The Argumentative Interaction in the Literary Discourse: From the Literature of Ideas to the Fictional Report

Abstract

The argumentative dimension of the literary text expresses itself in the capacity to orient the view of its readers. Perelman’s theory inscribes the argumentative interaction in the orator’s discourse, and the contemporary works of Pragmatics and Narratology allow, on the one hand, the precise localization of interdiscursive instances as they are inscribed in the text and, on the other, the identification of the modalities of social grounding pertaining to the enunciative device, founding an approach to the literary text in a dialogic perspective. The argumentation in the literary fiction will, then, be analyzed through the relations that the author, the narrator and the characters assume with the narratee, making thus visible the pluridimensionality of argumentation in the literary text. Finally, the argumentative analysis of a rally’s speech, as it was represented by the writer Roger Martin du Gard in The Thiabault, affords showing how the narrator’s discourse conducts to a questioning of the first level argumentation, as well as how the latter unfolds itself in the relation between the orator and the audience.