RT list: The Reader

If "implicature" is _reading between the lines_ -- what is _explicature_?

In a message dated 1/19/2009 1:10:34 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,
B.Clark@mdx.ac.uk writes:
Hi,

Does anybody know any good sources on writing and inference/pragmatics?
Nicky Owtram and I are looking at the inferences made by writers in various
genres and ways of teaching writing by focusing on inference. We have one or two
clues but are interested to find out more. We’re interested in writing and
inference more broadly as well as finding anything fairly closely connected to
our own interests.

Thanks and best wishes,

Billy
-----

Well, I would suggest, "The Reader", with Golden-Globe winner, Kate Winslet
(Reading, born, ain't that ironic or merely echoic?)

An analysis of the film would reveal:

(1) _Pace_, superficially, Grice, it's the _reading_ that counts, not the
writing. Read is cognate in English with 'riddle', and no trace of anything
classical about it (lego, etc.), so I'm not sure I get the gist. It seems that
for a Germanic speaker, to 'read' is to 'interpret' in a very _serious_ way.
Kate Winslet (or her character) rather, cannot read (is illiterate). Yet he
claims to read (to know). Yet she couldn't have _written_ (let alone read in
the proceedings) the condemnation of that contingent of Jewish war prisoners in
the burning of the Church -- eironic at worst --.

(2) As the film develops, the 'reader' becomes one. She reads, as we would
say, _everything_ -- a 'hedonist' reader rather than a critical one. She
learns, ditto, to _write_.

(3) At the more meta-interpretive level, it would seem, fallaciously, that
only _literacy_ involves the higher levels of the brain, and that the woman
was cognitively impaired when she could not read, but becomes all the wiser
(and older) when she does. I'm not so sure morality can be explained
pragmatically so easily as that!

------

Re: 'writing', in Gricean terms, it's just 'intended' reading, isn't it? As
Emma Thomson says in "Last Chance Harvey":

DH: Your goal in life?
ET: Oh, dunno. Become a writer, I suppose.
DH: What kind of writer.
ET: Beach, summer novel writer. Escapist sort of thing.

Even in the case of Emily Dickinson (and she did hold correspondence on her
'writings' to various people) we could apply Grice's 'borderline' cases: Even
in the scenario where the writer does not intend that her writing will be
'deciphered', one can assume a meta-representational intention to the effect
that she can always read herself!

Cheers,

J. L.
The Grice Club, etc.
Villa Speranza, Bordighera

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Received on Wed Jan 21 15:26:43 2009