Paratopia

This book presents Maingueneau’s notion of paratopia and its application to literary discourse. Unlike most discourse analysts, who pay little attention to literature, the author argues that a discourse analytical perspective allows us to challenge the usual separation between textual and contextual approaches to works. Considered as an impossible belonging, paratopia is a condition of possibility of literature, of the subjects who occupy a writer's position and of the use they make of language. To find their place as creators, writers must elaborate their own paratopia, they must give it shape and meaning. Their works must both construct a certain world and, through paratopic shifters, reflect and legitimise the conditions of their own appearance. Paratopia is an invariant of literature, but it takes different forms throughout history: writers draw on their paratopic potential to appropriate the resources made available to them by literary discourse in their own time. Today, the development of digital technologies and research on gender prompts us to take a different look at traditional forms of paratopia. The corpus includes canonical and recent texts, mainly from Western literature. It will be of interest to students and scholars in literary studies, discourse studies (discourse theory and discourse analysis), and sociology of culture. 

Dominique Maingueneau is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at Sorbonne Université, France. His research focuses on discourse analysis.