The Dummy in Critical Discourse

minimum a narrator who has read a text and a narrataire,1 generally a group of readers, who has read the same text. The narrator reveals something in the text he has seen or discovered that he assumes the narrataire has not seen. If the critic supposed that the others saw what he saw he would have no reason to point it out to them. Of course the critic cannot be sure what all the others see, so the general strategy of criticism is to construct a discourse whose rhetoric is revelatory, and that can be represented by a single imperative: look! If Genette is right to say that the Recherche develops the sentence Marcel devient ecrivain (p. 75), then criticism develops the sentence Look at what I see that you don't see. In criticism the narrator always sees more than the narrataire

Linguistics · Sociology · Linguistics and Discourse Analysis · Philosophy