Chapter Title: On Narrativity: Debate with A J.

Greimas

Book Title: A Ricoeur Reader

Book Subtitle: Reflection and Imagination
Book Author(s): Mario J. Valdés
Published by: University of Toronto Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3138/9781442664883.18

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On Narrativity:
Debate with AJ. Greimas

Ricoeur: It is a pleasure to share once again a discussion session with

Professor Greimas. Our paths have often crossed over the years and
our friendship has increased along with these exchanges. Let me first
say how my own agenda not only led me to cross Greimas's path but
also led me along the same road with him. Coming from the disci-
plines of phenomenology and hermeneutics, I was first interested in
the way semiotics responds to the aporias of hermeneutics, which is
fundamentally based on the notion of pre-understanding that is
necessary before scientific discourse on literature, and more specifi-
cally on narrative, can be elaborated.
My initial conviction was, and to a large extent still is, that we have
a first mode of understanding narrative configuration before having
the slightest notion about semiotics. When linguists speak of pho-
nemes, they are dealing with objects that have no social or institu-
tional existence. Narratives, by contrast, already have their social
functions, and they are understood in a certain way in social inter-
course among writers, narrators, readers, and speakers, for example.
Therefore, this first-order intelligibility, if I may so call it, has in a
sense its own rules, which are, if not thought out, at least understood.
The best document concerning this type of understanding prior to
any semiotics is provided by Aristotle's Poetics, which has a very ar-
ticulate system of categories that ignores the difference between
deep structures and surface structures. Aristotle speaks of the
'mythos' as the configuration of incidence in the story and uses the
term 'sustasis' to refer to a sort of system of events. But the kind of
intelligibility linked to our acquaintance with the way stories are
plotted is closer to what Aristotle in the rest of his work called
'forensis,' that is to say, practical intelligence, which is closer to the

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288 A Ricoeur Reader

way we use our intelligence in ethical and political matters than it is

to the kind of episteme that functions in physical and social sciences
at their systematic level.
My first approach to semiotics was therefore to consider the kind
of rationality it introduced in this field as being a second-order
rationality that has as its object not narratives themselves but the
pre-understanding we have of them. Hence, I would say that the
rationality at work in semiotics derives from this first-order intelligi-
bility, without being subordinated to it, for it has its own function
precisely because it introduces a new kind of rationality into this
first-order intelligence and understanding. This can be compared to
what happens in the field of history, where there is a sense of
belonging, a tradition of having expectations of the future. Thus,
there is a kind of inner intelligence, an intelligibility of the historically
that characterizes us. But when historians bring their rules of expla-
nation to bear on a topic, an inquiry and a dialectic is introduced
between first-order intelligibilty, the intelligibility of being historical,
and historiography, the writing of history.
My main theme would therefore be that to explain more is to
understand better, and it is in the exchange between understanding
better and explaining more that semiotics makes sense for me. It
increases the readability of texts which we have already understood
to a certain extent without the help of semiotics. Hence the following
three problems that we shall discuss since Professor Greimas kindly
accepted the format of my own questions, for which I am most
grateful.
The first problem I would like to raise is the relationship in
Greimas's semiotic system between deep structures, with their para-
digmatic principles, and superficial or surface structures.11 would like
to go even farther and raise the problem of the relationship between
these deeper structures and the text understood at the locus of
figuration, the figurative level of the story. My hunch here would be
that if the rules of transformation that belong to a logic of narrative
have a narrative character, it is to the extent that they go from the
peripeteia of the surface to the dynamics, without which the system
would not exist. My claim here is that surface is more than a kind of
reflection of deep structure, it is more than the instantiation of
narrative rules that can be construed at the deeper level. Something
happens at the level of figuration that makes the dynamism of the
processes described possible. In other words, to use vocabulary

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Debate with A J. Greimas 289

familiar to semioticians, in the shift from paradigmatic structures to

their syntagmatization, the historicization of the story occurs at the
surface and then it is by reflection of the surface at the deep level that
the deep level itself may be said to transform, to provide transfor-
mations from a first state of effect to a last state of effect.
To illustrate this point I will take two examples, the second from
Greimas's work itself. The first example is the study by one of
Greimas's former students, Louis Marin, on narrative in the Gospels,
in which he examined the role of the traitor who may be defined as an
opponent.2 In the actantial system it is easy to recognize the place of
the traitor in the system, but the fact that this traitor is Judas, and that
he has individual characteristics, is not secondary. For we can see
that, in the development of the character, say, from Mark to John,
there is an increasing enrichment that at the same time enriches the
story itself, the plot itself. In Mark, Judas is simply one of the twelve
apostles who shares the same meal with Jesus. He fulfils the proph-
ecy that the Son of Man will be delivered to His enemies, but there is
something contingent at every moment, since 'Judas' is a proper
name that connects the function of delivering the Son of Man to the
traitor who makes treason happen. Making something happen there-
fore seems to introduce a contingency, the equivalent of what
Aristotle called the peripeteia, which belongs, I think, to the surface
of the text. It would therefore seem to me that we cannot apply to the
relation between deep structures and surface structures something
which would be too close, for example, to the unfortunate distinction
between infrastructure and superstructure in Marx, where the super-
structure would be a mere reflection of the infrastructure. We have
here instead a dialectic of a kind that needs to be recognized.
I will take my second example from Greimas's wonderful book,
Maupassant: The Semiotics of Text: Practical Exercises, a 250-page
analysis of a 6-page short story, Two Friends.'3 The surface of the text
narrates the story of a failed fishing expedition that will end with a
reversal of roles because the enemy who has captured the unfortu-
nate fishermen does not succeed in making them confess they are
spies and that the fishing expedition is a cover story. The two friends
refuse to accept the role of spies, and they are executed by a firing
squad. The important event is that they are cast into the water and
given back to the fish. At the end of the tale the Prussian officer
catches the fish and has them fried up for himself. According to
Greimas's analyses, in fact, it is the unfortunate fishermen who offer

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290 A Ricoeur Reader

the fish to the officer. Greimas comes to this conclusion by construct-

ing all the proper semiotic squares. He sets in the right place the
oppositions between life and non-life, death and non-death and
therefore all the exchanges among the four poles of the square. But it
seems to me there is something decisive that does not belong to the
model as a logical model, namely, the way in which the homologation
of the individual characters is made in relation to the roles. This
homologation of the sun with cold life, the empty sky with cold non-
life, Mount Valerian with cold death, and the water with cold non-
death is brought about through the initiative of the enunciator. It is
very important for this homologation to be decisive since it gives the
clue to the whole story and makes the immersion of the unfortunate
fishermen into a quasi resurrection. The enunciator's initiation of
this very homologation makes the story unique. This is the story in
which the miraculous fishing expedition in the end becomes the
loser's victory. Therefore one could ask if it is not the surface of the
text that provides the element of contingency and the series of
unpredictable decisions which keep the story moving. Pushing this to
the limit, I would say finally that the deep structure reflects the
surface and not the contrary.
Greimas: In order to understand the questions raised by Professor
Ricoeur and the objections that could be made to semiotic theory, it
is necessary for me to make the following general points. I feel that
not only in semiotics but also in linguistics more generally, and,
again, in the whole of the social sciences, the first major methodolog-
ical step necessary is the identification of pertinent levels. It is only
when a scientific project posits the objects it wishes to describe or
construct at a specific level, and not at ten different levels, that it can
hold a coherent discourse on these objects. This constitutes, I be-
lieve, the superiority of linguistics over the other human sciences.
Yet, this is also the general rule to be followed if one wishes to carry
out rigorous semiotic practice. Thus, the distinction between the
deep and surface levels is an important methodological choice. When
developing models of description of narrative structures, it is neces-
sary once again to identify two levels: an abstract deep level and a
more concrete surface level. The difference between the two is that
the surface level is an anthropomorphic level, because all syntax of
natural languages is anthropomorphic. There exist subjects, objects,
beneficiaries; qualifications are attributed to subjects, for example.
Linguists generally try to hide this fact, but it cannot be hidden when

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Debate with A J. Greimas 291

one investigates discourse from a semantic perspective. This narra-

tive level of an anthropomorphic nature posits relations between
subject and object, the sender and receiver, which are fundamental.
The deeper level we try to establish is the level of abstract opera-
tions, that is to say, operations in which the operating subject is no
longer a human subject but, just as science demands, a substitutable
subject. This is what guarantees the transmissibility of scientific
knowledge. Often people do not understand the necessity I felt to
posit the existence of this deep abstract level.
As to the semiotic square, it could be a square or a cube or a circle.
The shape is of no importance whatsoever. It was necessary to
formulate a minimum number of relational tools, and in this case, a
fundamental structure of discourse that was as simple as possible.
The other problem raised is related to the passage from one level to
another. When passing from the surface level, what always raised
problems for Chomsky's generative grammar is that he wanted to
keep the equivalence of forms between the unfolding at one level
and the syntactic unravelling at the other, whereas in semiotics, when
passing from one level to another level towards the surface, we posit
a progressive increase in signification. Hence, there is an increase in
meaning as we go from deep structures toward the surface, and this
increase in meaning must be distinguished from the increase in
horizontal meaning which Paul Ricoeur spoke about. Within a story,
meaning increases syntagmatically. We notice - simply, for example,
by consulting a reader such as the one published by Dell Hymes,
Language in Culture and Society - that three thousand human com-
munities fabricate proverbs, riddles, stories, and so on in the same
way, and that they narrate these by using forms which are, mutatis
mutandis, identical.4 Consequently, when we speak about semio-
narrative structures we are in fact dealing with kinds of universals of
language, or rather with narrative universals. If we were not afraid of
metaphysics we could say that these are properties of the human
mind. The collective actant possesses these narrative universals and
so does humanity. However, the semio-narrative level must be distin-
guished from what I call the discursive level since individuals are the
ones who fabricate discourse. They do so by using narrative struc-
tures that already exist, that actually coexist with individuals. I thus
imagine the subject of enunciation as a kind of funnel into which the
narrative structures are poured drop by drop, and from which dis-
course emerges. This discourse, that is the product of the instance of

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292 A Ricoeur Reader

enunciation, can also be divided into levels of depth, a thematic level

and a figurative level. This I feel is the beginning of an answer to your
question.
The set of constraints that is presupposed, that exists prior to all
discourse, language, and thought, is so great that many semioticians
do not know how to come to grips with it. For example, in his
inaugural discourse at the College de France, my friend Roland
Barthes said that language was fascist. I believe that he attributed too
great an honour to fascism. We live by our organs, by our desires, in a
circumscribed world, and our possibilities are limited. There are a
great many restrictive things in human activity, and there is nothing
fascist or communist about this. It is simply a question of the com-
mon human condition. However, if we raise the question of the
instance of enunciation, then all of the lovers of liberty can take
heart. The subject of enunciation partakes of all possible liberties.
Once again a semiotic deviation appears where each one makes use
of all the possible specificities and liberties of discourse. We should
take things much more seriously. The characteristics of discursive
semiotics arid what happens with the setting into discourse, or with
discursivization, is essentially a phenomenon of spatialization,
temporalization, and actorialization. Act ants also are transformed
into actors. But to say that discourse is dependent upon space and
time is already to inscribe discourse, as well as the subject pronounc-
ing it, within exteriority. In fact, it corresponds to projecting discourse
outside the I, the subject of enunciation, and starting to relate stories
about the world.
This level of discourse is extremely important and is probably the
least studied of all in semiotics. It is also the least organized since we
have only a very few ideas and projects to create models to account
for it. In any case, a hypothetical provisional distinction can be made
between the thematic and figurative levels. For example, when
Chateaubriand says that 'my life was as sad as the autumn leaves
carried off by the wind,' you can see that 'my life was as sad' is
thematic, let us say, more abstract than 'the autumn leaves carried off
by the wind.' But one part of the sentence says the same thing as the
other. They can thus be superimposed, and we obtain a metaphor
that will be the figurative level. The figurative is a way of speaking in
either temporal or spatial figures, and if we examine our own dis-
Course we note that everything belongs to one or the other of these.
The concept of figures is of major theoretical importance for us not

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Debate with A J. Greimas 293

only, as some claim, because in painting we distinguish abstract art

from figurative art, but also because this term, which is taken from
Hjelmslev's linguistic theory, corresponds to the non-sign, or the
semantic part of the sign. On the other hand, 'figure' also permits us
to exploit the concept of 'gestalt,' the psychology of forms. The
problem is to know how discourse is composed - not with these
photographic representations of objects, but with schemata, so to
speak, of objects - and how it is used in the most diverse situations.
Chains of figures essentially constitute so-called narrative discourse;
and what narrative, from this perspective, happens to correspond to
is the exploitation of narrative structures from the deep level. We use
parts of the narrative structures that we need, and we set them in our
own discourse and clothe our own discourse in a figurative manner.
Yet there do exist more or less abstract discourses.
Ricoeur: Figures are much more than a garment. What I mean to say
is that at this level there is more than an investment, in the sense of an
instantiation; in fact, there is something productive. Precisely what is
productive is that you cannot have spatialization, temporalization,
and actorialization without plot. The different kinds of plot pro-
duced in the history of narrative show us that what we are dealing
with is not merely an application and projection at the surface, but
that there is something really productive which follows rules, and
that these rules for plot construction belong to the figurative level.
Hence, there is productivity of the figurative level. I would like to
return to this problem later. The point I want to make here is that the
figurative level provides the dynamics for the rules of transformation
and that they are projected backwards from the surface to the deep
structures.
Greimas: You are right to take me to task for having said that the
figurative clothed narrative structures. This is a bad metaphor and
certainly not the way to express the problem. One should first of all
take into account that the mode of existence of narrative structures is
a virtual mode of existence. Narrative structures do not exist per se
but are a mere moment in the generation of signification. When the
subject of enunciation says something, he utters a durative discourse
and proceeds by means of figures that are linked up. It is the figures
that bear the traces of narrative universals.
Ricoeur: I want to approach the problem from a different angle. Are
there not ways of dealing with narrative which, in a sense, bypass this
distinction between deep structure and surface structure? Because

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294 A Ricoeur Reader

of all the difficulties in connecting the levels, the freedom of enunci-

ation, and also the constraints of the last level, I insist that on this last,
or third level, this level of figurativization has its own rules. Let us
start with a comment made a few decades ago by Kate Hamburger in
her book The Logic of Literature,5 when she writes that the great feat
of narratives - 'epic,' in her own terms - is to explore minds in the
third-person narrative, to take all the narrative procedures through
which we make judgments on the thoughts, feelings, actions of third
persons, and to transfer them into first-person narrative, thereby
creating a pseudo-autobiography. If we then say that the function of
narrative is to provide a kind of mimesis of other minds, we need new
categories, and we need to know whether these categories belong to
the development of your own semiotics, or whether they are foreign
to it. This is not a critique but, rather, a question.
Let us therefore look at what is required if we begin this way, the
way Dorritt Cohn did in her work Transparent Minds,6 where she
showed that narratives always have this function of exploring other
minds. If we do so, we get constraints of another kind which are more
of a typological than a structural nature. This is the route first
followed by Franz Stanzel in his attempt to work out a typology of
narrative situations and, more powerfully, by Lubomir Dolezel in his
attempt to set up a dialectic between the discourse of the narrator
and the discourse of the character. The next step is to introduce the
category of narrator, a kind of figure that is the part of the text where
someone says something about other minds. You therefore have the
narrator's discourse, the character's discourse, and then it is neces-
sary to develop a typology to show what the constraints are. But my
claim would be that these constraints bypass the distinction between
deep structure and surface structure in your semiotics. They belong
to other systems of categorization, and I would like to know how
these systems intersect with yours. Here, notions such as point of
view and narrative voice would have to be introduced. (When I
speak about point of view, I am thinking about the work done by the
Tartu School. Uspensky, for example, who tried to show that the
interplay between points of view is a principle of composition.) If,
like Dorritt Cohn following Kate Hamburger, we speak of procedures
between narrator and character, we are in fact attempting to structure
enunciation itself. This is, I think, a third dimension which should be
added to the Proppian categories of functions and actants that you
have expanded. We would then be dealing with enunciation, with the

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Debate with A J. Greimas 295

enunciator inscribed in the text as narrator, but also with characters.

If I raise the point it is because I think that ultimately the figurative
has its own dimension, its own structuration, which is more a part of a
sort of typology than of a logic of transformation.
I would also add that I question your own theory when you say
that there is an increase in meaningfulness when we proceed from
deep structures to surface structures. My question is, where does this
increase in meaningfulness come from? I do not think that it is
implied only in the transformative capacities of the deep structures,
which are constraints.7 But it is a new kind of constraint that belongs
to the level of figurativization and all the resources provided by
notions such as narrator, characters, point of view, narrative voice,
and so on. These are constraints of a different kind which are
immediately figurative but not by derivation. I am aware that your
school of thought is not a closed system but is proceeding step by
step, from the most abstract to the more concrete. I feel you have
reached the point precisely where you have to come to grips with
contributions that do not come from your own semiotics. The devel-
opment of the third stage of your semiotics requires that either you
reject these categories or you reconstruct them within your own
system of reference.
Greimas: I have always claimed that semiotics is not a science but
rather a scientific project, still incomplete or unfinished; and I leave
the task of completing and transforming it, starting from a few
theoretical principles that I have attempted to establish, to future
generations of semioticians. To begin with the deep structures and go
toward the surface structures is perhaps a question of strategy. Per-
sonally, and on an anecdotal level, I was troubled by the way Jerrold
S. Katz and J.A. Fodor presented semantics as an appendix to
Chomskian theory. They simply took sentences, aligned them next to
one another, and established connections by drawing lines. They
thought that discourse could be structured in this way. I found the
same thing in Germany, where a type of text linguistics was devel-
oped that also treated only surface phenomena.
The second point you raised is related to the increase in significa-
tion that results from passing from one level to another. First of all,
the way I present things is not by means of a combination of ele-
ments; that is to say, I do not usually start with simple units and then
combine them to arrive at a more complex level. The problem as I
see it is related to the passage from meaning to signification As a

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296 A Ricoeur Reader

linguist I see this in the procedure of articulation, a sort of continu-

ous explosion. The production of meaning is the production of
difference, the production of oppositions, and when discourse hap-
pens it takes place by a sort of series of successive explosions that
produce the totality, the richness of discourse. On the other hand, we
can very well imagine that an analyst dealing with a realized discourse
would begin with the surface before going on to the deep structures.
That would be another way of proceeding.
The third point I would like to bring up is related to point of view.
What I will say about this does not come directly from my own
personal research but from work done by one of my students, Jacques
Fontanille, who wrote a thesis on the problem of point of view in
discourse.8 He studied cinema, painting, Marcel Proust, advertising,
and also quantum theory. He made use of common knowledge,
especially when dealing with the concept of the narrator that you
yourself mentioned. From a linguistic perspective, we notice that, in
addition to modalities, there exists the fundamental element of the
modulation of sentences constituted by aspectualities. These aspect-
ualities can be imagined and described only if one posits an observer
who is watching the process being actualized, whether it happens to
be inchoative, durative, or terminative. Thus, natural language
already utilizes the simulacrum of the observer to account for
linguistic phenomena, even at the level of the sentence. If one
examines narrative discourse one sees that these observers can be
situated anywhere. When analysing a text by Proust one notices that
the observer changes point of view at almost every sentence. What
Fontanille did was to posit that all discourse has a cognitive level and
that it is at this cognitive level that a diad - two actants - is located:
the observer-actant and the informer-actant. Between the two a sort
of exchange of information takes place that can be integrated into
the total or partial knowledge of either actant according to the wish
of the subject of enunciation, who can be a narrator. This would then
be a case of syncretism between the actor-subject of the enunciation
and the observer. However, this is not a generalizable actantial
structure. I would therefore insist on the need to distinguish in the
narrative flow between different levels - especially the cognitive and
the pragmatic levels, for example.
As for the last question related to figurativity, I must say that I
attach a great deal of importance to research being done in this area.
During a year-long seminar given over to the study of these problems

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Debate with A J. Greimas 297

some progress was made, but it still is not satisfying, since this level of
analysis is extremely complex. My first observation is that we can
encounter figurative expression at different levels of depth. To take a
very simple case, for example indirect discourse, when I say that it is
warm, this can mean 'open the window.' Therefore, 'it is warm' is a
figure for saying something else. Another type is parabolic discourse,
which is found for example in the Gospels. If you take the parable of
the Prodigal Son you can see that the four or five partial parables,
which do not start at exactly the same point, narrate the story
figuratively. Each parable is displaced a little in relation to the other,
but one can establish, by partial parables, so to speak, the common
thematic level that can account for the figurativization of the whole.
This is another way of grasping figurativity, the type of discourse
which we have studied most.
Finally, figurativity is found at the deep level of discourse, as was
illustrated, for example, by Denis Bertrand in his thesis on Zola's
Germinal.9 In Zola's story about miners living underground, spatial
configurations and spatial figures are transformed and become, so to
speak, an autonomous language. When we read the novel we think
that the lives of the miners are being narrated but, in fact, what is
narrated is the great mystery of the mediation within this under-
ground universe. Spatiality becomes an almost abstract sort of lan-
guage to speak about something other than surface figurativity.
These few examples are meant simply to point out that what I call the
discursive level of semiotics is a level in which there is an articulation,
a level at which other levels of depth can be found. The problematics
of levels is a strategy because the number of levels can be increased
or diminished in order to facilitate the analysis and the construction
of the model.
Ricoeur: I find this answer satisfactory, satisfactory because I ac-
knowledge and welcome this capacity of semiotics to expand. But I
wonder whether the initial model is not undermined by this expan-
sion, and whether the price to pay for such an expansion is not a
complete reformulation of the basic terms of depth and surface. It is
not by chance you ended up speaking about the depth of the surface,
which, if I may say so, now has a meaning quite different from your
original usage. We are no longer dealing with the idea that there are
logical, semantic rules having a logic of transformation which are
subsequently invested with anthropomorphic roles, and that then
those anthropomorphic roles are once more invested in figures.

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298 A Ricoeur Reader

Here figure itself has depth, and a quite different use is being made
of the term figure from that of the term/zgura, to which Auerbach
devoted one of his most extraordinary essays. Here we are dealing
with the polysemantic capacity of discourse, and it is no longer
possible to know if we are at the level of the depth of the surface.
The same story may be read in different ways because it is multilay-
ered, and this multilayered nature of any story calls for the role of a
reader, which we have not discussed at all. I think that by necessity
we have to reintroduce the dialectic between the text and the reader
because of this polysemanticism. I will give one example of bringing
out the complexity of the figure, to which we bring meaningfulness
but also introduce something that Kermode called secrecy. He took
the example of parables and the strong interpretation given them by
Mark. Parables are narrated in order not to be understood, that is to
say, there is an increase of secrecy. The actual title of his work is The
Genesis of Secrecy.w We therefore have to take into account the
possibility of another kind of deep meaning, and in so doing we join
up with the whole tradition of symbolism concerning the four mean-
ings of the Scriptures, for example. This is a tradition which, I think,
has a scope quite different from that of deep structure as it is
defined by semiotics. Finally, the best stories, those of Kafka, for
example, are not intended to increase intelligibility but to increase
perplexity and to call into question the reader's understanding. Here
productivity of the surface level is all the more striking as it increases
both meaningfulness and puzzlement.
Greimas: I agree in part with what you say. None the less, I would like
to make a brief observation. What scientific status can be given to
this type of task? Both of us have been speaking about intelligibility,
but intelligibility can be situated at different levels. We can under-
stand the main line, the essential; we can also attempt to understand
the greater and greater complexity of discourse. I once investigated
automatic translation. At that time it was said that to translate the
syntax of simple sentences the computer had to carry out two thou-
sand binary operations. Now, if we were to take a short story as
complex as Maupassant's 'Deux amis,' we could ask how many
binary operations would be necessary to analyse such a text. At each
level I feel we would reach the sum of several million at least.
Discourse is a complex object and so is the world. Hence, there are
no objections in principle if we deepen our knowledge of this phe-
nomenon.

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Debate with AJ. Greimas 299

Now, regarding accessibility to the secret that language is, I agree

with you, except that the hidden will perhaps remain hidden because
we wish to hide things, or because we cannot speak about them. No
matter, I would simply say that we linguists or semioticians have
extremely poor tools to speak about the secret of language. To speak
about meaning or signification, one of the rare means we have at our
disposal is transcoding, that is, to take a discourse, a sentence, and to
translate it into another discourse, with other words, in a different
way. This is how we understand what the first sentence or the first
discourse signified. Operations of transcoding are the only means we
have to grasp signification and, consequently, when I take a parable
such as the Prodigal Son, I am obliged to try and translated. In doing
so perhaps I have not exhausted the totality of meaning, which is
regrettable, but unfortunately it is impossible to do otherwise.

Notes
1 See also Paul Ricoeur, 'Greimas's Narrative Grammar,1 this volume, pp. 256-
86.
2 Louis Marin, Semiotique de la passion: Topiques et figures (Paris: Aubier-
Montaigne, 1971)
3 Algirdas Julien Greimas, Maupassant: The Semiotics of Text: Practical
Exercises, trans, by Paul Perron (Amsterdam: J. Benjamin, 1988)
4 See Language in Culture and Society: A Reader in Linguistics and Anthropol-
ogy, ed. by Dell Hymes (New York: Harper and Row, 1964).
5 Kate Hamburger, The Logic of Literature, trans, by Marilyn G. Rose
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973)
6 Dorritt Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Conscious-
ness in Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978)
7 For a detailed discussion of this point, see Jean Petitot-Cocorda,
Morphogenese du sens (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985), esp. pp.
260-8. See also Paul Perron, Introduction,' On Meaning: Selected Writings in
Semiotic Theory, by Algirdas Julien Greimas, trans, by Paul Perron and Frank
Collins (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1987), pp. xxiv-xlv
8 Jacques Fontanille, Le Savoir partage: Semiotique et theorie de la connaissance
chez Marcel Proust (Paris: Hades-Benjamins, 1987)
9 Denis Bertrand, L'espace et lesens: 'Germinal' d'Emile Zola (Paris: Hades-
Benjamins, 1985)
10 Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979)

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