Full Description
According to the traditional view, meaning presents itself under the form of some kind of identity. To give the meaning of a sentence amounts to being capable of producing some substitute based on the identity of the terms of the sentence. Is then the meaning of a book, or of any text, the capacity of rewriting it? Instead of retaining a double-standard theory of meaning, one for sentences and another for texts, that would allow for an ad hoc gap, the author provides a unified conception, called the question view of language he has developed, known as problematology. He pursues a systematic analysis of questioning in literature and shows how questioning makes the understanding process possible.
Contents
1. Acknowledgments; 2. 0. Introduction; 3. 1. The Classical Conception of Meaning and its Shortcomings; 4. 1.1. Meaning in a literary setting; 5. 1.2. The arguments for the defense; 6. 1.3. More about the propositional theory of language and its semantic consequences: the Xerox theory of meaning; 7. 1.4. Context matters; 8. 2. Toward an Integrated Theory of Meaning; 9. 2.1. The question of the validity of the substitution view; 10. 2.2. The problematological view of language; 11. 2.3. The problematological theory of reference; 12. 2.4. Reference and meaning; 13. 2.5. From substitutions to questions; 14. 2.6. Is meaning really substitutional?; 15. 2.7. Conclusion; 16. 3. The Rhetoric of Textuality; 17. 3.1. Textual meaning is rhetorical; 18. 3.2. Rhetoric and argumentation; 19. 3.3. Why should rhetoric (argumentation) be problematologically conceptualized?; 20. 3.4. Literary versus non-literary discourse; 21. 3.5 What is literature?; 22. 4. Ideas and Ideology; 23. 4.1. The nature of ideas; 24. 4.2. Ideas and questions in Plato's theory; 25. 4.3. Ideas and political ideologies; 26. 4.4. The logic of ideology; 27. 5. The Nature of Literariness; 28. 5.1. Ideas and textuality; 29. 5.2. Literature and political ideology; 30. 5.3. The dialectics of fiction; 31. 5.4. Fiction and reality; 32. 5.5. Literary forms as means of materializing the problematological difference; 33. 5.6. The birth of the novel: Don Quixote as an illustration; 34. 5.7. Conclusion; 35. 6. The Interpretative Process; 36. 6.1. Beyond traditions and omissions; 37. 6.2. Answerhood as meaning; 38. 6.3. The hermeneutic question and its answer; 39. 6.4. Textuality as the meeting point of poetics and hermeneutics; 40. 6.5. Where do we find the questions answered by a text?; 41. 6.6. Textual dialectics; 42. Footnotes; 43. References
