Represented speech and thought and auctorial irony: ambiguity and metarepresentation in literature

In this paper, I want to discuss one type of “pragmatic ambiguity”, i.e. utterances of which it is not clear whether they are sentences of narration or represented speech and thought. Through the discussion of these examples, I will introduce a few notions which seem to me important for the analysis of represented speech and thought, notably the notion of metarepresentation. I will then turn to another example of metarepresentation in literature, that is auctorial irony. Having shown that it is indeed a case of metarepresentation, I will then point out that its existence raises difficulties for the notion, traditional in literary studies, of a narrator, distinct from the author, and responsible of the narration itself. I will then conclude that the notion of author, which is not theoretical but relative to the actual producer of the text, should be rehabilitated and take pride of place in literary studies.