修辞叙事学和言语行为理论(上)

Introduction to Rhetorical Narratology and Speech-Act Theory(To becontinued)

卡恩斯的《修辞叙事学》是后经典叙事学的代表性成果之一,该书以语境主义作为指导思想,将语言哲学中的言语行为理论运用到对叙述声音及其受众的分析和研究,借助修辞学的理论工具延伸了传统结构主义的研究方法,最终希望建构一门以叙事交流、言语行为、情境语境、基本规约、读者脚本、修辞影响等作为基本内容的修辞叙事学。这里译出的是《修辞叙事学》导论的第一、二节,卡恩斯首先梳理叙事学历史,指出叙事学研究的两点不足:一是叙事学的主要工作是对叙事文本做技术性的分析,二是叙事学对于受众接触叙事文本时所处的语境没有给予足够的重视。随后,他主张以言语行为理论为基础强化其语境主义立场,并建构真正意义上的修辞叙事学。

As one of the important works of postclassical narratology,Kearns’s Rhetorical Narratology embraces contextualism and extends the scope of the traditional structuralist approach by applying speech-act theory to the study of narrative voices and their audience,with the ultimate goal of establishing a rhetorical narratology based upon narrative communication,speech act,situational context,ur-conventions,reader’s script,and rhetorical effect,etc.Here is the first two parts of Chinese translation of the Rhetorical Narratology,in which Kearns focuses on the history of narratological studies in order to show two defects,that is,the predominance of technical analysis on narrative texts and the neglect of the context for audience’s contact with texts.So he contends that by means of theory of speech act narrative studies re-enforces the attitude of linguistic contextualism so that the pursuit of a true meaning could be based on the firm ground.