2I will start by analyzing Raphaël Baroni's observations, most of which I agree with. Above all, however, and I imagine that this will provoke some discussion, I would like to place this observation in the context of a wider and much more disturbing crisis, that of a cultural and political crisis with its concomitant characteristics, of a world that is dying, whereas new values and ideas take time to emerge, to be adopted by political activists and producers of culture, and therefore to become consensual alternative proposals (1). Obviously, stating that one is not a narratologist involves explaining why one has adopted such a stance, and describing the stumbling blocks that led to this choice (2). Along the way, although opposing the fact that I am not a narratologist, I will affirm the meaning of my research on narratives, as well as its link with more encompassing pragma-enunciative issues: firstly, the relations between narratives and reasoning, especially indirect reasoning which uses enunciative effacement, when narratives develop arguments but without using the classical forms of reasoning; secondly, the relations between narratives and the issues of integrating enunciation and taking responsibility for it, which have repercussions on how intentions are expressed (by the author and text) and grasped (by readers), and on the intertwined questions of meaning and interpretation. These are linguistic issues at the intersection between the paradigms of enunciation, pragmatics, and reasoning and those of new rhetoric, textual linguistics, and discourse analysis (3). However, as these questions are not the exclusive domain of linguists, and as it is in the interest of both sides to reflect on the subjects they have in common (i.e. the narrative), as well as on the methods and theories that contribute to them, I will outline some perspectives for continuing the dialogue, focusing more on scientific discussion than institutional concerns (4).

Academic findings and their ideological and political backgrounds

3Let us first agree on the findings. In order to do so, I will discuss both negative and positive findings, distinguishing for each one the academic and political aspects. For, unlike Raphaël Baroni, I will not restrict myself to the academic field and in doing so will defend a number of clear-cut positions, in keeping with the spirit of the "Exchanges" feature of Questions de communication.

Negative findings

4To say that "the field of application" of narratology "has never seemed so wide" whereas narrative theory "appears to be dying" (Baroni, 2016: 219) is a paradox that is perfectly true. In fact, on one hand, narrative theory has scarcely evolved since the late 1970s, and narratologists have barely drawn on work outside narratology to renew their models. More seriously, this ossification seems to me to be driven by a conservative ideological entrenchment that is unfortunately not limited to political life or to intellectual debate. The stigmatizing of the “demon of theory”, in France in institutions where, on the contrary, we might have expected them to proclaim the role of theories in understanding the world loud and clear, has produced its effects: a lot of work that is lifeless, monotone, lacking in dynamism, without perspective, and bathed in the illusion that the endless hunt for a new corpus to exploit makes it useless to reflect on theoretical models and methods.

5The assertion that the "toolbox" of narratology, i.e. its structural matrices, has been questioned because of its formalism (ibid.: 220-221) is worthy of discussion. Accusations against formalism are quite often typical of unfounded debates, always aimed at the formalism of others, blind to their own practices. However, it must be determined whether formalism is to be criticized because the "tools", i.e. the concepts and/or methods, are wrong or whether they are wrongly applied by those who consider texts as pretexts for vague labelling. In the first instance, the fault is that of the tools and in the second that of the user, which is not at all the same thing. Both hypotheses are in fact relevant, but with different levels of responsibility: some tools have proved deficient (especially those related to focalization; I will come back to this later), but it is far from true for all of them. We also need to incriminate the shortcomings of the works that used these techniques without trying to shed new light on the narratives, which is what they were originally supposed to do, nor trying to improve those aspects of the theoretical framework in which it has proved to be deficient. Responsibility today therefore lies much less with the pioneers than with those who use a theory without improving it - not to mention those who think they can do without it!

8However, the notion of "great narrative" (which is another way of saying ‘storytelling’) is more complex and substantial if we consider some of its uses, as in the following remarks by Gilles Kepel (2016: 47-48) on the jihadist attacks that have struck France since Charlie Hebdo. Indeed, the concept, even if written in inverted commas, is an attempt at a holistic explanation, a synthesis of very heterogeneous elements, that sums up what motivates jihadists to take action, while at the same time giving society the means to act on the phenomenon holistically - and all this "without brainwashing"! –:

"While violent social phenomena always have their own logic, often but not always linked to the living conditions of marginalized populations but also stemming from the fragile psychological structure of individuals, the fact nevertheless remains that ideology gives awareness of action and determines its forms, just as it defines the boundaries of the community we belong to and that of our enemies, indeed regulates, in the cases reviewed, even the methods of extermination of the latter.
This is why it is imperative to be lucid about the motivations of the jihadist doctrine, even if it can only materialize when objective conditions allow it to flourish, such as indoctrination inside prisons, the rise of social networks or the widespread use of smartphones as vectors for preaching. This explains the gap between the online publication in 2005 of the texts mentioned above and their implementation in the middle of the following decade by activists, the first of whom was Mohamed Merah in 2012.
No doubt other narratives have played a role in constructing the "great narrative" of contemporary French Jihadism, such as the legacy of the Algerian War, helping to shed light on the retro-colonial nature of hatred. It is not incidental that the children of the Ozar-Hatorah school were massacred by Merah on the day of the fiftieth anniversary of the Evian Agreements of 19 March 1962, nor that, in his family’s subconscious, France was particularly abhorred. Added to this is the never-ending unresolved issue of the Arab-Israeli conflict, constantly fanning the flames of "anti-Zionism", one of jihadists' preferred means of calling for the extermination of all Jews".

10In addition to the lack of theoretical concern, care and uncertainty, there is also a lack of interdisciplinarity. These damaging shortfalls cannot be mentioned without evoking the fact that university disciplinary segmentation has been accompanied by an entrenchment of identity-based ideologies (ethnic, nationalist, cultural, religious or otherwise), which are not conducive to the interdisciplinary approaches that everyone raves about but that very few put into practice, or if so, at their own risk. The time is long gone when Roman Jakobson (1963: 248), in closing his Essays on General Linguistics, could say:

"If there are still critics who doubt the proficiency of linguistics with respect to poetry, I think, that apart from myself, they must have taken the poetic incompetence of a few narrow-minded linguists for a fundamental failure of linguistic science itself. Each of us here, however, has definitively understood that both linguists who are insensible to the function of poetry and literary scholars who are indifferent to the problems and ignorant of linguistic methods, are blatant anachronisms".

11It is hard to believe but blatant anachronisms are flourishing (in language sciences as well as literary sciences), combining punctiliousness here, and fascination for marginal trends and contempt for norms there, with in addition scientific reductionism worthy of merit, spurred on by a tendency to over-specialize. The latter is no doubt inevitable but should encourage us to invent teaching programs with broad perspectives and possible links between the sub-fields of a given discipline and other related disciplines. And yet anachronism is what we are facing.

13It seems to me that we underestimate the destructive cultural effects of a global crisis. The failure of political models on the left (of social transformation or prudent reformism) as well as on the right (whether liberal or authoritarian), faced with the challenges of all kinds of globalization (financial, industrial, technological, cultural), with the loss of shared points of reference and common values, and with ecological challenges, has led to the discrediting of national and transnational political institutions. This has been given a powerful voice by the rise in populism, the triumph of simplistic ideas and the mistrust of theoretical intelligence. The situation of universities everywhere in the world with their so-called race for excellence, their managerial style of functioning, and their contempt for dynamic research (Rabatel, 2015a), simply reproduces in both teaching and research a rivalry that we are dismayed to see many giving way to, thus encouraging an entrenchment of identity-based ideologies (ethnic, nationalist, cultural, religious or otherwise), which do not only exist in the political sphere. I can easily imagine what reservations these abrupt and elliptical statements might arouse but this "strange defeat" really does deserve to be analyzed in all its facets, free from any amalgamations or teleological or retrospective illusions. I certainly do not mean to say that there is a causal link between all these phenomena, particularly since they concern very different spheres. What I would like to point out is that all these partially autonomous negative phenomena produce, given the duration of the crisis, cumulative effects – thus accentuating the impact of each individual factor - indeed a systemic effect that makes sectoral public interventions inoperative (except at the fringes).

Positive practices to reinforce

15Similarly, I hail the growing importance of work on ethics and empathy, to which I myself am very attached. It is a significant research current, although we should not be under any illusions about the small number of these studies or the lack of transpositions that should be made more often in the fields of literature and linguistics (Rabatel, 2013; 2015b; 2016). For many works discuss empathy without exploring the concept in more depth or showing what the texts reveal about it, how they exploit it in language via the question of POV, and what narratives might contribute to the theory of empathy. As for the development of narrative sociology, narrative theology, and narrative historiography, the dominant tendency is that of an instrumentation of relatively basic narratological tools. But this does not produce interesting insights about narratives or the disciplines in question, unlike the debates historians had in the 1980s. And yet there is a lot to be said about elements of proof, the idea of biography, and the use of attested documents for the benefit of narratology. Similarly, the work devoted to the importance of narration in the (re)construction of identities in professional situations (professional memoirs or accreditations to conduct research), whether it be cure or care, does not seem to lead (as far as I am aware) to any substantial theoretical outcomes. In short, the empire is in place —but it is a particularly fragile empire because leaderless— making me more inclined to invoke the reign of an expansionist empiricism.

16However, we must avoid the temptation to focus only on narration, just as others are tempted to focus only on argumentation. This opposition between narration and argumentation is all the more debatable since, as shown by the work of Jean-Marc Ferry, there is a continuum between the two, and argumentation is most likely the offspring of narrative reasoning. As Marie-Laure Florea and myself (2011: 22-23) pointed out in the introduction to the chapter in Questions de Communication on discourse about death:

• 10 Which is what R. Baroni (2016: 225) says too.

"Identity is more than just narrative identity (Ricœur, 1983, Charaudeau, 1997)10. As Jean-Marc Ferry points out, in addition to the founding role of narration, which is the primary construction of identity, other registers come into play. Hence, interpretation plays a role "when the narrative is understood from the point of view of edification" (Ferry, 1991: 112), when the thought process goes beyond the contingent framework of action to explain what is. Ferry then suggests a third stage, namely argumentation, which he defines as the process of working out and explaining particular phenomena using different logical frameworks aimed at elaborating reasons to act that apply to all, not only to those who have been the authors or witnesses of such events, events that have been related then interpreted… This is why argumentation is itself grasped due to the need for a fourth dimension that completes the dynamic process of identity construction, referred to by Ferry as reconstruction. Reconstruction aims to justify argumentation by taking into account other good reasons, situating them, and contextualizing them, in order to avoid intolerant ideological excesses, without at the same time succumbing to relativism. It is indeed all these different dimensions that interact in the emotional and rational construction of identities, a construction focused on action, itself charged with emotion and reason”.

17To conclude this section, I would say without doubt that I have taken a more radical stance than Raphaël Baroni, and that my remarks are more encompassing, more directly political, but it seemed to me that the debate did not gain anything by being restricted solely to a university level. I imagine it will provoke some annoyance, but perhaps it will also open up a debate that integrates this dimension. Otherwise it will fall short of its objective, for it is difficult to autonomize these debates if we limit them to the academic field(s) alone. Indeed, intellectual debates on theories and how they are taught have, in France at least, had political repercussions and, conversely, political debates have fueled theoretical antagonisms, both in terms of the content and the format of the debates. As if everything had to be reduced to a killing game, allowing only the victory of one camp over another, with the backlash being history standing still and science dispensing with cumulative processes, a phenomenon that is heightened when academic divisions and fashion encourage an entrenchment of narrow-minded identity-based ideologies (ethnic, nationalist, cultural, religious or otherwise).

My divergences with narratology

18Raphaël Baroni has on several occasions wondered, despite the value of my research for narratology, why I do not identify with this paradigm. I therefore feel I need to clarify my differences with it, which I will do here, before outlining in the following section the linguistic meaning of my work, and its anthropological and political background.

19My reasons for disagreeing are primarily theoretical and methodological. In 2010, at the invitation of John Pier and Francis Berthelot, I published a text entitled "Pour une narratologie énonciative ou pour une analyse énonciative des phénomènes narratifs? (Enunciative narratology or an enunciative analysis of narrative phenomena?)" (Rabatel, 2010). The title was very explicit, for although it questioned the possibility of belonging to narratology, it did so by specifying it from the outset as enunciative narratology (all things said not a very popular concept), before rejecting such a lineage. Linguists who have taken an interest in narratives have often done so from the linguistic angle of voices or polyphony (Danon-Boileau, 1982; Rivara, 2000), and more rarely through the general analysis of the linguistic construction of the world, i.e. referencing. More often than not, their contributions have been limited by their acceptance of the Genettian framework of focalizations (Genette, 1972; 1983). However, I reject the idea of enunciative narratology, because I refuse the theoretical frameworks of narratology of the 1960s and mid-1970s, which are essentially the consequence of a structuralist influence in which priority is given to deep structures and less emphasis put on the texts with respect to construction of the discourse. Taking this as the starting point, and making the assumption that voices and POV were central issues, I tried to problematize the concept of POV, which led to me distancing myself from Genettian focalizations which in my opinion are at the heart of the system. I am of course aware that narratology has taken many other turns - including in terms of non-communicative approaches, which I also reject (Rabatel, 2011a) - but the bottom line is that narratological studies typologize from afar without confronting the materiality of the texts. As I am opposed to generalities and approximate metaphors, I maintain my position. I will not elaborate at length on my differences with Genettian narratology, but I cannot help but evoke them briefly:

• I regret the lack of distinction between the speaker, i.e. the source of the voices expressed or being expressed (Rabatel, 2011b: 15-17) and the enunciator, i.e. the source of the POVs, who can take account of wordless sentences (Ducrot, 1984; Banfield, 1982), as well the instances of narration. I realize that this question is also a subject of debate in language sciences, and that my position draws valuable support from literary works, since the scale of the text raises different questions from those in the text itself. This is an example of how linguistics would also benefit from using their techniques to tackle new objects, and how too many linguists make the mistake of neglecting literary works.
• I reject the fragility of the instances on which the three focalizations are based, as they lack substantial enunciative analysis. Because there are only two instances: the first speaker/enunciator and the second speaker/enunciator, which means there is no instance for a fantastical external focalization, one that mistakes focalization from the outside with external focalization (Rabatel, 1997b: 89, 102; 1998).
• I disagree with the non-existence of the narrator's POV, an idea put forward by Gérard Genette, who, it is true, gives three different definitions of zero focalization, and differs on more than just one point with the thesis of narratorial omniscience (Rabatel, 2010). I also disagree with the - by definition - limited perspective of the characters in a text, at the cost of basic ontological and phenomenological considerations about perception, in relation to the phenomenon of restriction of the field and the nature of restriction, in particular the assertion that a character cannot be privy to the thoughts of the other characters (Rabatel, 1997a: 239-269).
• I criticize the underestimation of the linguistic construction of what is "seen", which alone makes it possible to determine on the basis of textual data who sees, feels, thinks, speaks, acts. These semantic subsets of the centers of perspective need to be analyzed in detail; which for me has led to the identification of different types of POV (Rabatel, 2008a) that vary depending on the nature of the phenomena analyzed and the texts they emerge from:
  • In the foreground, embryonic POV: perceptions, thoughts, actions taken as a whole;
  • In the background, represented POV: perceptions (and thoughts inferred from or based on these perceptions) and/or actions deployed;
  • Asserted POV: thoughts and words (disconnected from perceptions) of secondary enunciators in reported/represented speech or in direct comments by the primary speaker/enunciator, in this case the homo- or hetero-diegetic narrator.
• I also regret the lack of anthropological background to theories on focalization, versus the horizon I am trying to give to POV and empathy, e.g.:
  • on the question of the continuum from pre-reflexivity to reflexivity, i.e. from the sensory to the intelligible, via what can be sensed, thought, and said, this continuum being itself part of a wider continuum from perception to action;
  • regarding the political and ethical horizon of empathy - when combined with an altruistic conception of sympathy (Nussbaum, 2012: 202-203) -; indeed, empathy does not only function at an individual or inter-individual level, it can also be between individuals and groups (Morin, 1999: 51-52; Nussbaum, 2010: 37-38, 61; 1995: 190-191): I will come back to this in the next section.

20These differences on the issue of focalizations have not made me forget Gérard Genette’s many other contributions, in particular, to stay within the bounds of narratology, the distinction between history, storytelling and narration. But although narration is about putting into words, it must be said that it is more concerned with the major structural blocks of storytelling, for example, isochronies or anisochronies; even frequency is approached structurally; it is not at all analyzed in terms of language at a contextual, textual level (Rabatel, 2008a: 305-321). These distinctions are undoubtedly relevant, but they would benefit from being completed by the repertoire of linguistic markers that implement them, a repertoire that is not limited to the study of statements but takes account of the text as a whole, for example through the following phenomena: coherence, cohesion, argument structuring, universe construction, represented discourse, emotions, POV phenomena, and how POV change, their intrications, etc.

21For the same reasons, I had similar misgivings about Algirdas Julien Greimas and semiotics. As I explained, I abandoned a thesis I was planning to do with him (Rabatel, 2015c: 328-329). Then, at the invitation of the semioticians, on the occasion of the centenary of Greimas' birth, I reconsidered my differences with his approach to enunciation and with those of other semioticians (Greimas, Courtés, 1979; 1986; Fontanille, 1998); Fontanille, Zilberberg, 1998), which ultimately have the same foundations as my criticism of narratology, namely a persistent underestimation of surface phenomena and discourse, due to a fascination with deep structures (Rabatel, available soon). In other words, at the heart of my disagreements are the great modelers of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Structural Semantics dates from 1966, Figures III from 1972). Many fundamental works have emerged since then, for example those of Paul Ricœur (1983, 1884, 1985) or Jean-Marc Ferry (1991), who have profoundly nourished my thoughts on narratives, even though they are not narratologists.

22On the other hand, my reluctance towards narratology has been fuelled by the negative effects of how it has been taught: the narrative turning point, like the enunciative moment (indeed like all analytical modes), have spread by relying on a little-questioned doxa, limiting analysis to the quinary scheme of the story or its actantial scheme (without, moreover, pondering the question as to why several schemes are possible). I can but share the observations and reservations expressed by Raphaël Baroni (2016: 226), for example on the occasion of the Narratives Matters conference in 2014...

23But there's more to it. Raphaël Baroni (2016: 228) regrets that the authors of the works that have contributed most to the evolution of the theoretical frameworks of narratology are not acknowledged as such:

“These theorists are rarely perceived by the public as narratologists in the strict sense of the word, and sometimes even they themselves are reluctant to assume this identity. In particular, it is worth mentioning the considerable contribution of many linguists who have developed narrative theory within language sciences, including Jean-Michel Adam, Françoise Revaz, Alain Rabatel and Dominique Maingueneau. Moreover, John Pier (2011) states that in France, contemporary narratology has very much shifted towards discourse analysis.”

A translinguistic pragmatic-enunciative framework

25Having set out my differences, I would now like to define the theoretical meaning of my approach, leaving narratology aside - but coming back to it at the end. From the very beginning of my work on "la problématisation sémio-linguistique de la notion de point de vue (semio-linguistic problematization of the concept of point of view)" (the title of my thesis), that is to say on narrative focalizations in narratives, I had the impression that I was touching on a crucial question for linguistics regarding the expression of subjectivity. Not only through its traditional forms - "indexical markers of the formal apparatus of enunciation" as Émile Benveniste said, and other markers outside this formal apparatus - but also through markers in the third person that can be found from the construction of referencing. I have already recounted the extension of my thoughts (Rabatel, 2015c: 341-345); I now take the liberty of referring readers back to it, thus enabling them to understand why the question of POV has been extended considerably to include other types of text than narratives: explanations, information, and argumentations. Hence my publications on media, religious, philosophical, and didactic corpuses. Concomittantly, the points I have been investigating have themselves evolved, with an essential place given to forms of enunciative erasure and the resulting argumentative effects, following on from Jean-Blaise Grize's work (1990, 2002) on natural inferential logic. This broadening out has been accompanied by a reflection on enunciative concepts, which in my view are essential when it comes to analyzing statements (Rabatel, 2012) as well as the enunciative responsibility of texts (Rabatel, 2008b; Rabatel, Chauvin-Vileno, 2006). These concepts question speakers about their choices, their strategies, and the importance of enunciative positionings with respect to quotations and reformulations: they are crucial when studying academic, biblical, philosophical, and media texts (aside from the well-worn subject of so-called media objectivity), insofar as it is crucial to determine who thinks what, about what, and about whom. Moreover, these questions are also indispensable for studying narratives (fictional or not), in the third person and a fortiori in the first person, especially when they have unusual themes (Gustave Flaubert, Salman Rushdie...) or represent with a certain narratorial neutrality worlds that arouse fear and disapproval (Les Bienveillantes, Littell, 2006), causing the reader to doubt what the author (who is not the narrator, even less so his characters) thinks. This is also the case when stories describe with the same distance characters derived from axiology and value systems with opposing polarities, or even violently antagonistic ones (Fyodor Dostoevsky, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Marcel Aymé...).

26Finally, my questions about POV relate to the mechanisms used to construct meaning in discourse, and thus to the link between meaning and interpretation. They are also accompanied by an in-depth semantic reflection on the mechanisms of meaning through work on figures (even if, here once again, I do not reduce the mechanism of figurations to tropes (antimetaboles, spoonerisms, approximations, antanaclases, syllepses, lapses, etc.), for example by also looking at figures of thought (irony, humor, hyperbole...), taking into account all the figurative processes of discourse in lists, repetitions, connivance phenomena (see note 1 above), etc.

27In some ways, my work on POVs is the prism through which I have worked for the past 20 years, and I think the interest of it is fourfold:

• a theoretical-didactic interest, deepening the study of subjectivity, making it possible to consider a large number of markers and clues, by analysing their effects on the reader, and thus going beyond formalist descriptive observations, disconnected from any interpretative considerations. This applies both to the reading of works and to literary writing or the question of style, via the rewriting or writing of imitations/inventions (Rabatel, 2004); and it also touches upon the questions of subject matter and intentionality, as constructed in and by discourse;
• an anthropological interest by attempting to account for the continuum of pre-reflective perceptions to thoughts, words and action (Rabatel, 2008a: 417-420 ; 440-449 ; 464-469), against the background of what Alain Berthoz and Bernard Andrieu (2011) describe using a very enlightening portmanteau word: perceivaction. In doing so, they ensure that the whole infra-verbal dimension of thoughts and emotions that accompany and transform perceptions into intentional, imaginative reflections is heard; through flashes of inspiration or more elaborate reasoning, which ultimately become embodied in actions and intellectualized in repertoires of rules for acting and living (Ferry, 1991; Jouvent, 2009: 12-13). It is up to the linguist to account linguistically for these different forms of expression of reflexivity (see above my proposals on the various forms of POV);
• a psycho-social interest by relating my POV theory to empathic, cognitive, and emotional approaches, giving a socio-cultural meaning to grammatical markers. In turn, this enables us to analyze how enunciators are able to put themselves in other people's shoes, imagining what they might, want to or should perceive, feel (sentiments, emotions, feelings), think, say, do, and the implications of these representations as regards understanding situations, and the choices and constraints that each of us are subject to (Rabatel, 2016). This empathic shift does not only involve others (heterodialogue), it also affects the subject/speaker, who is capable, through self-dialogic reflexivity, of multiplying perspectives (spatially, temporally and conceptually) in order to better understand complexity;
• a political interest, insofar as the work on empathic displacements (Berthoz, 2004) and narrative imagination (Nussbaum, 2010: 121-122; 1995: 202-204) allows us to construct, based on an understanding of the complex relationship with otherness, an awareness of oneself, of others, and of the collective, which must be taken into account in the construction of objects, concepts, and decisions. This political interest seems to me even more important since I am advocating all-encompassing empathic mobility. In other words, we must put ourselves in the shoes not only of those close to us, but of everyone, including those furthest away from us; we need as well to practice empathy from subject to subject but also put ourselves in the shoes of groups and institutions (Morin, 1999; Nussbaum, 2010; Rabatel, 2015b). All of this gives content and meaning to the ethical and political values which are fundamental to living together in society, but which are today undermined13.

28I would like my position to be understood through all these dimensions: it is only then that interdisciplinary dialogue can be productive. We all need to come together and set aside our certainties and disciplinary preoccupations. In conclusion, and to put it another way, I willingly admit that I am not a narratologist, but I consider my work to be of interest (in particular) to narratology, just as I have said on other occasions that I am not a didactician, but that my work sometimes touches on didactics.

Conclusion

30I do not have a clear-cut opinion about whether narratology should, as a matter of principle, come under the departments of French language and literature, language sciences or information-communication. Based on the narratological productions I am familiar with, I do not find them very compatible with the scientific practices of the last two options. One might also consider that it would be just as possible to recruit narratologists in sections 7 to 15 of the National Board of Universities (CNU), i.e. all the sections that combine language and literature. Moreover, pragmatically, I notice that, in many medium-sized universities, there are no autonomous language science departments, whereas information and communication sciences are developing and adding language science researchers to their teams. What is more, it would only make sense to have a narratologist in language and literature departments if at the same time other paradigms, equally valuable for understanding texts, were represented (see above). Such a situation first requires a profound redefinition of disciplines, certainly not by abandoning the preparatory courses for competitive examinations for the recruitment of teachers, but by offering courses that are partly independent of the latter. Of course, it would also be a good idea (we still have to dream!) to change the content of these competitive exams, even if this is far from easy given the weight of conservatism, including among colleagues whose cultural conservatism is in contradiction with their political convictions.

31Although these hypothetical institutional and academic reforms are complex because they provoke resistance from lobbies and depend (in France) as much on the Ministry of Higher Education and Research as on the Ministry of Education, indeed on the Prime Minister and President of the Republic, the opportunities for debate can nevertheless be multiplied without waiting for these reforms to be implemented. I applaud the opportunity for debate provided by Raphaël Baroni, and the role played by 'Questions de communication' via its "Exchanges" section, in so many of its earlier issues. This review demonstrates that it is possible for a university to be a place of academic excellence, of disciplinary cross-fertilization, and of controversies, both as regards theoretical questions as well as their social implications. More reviews should play this role, albeit in different forms, and networks should be set up to debate and discuss topical issues. Opportunities for interdisciplinary exchange around common objects or concepts should be multiplied, and these objects and concepts tested against conflicting bodies of work. This would be a good way of moving forward, encouraging people to make deeper and richer theoretical choices as well as to trail-blaze new territories.