Language and Literature recent issues

Pala Prize 2008

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 04:46:38 PST

Why care about pedagogical stylistics?

Burke, M. — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 04:46:38 PST

Pedagogical stylistics, literary awareness and empowerment: a critical perspective

Zyngier, S., Fialho, O. — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 04:46:38 PST

Based on the premise that stylisticians who are involved with teaching should be aware of the pedagogical orientation and reading paradigms which inform their practice, this article questions whether critical pedagogy can dialogue with stylistics as an approach to working with literary texts in the classroom. The theoretical claims are illustrated with examples from two Literary Awareness workshops in an EFL situation. The argument leads to the conclusion that irrespective of the political orientation and a rather romantic view of education, some of the ideas proposed by critical pedagogy can still contribute to the area of pedagogical stylistics in the years to come. The article concludes with a recommendation for more empirical research in the area.

How students learn stylistics: Constructing an empirical study

Bellard-Thomson, C. — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 04:46:38 PST

This article presents experiential learning outcomes and some data from a pilot study which forms part of a developing doctoral study entitled, ‘Joining the Stylistics Discourse Community: Student Development in Learning Stylistics’. The pilot was designed to assess how information and hard data could be created such that empirical study of student development would be possible, and to gather a small amount of such data for analysis. The article discusses the structuring of the pilot study, the delivery of it and the resulting outcomes. Student groups participating were asked to undertake analysis of a selected text and to complete a questionnaire about their process of learning to analyse.

Authentic instruction in literary worlds: Learning the stylistics of concept-based grammar

Yanez Prieto, M. d. C. — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 04:46:38 PST

Over the last few years, researchers have criticized the typical divides between the lower and the higher stages of the mainstream American undergraduate foreign-language curriculum. Roughly speaking, the lower levels are commonly characterized by meaning-focused, sentence-based language instruction with emphasis on oral interaction, whereas the higher levels tend to focus on formal, text-oriented instruction with an emphasis on reading, writing, literature and content-oriented study. This division has clear repercussions for the conceptualization of communication, language, and language learning in the mainstream foreign-language curriculum. One of the most notable consequences is the idea that literature is essentially different from ordinary language, and, therefore, a less ‘authentic,’ ‘real-life’ form of discourse. The present article presents an alternative, integrative, literature-through-language pedagogy founded on a stylistics-based approach to language. The study was implemented with a group of sixth-semester students of Spanish at an American university. This study examines how the learners’ acculturation into the conventional two-tiered curricular configuration shaped their language constructs and the ways they composed meaning in texts. This article also discusses how the alternative course impacted on the learners’ linguistic development, views of language, and learning attitudes.

Rhetorical pedagogy: Teaching students to write a stylistics paper

Burke, M. — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 04:46:38 PST

How can we help our students to think clearly and plan wisely so that they can write better stylistics papers? This article evaluates a set of rhetorical pedagogical guidelines that I made for my own undergraduate stylistics students in an attempt to address this question. The article primarily reproduces the guidelines I designed, but also a questionnaire that I drew up, and, crucially, reports the responses of the subjects in that questionnaire. It is hoped that such data might lead to better testing methods and ultimately an improved set of stylistics guidelines so that students can be empowered to perform better, with increased confidence and motivation, in the undergraduate stylistics classroom.

An Anglo-Saxon mystery

Nash, W. — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 04:46:38 PST

The Anglo-Saxon poem called Wulf and Eadwacer, a text so deeply embedded in ambiguity as to have achieved canonic status on that account alone, is the subject of this exercise, which reviews briefly the progress of interpretation from the late 19th century to the present time. It then considers methods of study, as orientated from the source-text, which begets translations, or, conversely from various translations leading back to the source. The pedagogic implications of ‘teaching a poem’ arise out of this discussion, which consequently questions the purpose and value of translation as an instructional and imaginative exercise.

Issues in pedagogical stylistics: A coda

Carter, R. — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 04:46:38 PST

Book review: A Mieke Bal Reader, by Mieke Bal, 2006. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, pp. xxiv--491. ISBN 022603585 (pbk)

Krishnamurthy, S. — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 04:46:38 PST

Books Received 2008--9

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 04:46:38 PST

Unnatural conversations in unnatural conversations: speech reporting in the discourse of spiritual mediumship

Wales, K. — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:55:00 PDT

Despite the popular attraction of spiritualism in contemporary society, the discourse of spiritual mediumship has attracted little attention from linguists or stylisticians. One of the practical reasons for this is probably the lack of material in the public domain. On the basis of a recording of a whole session between a professional medium and her client, this article looks at the reporting strategies used by the medium to convey alleged messages from those who have Passed Over: messages which are central to the claims of spiritualism and hence to the authority of the medium. It will be argued that the common accepted formalist terminology of speech representation is inadequate, failing to do justice to the blended spaces of this world and that Beyond and to the medium’s role as ‘intermediary’. Four types are illustrated (interpreted, relayed, dictated and unmediated speech). The methodology proposed might offer a useful approach to the complexities of speech presentation even in This World.

Time- Lessness, simultaneity and successivity: repetition in Beckett's short prose

Paton, S. — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:55:00 PDT

This article focuses on the ways in which Samuel Beckett’s short prose work Lessness constructs the idea of timelessness through formal means. It shows how stylistic features such as the exceptionally high levels of repetition and parallelism, omission of tensed verbs, and omission of connectives and subordinate clauses, work to remove time from the form of the text. In Jakobsonian terms these formal features are seen to replace the forces of successivity — movement in time and narrative progression — with a radical simultaneity. The article then deals with the problematic form of successivity created by the repetition which structures Lessness (in which the first 60 sentences are repeated in a different random permutation to create the text’s second half). Employing Genette’s (1980) terminology, the article shows that although the second half of Lessness does result in an increase in ‘narrative time’ (reader time), it does not result in any parallel increase in ‘story time’ (time within the fiction), and this is because the second set of sentences necessarily conveys the same timelessness as the first. Whereas Esslin (1986) reads this repetition as an economical way of showing that the text’s situation will last into infinity (i.e. in time), this article suggests that the repetition is necessary to show that the fictional situation is timeless and cannot possibly progress. Furthermore, the article ends by showing that the final sentence of Lessness closes off the text’s capacity for infinite regeneration by creating a strong sense of closure in form and content.

The year's work in stylistics 2008

Gavins, J. — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:55:00 PDT

Book Review: Investigating Classroom Discourse by Steve Walsh, 2006. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 188 ISBN 0415364698 (pbk)

Zotzmann, K. — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:55:00 PDT

Book Review: Literature, Metaphor, and the Foreign Language Learner by Jonathan D. Picken, 2007. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.v + 174 ISBN 978023506954 (hbk)

Cheung, K.Y. M. — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:55:00 PDT

Book Review: The Cambridge Companion to Narrative by David Herman (ed.), 2007. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. xiii + 310 ISBN 978 0 521 67366 2 (pbk)

Macrae, A. — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:55:00 PDT

Book Review: Corpus-Based Language Studies: An Advanced Resource Book by Tony McEnery, Richard Xiao and Yukio Tono, 2006. New York: Routledge, pp. xx +386 ISBN 0415286239 (pbk)

Straaijer, R. — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:55:00 PDT

Book Review: The Body in Flannery O'Connor's Fiction by Donald E. Hardy, 2007. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, pp. ix + 188 ISBN 978 1 57003 698 9 (hbk)

Moreton, E. — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:55:00 PDT

Book Review: Language in Literature: Style and Foregrounding by Geoffrey Leech, 2008. Harlow: Longman, pp. xii + 222 ISBN 978 0 582 05109 6 (pbk)

Jobert, M. — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:55:01 PDT

Book Review: How to Read Texts: A Student Guide to Critical Approaches and Skills by Neil McCaw, 2008. London and New York: Continuum, pp. viii + 163 ISBN: 978 0 8264 9288 3 (pbk)

Sorensen, E. P. — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:55:01 PDT

Book Review: On Criticism by Noel Carroll, 2009. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 210 ISBN 978 0 415 39621 9 (pbk)

Forceville, C. — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:55:01 PDT

Book Review: The Language of War by Steve Thorne, 2006. London and New York: Routledge, pp. vii+104 ISBN: 0 415 35868 X (pbk)

Pack, J. L. — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:55:01 PDT

Researching literary reading as social practice

Allington, D., Swann, J. — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 06:03:11 PDT

This article first discusses ‘the reader’ as generally conceived within literary studies (including stylistics), grounding its claims with an empirical analysis of articles published in Language and Literature from 2004 to 2008. It then surveys the many ways in which real readers have been empirically investigated within cultural studies, the history of reading, and cultural sociology. Lastly, it introduces the remaining papers in this special issue as contributions to the study of language and literature.

'Folk stylistics' and the history of reading: a discussion of method

Halsey, K. — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 06:03:11 PDT

The Reading Experience Database 1450—1945 contains more than 25,000 pieces of evidence about reading habits and practices over five centuries, and of these, more than 1500 directly discuss the literary style of the works read, while others make indirect comments on style. This evidence shows literary critics and common readers alike commenting on issues of ‘good’ or ‘imitable’ style; describing how easy the work is to read aloud, recording their impressions of the ‘morality’ of the style; identifying anonymous authors by their style; and making literary judgements on the basis of style. By tracing these remarks over a long historical period (1450 to 1945), we can reconstruct the prevailing stylistic concerns of individual readers and communities of readers, and test grand historical or literary narratives against the everyday experiences of common readers. This article focuses on the period 1800—1945, and considers the ways in which the historicist and evidence-based methods of the new sub-discipline of the history of reading might be used to complement traditional stylistic analyses and methods.

Reading groups and the language of literary texts: a case study in social reading

Swann, J., Allington, D. — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 06:03:11 PDT

This article analyses discourse arising in reading group discussions as an instance of a real-world literary reading practice; it arises from and reports on the AHRC-funded Discourse of Reading Groups project. This naturalistic, observational approach to literary reading is contrasted with experimental approaches. Excerpts from the total dataset in which the language of literary texts is discussed are here subjected to two forms of analysis: software-assisted qualitative analysis suggests that where participants appear to make reference to their subjective responses to texts, this often has the function of presenting evaluations of those texts in mitigated form; interactional sociolinguistic analysis shows the sequential emergence of ‘language’ as a discussion topic, how discussion of language is co-constructed between participants and how such literary activity is culturally, interactionally and interpersonally contingent. ‘Face’ emerges as a key explanatory concept in both analyses.

'From now on we speak civilized Dutch': the authors of Flanders, the language of the Netherlands, and the readers of A. Manteau

Absillis, K. — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 06:03:11 PDT

Subjugated to the linguistic and literary norms of the Netherlands and, at the same time, confined to the borders of the multilingual state of Belgium, Flemish authors have always had to struggle hard to legitimize their cultural identity. After the Second World War, however, Flemish literature suffered from an existential crisis due to the fact that a small but prominent part of the Flemish Movement had collaborated with the German occupiers. Publishers therefore had to explore new ways in which to turn Flemish literature into a commercially and artistically successful commodity in Flanders and the Netherlands. Introducing a theoretical framework that was conceived of by Pierre Bourdieu and further elaborated on by Pascale Casanova in The World Republic of Letters, this article will discuss and interpret the ways in which Flemish publishers have edited, designed, and marketed literary texts, and explore the positive and negative effects which strategies of assimilation and differentiation have had on the reception of those texts. The reading practices engaged in by literary gatekeepers, both in Belgium and in the Netherlands, are shown to have been a profoundly influential force in the history of Flemish literature.

Avid versus struggling readers: co-construed pupil identities in school booktalk

Eriksson Barajas, K., Aronsson, K. — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 06:03:11 PDT

In the present article, we argue for a combination of reader reception studies and discursive psychology that we would like to call discursive reception studies: that is, discursive-psychological analyses of reader reception data. Such approaches provide possibilities to analyse the role of social interaction in the co-construction of the reading of a given book (or talk on a film or other reader reception data). Drawing on detailed analyses of video-recorded teacher-led booktalk sessions in grades 4—7, pupils’ self presentations and other types of co-construed categorizations of readers are examined and discussed in relation to the pupils’ and teachers’ co-construction of two contrasting categories of reader positions: avid readers (bokslukare ; literally, book-devourers), on the one hand, and struggling readers , on the other. These categorizations in turn involve two different sets of continua in terms of the participants’ (pupils’) spontaneous positionings: one based on motivation (willing versus unwilling readers) and one based on reading speed (fast versus slow readers). Both sets of contrasting categories involve implicit local hierarchies, yet these two continua do not necessarily overlap. An important finding is that the position of a fast reader does not imply the position of a book-lover. Through detailed examinations of the participants’ co-construed local hierarchies in booktalk, this study documents ways in which discursive reception studies may contribute to a deeper understanding of reading as a situated social practice. Our findings have implications for teacher training, with respect to the promotion of literary reading among children.

'A pathetic and racist and awful character': ethnomethodological approaches to the reception of diasporic fiction

Benwell, B. — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 06:03:11 PDT

In this article I report on findings from an ongoing research project into the activities of a transnational range of book groups reading the same series of ‘diasporic’ novels. Rather than relying upon speculations as to how readers respond to text-immanent cues, this project conceives reading as a socially situated, localized activity, contingent upon the context in which it is produced. Empirical approaches to literary reception (whether historical, experimental, or ethnographic) have rarely taken full account of the conditions in which reception data is produced. An ethnomethodological analysis of transcribed book group sessions illuminates the ‘social order’ of particular book groups, their implicit values and systems of accountability, and their careful management and negotiation of subjective experience. This contributes to a complex understanding of the processes of literary interpretation, allowing linguistic studies of reading to complement sociological reception studies.

Reading race in Small Island: discourse deviation, schemata and the textual encounter

Lang, A. — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 06:03:11 PDT

This article uses the work of Cook and Semino on discourse deviation to investigate the schemata — the existing cognitive frameworks — that readers bring to their encounters with texts. It aims to challenge the tendency within some strands of discourse analysis and literary theory to ignore empirical readers and to focus on the effects of texts on readers while neglecting the role played by readerly agency. The analysis centres on a discussion between Liverpool residents with various levels of involvement in Small Island Read 2007: a project encouraging residents of the city to read Andrea Levy’s novel Small Island as part of the commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the passing of the Slave Trade Abolition Bill. In this discussion, hedging around lexical items connected to ethnicity and slavery suggests that these readers came to Small Island with a marked reluctance to discuss these topics. When coupled with corroborating data from online questionnaire responses on the topic of ethnicity, this finding is a significant one for understanding the effect of Small Island on its readers, as it offers a degree of contextualization missing from extant claims that readers have been transformed in some way by the novel, and brings empirical depth to discussions which have so far been predominantly theoretical. As an exploratory study, the analysis also offers a model for other investigations into the effects of reading which, I argue, would be enhanced by considering what readers bring to — as well as take from — their textual encounters.

Texts, readers -- and real readers

Hall, G. — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 06:03:11 PDT

Stylistics and 'reading-in-talk'

Myers, G. — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 06:03:11 PDT

In memoriam Colin Martindale

van Peer, W. — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 02:00:20 PDT

Negation and the creation of implicit meaning in poetry

Nahajec, L. — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 02:00:20 PDT

Creating meaning through the use of negation is a cooperative process between speaker and hearer or writer and reader; at surface level, negation acts as an instruction that a proposition should be understood as an unrealized state, event or existence. However, this unrealized state of affairs appears to add no positive information to an ongoing discourse, and approaches based on an analysis of formal semantics and predicate logic are limited in their ability to account for how negated propositions are meaningful in discourse. A reader must infer the intended relevant meaning of a negated proposition based on the assumption that it functions explicitly to deny its opposite, positive counterpart. Further, in order to understand a negated proposition we must be able to conceptualize the positive proposition that is being denied, and this concept, though understood as an unrealized state of affairs, adds to the ongoing discourse both as a concept and as an expectation. A cognitive approach to the analysis of negation in natural language provides the tools to examine how readers and writers cooperate to make meaning. In this article, I use a cognitive stylistic approach, Text World Theory (Werth, 1999), as a framework in my analysis of a small selection of poems, 'The Tyre' (Simon Armitage), 'The Listeners' (Walter de la Mare) and 'Talking in Bed' (Philip Larkin) to explore how negation, as a pragmatic phenomenon, creates unrealized worlds, which far from being discarded are integral to the construction of meaning and effect.

Parentheticals and point of view in free indirect style

Blakemore, D. — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 02:00:20 PDT

This article explores the functions of parentheticals in Free Indirect Style (FIS), and in particular their role in enabling the author to represent thoughts from a variety of perspectives — including his own. I argue that while there is a sense in which a FIS text can achieve relevance by creating a sense of mutuality that is unmediated by the presence of the author, there are also features which allow the author to signal his own attitudes towards the characters whose thoughts he is representing. Indeed, as Dillon and Kirchhoff (1976) and Fludernik (1993) have shown, an author is able to communicate a sense of ironic distance even if he does not necessarily explicitly comment on his characters. Using examples from Katherine Mansfield, Malcolm Lowry and Virginia Woolf, I show that parentheticals play a role both in establishing a sense of affective mutuality between reader and character and in establishing a sense of irony by placing represented thoughts in a ludicrous light.

Cognitive bias and the poetics of surprise

Tobin, V. — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 02:00:20 PDT

The 'curse of knowledge' is a pervasive cognitive bias that makes it very difficult for us accurately to imagine, once we know something, what it is like not to know it. This article analyzes examples drawn from both novels and films to demonstrate that this bias plays a substantial and previously unexamined role in narrative structure. I argue that narratives often take advantage of the curse of knowledge to solve an ongoing storytelling dilemma: how to engineer satisfying twists that genuinely surprise audiences but also avoid coming off as non-sequiturs or cheats. The curse of knowledge provides a useful mechanism to encourage readers to over-generalize propositions in predictable and reproducible ways, while making it likely that they will also agree, in retrospect, that these generalizations were mistaken. The same bias serves to enhance the impression, in hindsight, that the narrative's outcome was indeed possible to predict. Finally, building on Mental Spaces theory (Fauconnier, 1985, 1997) and simulation-based theories of language processing (e.g. Barsalou, 1999; MacWhinney, 2005), I argue that the curse of knowledge is an artifact of a more general cognitive shortcut that is implicated in features of 'correct' sentence interpretation such as presupposition projection as well as in phenomena traditionally described as curse-of-knowledge errors. This account unifies the discussed examples and helps to explain why certain devices, particularly unreliable narration, emerge so frequently as aids to narrative surprise.

Salient inferences: Pragmatics and The Inheritors

Clark, B. — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 02:00:20 PDT

This article considers the role of accounts of inferential processes in the stylistic analysis of texts. It approaches this question by considering the range of contributions an account of inferential processes might make to the stylistic analysis of William Golding's 1955 novel The Inheritors. It considers what such an account might add to insights already provided by previous analyses, including Halliday's famous analysis ('Linguistic Function and Literary Style', 1971) and Hoover's more recent corpus-based work (Language and Style in 'The Inheritors', 1999), both of which say relatively little about inferential processes. This article suggests that an account of inferential processes is in principle a vital part of any adequate account of how texts create effects, even though it is not always practical to offer a detailed account. In some cases, including the case of The Inheritors, the nature of the inferential processes which the text gives rise to makes an important contribution to how we understand and respond to the text.

Book Review: Finding Metaphor in Grammar and Usage: A Methodological Analysis of Theory and Research by Gerard Steen, 2008. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 430. ISBN 978 90 272 3897 9 (hbk)

Low, G. — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 02:00:20 PDT