Abstract
This is our first day in the English department at the University of Nanterre. We are headed, with eager step (there is a queue in front of the lift) and panting heart (three floors is a long way up), towards a class with the forbidding name of G1-100, ‘Lire un texte’, where we are hoping to acquire the rudiments of literary interpretation — to indulge in the practice, and to revel in the achievement (for the term, like many nouns derived from verbs, ‘representation’ for instance, is ambiguous between process and result).
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Notes
G. Greene, ‘I Spy’, in Twenty-One Stories (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1970), pp. 44–6.
U. Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (London, Macmillan, 1984).
J. Barth, ‘Glossolalia’, in Lost in the Funhouse (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1972), pp. 118–9. The author’s note is on p. 9.
M. Chénetier, ‘John Barth: la langue contrainte’, in Sgraffites, encres et sanguines (Paris, Presses de l’Ecole Normale Supérieure, 1994), pp. 191–201.
G. Steiner, After Babel (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 168.
See N. Dubleumortier, Glossolalie (Paris, L’Harmattan, 1997).
Herodotus, History (London, Dent & Dutton (Everyman’s Library), 1910), vol. 1, pp. 23–4.
W. Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, in Illuminations (London. Fontana, 1973).
J. Roberts, Walter Benjamin (London, Macmillan, 1982), p. 111.
W. Benjamin, ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’, in One-Way Street and Other Essays (London, New Left Books, 1979).
For an illustration of this, see J. Favret-Saada, Les mots, la mort, les sorts (Paris, Gallimard, 1977)
J. Favret-Saada, The Violence of Language (London, Routledge, 1990), pp. 234–8.
S. Freud, ‘Constructions in Analysis’, in Standard Edition, J. Strachey, ed. (London, Hogarth Press, 1953–66), vol. 23.
L. Carroll, The Annotated Alice (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1970), p. 270.
A. Ettleson, Lewis Carroll’s ‘Through the Looking-Glass’ Decoded (New York, Philosophical Library, 1961), p. 22.
A. Ettleson, Philosophy of Nonsense (London, Routledge, 1994), pp. 5–19.
M. Burstein, ‘As Pigs Have to Fly: Who Really Wrote the Alice Books?’, in Jabberwocky, 13(1), 1983/4, pp. 3–11.
A. Ettleson, ’Alice in Wonderland’: the Secret Language of Lewis Carroll Revealed (New York, Carlton Press, 1971).
J. Elwyn Jones and J.F. Gladstone, The Red King’s Dream, or Lewis Carroll in Wonderland (London, Jonathan Cape, 1995).
W. Empson, ‘The Child as Swain’, in Some Versions of Pastoral (London, Chatto & Windus, 1935, and Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1966, pp. 201–33).
See E.P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993).
N. Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis, Hackett, 1976), ch. 1.
I use the term ‘pragmatics’ in the common-and-garden sense in which linguists use it today, even if I draw different conclusions. See S.C. Levinson, Pragmatics (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983);
J.L. Mey, Pragmatics: an Introduction (Oxford, Blackwell, 1993);
S. Petrey, Speech Acts and Literary Theory (London, Routledge, 1990).
F. Flahault, La parole intermédiaire (Paris, Seuil, 1978).
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© 1999 Jean-Jacques Lecercle
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Lecercle, JJ. (1999). Pragmatics of Interpretation. In: Interpretation as Pragmatics. Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230373648_1
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