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In order to demonstrate the benefits of an anthropological approach to literary studies, this paper begins with introducing ethnocritique as a paradigm combining formal analysis and an awareness of the cultural components of texts. It then shifts to evaluate the faculty of ethnocritique to account for literature considered as discourse. Eventually, studying a short story by Maupassant (Saint-Antoine, 1883), it highlights how ethnocritique, integrated within the frame of discourse analysis, can unveil discursive activities, such as the mode of relation between reader and text, and, beyond, the efforts of positioning of the author in the literary field.

In this article, the author proposes a discussion of the scientific legitimacy of mental representation and organizes his argument around the inherited theses of the quarrel of universality. In the first place, it is suggested that representation are the product of our understanding. And, the try to prove their existence in order to assure ourselves that they are indeed things. In concluding, the author ascertains that representation may indeed have no existence and are mere “emissions of the voice”. This text will also attempt a synthesis of what we know today about mental representations by questioning disciplines other than communication studies and try to suggest that this interdiscipline would do well to open itself up to the contributions of neuroscience and the cognitive sciences.