Characters in Bakhtin\u27s Theory

A common focus in many modern theories of literature is a reassessment of the traditional view of the character in a narrative text. The position that this article defends is that a revised conception is necessary for an understanding of the means by which dialogism is said to function in novelistic discourse. Revising the notion does not, however, involve discarding it outright as recent theories of the subject would have us do. Nor can we simply void it of all psychological content as suggested by many structuralist proposals. To retain Bakhtin\u27s concept of the notion of character, we must understand the term psychological in the context of his early book on Freud. In artificially combining Bakhtin\u27s isolated remarks on the literary character, we arrive at a view which postulates textualized voice-sources in the novel. In such a schema, maximum variability and freedom is afforded to each separate source. Yet we must use the term separate with extreme caution, for in Bakhtin\u27s writings all those beings which we might wish to view as separate entities are in fact intricately intertwined and inseparable. Viewing something as absolutely separate implies knowing intimately all of its boundaries and possibilities. This is surely a capacity which Bakhtin would deny us when it comes to human figures in texts

Au-delà du langage, c'est la mort d'un bavard

Le Bavard de Louis-René des Forêts nous livre le spectacle de celui qui ne dit rien. Ce spectacle doit se comprendre comme un énoncé performatif dont les limites s'étendent bien au-delà de quelques mots ou structures isolés. Si nous étudions la performativité en tant qu'événement, nous voyons, grâce à ce roman, que tout sens se lie en dernière analyse à la mort de l'acteur et de son spectacle. Le texte de des Forêts creuse sous la surface du langage parce qu'il crée du sens à partir de ce qui compose le discours vide d'un bavard. Ainsi voit le jour une série de verbes performatifs d'apparence intolérable: «Je parle», «Je mens» et «Je meurs».Louis-René des Forêts' novel, le Bavard, is a performance of the act of saying nothing. As a performative utterance extended beyond the limits of isolated words or structures, this novel shows us, through an exploration of the nature of the performance as event, that meaning is ultimately linked to the death of the performer and the performance. This text goes beyond the surface of language by creating meaning with words which constitute idle talk and thus puts into motion some seemingly impossible performatives: "I am speaking", "I am Iying", and "I am dying"

Rigidity of symmetric linearly constrained frameworks in the plane

A bar-joint framework $(G,p)$ is the combination of a finite simple graph $G=(V,E)$ and a placement $p:V\rightarrow \mathbb{R}^d$. The framework is rigid if the only edge-length preserving continuous motions of the vertices arise from isometries of the space. Motivated by applications where boundary conditions play a significant role, one may generalise and consider linearly constrained frameworks where some vertices are constrained to move on fixed affine subspaces. Streinu and Theran characterised exactly which linearly constrained frameworks are generically rigid in 2-dimensional space. In this article we extend their characterisation to symmetric frameworks. In particular necessary combinatorial conditions are given for a symmetric linearly constrained framework in the plane to be isostatic (i.e. minimally infinitesimally rigid) under any finite point group symmetry. In the case of rotation symmetry groups whose order is either 2 or odd, these conditions are then shown to be sufficient under suitable genericity assumptions, giving precise combinatorial descriptions of symmetric isostatic graphs in these contexts.Comment: 26 pages, 9 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2210.0606