Conspicuous Silences
Subtitle: Implicature and Fictionality in the Victorian Novel
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: Dec 13, 2016
Language: eng
Format: hardcover
Number of pages: 208
ISBN-13: 9780198769743
Description: How are a reader's perceptions of a plot impacted by its presentation through textual clues rather than explicit narration, and why would an author choose this comparatively indirect mode of narration? 'Conspicuous Silences' answers these questions by examining Victorian novels in which pivotal events are left inexplicit for hundreds of pages at a time, but are nonetheless evident to the reader. The clarity with which readers understand these inexplicit plot lines is evidenced by their ability to follow the progression of narratives that rely heavily on the inexplicit content being detected; without this reader comprehension, these narratives would be deemed incoherent. In linguistics, communications that depend on a hearer's or reader's inference, rather on their 'decoding' the explicit content of an utterance, are termed 'implicatures'. 'Conspicuous Silences' explores the impact that central, sustained implicatures have on a reader's experience of a novel. It also discusses how authors may generate those implicatures by exploiting the reader's assumption of narratorial omniscience, and the correlated reader assumption of a narrative's fictionality.
Notes: Source title: Conspicuous Silences: Implicature and Fictionality in the Victorian Novel (Oxford English Monographs)