Showing papers in "Language and Literature in 2017"
TL;DR: Reader response research in stylistics is characterised by a commitment to rigorous and evidence-based approaches to the study of readers' interactions with and around texts, and the application of such datasets in the service of stylistic concerns as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: This article introduces the special issue. In it, we argue that research into reader response should be recognised as a vital aspect of contemporary stylistics, and we establish our focus on work which explicitly investigates such responses through the collection and analysis of extra-textual datasets. Reader response research in stylistics is characterised by a commitment to rigorous and evidence-based approaches to the study of readers’ interactions with and around texts, and the application of such datasets in the service of stylistic concerns, to contribute to stylistic textual analysis and/or wider discussion of stylistic theory and methods. We trace the influence of reader response criticism and reception theory on stylistics and discuss the productive dialogues which exist between stylistics and the related fields of the empirical study of literature and naturalistic study of reading. After offering an overview of methods available to reader response researchers and a contextualising survey of exis...
73 citations
TL;DR: The authors used reading times as a measure of the processing effort demanded by difficult poems, where difficulty is defined as a text-driven response phenomenon associating the poem with a text.
Abstract: This study presents an experiment that uses reading times as a measure of the processing effort demanded by ‘difficult’ poems, where difficulty is defined as a text-driven response phenomenon assoc...
36 citations
TL;DR: This article found a positive correlation between lite reading and affective benefits of literary reading, and a positive relationship between reading quality and the affective benefit of reading quality, which is a common belief in the humanities.
Abstract: The alleged crisis of the humanities is currently fueling renewed interest in the affective benefits of literary reading. Several quantitative studies have shown a positive correlation between lite...
33 citations
TL;DR: This study is the first of its kind in analysing real-time reading contexts with real readers during a researcher-led literary project (‘read.live.learn’) in Northern Ireland’s only female prison and is unique in addressing experimental and post hoc bias.
Abstract: Cognitive stylistics offers a range of frameworks for understanding (amongst other things) what producers of literary texts 'do' with language and how they 'do' it. Less prevalent, however, is an understanding of the ways in which these same frameworks offer insights into what readers 'do' (and how they 'do' it). Text World Theory (Werth, 1999; Gavins, 2007; Whiteley, 2011) has proved useful for understanding how and why readers construct mental representations engendered by the act of reading. However, research on readers' responses to literature has largely focused on an 'idealised' reader or an 'experimental' subject-reader often derived from within the academy and conducted using contrived or amended literary fiction. Moreover, the format of traditional book groups (participants read texts privately and discuss them at a later date) as well as online community forums such as Goodreads, means that such studies derive data from post-hoc, rather than real-time textual encounters and discussions. The current study is the first of its kind in analysing real-time reading contexts with real readers during a researcher-led literary project ('read.live.learn') in Northern Ireland's only female prison. In doing so, the study is unique in addressing experimental and post hoc bias. Using Text World Theory, the paper considers the personal and social impact of reader engagement in the talk of the participants. As such, it has three interrelated aims: to argue for the social and personal benefits of reading stylistically rich literature in real-time reading groups; to demonstrate the efficacy of stylistics for understanding how those benefits come about, and to demonstrate the inter-disciplinary value of stylistics, particularly its potential for traversing traditional research parameters.
26 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors have discussed the "positions" that readers adopt in relation to the author, narrator, and characters in fictional narratives, and applied this approach to the ethical experiences of fictional narratives.
Abstract: Recent investigations into ethical experiences of fictional narratives have discussed the ‘positions’ that readers adopt in relation to the author, narrator and characters . This article applies Te...
24 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors consider the text of the Harry Potter novels to understand the way in which gender is represented in the books. The analysis centers on the two sidekick characters, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley.
Abstract: This study considers the text of the Harry Potter novels to understand the way in which gender is represented. The analysis centers on the two sidekick characters, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley,...
20 citations
TL;DR: Sotirova as mentioned in this paper argues that stylisticians have succeeded in creating a domain of their own, as evidenced by the publication of two discipline-defining handbooks (Burke, 2014; Stockwell and Whiteley, 2014), leading her to conclude that stylistics has matured and is indeed in good shape.
Abstract: 2016 was imbued with a sense of shifting sands in global politics, characterised by very little security in the old or – perhaps more accurately – a sense that tradition can take surprising new forms. In a way, browsing through the titles published in stylistics in 2016 gives the same sense, albeit with altogether more positive developments. I will try to explain what I mean, first looking at the solid foundations on which these changes are wrought. With the recent publication of two discipline-defining handbooks (Burke, 2014; Stockwell and Whiteley, 2014) and a comprehensive compendium (Sotirova, 2015) the contemporary field of stylistics has been very clearly set out. There is general agreement in the remit of research in stylistics, as well as in the eclecticism that it embodies. Sorlin’s cross-referencing review of these three volumes, published in Language and Literature last year (Issue 3), makes this harmonious agreement clear, leading her to conclude that stylistics has matured and is indeed in ‘good shape’. Reflecting on an outdated suggestion that stylistics lacks an ‘autonomous domain of its own’ (Widdowson, 1975: 3) and that it is a method of analysis rather than a discipline, Sorlin asserts that in the intervening decades stylisticians have succeeded in creating a domain of their own, as evidenced by the publication of these comprehensive volumes. It is against that background of disciplinary health and energy that I undertake to review subsequent publications in the field, which both contribute to and develop the lay of the land. However, I would venture to surmise that as a result of the sense of confidence in ‘our domain’, stylisticians are engaging more fully in the interdisciplinary work that has always been at the core of this eclectic field. In the opening lines of her
16 citations
TL;DR: The Corpus of the Canon of Western Literature (Version 1.0) as discussed by the authors is an operationalization of the western canon based on Bloom's The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994).
Abstract: This paper introduces the Corpus of the Canon of Western Literature (Version 1.0), accompanied by a demonstration of its potential uses. The canon of western literature has been an important construct in the study of literature, long standing and long contested. It has been argued to represent many of the greatest works produced in the history of western literature. This corpus operationalizes the western canon based on Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994). The paper describes the development of the corpus, its organization and source material. Corpus procedures are applied to the corpus, such as word frequency analysis, lemmatization and keyness, to demonstrate its potential uses in culturomics and corpus stylistics, two interdisciplinary fields between the traditional and digital humanities, and the linguistic and literary approaches to literature. Culturomics is the study of culture and social psychology via the investigation of corpora of literature as cultural art...
14 citations
TL;DR: For some time scholars have examined unconventional linguistic patterns in E. E. Cummings' poetic style as mentioned in this paper, and of all the aspects under consideration, it is grammar, lexis and morphology that have been m...
Abstract: For some time scholars have examined unconventional linguistic patterns in E. E. Cummings’ poetic style. Of all the aspects under consideration, it is grammar, lexis and morphology that have been m...
12 citations
TL;DR: This paper used corpus methods to help isolate, quantify and categorise the distinctive lexicogrammatical features of this art language and investigate how Burgess introduces a new, mainly Russian-based lexicon to readers.
Abstract: The 1962 dystopian novella A Clockwork Orange achieved global cultural resonance when it was adapted for the cinema by Stanley Kubrick in 1971. However, its author Anthony Burgess insisted that the novel’s innovative element was the introduction of ‘Nadsat’, an art language he created for his protagonist Alex and his violent gang of droogs. This constructed anti-language has achieved a cultural currency and become the subject of considerable academic attention over a 50-year period, but to date no study has attempted a systematic analysis of its resources and distribution. Rather, a number of studies have attempted to investigate the effects of Nadsat, especially in terms of the author’s claim that learning it functioned as a form of ‘brainwashing’ embedded within the text.This paper uses corpus methods to help isolate, quantify and categorise the distinctive lexicogrammatical features of this art language and investigate how Burgess introduces a new, mainly Russian-based lexicon to readers. In doing so, ...
12 citations
TL;DR: The authors examined 28 reflective accounts produced by high-school English as a foreign language (EFL) teenagers who participated in a literary awareness workshop on iconicity, which aimed at sensitizing students to verbal artistry.
Abstract: The growing number of recent publications on pedagogical stylistics indicates that this area is still of much interest to those who invest in the integration of language and literature. However, evidence-based assessments of pedagogical stylistics are still few and depend mostly on teachers’ intuitions. The present study contributes towards filling this gap by examining 28 reflective accounts produced by high-school English as a foreign language (EFL) teenagers who participated in a literary awareness workshop on iconicity. Branching out from pedagogical stylistics, literary awareness is here described as a program which aims at sensitizing students to verbal artistry. The bottom-up analysis of the participants’ accounts reveals five main aspects – “applicability,” “learning,” “materials,” “students” and “teaching” – and indicates that the workshop was to a certain degree transformative. Instead of an instrumental approach to language learning, the workshop aimed mostly at consciousness-raising. Students’...
TL;DR: The authors show that time personification is grounded in an Abstract Cause Personification template, in which the cause of an event is mapped onto an agent that performs an action that results in that same event (e.g., ‘cancer killed him’).
Abstract: Despite the exponential growth of metaphor studies in recent decades, personification has nonetheless remained overshadowed by other types of metaphor. Specifically, it has been suggested that not all personifications are equal in that they vary considerably in linguistic, conceptual and communicative terms. In this paper, we argue that personification indeed features cultural diversity and stylistic creativity, yet its expression is underpinned by a shared conceptual structure along the lines of a generic integration template. Drawing on data from poetic discourse, we focus on a particular domain, that of time, and its various personified manifestations in four languages (English, Modern Greek, French and Spanish). We show that time personification is grounded in an Abstract Cause Personification template, in which the cause of an event is mapped onto an agent that performs an action that results in that same event (e.g., ‘cancer killed him’). This causal tautology (that in the case of time amounts to th...
TL;DR: The authors examined two cultural texts, Philip Roth's Nemesis and Ridley Scott's Alien, based on cognitive linguistic approaches to figurative language in communication, cognitive metaphor theory a.k.a. The authors.
Abstract: This paper examines two cultural texts, Philip Roth’s Nemesis and Ridley Scott’s Alien, based on cognitive linguistic approaches to figurative language in communication, cognitive metaphor theory a...
TL;DR: The authors have devoted much attention to linguistic features used in the recreation of source text dialects. But only limited discussions can be found on what stra... The authors. But this is not the focus of this paper.
Abstract: Studies on the translation of literary dialects have devoted much attention to linguistic features used in the recreation of source text dialects. Only limited discussions can be found on what stra...
TL;DR: In this article, an empirical study that investigates reader responses to a prominent narrative phenomenon in Virginia Woolf's novels, shifts in point of view, was conducted to examine how ordinary readers, that is, readers without much literary or linguistic training, respond to this stylistic feature.
Abstract: This paper reports an empirical study that investigates reader responses to a prominent narrative phenomenon in Virginia Woolf’s novels: shifts in point of view While the frequent viewpoint shifts in Woolf’s novels have been noted by critics and literary linguists, only a limited amount of research has been conducted to examine how ‘ordinary readers’, that is, readers without much literary or linguistic training, respond to this stylistic feature In order to gain a better understanding of this issue, the current study combines qualitative and quantitative approaches in the investigation The main experiment material is a passage from To the Lighthouse, in which the narrative viewpoint shifts between two characters For the purpose of comparison, another three passages containing a consistent narrative point of view were also selected A re-reading task was set up: in the first reading, participants read for general comprehension, and in the second reading, they were asked to identify whose point(s) of v
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine narrativity and creativity in an interactive oral storytelling context where the teller engages the audience directly in the story and draws on concepts from narratology and stylistics.
Abstract: Drawing on concepts from narratology and stylistics, this article examines narrativity and creativity in an interactive oral storytelling context where the teller engages the audience directly in t...
TL;DR: In this paper, it is argued that a distinction between overt and covert intentions and between first-order and second-order intentions is useful in affording a purchase on the nature of deception in conversational interaction.
Abstract: This article proceeds from the assumption that speakers engaging in verbal interaction are perceived by their interlocutors to have intentions, and it explores the concepts of impoliteness and aggravated impoliteness. Two case studies, both from Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens are considered, and it is argued that a distinction between overt and covert intentions and between first-order and second-order intentions is useful in affording a purchase on the nature of deception in conversational interaction. The article thus seeks to contribute to a deeper understanding of an aspect of impoliteness theory and to the application of impoliteness theory to the analysis of a Shakespearean play.
TL;DR: The Language of Suspense in Crime Fiction: A Linguistic Stylistic Approach by Dutta-Flanders et al. as mentioned in this paper is a collection of stylistic approaches to crime fiction.
Abstract: Aristotle (1992) The Art of Rhetoric. Translated by HC Lawson-Tancred. London, UK: Penguin Books. Bray J (2004) The Epistolary Novel: Representations of Consciousness. London, UK: Taylor & Francis. Burke M (ed.) (2014) The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Gregoriou C (2014) Voice. In: Stockwell P and Whiteley S (eds) The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp.165–178. Dutta-Flanders R (2017) The Language of Suspense in Crime Fiction: A Linguistic Stylistic Approach. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Montoro R (2012) Chick Lit: The Stylistics of Cappuccino Fiction. London, UK: Continuum. Simpson P (2003) On the Discourse of Satire: Towards a Stylistic Model of Satirical Humor. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins. Wales K (2001/2014) A Dictionary of Stylistics. Harlow and London, UK: Pearson Education Ltd. and Routledge.
TL;DR: This article investigated the practical criticism experiment that IA Richards carried out in the 1920s and that he reported on in Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (1929) and argued that Richards was primarily interested in the responses of his readers to the poem and not in the poem itself.
Abstract: My article provides historical background to stylisticians’ current interest in empirical approaches to literary response by investigating the practical criticism experiment that IA Richards carried out in the 1920s and that he reported on in Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (1929) In literary studies, practical criticism is typically regarded as a method of reading that focuses on the text itself and that isolates the text from its social and historical context Yet, Richards’ technique of issuing his student audiences with anonymized and unknown poems, and asking them for their written responses (or ‘protocols’), was explicitly part of a psychological experiment and not a model of how we should, or even could, read literature And he was primarily – if not exclusively – interested in the responses of his readers to the poem and not in the poem itself I have argued that Richards’ technique of practical criticism was the very first large-scale experiment in psychology conducted to disco
TL;DR: This paper explored the various ways in which the characters' and narrator's use of mixed English-French utterances generates inferences which make the transcending of their mono-cultural self possible.
Abstract: Starting from a set of examples of borrowings from French in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, I explore the various ways in which the characters’ and narrator’s use of mixed English–French utterances generates inferences which make the transcending of their mono-cultural self possible. I go on to argue that in Jumeau’s recent French translation of the novel, the reader is not given access to those inferences, resulting in the erasing of an Anglo-European, cosmopolitan identity.
TL;DR: Nowell Smith as mentioned in this paper proposes an alternative conceptualisation of metre whereby metre is not "an external constraint" but rather "a prosthetic to thought [...] a vehicle, and mode, of thinking".
Abstract: accent in How late it was, how late. The written representation of accent is an important area of enquiry in stylistics, where it is seen as a tool of characterisation and social realism (Adamson, 1999: 603). Nowell Smith is however less interested in its techné than in the change of mind-set this representation might engender in readers. He sees nonstandard orthography ‘not as the “phonetic” transcription of accent’ but more broadly as a means to demand ‘a different conception of what language is and does’ (p. 119). This fits his politically committed agenda even at the cost of favouring a readerly attitude beyond the specifics of each literary work. Chapter 5 sets out to gauge the ‘in-between’ nature of voice with the purpose of ‘getting the measure of voice’. Through a metrical scansion of John Donne’s ‘The Triple Fool’, Nowell Smith proposes an alternative conceptualisation of metre whereby metre is not ‘an external constraint’, but rather ‘a prosthetic to thought [...] a vehicle, and mode, of thinking’ (p. 139). The author’s interest in prosthetics emerges again when he likens the typewriter to a gramophone under the influence of Charles Olson’s ‘Projective Verse’. In this manifesto, Olson welcomed the use of a typewriter as a means to ‘indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspension even of syllables’ (Olson, 1997: 245). Faithful to its open-ended nature, the book renounces a conclusion, marking with a final question its own discourse as provisional. Overall, this is an honest and ambitious monograph with a remarkably clear sense of intellectual positioning. Its chapters, interconnected without being sequentially interdependent, demonstrate that it is possible ‘to establish coherence without imposing a determinate centre’ (p. 156). The book is recommended reading for those stylisticians interested in the philosophy of language and for all those who believe, as I do, that we become better scholars by measuring ourselves against those whose theoretical assumptions seem to diverge so radically from ours.