José Angel García Landa
University of Zaragoza, Department of English and German Philology, Faculty member (retired 2022 - but alive and clickin' in the Afterlife).
José Ángel GARCíA LANDA (MA Brown University, PhD Zaragoza, 1988) has been a Senior lecturer in English at the University of Zaragoza, Spain (1992-2022). He specialises in literary theory and narratology. He is the author of 'Samuel Beckett y la narración reflexiva' (Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza, 1992) and of 'Acción, Relato, Discurso: Estructura de la ficción narrativa (Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1998). He has coedited essay collections such as 'Narratology' (Longman Critical Reader, 1996), 'Gender, I-deology: Essays on Theory, Fiction and Film' (Rodopi, 1996), and 'Theorizing Narrativity'(Walter de Gruyter, 2008). He was the editor (1992-1999) of the academic journal of English and American Studies 'Miscelánea', and has written papers for 'Atlantis', 'Papers on Language and Literature', 'English Language Notes', 'European Journal of English Studies' and other philological journals, as well as contributions to a number of books. He is currently working on 'A Bibliography of Literary Theory, Criticism and Philology', a free-access Internet resource included in the Oxford Text Archive. He has been teaching courses in English studies (Commentary of Literary Texts, English and American criticism, English and American literature, Shakespeare, drama...) up to 2022, and formerly in the postgraduate program, usually on literature, critical theory or narratology. He runs a number of blogs on these and other subjects, and is a sworn enemy of face masks and face maskers.
Address: Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana
Facultad de Filosofía y Letras
Universidad de Zaragoza
50009 Zaragoza
Spain
Address: Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana
Facultad de Filosofía y Letras
Universidad de Zaragoza
50009 Zaragoza
Spain
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Papers by José Angel García Landa
English Abstract: The 'Matthew Effect' described by Thomas Merton has been recently revalued by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in 'The Black Swan'. It consists essentially in a statistic principle of accumulation through feedback dynamics, as a result of mutual attention in the circulation of information. Here we extract some narratological and hermeneutic consequences from Taleb's account, relating this concept with canon formation and dynamics of evaluation in literature and in academic criticism, as well as with the the concept of retrospective distortion of hindsight bias. The informational vortices resulting from the Matthew Effect give rise, retroactively, to the phenomena which will feed back on these informational dynamics of attention in the future.
Keywords: Statistics, Success, Canon, Attention, Retrospection, Hindsight Bias, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Matthew Effect, Feedback, Quality, Evaluation
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Notes on Karl Bühler's Theory of Language, originally published as Sprachtheorie (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1934). Synthesizing the book's main insights and theories regarding the role of the different kinds of signs, signals and symbols in language, the role of concepts and indices, the functions of language, the levels of linguistic articulation, and the relevance of the whole to speech and communication, speech acts, linguistic forms, psycholinguistics and linguistic interaction, as well as the logic and semantics of linguistic representation. Note: Downloadable document is in Spanish.
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This paper examines the representation of characters in two medieval French epic poems, "Le Couronnement de Louis" and "Le Pèlerinage de Charlemagne," with special attention to the conventions of this particular epic genre, and the ideology implicit in their positive as well as in their negative values, such as the ahistorical representation of the Moors.
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English Abstract: Some reflections on the relationship between imagination, memory and narrative, more specifically on the question of autobiographical fictions and Rosa Montero's book 'The Madwoman in the Family' (2003). The Intertwining of factual narrative and invention is at the centre of her reflections, and here I comment their bearing on cognitive narratology and on the theory of retrospection I deal with in other papers. This is a retropost from 2009.
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English abstract: Notes and commentary on "Teams", the second chapter of Erving Goffman's seminal work of dramaturgic sociology, "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life." This is a 2009 retropost on a 1959 book. Social actors are shown to act not in isolation but in organized groups or teams, whose members cooperate in maintaining the collective fictions shared by the group and the social roles assigned to each member.
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English Abstract: A discussion of the notion of natural order with reference to the development of evolutionary thought. The inherent weakness of Paley's creationist argument for intelligent design is discussed preparing the ground for the examination of one crucial insight in evolutionary theory: the notion that rationality requires that complex phenomena should be preceded by simple phenomena and that they derive from them. The development of this insight is examined in the evolutionary biology of Lamack and in the cultural evolutionism of Vico. A discussion of the Great Chain of Being and mythical creation stories such as Genesis shows that this rationality is grounded in forms of thought prior to evolutionism — that is, that the complex thought of evolutionary theory derives from simpler proto-evolutionary insights that are to be found as far back as creationist myths of origin. The perspectival problems attending the study of the development of evolutionary thought, notably hindsight bias, are also discussed with reference to the work of Vico.
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Implied authors and unreliable narrators are two concepts which are closely linked in narrative theory, as they were originally developed by Wayne Booth. Their afterlives have diverged: the implied author is often questioned or rejected as a theoretical concept, and is usually downplayed in narratologists's accounts; while the unreliable narrator has acquired an unprecedented popularity and expansion. I will add some historical notes and will try to show that the implied author is not so easily done away with; moreover, it is a necessary concept in order to give an adequate definition of the unreliable narrator.
English abstract: This paper examines the institutional context of English studies in general, at university level, at the University of Zaragoza in the early years of the 21st century, with a special focus on the disciplinary, professional and institutional status of English linguistics.
Keywords: English, English studies, degrees, University of Zaragoza, English philology