Overview

This is a ground-breaking work that offers a new explanation of the power and popularity of literary fictional texts. It does this by explaining the multiple dimensions of any fictional text and why it is that fictional literature cannot be reduced to a subset of these dimensions. This book offers an expansion of the field of pragmatics, “the philosophy of the act,” in which the three categories of fictional actors—author, character and reader—can be given their due. It achieves this by bringing together schools of thought that are too often kept apart: Anglo-American pragmatics and European philosophy. Drawing on a range of thinkers, from Charles Morris and John Searle to Friedrich Nietzsche, M. M. Bakhtin and Georg Lukács, the book applies a unique framework to a range of modern fictional texts. Key concepts here are ethical intention and the agon of authorship.

Full Product Details

9781527568587

Table of Contents

Reviews

Author Information

Tahir Wood is an Extraordinary Professor in the Language Education Department of the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, an institution to which he has been affiliated for the last 20 years. He obtained his PhD from the University of Cape Town in 1994. He is the author of the book Elements of Hermeneutic Pragmatics: Agency and Interpretation, as well as numerous research papers in linguistics, literature and education.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available