on narrativity

On NarrativityAuthor(s): Algirdas Julien Greimas, Paul Ricoeur, Paul Perron and Frank CollinsReviewed work(s):Source: New Literary History, Vol. 20, No. 3, Greimassian Semiotics (Spring, 1989), pp. 551-562Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/469353 .

Accessed: 13/12/2012 03:19

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toNew Literary History.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded on Thu, 13 Dec 2012 03:19:25 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jhup

http://www.jstor.org/stable/469353?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp



On N arrativity*

AI gird as Julien Greimas and Paul Ricoeur

R ICOEUR: It is a pleasure to share once again a discussion session with Professor Greimas. Our paths have often crossed over the years and our friendship has increased along with these

exchanges. Let me first say how my own agenda led me not only to cross Greimas's path but also led me along the same road with him. Coming from the disciplines of phenomenology and hermeneutics, I was first interested in the way semiotics responds to the aporias of hermeneutics, which is fundamentally based on the notion of preunderstanding that is necessary before scientific discourse on literature and more specifically on narrative can be elaborated.

My initial conviction was, and to a large extent still is, that we have a first mode of understanding narrative configuration before having the slightest notion about semiotics. When linguists speak of phonemes they are dealing with objects that have no social or institutional existence. Narratives, by contrast, already have their social functions, and they are understood in a certain way in social intercourse among writers, narrators, readers, and speakers, for example. Therefore, this first order intelligibility, if I may so call it, has in a sense its own rules which are, if not thought out, at least understood. The best document concerning this type of understanding prior to any semiotics is provided by Aristotle's Poetics, which has a very articulate system of categories that ignores the difference between deep structures and surface structures. Aristotle speaks of the "mythos" as the configuration of incidence in the story and uses the term "sustasis" to refer to a sort of system of events. But the kind of intelligibility linked to our acquaintance with the way stories are plotted is closer to what Aristotle in the rest of his work called "forensis," that is to say, practical intelligence, which is closer to the way we use our intelligence in ethical and political matters than it is to the kind of episteme that functions in physical and social sciences at their systematic level.

* This discussion was the closing session of a colloquium on the "Universals of Narrativity" held at Victoria College, University of Toronto, on June 17, 1984 during the Fifth International Summer Institute for Semiotic and Structural Studies.



552 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

My first approach to semiotics was therefore to consider the kind of rationality it introduced in this field as being a second-order rationality that has as its object not narratives themselves but the preunderstanding we have of them. Hence, I would say that the rationality at work in semiotics derives from this first-order intelligibility, without being subordinated to it, for it has its own function precisely because it introduces a new kind of rationality into this first-order intelligence and understanding. This can be compared to what happens in the field of history, where there is a sense of belonging, a tradition of having expectations of the future. Thus, there is a kind of inner intelligence, an intelligibility of the historicality that characterizes us. But when historians bring their rules of explanation to bear on a topic, an inquiry and a dialectic is introduced between first-order intelligibility, the intelligibility of being historical, and historiography, the writing of history.

My main theme would therefore be that to explain more is to understand better, and it is in the exchange between understanding better and explaining more that semiotics makes sense for me. It increases the readability of texts which we have already understood to a certain extent without the help of semiotics. Hence the following three problems that we shall discuss since Professor Greimas kindly accepted the format of my own questions, for which I am most grateful.

The first problem I would like to raise is the relationship in Greimas's semiotic system between deep structures, with their paradigmatic principles, and superficial or surface structures. I I would like to go even further and raise the problem of the relationship between these deeper structures and the text understood at the locus of figuration, the figurative level of the story. My hunch here would be that if the rules of transformation that belong to a logic of narrative have a narrative character, it is to the extent that they go from the peripeteia of the surface to the dynamics, without which the system would not exist. My claim here is that surface is more than a kind of reflection of deep structure, it is more than the instantiation of narrative rules that can be construed at the deeper level. Something happens at the level of figuration that makes the dynamism of the processes described possible. In other words, to use vocabulary familiar to semioticians, in the shift from paradigmatic structures to their syntagmatization, the historicization of the story occurs at the surface and then it is by reflection of the surface at the deep level that the deep level itself may be said to transform, to provide transformations from a first state of effect to a last state of effect.

To illustrate this point I will take two examples, the second from



ON NARRATIVITY 553

Greimas's work itself. The first example is the study by one of Greimas's former students, Louis Marin, on narrative in the Gospels, in which he examined the role of the traitor who may be defined as an opponent. 2 In the actantial system it is easy to recognize the place of the traitor in the system, but the fact that this traitor is Judas, and that he has individual characteristics, is not secondary. For we can see that in the development of the character, say from Mark to John, there is an increasing enrichment that at the same time enriches the story itself, the plot itself. In Mark, Judas is simply one of the twelve apostles who shares the same meal with Jesus. He fulfills the prophecy that the Son of Man will be delivered to His enemies, but there is something contingent at every moment, since Judas is a proper name that connects the function of delivering the Son of Man to the traitor who makes treason happen. Making something happen therefore seems to introduce a contingency, the equivalent of what Aristotle called the peripeteia, which belongs, I think, to the surface of the text. It would therefore seem to me that we cannot apply to the relation between deep structures and surface structures something which would be too close, for example, to the unfortunate distinction between infrastructure and superstructure in Marx, where the superstructure would be a mere reflection of the infrastructure. We have here instead a dialectic of a kind that needs to be recognized.

I will take my second example from Greimas's wonderful book, Maupassant: The Semiotics of Text: Practical Exercises, a 250-page analysis of a 6-page short story, "Two Friends."3 The surface of the text narrates the story of a failed fishing expedition that will end with a reversal of roles because the enemy who has captured the unfortunate fishermen does not succeed in making them confess they are spies and that the fishing expedition is a cover story. The two friends refuse to accept the role of spies, and they are executed by a firing squad. The important event is that they are cast into the water and given back to the fish. At the end of the tale the Prussian officer catches the fish and has them fried up for himself. According to Greimas's analyses, in fact, it is the unfortunate fishermen who offer the fish to the officer. Greimas comes to this conclusion by constructing all the proper semiotic squares. He sets in the right place the oppositions between life and nonlife, death and nondeath and therefore all the exchanges among the four poles of the square. But it seems to me there is something decisive that does not belong to the model as a logical model, namely, the way in which the homologation of the individual characters is made in relation to the roles. This homologation of the sun with cold life, the empty sky with cold nonlife, Mount Valerian with cold death, and the water with cold nondeath is




brought about through the initiative of the enunciator. It is very important for this homologation to be decisive since it gives the clue to the whole story and makes the immersion of the unfortunate fishermen into a quasi resurrection. The enunciator's initiation of this very homologation makes the story unique. This is the story in which the miraculous fishing expedition in the end becomes the loser's victory. Therefore one could ask if it is not the surface of the text that provides the element of contingency and the series of unpredictable decisions which keep the story moving. Pushing this to the limit, I would say finally that the deep structure reflects the surface and not the contrary.

GREIMAS: In order to understand the questions raised by Professor Ricoeur and the objections that could be made to semiotic theory, it is necessary for me to make the following general points. I feel that not only in semiotics but also in linguistics more generally, and, again, in the whole of the social sciences, the first major methodological step necessary is the identification of pertinent levels. It is only when a scientific project posits the objects it wishes to describe or construct at a specific level, and not at ten different levels, that it can hold a coherent discourse on these objects. This constitutes, I believe, the superiority of linguistics over the other human sciences. Yet, this is also the general rule to be followed if one wishes to carry out rigorous semiotic practice. Thus, the distinction between the deep and surface levels is an important methodological choice. When developing models of description of narrative structures, it is necessary once again to identify two levels: an abstract deep level and a more concrete surface level. The difference between the two is that the surface level is an anthropomorphic level, because all syntax of natural languages is anthropomorphic. There exist subjects, objects, beneficiaries; qualifications are attributed to subjects, for example. Linguists generally try to hide this fact, but it cannot be hidden when one investigates discourse from a semantic perspective. This narrative level of an anthropomorphic nature posits relations between subject and object, the sender and receiver, which are fundamental. The deeper level we try to establish is the level of abstract operations, that is to say, operations in which the operating subject is no longer a human subject but, just as science demands, a substitutable subject. This is what guarantees the transmissibility of scientific knowledge. Often people do not understand the necessity I felt to posit the existence of this deep abstract level.

As to the semiotic square, it could be a square or a cube or a circle. The shape is of no importance whatsoever. It was necessary to formulate a minimum number of relational tools, and in this case, a



ON NARRATIVITY 555

fundamental structure of discourse that was as simple as possible. The other problem raised is related to the passage from one level to another. When passing from the surface level, what always raised problems for Chomsky's generative grammar is that he wanted to keep the equivalence of forms between the unfolding at one level and the syntactic unraveling at the other, whereas in semiotics, when passing from one level to another level toward the surface, we posit a progressive increase in signification. Hence, there is an increase in meaning as we go from deep structures toward the surface, and this increase in meaning must be distinguished from the increase in horizontal meaning which Paul Ricoeur spoke about. Within a story, meaning increases syntagmatically. We notice-simply, for example, by consulting a reader such as the one published by Dell Hymes on Language in Culture and Society-that three thousand human communities fabricate proverbs, riddles, stories, and so on in the same way, and that they narrate these by using forms which are, mutatis mutandis, identical.4 Consequently, when we speak about semio-narrative structures we are in fact dealing with kinds of universals of language, or rather with narrative universals. If we were not afraid of metaphysics we could say that these are properties of the human mind. The collective actant possesses these narrative universals and so does humanity. However, the semio-narrative level must be distinguished from what I call the discursive level since individuals are the ones who fabricate discourse. They do so by using narrative structures that already exist, that actually coexist with individuals. I thus imagine the subject of enunciation as a kind of funnel into which the narrative structures are poured drop by drop, and from which discourse emerges. This discourse, that is the product of the instance of enunciation, can also be divided into levels of depth, a thematic level and a figurative level. This I feel is the beginning of an answer to your question.

The set of constraints that is presupposed, that exists prior to all discourse, language, and thought, is so great that many semioticians do not know how to come to grips with it. For example, in his inaugural discourse at the College de France, my friend Roland Barthes said that language was fascist. I believe that he attributed too great an honor to fascism. We live by our organs, by our desires, in a circumscribed world, and our possibilities are limited. There are a great many restrictive things in human activity, and there is nothing fascist or communist about this. It is simply a question of the common human condition. However, if we raise the question of the instance of enunciation, then all of the lovers of liberty can take heart. The subject of enunciation partakes of all possible liberties. Once again a




semiotic deviation appears where each one makes use of all the possible specificities and liberties of discourse. We should take things much more seriously. The characteristics of discursive semiotics and what happens with the setting into discourse, or with discursivization, is essentially a phenomenon of spatialization, temporalization, and actorialization. Actants also are transformed into actors. But to say that discourse is dependent upon space and time is already to inscribe discourse, as well as the subject pronouncing it, within exteriority. In fact, it corresponds to projecting discourse outside the I, the subject of enunciation, and starting to relate stories about the world.

This level of discourse is extremely important and is probably the least studied of all in semiotics. It is also the least organized since we have only a very few ideas and projects to create models to account for it. In any case, a hypothetical provisional distinction can be made between the thematic and figurative levels. For example, when Chateaubriand says that "my life was as sad as the autumn leaves carried off by the wind," you can see that "my life was as sad" is thematic, let us say, more abstract than "the autumn leaves carried off by the wind." But one part of the sentence says the same thing as the other. They can thus be superimposed, and we obtain a metaphor that will be the figurative level. The figurative is a way of speaking in either temporal or spatial figures, and if we examine our own discourse we note that everything belongs to one or the other of these. The concept of figures is of major theoretical importance for us not only, as some claim, because in painting we distinguish abstract art from figurative art, but also because this term, which is taken from Hjelmslev's linguistic theory, corresponds to the nonsign, or the semantic part of the sign. On the other hand, "figure" also permits us to exploit the concept of "gestalt," the psychology of forms. The problem is to know how discourse is composed-not with these photographic representations of objects, but with schemata, so to speak, of objects-and how it is used in the most diverse situations. Chains of figures essentially constitute so-called narrative discourse; and what narrative, from this perspective, happens to correspond to is the exploitation of narrative structures from the deep level. We use parts of the narrative structures that we need, and we set them in our own discourse and clothe our own discourse in a figurative manner. Yet there do exist more or less abstract discourses.

RICOEUR: Figures are much more than a garment. What I mean to say is that at this level there is more than an investment, in the sense of an instantiation; in fact, there is something productive. Precisely what is productive is that you cannot have spatialization, temporalization, and actorialization without plot. The different kinds of plot



ON NARRATIVITY 557

produced in the history of narrative show us that what we are dealing with is not merely an application and projection at the surface, but that there is something really productive which follows rules, and that these rules for plot construction belong to the figurative level. Hence, there is productivity of the figurative level. I would like to return to this problem later. The point I want to make here is that the figurative level provides the dynamics for the rules of transformation and that they are projected backwards from the surface to the deep structures.

GREIMAS: You are right to take me to task for having said that the figurative clothed narrative structures. This is a bad metaphor and certainly not the way to express the problem. One should first of all take into account that the mode of existence of narrative structures is a virtual mode of existence. Narrative structures do not exist per se but are a mere moment in the generation of signification. When the subject of enunciation says something, he utters a durative discourse and proceeds by means of figures that are linked up. It is the figures that bear the traces of narrative universals.

RICOEUR: I want to approach the problem from a different angle. Are there not ways of dealing with narrative which, in a sense, bypass this distinction between deep structure and surface structure? Because of all the difficulties in connecting the levels, the freedom of enunciation, and also the constraints of the last level, I insist that on this last or third level, this level of figurativization has its own rules. Let us start with a comment made a few decades ago by Kate Hamburger in her book The Logic of Literature,5 when she writes that the great feat of narrative-" epic," in her own terms-is to explore minds in the third person narrative, to take all the narrative procedures through which we make judgments on the thoughts, feelings, actions of third persons, and to transfer them into first person narrative, thereby creating a pseudoautobiography. If we then say that the function of narrative is to provide a kind of mimesis of other minds, we need new categories, and we need to know whether these categories belong to the development of your own semiotics, or whether they are foreign to it. This is not a critique but, rather, a question.

Let us therefore look at what is required if we begin this way, the way Dorritt Cohn did in her work Transparent Minds,6 where she showed that narratives always have this function of exploring other minds. If we do so, we get constraints of another kind which are more of a typological than a structural nature. This is the route first followed by Stanzel in his attempt to work out a typology of narrative situations and, more powerfully, by Lubomir Dolezel in his attempt to set up a dialectic between the discourse of the narrator and the discourse of the character. The next step is to introduce the category of




narrator, a kind of figure that is the part of the text where someone says something about other minds. You therefore have the narrator's discourse, the character's discourse, and then it is necessary to develop a typology to show what the constraints are. But my claim would be that these constraints bypass the distinction between deep structure and surface structure in your semiotics. They belong to other systems of categorization, and I would like to know how these systems intersect with yours. Here, notions such as point of view and narrative voice would have to be introduced. (When I speak about point of view, I am thinking about the work done by the Tartu School, Uspensky, for example, who tried to show that the interplay between points of view is a principle of composition.) If, like Dorritt Cohn following Kate Hamburger, we speak of procedures between narrator and character, we are in fact attempting to structure enunciation itself. This is, I think, a third dimension which should be added to the Proppian categories of functions and actants that you have expanded. We would then be dealing with enunciation, with the enunciator inscribed in the text as narrator, but also with characters. If I raise the point it is because I think that ultimately the figurative has its own dimension, its own structuration, which are more a part of a sort of typology than of a logic of transformation.

I would also add that I question your own theory when you say that there is an increase in meaningfulness when we proceed from deep structures to surface structures. My question is, where does this increase in meaningfulness come from? I do not think that it is implied only in the trans formative capacities of the deep structures, which are constraints. 7 But it is a new kind of constraint that belongs to the level of figurativization and all the resources provided by notions such as narrator, characters, point of view, narrative voice, and so on. These are constraints of a different kind which are immediately figurative but not by derivation. I am aware that your school of thought is not a closed system but is proceeding step by step, from the most abstract to the more concrete. I feel you have reached the point precisely where you have to come to grips with contributions that do not come from your own semiotics. The development of the third stage of your semiotics requires that either you reject these categories or you reconstruct them within your own system of reference.

GREIMAS: I have always claimed that semiotics is not a science but rather a scientific project, still incomplete or unfinished; and I leave the task of completing and transforming it, starting from a few theoretical principles that I have attempted to establish, to future generations of semioticians. To begin with the deep structures and go toward the surface structures is perhaps a question of strategy.



ON NARRATIVITY 559

Personally, and on an anecdotal level, I was troubled by the way Katz and Fodor presented semantics as an appendix to Chomskian theory. They simply took sentences, aligned them next to one another, and established connections by drawing lines. They thought that discourse could be structured in this way. I found the same thing in Germany, where a type of text linguistics was developed that also treated only surface phenomena.

The second point you raised is related to the increase in signification that results from passing from one level to another. First of all, the way I present things is not by means of a combination of elements; that is to say, I do not usually start with simple units and then combine them to arrive at a more complex level. The problem as I see it is related to the passage from meaning to signification. As a linguist I see this in the procedure of articulation, a sort of continuous explosion. The production of meaning is the production of difference, the production of oppositions, and when discourse happens it takes place by a sort of series of successive explosions that produce the totality, the richness of discourse. On the other hand, we can very well imagine that an analyst dealing with a realized discourse would begin with the surface before going on to the deep structures. That would be another way of proceeding.

The third point I would like to bring up is related to point of view. What I will say about this does not come directly from my own personal research but from work done by one of my students, Jacques Fontanille, who wrote a thesis on the problem of point of view in discourse.8 He studied cinema, painting, Marcel Proust, advertising, and also quantum theory. He made use of common knowledge, especially when dealing with the concept of the narrator that you your· self mentioned. From a linguistic perspective, we notice that, in addition to modalities, there exists the fundamental element of the modulation of sentences constituted by aspectualities. These aspectualities can be imagined and described only if one posits an observer who is watching the process being actualized, whether it happens to be inchoative, durative, or terminative. Thus, natural language already utilizes the simulacrum of the observer to account for linguistic phenomena, even at the level of the sentence. If one examines narrative discourse one sees that these observers can be situated anywhere. When analyzing a text by Proust one notices that the observer changes point of view at almost every sentence. What Fontanille did was to posit that all discourse has a cognitive level and that it is at this cognitive level that a diad-two actants-is located: the observer-actant and the informer-actant. Between the two a sort of exchange of information takes place that can be integrated into the total or partial




knowledge of either actant according to the wish of the subject of enunciation, who can be a narrator. This would then be a case of syncretism between the actor-subject of the enunciation and the observer. However, this is not a generalizable actantial structure. I would therefore insist on the need to distinguish in the narrative flow between different levels-especially the cognitive and the pragmatic levels, for example.

As for the last question related to figurativity, I must say that I attach a great deal of importance to research being done in this area. During a year-long seminar given over to the study of these problems some progress was made, but it still is not satisfying, since this level of analysis is extremely complex. My first observation is that we can encounter figurative expression at different levels of depth. To take a very simple case, for example indirect discourse, when I say that it is warm, this can mean "open the window." Therefore, "it is warm" is a figure for saying something else. Another type is parabolic discourse, which is found for example in the Gospels. If you take the parable of the Prodigal Son you can see that the four or five partial parables, which do not start at exactly the same point, narrate the story figuratively. Each parable is displaced a little in relation to the other, but one can establish, by partial parables so to speak, the common thematic level that can account for the figurativization of the whole. This is another way of grasping figurativity, the type of discourse which we have studied most.

Finally, figurativity is found at the deep level of discourse, as was illustrated, for example, by Denis Bertrand in his thesis on Zola's Germinal. 9 In Zola's story about miners living underground, spatial configurations and spatial figures are transformed and become, so to speak, an autonomous language. When we read the novel we think that the lives of the miners are being narrated but, in fact, what is narrated is the great mystery of the mediation within this underground universe. Spatiality becomes an almost abstract sort of language to speak about something other than surface figurativity. These few examples are meant simply to point out that what I call the discursive level of semiotics is a level in which there is an articulation, a level at which other levels of depth can be found. The problematics of levels is a strategy because the number of levels can be increased or diminished in order to facilitate the analysis and the construction of the model.

RICOEUR: I find this answer satisfactory, satisfactory because I acknowledge and welcome this capacity of semiotics to expand. But I wonder whether the initial model is not undermined by this expansion, and whether the price to pay for such an expansion is not a



ON NARRATIVITY 561

complete reformulation of the basic terms of depth and surface. It is not by chance you ended up speaking about the depth of the surface, which, if I may say so, now has a meaning quite different from your original usage. We are no longer dealing with the idea that there are logical, semantic rules having a logic of transformation which are subsequently invested with anthropomorphic roles, and that then those anthropomorphic roles are once more invested in figures. Here figure itself has depth, and a quite different use is being made of the term figure than of the term figura, to which Auerbach devoted one of his most extraordinary essays. Here we are dealing with the polysemantic capacity of discourse, and it is no longer possible to know if we are at the level of the depth of the surface. The same story may be read in different ways because it is multilayered, and this multilayered nature of any story calls for the role of a reader, which we have not discussed at all. I think that by necessity we have to reintroduce the dialectic between the text and the reader because of this polysemanticism. I will give one example of bringing out the complexity of the figure, to which we bring meaningfulness but also introduce something that Kermode called secrecy. He took the example of parables and the strong interpretation given them by Mark. Parables are narrated in order not to be understood, that is to say, there is an increase of secrecy. The actual title of his work is The Genesis of Secrecy. 10 We therefore have to take into account the possibility of another kind of deep meaning, and in so doing we join up with the whole tradition of symbolism concerning the four meanings of the scriptures, for example. This is a tradition which, I think, has a scope quite different from that of deep structure as it is defined by semiotics. Finally, the best stories, those of Kafka for example, are not intended to increase intelligibility but to increase perplexity and to call into question the reader's understanding. Here productivity of the surface level is all the more striking as it increases both meaningfulness and puzzlement.

GREIMAS: I agree in part with what you say. Nonetheless, I would like to make a brief observation. What scientific status can be given to this type of task? Both of us have been speaking about intelligibility, but intelligibility can be situated at different levels. We can understand the main line, the essential; we can also attempt to understand the greater and greater complexity of discourse. I once investigated automatic translation. At that time it was said that to translate the syntax of simple sentences the computer had to carry out 2000 binary operations. Now, if we were to take a short story as complex as Maupassant's "Deux amis," we could ask how many binary operations would be necessary to analyze such a text. At each level I feel we would reach the sum of several million at least. Discourse is a complex




object and so is the world. Hence, there are no objections in principle if we deepen our knowledge of this phenomenon.

Now, regarding accessibility to the secret that language is, I agree with you, except that the hidden will perhaps remain hidden because we wish to hide things, or because we cannot speak about them. No matter. I would simply say that we linguists or semioticians have extremely poor tools to speak about the secret of language. To speak about meaning or signification, one of the rare means we have at our disposal is transcoding, that is, to take a discourse, a sentence, and to translate it into another discourse, with other words, in a different way. This is how we understand what the first sentence or the first discourse signified. Operations of transcoding are the only means we have to grasp signification and, consequently, when I take a parable such as the Prodigal Son, I am obliged to try and translate it. In doing so perhaps I have not exhausted the totality of meaning, which is regrettable, but unfortunately it is impossible to do otherwise.

PARIS (Translated and adapted by Paul Perron and Frank Collins)

NOTES

1 See also, in this issue, Paul Ricoeur, "Greimas's Narrative Grammar." 2 Louis Marin, Semiotique de la Passion: Topiqu.es et figures (Paris, 1971 ). 3 AlgirdasJulien Greimas, Maupassant: The Semiotics of Text: Practical Exercises, tr. Paul Perron (Amsterdam, 1988). 4 See Language in Culture and Society: A Reader in Linguistics and Anthropology, ed. Dell Hymes (New York, 1964). 5 Kate Hamburger, The Logic of Literature, tr. Marilyn G. Rose (Bloomington, Ind., 1973). 6 Dorritt Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton, N.J. , 1978). 7 For a detailed discussion of this point, see Jean Petitot -Cocorda, M orphogenese du sens (Paris, 1985), esp. pp. 260-68. See also Paul Perron, Introduction, On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory, by Algirdas Julien Greimas, tr. Paul Perron and Frank Collins (Minneapolis, 1987), pp. xxiv-xlv. 8 Jacques Fontanille, Le Savoir Partage: Semiotique et thlorie de la connaissance chez Marcel Proust (Paris, 1987). 9 Denis Bertrand, L'espace et le sens: "Germinal" d'Emile Zola (Paris, 1985). 10 Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge, Mass., 1979).


on narrativity

Documents