What we talk about when we talk about texts

Identity compressions and the ontology of the “work”

Bibliographic Data

ID10738076
AuthorsVera Tobin (0000-0002-6204-7686, 1Department of Cognitive Science, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA, corresponding author), Todd Oakley (0000-0002-5242-461X, 1Department of Cognitive Science, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA)
Year2017
Volume2017
Issue215
Pages119-141
Publication date2017-03-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSemiotica (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0037-1998 • E-ISSN: 1613-3692
PublisherWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/sem-2015-0146
OpenAlexW2582710809
LanguageEN
References cited6

The ideal of an “authoritative text” is no longer a taken-for-granted assumption among editorial and critical theorists of the literary text. Rather, texts are, and should be thought of as, composites of distributed activities of multiple social agents. This view has many virtues, but it quickly runs up against the deeply entrenched gestaltism of the “underlying work” stance, a perspective that invades some of the most commonplace ways of talking about Anglo-American literary texts. We explain the fundamental tensions that arise from this stance and offer a general ontology of literary artifacts that can account for the ways we habitually conceptualize texts and their effects. We provide a basic cognitive framework for understanding the ontology of the document, in its most generalized form, which can embrace a wide range of practices, literary and otherwise, that have significant implications for understanding editorial, authorial, and readerly behavior

Aesthetics · Cognition · Epistemology · Ideal (ethics) · Identity (music) · Linguistics · Narrative · Ontology · Perspective (graphical) · Sociology · Advanced Text Analysis Techniques · Computer Science · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Philosophy · Psychology

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