Dialogicality and ethics

Four cases of literary address

Roger D. Sell | Åbo Akademi University

Now that linguists are beginning to see an element of dialogicality in all language use, there is more scope for a humanized dialogue analysis with ameliorative goals. This can divide its labour between a communicational criticism dealing with the ethics of address, and a mediating criticism dealing with the ethics of response. In the present article, I outline the distinctive features of such an approach, and by sketching a communicational theory of literature (cf. Sell 2000) draw particular attention to the dialogicality arising between literary writers and their audience. From this starting-point, I then examine instances of four different literary genres for the light they can throw on the general ethics of address. Key terms here are “genuine communication”, by which I mean any manner of communication which respects the autonomy of the human other, and “negative capability”, defined by Keats (1954 [1817]: 53) as the capability of “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”.

Keywords: dialogicality, humanized dialogue analysis, communicational criticism, mediating criticism, literary-communicational theory, genuine communication, negative capability, ethics

Published online: 27 May 2011
https://doi.org/10.1075/ld.1.1.06sel

Cited by

Cited by 5 other publications

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2020. In Literary Communication as Dialogue [FILLM Studies in Languages and Literatures, 14],

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2021. In Words, Books, Images, and the Long Eighteenth Century [FILLM Studies in Languages and Literatures, 16],

Garcia Landa, Jose Angel

2011. El autor implícito y el narrador no fiable- según nuestro punto de vista (Implied Authors and Unreliable Narrators- From Our Point of View). SSRN Electronic Journal

Ledent, Bénédicte

2014. In Literature as Dialogue [Dialogue Studies, 22], ► pp. 99 ff.

Sell, Roger D.

2014. In Literature as Dialogue [Dialogue Studies, 22], ► pp. 1 ff.

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