On literary narratives, fictionality, and the rules of conversation

Abstract

"Writing, when properly managed (as you may be sure I thirik mine is) is but a different name for conversation" - "thus Laurence Sterne in Trist Shandy ( 1767). Such statements provoke an examination of possible links between literary narratives and iinguistic models of oral communication. Recent developments in the field of pragmatics, in particular Speech Acts, Deixis and H. P.Grice's Logic and Conversation, provide concepts and structurai principles which could prove useful to literary criticism. This comment, for instance, by Roland Barthes might suggest the need to resort to the theory of deixis: Il ne peut y avoir de recit sans narratetir et sans auditeur.