Reading What is Not There: Ethnomethodological Analysis of the Membership Category, Action, and Reason in Novels and Short Stories
This paper investigates how the reader of prose fiction fills in the blanks regarding a fictional character’s membership category, action, and reason for the action. Aligning with an ethnomethodological approach to texts and appropriating membership categorization analysis (MCA), we analyze how the...
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Published in | Human studies Vol. 46; no. 1; pp. 117 - 135 |
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Main Authors | , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
Dordrecht
Springer Netherlands
01.03.2023
Springer Nature B.V |
Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | This paper investigates how the reader of prose fiction fills in the blanks regarding a fictional character’s membership category, action, and reason for the action. Aligning with an ethnomethodological approach to texts and appropriating membership categorization analysis (MCA), we analyze how the readers of J. D. Salinger, an author whose works are well known for their ambiguity and ambivalence, would grasp the unwritten identities of characters and the meanings of their actions. Our analysis specifies two types of methods deployed for the reader to understand the fictional texts. First, in an at-a-glance way, the reader can supply the missing categories and sequence of actions by turning to the commonsense knowledge and social norms regarding the association between the category and the activity. Second, the reader can construct various interpretations regarding the recognizably ambiguous scenes of the text by turning to the conceptual knowledge of the relevant social phenomena, the maxims specific to the act of storytelling, and the writer’s techniques peculiar to the fictional texts. The findings demonstrate the vast applicability of an MCA approach to the analysis of the work of reading prose fiction and shed light on the detailed operations of the author’s maxims and techniques in the textual configuration of prose fiction, thereby indicating the possibility of ethnomethodological analysis including the interwoven consideration of the reader’s activity and the textual organization. |
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ISSN: | 0163-8548 1572-851X |
DOI: | 10.1007/s10746-022-09658-y |