.g. the diagnosis of an illness or the experience of a traumatic event. This paper introduces a model of narrative analysis that can provide insight into the ways in which people make meaning of traumatic events and the types of resources that aid or hinder this process. The model, an adaptation of grounded narrative analysis (Murray, 2003), was applied at two levels (narrative form and narrative content) to the narratives of British male veterans of World War II (WWII) and post WWII veterans up to and including the Iraq war (2003– ). Narrative form concerned the coherence of the narrative, which was defined as an oriented, structured, affectively consistent, and integrated narrative, indicative of the reconciliation. Narrative content focused on the social support experiences of the veterans. Through this two level analysis, it was possible to make theoretical links between the types of social support that aid the meaning making process and help veterans to reconcile their experiences.

scholarly journals Celebrities and spiritual gurus: Comparing two biographical accounts of kidney transplantation and recovery

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rose Richards
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Chronic Kidney Disease ◽  
Kidney Disease ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Kidney Transplant ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Kidney Transplant Recipient ◽  
Perfect Match ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Second Chance

Background: As a kidney transplant recipient I have long been exposed to a shortage of renal narratives and to a dominant theme in those that exist: transplant as restitution or redemption. My lived experience has, however, shown me that post-transplant life is more complex. Even after transplantation, chronic kidney disease requires lifelong health care with varying degrees of impairment, resulting in ongoing liminality for those who experience it. Nonetheless, as atransplant recipient I find the restitution or redemptive narrative pervasive and difficult to escape.Objective: I examined two seemingly very dissimilar insider renal biographies, JanetHermans’s Perfect match: A kidney transplant reveals the ultimate second chance, and Steven Cojocaru’s Glamour, interrupted: How I became the best-dressed patient in Hollywood, to explore how the narrators treat chronic kidney disease and transplantation.Methods: In addition to a close textual reading of the biographies, I used my own experience of meaning-making to problematize concepts around restitution or redemptive narratives.Results: I found that the two biographies are, despite appearances and despite the attempts of one author to escape the redemptive form, very much the same type of narrative. The accounts end with the transplant, as is common, but the recipients’ lives continue after this, as they learn to live with their transplants, and this is not addressed.Conclusions: Emphasising restitution or redemption might prevent an understanding ofpost-transplant liminality that has unique characteristics. The narrator evading this narrative form must come to terms with a changed identity and, sometimes, fight to evade the pervasive narratives others impose.

scholarly journals Sameness and difference in narrative modes and narrative sense making: The case of Ramsey Campbell’s “The Scar”

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 130-146
Author(s):  
Mari Hatavara ◽  
Jarkko Toikkanen
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Sense Making ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Linguistic Resources ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Narrative Studies ◽  
Modes Of Representation ◽  
The Everyday

AbstractThe article discusses basic questions of narrative studies and definitions of narrative from a historical and conceptual perspective in order to map the terrain between different narratologies. The focus is placed on the question of how fiction interacts with other realms of our lives or, more specifically, how reading fiction both involves and affects our everyday meaning making operations. British horror writer Ramsey Campbell’s (b. 1946) short story “The Scar” (1967) will be used as a test case to show how both narrative modes of representation and the reader’s narrative sense making operations may travel between art and the everyday, from fiction to life and back. We argue that the cognitively inspired narrative studies need to pair up with linguistically oriented narratology to gain the necessary semiotic sensitivity to the forms and modes of narrative sense making. Narratology, in turn, needs to explore in detail what it is in the narrative form that enables it to function as a tool for reaching out and making sense of the unfamiliar. In our view, reading fictional narratives such as “The Scar” can help in learning and adopting linguistic resources and story patterns from fiction to our everyday sense making efforts.

Wolfgang Iser’s conception of indeterminacy: An integrational critique

2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-159
Author(s):  
Theodore Tsz Hang Tam
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Reception Theory ◽  
Reading Process ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Wolfgang Iser

Abstract Adopting the perspective of a “Harrisian” integrational linguist, this article identifies two conflicting ways in which Wolfgang Iser describes “indeterminacy” and its implications on the act of reading in his “reception theory”. It will be argued that while his understanding of contextualisation and recontextualisation is markedly similar to the integrational idea of the radical indeterminacy of the sign, he is not an “integrational literary theorist” since he ultimately sees literary works as comprising determinate, intersubjective segments and indeterminate links supplied by the reader. Iser’s significance for integrationism lies mainly in the directions he provides for the development of “integrational literary criticism”, the practitioners of which would be “cultured readers” who appreciate the impossibility of “correct” analyses and recognise indeterminacy as an integral part of the reading process.

scholarly journals The emotional and embodied nature of human understanding: Sharing narratives of meaning

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Delafield-Butt
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Later Life ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Complex Projects ◽  
Sensory Effects ◽  
Clinical Disorders ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Small Story ◽  
Before School ◽  
Conscious Control

This chapter explores the emotional and embodied nature of children’s learning to discover biological principles of social awareness, affective contact, and shared sense-making before school. From mid-gestation, the fetus learns to anticipate the sensory effects of simple, self-generated actions. Actions generate a small ‘story’ that progresses through time, giving meaningful satisfaction on their successful completion. Self-made stories become organized after birth into complex projects requiring greater appreciation of their consequences, which are communicated. They are mediated first by brainstem conscious control made with vital feelings, which motivates a more abstract, cortically mediated cognitive and cultural intelligence in later life. By tracing the development of meaning-making from simple projects of the infant to complex shared projects in early childhood, we appreciate the embodied narrative form of human understanding in healthy affective contact, how it may be disrupted in children with clinical disorders or educational difficulties, and how it responds in joyful projects to an understanding teacher’s support for learning.

scholarly journals Aesthetic distance as a form of liminality in selected short stories of American literature

Ars Aeterna ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-56
Author(s):  
Natália Čechová
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Reception Theory ◽  
Reading Process ◽  
Liminal Spaces ◽  
The World ◽  
Tools And Techniques ◽  
Aesthetic Distance ◽  
Wolfgang Iser

Abstract Aesthetic distance is a phenomenon that has attracted a considerable amount of attention, especially since the first works of postmodernism came to light. Aesthetic distance is based on creating such works which - using certain artistic tools and techniques - break the illusion and thus inhibit readers from immersing themselves in the literary world portrayed in the work they read. As a result, aesthetic distance creates a liminal space, or an invisible but consciously perceivable border between reality, i.e. the world we live in and fiction, i.e. the world we want to relocate to and enjoy during the reading process. The paper is based on an article by Bjorn Thomassen, in which he presents several types of liminality and states that the typology is not final. My aim is to prove that liminality can occur in literature as well, particularly in works built on aesthetic distance. In this matter, I focus on the reception theory of Wolfgang Iser, who studies literary texts from three perspectives: the text, the reader and the communication between the two. The theory is applied to selected short stories of American literature, which contain illusion-breaking features and thus may be viewed as liminal spaces.

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