Literatura académica sobre el tema "Group sex – Fiction"

In order for true beliefs acquired from reading fiction to count as knowledge proper, they must survive ‘the challenge from luck’. That is, it must be established that such beliefs are neither luckily true, nor luckily believed by readers. The author considers three kinds of true belief a reader may, she assumes, get from reading fiction: a) those based on testimony about empirical facts; b) those based on ‘true in passing’ sentences; and c) those beliefs about counterfactuals one may get from reading a ‘didactic’ fiction. The first group escape the challenge from luck relatively easily, she argues. However, things turn out to be more complicated with the second group. The author examines Mitchell Green’s suggestion, effectively, that knowledge of fictional genre may see off the challenge from luck here, but rejects this in the form presented by Green, adapting it substantially to offer beliefs of this kind a more promising escape route. The author finishes by following Green’s lead once again, and discussing the category of ‘didactic’ fiction, as he calls it. She argues that any true beliefs about counterfactuals gained from such fictions are likely to be lucky. The author concludes however that things are much more promising for any true beliefs gained about oneself as a result of engaging with what Green calls an ‘interrogative’ fiction.

Would you kill your best friend if you found out he raped someone? In this work of philosophical short story fiction, the narrator is a sophomore in college who spends time with her friend, a drug dealing college student named Nate, and his law school friend Jack. They all get together to drink, smoke pot, and have long philosophical debates. One night at a party the narrator wakes up to find Jack having sex with her. She waits until the party is over and tells Nate that Jack raped her. Nate comforts her, and supporters her, although she opts not to press charges, she tells Nate she wants Jack dead When Jack calls her to say he had a good time, and ask her out on a date, she refuses. The group grows apart until a year later, word gets back that Jack was at a party at Nate’s house when he drank to much and died of alcohol poisoning. Oddly, the police find nothing when questioning Nate because this is the one party where Nate, a drug dealer, doesn’t have drugs in the house. They never talk again, but the narrator wonders if Nate followed through and killed Jack. She hopes he did.

IN1895,GRANT ALLEN PUBLISHED A NEW WOMAN NOVELentitledThe Woman Who Did. This treatise-like novel appeared as part of the Keynotes Series, a group of ideologically progressive texts published by John Lane for Bodley Head in the 1890s. As Margaret Diane Stetz writes, Lane made this series “a haven for ‘New Woman’ fiction, naturalistic short stories, and ‘decadent’ poetry and art” (72). Marketed as status and sex objects (81), many of the thirty-three novels and short-story collections that make up the series concern themselves with New Woman issues such as marriage and female sexuality. Lane had taken the name for this series from George Egerton'sKeynotes(1893), a collection of short stories told from the perspective of an emancipated woman.The Woman Who Did, published two years later, also featured a New Woman and became the most notorious book of the series. Combining a free-love, anti-marriage message with a tragic plot, Allen's novel focuses on a clergyman's daughter, Herminia Barton, who refuses to marry the father of her child, Alan Merrick, on feminist principles. Unwilling to enter an institution that she compares to “vile slavery” (43), she chooses to live unmarried with her lover and daughter until his death. She withstands the calumny of family and friends and years of grieving and penury only to discover in the end that her daughter rejects her feminism and views her illegitimacy not as the “supreme privilege” her mother believed it to be, but rather as a “curse” (132). In a way typical of New Woman novels, the story ends with the heroine's suicide.

In the late Joseon Dynasty, a group of novels called ‘Hwejeol Fiction(Stories about Men Breaking His Faith)’ appeared. They shared the narrative that the heterosexual sexuality of the male character is confirmed through tests. This narrative means the process of confirming the heterosexual sexuality of individual men and granting them membership in the homosocial communities. This work was examined the homosocial between mens through three works of Hwejeol Fiction: ‘Jibong-jeon’, ‘Oyuran-jeon’, and ‘Samseon-gi’. First, in ‘Jibong-jeon’, a dominant man who rejects heterosexual sexuality and has the potential to discord with homosocial standards appears as the main character. In this text, as the relationship between the dominant men is focused, the virtue of the public relationship between them is particularly emphasized to sustain the male bond. The dominant male protagonist never becomes profanity in the process, and is embraced into the community after the interruption. Next, in ‘Oyuran-jeon’, an immature man who pursues hegemonic masculinity appears. The narrative deals with the process of growing these immature men into true dominant men. He grows up with the help of men in private relationships such as family and friends, and in the process, a humorous episode in which they are shown there naked bodies. At the end of the narrative, they transforms into a being who embodies full hegemonic masculinity and lives happily as a member of the homosocial community. Lastly, ‘Samseon-gi’ is distinguished from the previous two types in that it shows the practice of a newly adjusted ‘alternative masculinity’ rather than actively incorporating into the homosociality by breaking personal beliefs. Here, women have much more active voices and self-awareness than in the previous two types. Since the gender practice of the male protagonist poses the greatest threat to the maintenance of male same-sex society, unlike other narratives, hostile forces that block him appear, showing explicit hostility toward the protagonist. In the end, the protagonist is not fully incorporated into the existing homosocial society but is incorporated into a different world. The fact that most of these narratives written in Chinese characters, have been mainly enjoyed between male readers. It suggests that the enjoyment of narratives itself can be an practice for male readers’ homosocial solidarity. The existence of a long-running these narratives clearly reveals that the concept of masculinity, which on the other hand seems to be a firm power, is only a fragile component that is constantly challenged, but it also has great implications today in that it also tells us how difficult and can have a great influence on the existing male model holding hegemony.

In the vein of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), the German writer Johann Gottfried Schnabel (1692–1748) wrote a four-volume Robinsonade novel, Die Insel Felsenburg [The Island Felsenburg], which was published between 1731 and 1743. Schnabel’s novel became extremely popular in Germany, as it tells the story of a group of shipwrecked settlers who, in the spirit of protestant piety, establish an ideal state on the beautiful island on which they are stranded. One day, they discover a hidden cave, where they find a well-preserved mummified man, sitting in a stone chair at a table. On a tin board, this man, Don Cyrillo de Valaro, had engraved important information for posterity: namely that he was born on 9 August 1475, came to the island on 14 November 1514, and recorded his recollection on 27 June 1606. His writing ends as follows: ‘I am still alive, however close to death, June 28. 29. and 30. and still July 1., 2. 3., 4. By recording every day that he was still alive, Don Cyrillo, the only inhabitant on the island at the time, managed to do what no autobiographer could ever complete: record his death. One could even go so far as to say that his method typifies a life-writing model – documenting the days of one’s life in the face of inevitable death. In the context of Schnabel’s novel, this episode is remarkable in so far as the most prominent entertainment of the island’s inhabitants is to tell one another about their lives. In the evening, when their work is done, they come together – and there is no TV or internet – and tell their stories. Remarkably enough, their stories are full of sex and crime – aspects of life that are banned from the virtuous island. The story of Don Cyrillo de Valaro and the settlers is fiction, of course. However, it triggers the question as to how ‘real’ autobiographers deal with or even describe their own deaths.

Denna studie presenterar och analyserar ett läsprojekt i F–3-klasser vid två skolor i en mindre kommun. Litteraturläsning i skolan kombinerades med lässtrategiundervisning och boksamtal som övades i hemmen. Bokurvalet omfattade en bilderboksserie i pixiboksformat för förskoleklassens elever och mer omfattande böcker i skolår 1–3. Eleverna förväntades läsa med eller för vårdnadshavare eller annan närstående, samtala om det lästa och träna de båda läsförståelsestrategierna förutspå respektive sammanfatta. Läsprojektet pågick under sex veckor, och data samlades in genom veckovisa enkäter till vårdnadshavare och, efter avslutat projekt, fokusgruppsintervjuer med elever. Såväl elever som vårdnadshavare upplevde att mängden av textläsning bidrog till att utveckla elevernas läsfärdighet, och bokurvalets och boksamtalets betydelse kommenterades överlag positivt av deltagarna. Läsprojektet belyste och problematiserade skolans kompensatoriska uppdrag för elever som inte har ett väl utvecklat lässtöd hemifrån. ENGLISH: This study presents and analyses a reading project in K–3 classes (6–9-year-olds) at two schools. The project combined the teaching of reading strategies with reading fiction and book talks prepared at the schools and then practiced at home. The book selection included easy-to-read books for children, 6-year-olds, and books for the intermediate readers. The pupils were to read at home, with or for family members, talk about the books and practice the reading comprehension strategies making predictions and summarising. Data from the six-week project were collected through weekly surveys submitted by the families, and, after the completion of the project, by focus group interviews with the pupils. According to the participants, the focus on reading contributed to the development of the pupils’ reading skills and selecting suitable books and having book talks were key factors to engage the pupils. The project highlighted the awareness of the school’s compensatory duties towards pupils needing support. Keywords: Teaching literature, Reading literacy, Reading for pleasure, Collaborative project, Action research, School years K–3, Home reading

Making New Land is an essay in theory-fiction set in a near future, where the oceans have disappeared. In these devastated landscapes, a first person narrator investigates unsolved biological enigmas on Earth and on Mars. In the footsteps of a fictional group of Anarcho-botanists called Sea for Space, the story alternates a melancholic longing for the beauty of intertidal and coastal lifeforms with futuristic visions of new species engineered by humans as new companions. The scenario explores archetypal figures of plant-human coexistence: from the botanical gaze to a nostalgic longing for connection, and from the hubris of genetical engineering to the dream of a post-humanism communion with the vegetal. The fictional story is interwoven with scholarly references and a critical discussions of artistic and literary works dealing with the fauna, flora and mythologies of the seaside, which form the outlines of an 'Intertidal Aesthetics'.

This article proposes a form of research that integrates reader study with textual analysis. Its purpose is to investigate the social production of literary value, potentially providing cultural sociology with a systematic means by which to study the formal features of texts in relation to their social significance: a means arguably required by (but not necessarily supplied in) the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of reading group (or ‘book club’) discussions reveals an association between descriptive writing, cultural legitimacy, and a focus on the form, rather than the content, of fictional texts. In order to understand this association, the analysis then turns to two paragraphs from John Steinbeck’s The Pearl (2000 [1946]), which had been read by most of the groups involved and which many group members had referred to as involving ‘description’. It is argued that a long-standing tradition of association between descriptive writing and visual art has served as a resource both for consumers and for producers in distinguishing literature from popular fiction.

Abstract While there are interesting connections between literature and evil, there is as of yet no systematic collection of models of evil to study literature. This is problematic, since literature is among other things an evaluative discourse and the most basic evaluative category is the polarity of good versus evil. In addition, evil shows important affinities with basic narratological principles. To initiate a discussion of models of evil for the analysis of literature, this article organizes a dozen models of evil into four groups. The first consists of a core model which coincides with basic narratological elements in character analysis and narrative tension. The second group contains two pre-modern models of evil, defilement and moral-natural evil. The third group takes its cue from personality theory and proposes the five-factor model of personality and an enriched “dark triad,” and, to balance description against narration, a model which categorizes kinds of murder. The last group organizes six models around the thematic opposition between nature and society, an opposition which forms the backbone of Western philosophy and narrative. To test their validity, the models are applied to a series of literary examples/characters, above all Grendel (Beowulf), Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” and Carol Oates’ short story “Heat.”

The following fictional case is intended as a learning tool within the Pathology Competencies for Medical Education (PCME), a set of national standards for teaching pathology. These are divided into three basic competencies: Disease Mechanisms and Processes, Organ System Pathology, and Diagnostic Medicine and Therapeutic Pathology. For additional information, and a full list of learning objectives for all three competencies, see http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2374289517715040 .1

This chapter explores the reception of the empress Plotina in three texts from three literary traditions within the Roman Empire: the Acta Hermaisci, the Talmud, and Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. It argues that the Plotina character we see in these texts is based on an idea of the Roman empress’ ability to influence the emperor to the detriment of provincial groups. This ‘plotting Plotina’ figure is the opposite of the official ideal found in Pliny’s Panegyricus and may develop the suspicion we see in Roman historical texts that Plotina exercised improper influence on Hadrian’s succession. Indeed, the motherhood of the ‘plotting Plotina’ character may respond to the problematic childlessness of the real empress. In addition to exploring how provincial texts fictionalized a historical woman to articulate the powerlessness of being a Roman subject, this chapter provides an example of how one theme could be deployed in texts from different cultures written in the same empire. It thus offers a perspective on how a broad understanding of ‘imperial literature’ can inform our knowledge of connections between the literary cultures that coexisted under Roman rule.

This chapter analyzes the contradictory regional class and caste politics of large-scale land investments in Maharashtra, India, focusing on the conversion of peri-urban agricultural land into urban real estate. The chapter uses the case of the Khed special economic zones (SEZ) to explore these contradictions and unexpected twists in Maharashtra's land commodification tale. Whereas dominant agrarian castes long-invested in commodity agricultural production and with the deepest ties to urban capital vociferously protested land acquisition for the formation of a special economic zone, Adivasi “tribals” along with Dalit groups historically dependent on “waste” lands embraced forced land acquisition. It shows how historic narratives of waste that twin expectations about poor land quality to presumptions of wasteland occupants' social backwardness were leveraged by lower-class and -caste groups to portray land expropriation as a means of pursuing a place in the urban economy. Ultimately, the chapter highlights how fictions of waste that previously excluded the most socially subordinated groups from crop capitalism became an instrument of urban inclusion.

This chapter turns to discuss the contest for the virtual in the twenty-first century as represented in the fiction of William Gibson. In Gibson's earlier speculative fictions of the near-to-distant future, power largely means corporate power, following the posited decline of the nation-state; more recent work, set in the approximate present, place the intelligence agencies in play alongside international corporate interests. In opposition to such power, we find various marginal communities and oppositional groups who occupy outlaw spaces, both real and virtual, with Gibson's protagonists usually occupying an ambivalent position between the powerful and their opponents. The discussion examines Gibson’s contrasting of the Borgesian Aleph (a virtual universe of infinite potential), and Bentham's Panopticon (a virtual prison of total surveillance). It uses the dialectic between these two to ask questions of the contest for the virtual that currently occupies us as we balance the emergence of a potential information utopia against the simultaneous rise of the surveillance state.

Abstract This chapter examines YA fiction by Nalo Hopkinson and Nnedi Okorafor and draws on Raymond Williams’s idea of dominant/residual/emergent in order to see how emergent practices—particularly those rooted in religious traditions—enable a shift of emphasis away from national or State-based identities to non-natal kinship groups as a source of power, resistance, and safety. These novels illustrate the power of reimagining the local as a challenge to dominant, environmentally destructive systems. The ancient belief systems that characters rediscover ultimately serve as modes of resistance to the Anglo-European legacies of colonialism and imperialism that have done such damage to the planet and its inhabitants.

This chapter follows Zadie Smith’s “root canals,” a metaphor and a narrative form she developed in her first novel White Teeth (2000), to describe the transnational historical networks obscured by nation-centered accounts of the past. It argues that Smith develops modernist literary forms of unboundedness like the root canal in order to entwine different groups’ collective memories; she then uses that strategy to address head on the topic of causality within a global framework. Smith asks what economic, political, and personal conditions bring migrants to Europe and the United Kingdom and, in turn, how residents in metropolitan countries might be implicated in stories of migration, distant violence, and global economic inequality that they see as irrelevant to their everyday lives. Focusing specifically on Smith’s northwest London fictions (“The Embassy of Cambodia” (2013) and NW (2012) in addition to White Teeth), I show how their strategies of formal division (sectioning, chapter construction, and unsynthesized narrative remainders) address the problem of drawing boundaries around accounts of both personal attention and structural inequality. Smith uses the dyads of form and matter, parts and wholes, in her fiction to bring ongoing (and sometimes competing) stories of uneven development within a globalized modernity to bear on tarnished dreams of upward mobility and leftist demands for collective resistance against neoliberal policies of privatization.

This chapter discusses millennial Beatles fan culture and Beatles tribute bands, slash fiction, YouTube, heritage culture, Beatles walks, LeakyCon, and Potterverse. These manifestations of Beatles fandom epitomize the desires of millennials who want to inhabit Beatles art and twist the music and lyrics into new cultural forms. Millennial fans want to be playful with canons and reimagine songs and films. Millennials’ digital “cultural construction” and remix bricolage texts represent a desire to reorganize anthems of the past to make them relevant to the present. Millennials are active fans who mash fan vids, set up Facebook groups, bring personalized signs to McCartney concerts, and collect ’60s memorabilia. Unlike boomer fans, they are not content to be passive: millennial tribute bands, slash fiction, YouTube videos, conventions, and heritage culture make Beatles culture fresh, new, and exciting. This chapter includes interviews with millennials and postmillennials for insight into these fans’ new direction.

Chapter 3 examines the zombie horde avatar, an iconic trope that first emerged in contemporary US visual culture in the late 1960s, by focusing on its nearly simultaneous rise in Haitian literature in the 1970s. Why, in contrast to earlier representations in which Haitian zombies typically appear individually or in small groups, did zombie hordes began invading Haitian novels by writers such as Frankétienne and Dany Laferrière only six years after George Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead represented voracious living dead masses? While scholars have noted the connection between Duvalier and the zombie’s appearance in Haitian literary fiction, this chapter connects the emergence of the living dead horde to both local and global contexts, showing how Haitian authors’ use of the trope is at once a critique of local socio-political concerns and tied to the era’s global social uprisings and Cold War–era anxieties, which also gave rise to the rabid masses of Night of the Living Dead.

Abstract In cat hindlimb muscle nerves, most of the afferent fibers with conduction velocities in the group II range (24-72 m/s) are spindle secondary afferents arising from the “flower spray” endings contacting nuclear chain and bag type 2 fibers in the muscle spindle (for review see Jack, 1978; Hunt, 1990). The firing of spindle secondaries is well correlated with maintained stretch of the spindle (Matthews, 1981; Hunt, 1990), and in many situations firing can be predicted rather well from the overall length of the muscle in which it is situated (Prochazka et al., 1989).

This chapter summarises debates in the trade press in the 1920s about whether art cinema could be successful or if it could only ever be an entertainment medium. The summary forms the basis of an exploration of the production and reception of Brunel’s first feature, The Man Without Desire. The film brought together a disparate group of creatives and Bohemian figures, not least its star Ivor Novello, in an attempt to create a commercially successful film that incorporated elements from other arts. The result was an ambitious Venice-set production which employed both classical and Expressionist visuals along with fantasy and science fiction tropes. Though lauded by the critics and enjoying a successful run in London, it failed to make a profit, apparently because regional film renters regarded it as too highbrow for the average filmgoer.

This chapter explores how Jean-Claude Izzo transposes black Atlantic musical culture into the aesthetic, cultural, and geographic settings of the Mediterranean noir. This essay locates Izzo’s aesthetic within a history of opaque relations between the textual, the visual, and the sonic that participate in the constitution of blackness in noir fiction. It focuses on Izzo’s neo-noir trilogy, set in his hometown Marseille, which includes the novels Total Khéops (1995), Chourmo (1996), and Soléa (1998). From beginning to end, Izzo marks his texts under the sound/sign of musical culture: Total Khéops references DJ Khéops and the inaugural mix-tape of Marseille rap group IAM; Chourmo references an album by the Marseille group Massilia Sound System; and Soléa references a Miles Davis / Gil Evans recording, Sketches of Spain. The essay will suggest that, if the noir novel evolves as a genre, as Izzo explains, “in parallel with an investigation into the social conditions of contemporary man, the modern form of fate,” then Izzo’s engagement with musical culture represents a deep, embodied meditation on unimagined yet vital futures—modeled and molded in the hybrid, borrowed, clandestine, and popular forms of cultural relation and collectivity that mark the black Atlantic.

Coupled reactor kinetics and heat transfer models have been developed at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) to study Pebble-Bed, Fluoride-salt-cooled, High-temperature Reactors (PB-FHRs) transient behaviors. This paper discusses a coupled point kinetics model and a two-dimensional diffusion model. The former is based on the point kinetics equations with six groups of delayed neutrons and the lumped capacitance heat transfer equations. To account for the reflector effect on neutron lifetime, additional (fictional) groups of delayed neutrons are added in the point kinetics equations to represent the thermalized neutrons coming back from the reflectors. The latter is based on coupled multi-group neutron diffusion and finite element heat transfer model. Multi-group cross sections and diffusion coefficients are generated using the Monte Carlo code Serpent and defined as input in COMSOL 5.0.

The starting point of the present paper is the hypothesis that the distribution of discursive words characterizes the trends in the development of the writing style of the 19th century. The paper presents and discusses the results of an experiment based on the data of the Russian National Corpus on the frequency of using discursive words with the semantics of epistemic modality, such as konechno, razumeetsya (both roughly meaning ‘of course’), po-vidimomu ‘apparently’, kak kazhetsya, kazalos’ by (both ≈ ‘it would seem’), naverno ≈ ‘as it were’, veroyatno ‘probably’, pozhaluy ≈ ‘maybe’, deystvitel’no ‘really’, etc. We show that the frequency of this group of expressions increases in the second half of the 19th century. A similar trend is also observed for some syntactic constructions with the same semantics: (ya) dumayu, chto… ‘(I) think that...’; (ya) schitayu, chto… ‘(I) believe that...’; (mne) kazhetsya, chto… ‘it seems to me that’. The revealed regularity is considered as a discursive practice in changing the style of fiction, which consisted in expanding the modus part of the utterance as compared to the earlier period. The discursive practice of expanding the modus was inherent only to a group of innovative writers (first of all, F. M. Dostoevsky, M. E. SaltykovShchedrin, L. N. Tolstoy, I. A. Goncharov, A. F. Pisemsky, P. I. MelnikovPechersky, N. S. Leskov, and I. S. Turgenev), who, however, due to their talent, social significance, and the number of published texts, had a significant impact on the language of fiction. The task of studying the dynamics of artistic style is to identify and describe a set of discursive practices that establish written discourse as such.

La rhétorique du point de vue du monde de la vie La rhétorique de l’image dont parlait Barthes, reprise d’une manière beaucoup plus systématique dans les travaux du Groupe µ, n’est qu’une partie de la rhétorique classique, l’elocutio, mais c’est aussi celle qui a dominé dans l’Occident pendant ces derniers 500 ans. À l’extérieur de la sémiotique, cependant, le renouveau de la rhétorique à l’époque contemporaine tend à concevoir cette dernière comme la science qu’étudie la communication. Or, nous savons que la sémiotique a souvent été identifiée comme étant la science de la communication, et un autre candidat à ce titre est sans doute l’herméneutique. Alors que ces trois disciplines ont toutes trait au processus entier, elles le conçoivent dans une perspective chaque fois différente. La rhétorique prend le point de vue du créateur du message : il demande comment il faut s’exprimer pour obtenir l’adhérence de l’autre. L’herméneutique prend le point de vue du récepteur : sa question porte sur les moyens pour comprendre le message de l'autre. La sémiotique prend une position intermédiaire aux deux autres, c’est-à-dire au sein de la phase allant de l’artefact à sa concrétisation : elle demande quelles sont les ressources disponibles pour faire se produire le processus. À une telle rhétorique informée par la sémiotique la contribution du Groupe µ a été de toute première importance. Cependant, l’investigation des ressources disponibles, qui sont différentes dans le cas de l’image que dans celui de la langue, peut recevoir une base plus certaine en partant du monde de la vie, dans le sens de la phénoménologie, qui est aussi celui de l’écologie dans le sens de Gibson et le monde naturel tel que le comprend Greimas. Si l’on veut comprendre la manière dont la divergence est produite dans les images, il faut commencer par considérer ce qui est donné pour acquis, dans le sens à la fois de ce qui est normal, et de ce qui est normatif. Dans le monde de la vie, il y a certaines choses qui ont tendance à se présenter ensemble, en contiguïté ou comme des parties d’un tout (désormais, la factorialité). C’est la dimension indicielle. Mais le sens commun s'attend également à ce que les choses qui apparaissent ensemble soient suffisamment différentes pour pouvoir être distinguées, sans aller à l'extrême opposé de s’exclure mutuellement (une observation qui peut être entendue comme une généralisation de ce que le Groupe µ dit sur la norme de l’image, la homomatérialité et la hétéroformalité). En ce sens, il y a une rhétorique de trop de ressemblance ainsi que de trop de différence. Nous appellerons ceci la dimension iconique. Une troisième rhétorique prend son point de départ dans le caractère de signe de l'image. Nos attentes sont déçues tant en trouvant une trop grande partie de la réalité dans l'image qu’en rencontrant des niveaux supplémentaires de fiction au sein du contenu pictural. On peut appeler ceci la dimension symbolique. Enfin, les images remplissent des fonctions différentes dans une société donnée et sont, en raison de ce fait, imputables à diverses catégories, donnant ainsi lieu à une quatrième rhétorique dans laquelle nos attentes, en ce qui concerne les catégories sociales auxquelles les images sont assignées, ne sont pas remplies. On peut parler ici d’une dimension de catégorisation socioculturelle. Avant d’aborder les figures rhétoriques, ou ce qui en tient lieu, il est cependant nécessaire de discuter dans quelle mesure les ressources des images comprennent une part de dispositio, dans d’autres termes, une structure argumentative. Si nous définissons une affirmation comme étant une construction verbale, alors il est trivialement vrai que les images ne peuvent rien affirmer. Toutefois, si nous définissons une affirmation plus simplement comme une opération, au moyen de laquelle une propriété particulière est assignée à une entité particulière, alors il est possible pour l'image de faire des affirmations à la façon des images. Or, même ceci peut sembler impossible, s’il est vrai que les images, comme on l’a souvent dit, ne font que reproduire le monde de notre expérience. Au contraire, il faut admettre que les images peuvent se servir des arguments qui, dans le sens de Perelman, s’appuient sur la structure de la réalité ou servent à changer cette structure-là. Il s’ensuit que les transformations homogènes, contrairement à ce que suggère le Groupe µ, font aussi partie de la rhétorique, mais de la rhétorique de la dispositio. Considérée comme l’une des transformations possibles à partir du monde de la vie, la première dimension de la rhétorique correspond plus directement à la rhétorique telle qu’elle a été conçue par le Groupe µ, mais en retournant aux fondements jetés par la sémiotique phénoménologique proposée dans Pictorial concepts (1989). Contrairement au Groupe µ, nous proposons de distinguer les transformations portant sur la factorialité (la relation des parties au tout) et celles concernant la contiguïté. C’est « l’objet indépendant », dans le sens de James Gibson, qui fait la différence entre la contiguïté et la factorialité : il s’agit d’un degré d’intégration plus ou moins poussée. En fait, il y a sans doute des cas intermédiaires entre l’objet indépendant avec ses parties et la constellation arbitraire, mais ces cas-là sont aussi qualitativement vécus : le jeu, la série, l’ensemble. La rhétorique, de ce point de vue, relève de la méréologie, la science des parties et du tout, formalisée par Lesniewski en tirant son inspiration de Husserl et de Twardowski. Notre deuxième observation concerne la nature de l’opération nous faisant passer du monde de la vie à l’image. Dans la majorité de cas, l’opération rhétorique, pour fonctionner, à besoin non pas d’une absence de ce qui est attendu ou de la présence de quelque chose qui n’est pas attendu, mais des deux à la fois. Rares sont les cas (surtout s’agissant de la contiguïté) où une simple absence peut créer un effet de rhétorique. Dans les termes de la rhétorique générale d’abord conçue par le Groupe µ, la substitution est une opération rhétorique plus sûre que l’addition ou la suppression. D’autre part, dans le cas de la factorialité, l’effet est tellement différent selon les relations entre le tout et les parties qu’il faut spécifier la nature du rapport de la partie au tout. Il faut surtout distinguer le cas où quelque chose est ajouté à un tout qui est déjà en soi un objet indépendant, et le cas où les parties font partie d’un autre objet indépendant que le tout qui est perçu. Nos attentes peuvent être déçues par d’autres opérations que l’absence ou la présence d’un élément. Il peut y avoir une contradiction entre l’élément attendu et l’élément réellement présent. C’est la dimension iconique de la rhétorique. Les images, il est vrai, ne peuvent pas présenter des contradictions proprement dites, mais elles peuvent comporter toute sorte de manifestations d’une ressemblance ou d’une différence plus grande que ce que l’on a anticipé. Cet effet est présent dans plusieurs exemples considérés par le Groupe µ, sans que la spécificité de l’opération soit prise en compte. S’agissant d’un signe, en l’occurrence d’une image, il y a toujours un risque de confusion entre le signe et ce qui est signifié, et il est possible d’en tirer une rhétorique. À un extrême, le signe peut incorporer des objets réels ; à l’autre extrême, il peut contenir d’autres signes, notamment d’autres images, comme c’est le cas avec les images représentant d’autres images. Il s’agit donc de la dimension symbolique de la rhétorique. Finalement, la catégorisation des signes, dans ce cas les images, peut donner lieu à une rhétorique plus clairement socioculturelle. Les images peuvent être catégorisées en tenant compte de leur manière de construction, de la fonction qu’elles sont censées remplir dans la société, ou de leur manière de circuler à l’intérieur de la société. Les attentes qui peuvent être déçues dans ces cas ne concernent pas seulement l’appartenance de certaines images à des catégories particulières, mais surtout la combinaison de certaines catégories de construction avec certaines catégories de fonction et certaines catégories de circulation. Toute l’aventure du modernisme dans l’art plastique peut être conçue comme un vaste geste rhétorique à partir de la notion d’art à la fin du 18e siècle : une peinture à l’huile (construction) circulant dans des salons, des galeries et des musées (circulation) ayant pour but de produire un effet de plaisir esthétique (fonction). Dans le présent texte, j'ai suggéré que, contrairement aux signes verbaux, les images sont immédiatement rhétoriques, parce qu'elles nous offrent en même temps leur similitude et leur différence par rapport au monde de la perception. Par conséquent, j'ai fait observer que la rhétorique des images doit être fondée sur les structures de perception telles qu’elles apparaissent au sens commun, surdéterminées par le monde de la vie socioculturel spécifique. La dimension primaire de la rhétorique de l’image, l’indexicalité, dérive sa signification d'un écart par rapport à l'intégration relative des voisinages, des objets indépendants et des totalités de niveaux supérieurs. Elle peut concerner la contiguïté ou la factorialité, mais elle suppose d'habitude à la fois la présence de quelque chose d’inattendu et l'absence de quelque chose de prévu. L’iconicité, qui détermine la deuxième dimension, est fondée sur l'expectative d'une différenciation relative des objets du monde, qui ne suppose pas trop de similitude, ni trop de dissimilitude. La troisième dimension dépend du caractère fictif de l’image comme signe, dont les niveaux peuvent être confondus soit par une expérience trop directe, soit par des degrés de fiction trop nombreux. Finalement, la quatrième dimension concerne l'image en tant qu’objet social, faisant partie de certaines catégories de construction, de circulation, et de fonction. L'avantage de cette conception, par rapport au modèle de Groupe µ auquel il est endetté, consiste en son attention plus proche aux structures de la perception du sens commun.