| Maurice Merleau-Ponty declares that the reading (and writing) process not only reminds us of meaning from other contexts, but "brings the meaning into existence as a thing at the very heart of the text," as an "organism of words...opening a new field or a new dimension to our experience" (Phenomenology of Perception 182). In the theory chapter of the present dissertation, Merleau-Ponty's concept of the "lived body of language" is related to the psycholinguistic term "deixis." Karl Buhler defines the deictic field as the Origo of Here/Now/I, in other words, as the source of subjectivity and reference. Deixis is a language universal, realized in personal and demonstrative pronouns, verb tense, and other markers of a "source position" in space, time, and self. Words such as "here," "now," "I" normally take their referents from the situation of their utterance. As has been argued by Kate Hamburger, S.-Y. Kuroda, and Ann Banfield, and with qualification by Dorrit Cohn, fictional texts create a deictic field which originates in the subjectivity of characters rather than in the speaking or writing situation. The hypothesis that his "deictic shift" is a defining characteristic of fictional narrative is named here the deictic shift model of fiction. Alternative models--the "speech act" model and the "dual voice" model--are described, and their differences with the deictic shift model discussed. The deictic shift model is upheld as more adequate than the other models.;Three readings follow the theory chapter, each close study of the opening of a novel. In each case, the protagonist is a child undergoing a traumatic experience: Jane in Jane Eyre, Pip in Great Expectations, and Maisie in What Maisie Knew. Each reading is an attempt to describe the initial setting up of the subjectivity of the child protagonist as this process of immersion and imagination is experienced by a particular reader (myself). Using concepts from narrative theory, cognitive linguistics, and phenomenology, the readings give a detailed account of the various devices used to establish self-world relations in the opening sentences of the novels. The process of "entering into" each story is described on several levels, including the story level, the level of narration, and the text/reader level.;The dissertation is intended to contribute to a "linguistics of subjectivity in narrative" both through detailed description of specific effects and through theoretical arguments about the process and bodily experience of reading fiction. |
