Sandy Petrey

Word associations and the development of lexical memory

Abstract Endel Tulvings distinction between “episodic” and “semantic” memory defines changes with age in word association norms in a more informative and more comprehensive manner than the syntactic classifications normally used. The principal development as subjects mature is an episodic-semantic shift. Young children associate primarily to the stimuluss perceived contexts, older subjects to its abstract semantic content.

Whose Acts? Which Communities? A Reply to David Gorman

It seems a safe bet that readers of David Gorman’s ‘‘Use and Abuse of Speech-Act Theory in Criticism’’ () will suspect this already, but let me say it anyway: I think more highly than he does of literary critics’ adaptations of speech-act theory. I will therefore not use the space generously provided me by the editors of Poetics Today to explain why I don’t agree with Gorman (: ) that ‘‘sheer badness’’ and ‘‘catastrophic inadequacy’’ are valid categorizations of my literary colleagues’ work with J. L. Austin or that ‘‘the most striking problemwith Petrey’s study is that he simply doesn’t understand Austin well’’ (ibid.: ) provides a reliable overview of my own. I assume that anyone bothering to read my response has admitted at least the possibility thatmy inadequacies, however numerous, stop short of catastrophe. Since Gorman’s essay makes his own adequacy apparent, the question I want to address isn’t which of us apprehends more astutely, but how we could have come to such disparate apprehensions of Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (). The answer I will propose is that our differences arise not because one of us understands and the other doesn’t but because each of us understands through distinct conceptual frames. I am a literary critic, as are almost all the scholars whose work Gorman finds catastrophically inadequate. Literary critics work and think within categories and paradigms that, despite their variety, have enough in common to give us a common scholarly identity. Although he is a member of an English department, Gorman takes his perspective from different categories and paradigms, those developed by the tradition of Anglo-American philosophy, to which Austin himself belonged. As Gorman points out early in his essay, the interrelations between literary critics and Anglo-American philosophers have not been numerous or fruitful, which has exacerbated the dissonance normally felt when disciplines confront one another. Critics and analytic philosophers have evaluated Austin’s version of speech-act

iterating revolution: speech acts in literary theory

made those connections the armature of his concept of performative language, and Derrida’s &dquo;Signature Event Context&dquo; cogently described the obstacles Austin elided in making what words do central to defining what words are. Austinian speech-act theory resolutely situates language in the world; Derridean deconstruction just as resolutely denounces the epistemological legerdemain required for language’s situation in the world to

History in the Text: 'Quatrevingt-Treize' and the French Revolution

The title of this study “History in the text” is an oxymoronic phrase, and by this, the main focus of the book is clear immediately. On the other hand, there still remains the question to what extent text and history are comparable. The author of this volume tries to answer this by discussing the famous novel of Victor Hugo Quatrevingt-Treize against the background of the French Revolution.