The Act of Fictional Communication in a Hermeneutic Pragmatic

Tahir  Wood

doi:10.2478/v10015-011-0039-4

Authors

Tahir Wood University of the Western Cape, South Africa

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.2478/v10015-011-0039-4

Abstract

This paper is concerned with fictional communication, as the act of an author in relation to a reader. Fictional discourse exhibits certain complexities that are not observable in other forms of discourse. For example, the author’s act is mediated for the reader by that set of persons called characters. This fact generates a range of relations, firstly the triad of author-reader, author-character, and reader-character. But closer observation reveals that this mediation may be such that it gives way to another, deeper set of relations. At the deepest level one may postulate reader’s relation to author’s self-relating and author’s relation to reader’s self-relating. These questions are explored with view to deriving a revisionist notion of pragmatics that is open to agency.

Author Biography

Tahir Wood , University of the Western Cape, South Africa

Tahir Wood is Director of the Academic Planning Unit at the University of the Western Cape, a historically black South African university He obtained his PhD from the University of Cape Town in 1994, supervised by the author and Nobel Laureate, J. M. Coetzee. He has published in the fields of Linguistics, Literature and Education and presented conference papers in the United States, New Zealand, Cuba, Germany, Spain, Italy, Hungary, Portugal, Poland and South Africa. Except for brief periods, he has always lived in Cape Town.

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