The positioned reader

Abstract

Modern stylistics is in the process of emerging completely from the shadows of the New Critical prohibitions on discussing the intentional and psychological fallacies in literary reading. Informed by cognitive linguistics and the psychology of cognition, a strong tradition of cognitive poetics has become established within stylistics, serving as a powerful challenge to the psychological fallacy in particular: readerly effects, emotions and significances in literary engagement are now regarded as part of the legitimate ground of stylistic study. In the classical terms that underpin the long view of stylistics, we now possess a good research programme in the systematic account of meaningfulness (logos) and emotional affect (pathos). What remains is the challenge of a similarly principled account of ethics.

However, just as the cognitive turn has taken an applied linguistic approach to interpretation and aesthetics, so our cognitive poetic approach to ethos must be based on a descriptive account not of authority and immanent intentionality, but on the readerly sense of adopting a position in the process of literary reading. The concept of the intentional fallacy cannot be criticised as comprehensively as the psychological fallacy, but it nevertheless poses the wrong sort of question.

This article sets out an encompassing framework for the analysis of ethics as an interaction between readerly disposition and textual imposition, to produce a sense of a ‘positioned reader’ of a literary work. Brief analytical illustrations from literary prose fiction are presented for exploration. The article draws on and questions related traditions in critical theory and psychology, with the aim of establishing a fully rounded stylistics as the foundational principle and principal method in literary study. My ultimate framing objective is an applied linguistic approach to literary scholarship that is evidential, dialogic and humane, and which completes the circle of meaning, feeling and significance familiar to generations of literary scholars.