The role of second person narration in representing mental states in Sylvia Plath’s Smith Journal

This paper looks at instances of second person narration in the first journal published in The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (Kukil, 2000) in order to determine the potential that second person narration can have for the linguistic representation of mental states. The contributions of different disciplines (narratology, linguistics, psychology) to the study of second person narration are considered and their findings are re-applied to a non-fictional text. In a corpus-informed comparative analysis, the paper takes into consideration both perspectives from narratology and developments in the understanding of language use in the field of psychology to provide an interdisciplinary, but cognitively inclined perspective on the phenomenon. Appearances of second person narration are chronologically tracked through the data and compared to biographical developments in Sylvia Plath's life; entries written in the first- and second person are compared to each other to determine linguistic differences using corpus methods; the results of the two analyses are then interpreted in the light of traditional functions attributed to second person narration in narratology, and in the light of research in narrative psychology. The paper aims to demonstrate that second person narration can project a sense of emotional depth and inner conflict as well as of emotional balance. However, the temporal orientation of a given text will influence which of these effects predominates

Speaking of madness in the first person / speaking madness in the second person? Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and 'The Cheater’s Guide to Love'

peer reviewedDrawing on Soshana Felman’s distinction between “the texts of madness” and “the madness of texts”, Munos looks at Junot Díaz’s "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" (2008) and “The Cheater’s Guide to Love” (2012), a short story written in the second person, with a view to showing how the “reader-effects” at play in these two texts further ambiguate the suggested equation between cultural authenticity and Dominican hyper-masculinity. By comparing Díaz’s use of the first person in his novel and that of the second person in his short story, Munos’s aim is to show how “The Cheater’s Guide” shifts the ground of analysis even more irrevocably from thematizing the madness of Dominican hyper-masculinity to dramatizing the status of knowledge and the very possibility of interpretation

You’re the emotional one: the role of perspective for emotion processing in reading comprehension

Two experiments were conducted to explore whether perspective influences the way readers engage with and process emotional information while reading. Texts presenting characters in an emotional situation from either a personal or an onlooker perspective were presented and reading times were measured for each sentence. Participants also provided emotional self-ratings after reading. In the first experiment, positive texts were processed with greater ease, especially when readers experienced the texts from a personal perspective. In Experiment 2, an emotional match/mismatch was inserted so that a final explicit emotion word either matched or mismatched the emotional valence of the text. Mismatch effects were stronger and more consistent for the personal perspective. The two experiments provide evidence that the perspective of the reader can influence emotion processing. Processing of emotional information was easier for the personal perspective, and readers were more sensitive to inconsistent emotional information from that perspective

翻訳 モーニカ・フルーデルニク 物語論入門（II）

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