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Consider the following expressions from Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, 66: |
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(2) Consider for example the proceedings that we call ''games.'' I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games. . . . Look and see whether there is anything common to all. For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. |
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All the personal pronouns (whether explicit or implicit) are not indicating a person called Wittgenstein or any empirical reader: they are textual strategies. The intervention of a speaking subject is complementary to the activation of a Model Reader whose intellectual profile is determined only by the sort of interpretive operations he is supposed to perform (to detect similarities, to consider certain games . . .). Likewise the 'author' is nothing else but a textual strategy establishing semantic correlations and activating the Model Reader: /I mean board-games/ and so on, means that, within the framework of that text, the word /game/ will assume a given semantic value and will become able to encompass board-games, card-games, and so on. |
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According to this text Wittgenstein is nothing else but a philosophical style, and his Model Reader is nothing else but his capability to cooperate in order to reactualize that philosophical style. |
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In the following paragraphs I shall renounce the use of the term /author/ if not as a mere metaphor for «textual strategy», and I shall use the term Model Reader in the terms stipulated above. |
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In other words, the Model Reader is a textually established set of felicity conditions (Austin, 1962) to be met in order to have a macro-speech act (such as a text is) fully actualized. |
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0.3.1. Narrative and Nonnarrative Texts |
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To say that every text is a syntactic-semantico-pragmatic device whose foreseen interpretation is part of its generative process is still a generality. The solution would be to represent an 'ideal' text as a system of nodes or joints and to establish at which of them the cooperation of the Model Reader is expected and elicited. |
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Probably such an analytical representation escapes the present possibilities of a semiotic theory: this has been attempted only apropos of concrete texts (even though the categories provided ad hoc were aiming at a more universal application). The most successful examples are, I think, Barthes' (1970) analysis of Sarrazine and Greimas' (1976) of Maupassant's Deux amis. More detailed analyses of shorter textual frag- |
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