Studying English Literature and Language, 3rd Edition

@ PART THREE

THEORIES AND APPROACHES

This gives an extended illustration of theory in practice and suggests Activities and questions for Discussion for each of the theories and approaches represented. Web links are supplied for every area.  There is an additional section reviewing Linguistic and Stylistic approaches to the subject, including current developments in the area of Cognitive Poetics. The overall aim continues to be active theorising with specific texts rather than the dutiful rehearsal of theories in the abstract. The ‘approaches’ involved will therefore tend to be adapted not simply adopted, and richly singular and complex not uniformly orthodox. Strong theorising challenges and changes itself. An interesting approach transforms its objects. The materials supplied here are designed to help you do this in and on your own terms as well as those of other people.

@ 3 contains:      

@ 3.1 Theory in Practice

3.1.1 Theorising in a nutshell – or daffodil . . .

3.1.2 Further activities and discussion

@ 3.2  Practical Criticism and (old) New Criticism

Activities, discussion and web links

@ 3.3  Formalism into Functionalism

Activities, discussion and web links

@ 3.4   Psychological approaches

Activities, discussion and web links

@ 3.5   Marxism, Cultural Materialism and New Historicism

Activities, discussion and web links

@ 3.6   Feminism, Masculinity and Queer theory

Activities, discussion and web links

@ 3.7   Poststructuralism and Postmodernism

Activities, discussion and web links

@ 3.8   Postcolonialism and Multiculturalism

Activities, discussion and web links

@ 3.9   The new Eclecticism? Ethics, Aesthetics, Ecology

Activities, discussion and web links

@ 3.10 Linguistics, Stylistics and Cognitive Poetics 

Overview

Major figures and models

How to practise . . .

Example

Activities, discussion and web links  

@ 3.1 THEORY IN PRACTICE

This section provides activities to help you get your own bearings when theorising practice and practising theory. It begins with some thumbnail sketches of theoretical positions relative to a particular cluster of texts from the Anthology (the Wordsworth ‘Daffodils’ materials in 5.4.1). This leads to some further activities and discussion for each set of theories and practices, to help you relate them to texts that you yourself are studying as well as those in the Anthology. Some relevant web links are also provided for theory in general.

@ 3.1 contains:

3.1.1    Theorising in a nutshell – or daffodil . . .

3.1.2    Further activities, discussion and web links

3.1.1 Theorising in a nutshell – or daffodil . . .

This preliminary section is offered by way of both encouragement and warning. It encourages you to see the activity of theorising as a natural and necessary part of being a reflective reader and writer. It warns you against simply mugging up theories so as to sprinkle your speech with flashy phrases that sound clever. Knowing about other people’s theories is important, even essential. Opening up that knowledge is precisely what the rest of Part Two is designed to do. At the same time, knowing about such things is not necessarily the same as knowing how to do them. Nor is it the same as knowing when to refine and replace the tools you are working with and pick up others which will do a certain job better. That is why there is particular emphasis on exploring and experimenting with each approach in the various ‘How to practise . . .’ and Activity sections. Cumulatively, too, as we move from theory to theory, you will see that there is an insistence on bracing one theory against another: sometimes combining them and sometimes leaving them in conflict. Either way, it is insisted that precisely how or whether you use a certain approach (or combination of approaches) will partly depend upon the particular material in hand as well as the hand (and mind and identity) of the particular person who is wielding it. Theories may propose – but it is particular writers, materials and readers that dispose. A number of things are therefore worth stressing:

• No one has a single, pure and fixed position. Anyone who declares ‘I’m a feminist critic’ or ‘Postmodernism is what it’s all about’ and merely leaves it at that is naïve or deluded.
• Everyone to some extent has plural, hybrid and shifting orientations. The person who says ‘I have a strong interest in gender from a psychoanalytic point of view, mainly in contemporary film and fiction. But I’m also getting interested in . . . ’ is likely to be much more self-aware and sensible.
• No-one has an approach identical to other people’s. We are all coming from and going to somewhat different places. The text in hand is grasped by each of us differently, and at different moments differently.
• Yet everyone also has aspects of their approach which interrelate with other people’s. We may not have a ‘common pursuit’, but we do have some things that we share and can agree as well as argue about.
• A mind which is utterly open is never made up. A mind which is utterly closed is simply not thinking. The most critical and creative minds tend to move between and beyond. This may be put more abstractly. In theory, critical differences are infinite and may be indefinitely delayed and deferred. But in practice we always have to settle on provisional preferences. The main thing is to try to keep both the differences and the preferences in play, simultaneously or by turns.

All that said, here is an activity to help you gauge your own present positions as well as the directions and dimensions in which you are currently moving.

Activity

Turn to the ‘Wordsworth’ texts gathered in Part Five (5.4.1). Read each of them in order with the following suggestions and questions in mind.

(a) William Wordsworth’s ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud . . .’. Do you normally read such texts with or without the kind of information supplied in the accompanying notes? Does such information make a difference to how you understand the poem?

This points to the difference between a purely textual and a contextual approach. PRACTICAL and (old) NEW CRITICS and FORMALISTS tend to be more purely textual; most other approaches also take contextual information into account.

(b) Dorothy Wordsworth’s ‘Grasmere Journals’. Do you expect to read journals, diaries and letters as part of an ‘English’ course? Would you classify this piece as ‘literature’ or something else? Go on to weigh how far your reading of Dorothy’s journal entry modifies your understanding of her brother William’s poem about the same episode.

This points to the difference between a purely ‘literary’ and a more broadly textual approach to materials. It also suggests that auto/biography and history may – or may not – be allied areas of study depending how you conceive the subject.

(c) Lynn Peters’s ‘Why Dorothy Wordsworth is not as famous as her brother’. This text takes a humorously parodic and decidedly FEMINIST turn. Are you happy with or irritated by this? How does reading Lynn Peters’s poem affect your earlier readings of William’s poem and Dorothy’s journal entry?

This points up the fact that you may or may not attach importance to the GENDER dimensions of writing and reading. It also points to the use of parody as a form of critique, and perhaps highlights the question of how serious and reverential or playful and irreverent you expect your subject to be. Some CULTURAL MATERIALIST, FEMINIST and QUEER approaches sport with this kind of iconoclasm.

(d) ‘Heineken refreshes the poets others beers can’t reach’. Here there’s a switch of MEDIA (print to TV screen plus music) and a hybridising of genres (poem within advert). There’s therefore the obvious aim of selling – and not just saying – something: the humour has a commercial as well as a parodic function. The advert is also unashamedly populist in appeal.

We are thus now firmly within the domain of the POSTMODERN. Though we could also be in the domain of, say, MARXIST, FEMINIST and POSTCOLONIAL approaches if we drew attention to the evident class, gender and colour dimensions of this advert and its particular market appeal, along with the cultural, political and economic implication of alcohol production and consumption in general.

Finally, look through the ‘Overviews’introducing each of the main positions and approaches featured in the rest of Part Two: from PRACTICAL CRITICISM (3.2) to ECOLOGICAL (3.9); also LINGUISTICS, STYLISTICS AND COGNITIVE POETICS (@ 3.10 below). Which of these approaches do you currently find (i) most familiar; (ii) most interesting; (iii) most forbidding? Be prepared for all this to change as you find out more.

3.1.2 Further activities, discussion and web links

(a) Bearing in mind what was done with the ‘Daffodils?’ material above (in @ 3.1.1), compare some of the texts within such clusters as ‘Performing poetry, singing culture’ (5.1.5) and ‘Mapping Journeys’ (5.4.2).  Which theories and approaches seem to go best with which texts? Perhaps go on to compare between these clusters and look at other clusters entirely (see next).

(b) Bearing in mind what was done with Shakespeare’s and other people’s ‘Hamlets’ above (@ 3.1.2), explore another classic text that has received a lot of attention – theoretical and practical, critical and creative. Obvious examples of novels featured in the book are Wuthering Heights (1.2.4—5 and 2.1—2); Robinson Crusoe (5.2.2) and Great Expectations (see 5.3.1 and 5.4.5) from Part Five. But there are plenty of others of many kinds here and elsewhere, in mind or preferably to hand.  What have theorists and practitioners in every sense ‘made’of that text? By extension, how precisely have they ‘re-made’ – re-read, re-written, rep-represented – it?  And what about you? How would you care (or dare) to theorise and practise it for yourself – partly in and on your own terms as well as those of others.

(c) Consider a favourite novel, poem, play, song or advert. Do one or two things with it – both if you fancy and have time:

Either Explore it using the model of ‘Text as Processes and Products’ provided in the book (3.1). Which aspects of it can best be conceived (and followed up) in terms of ‘Text’, ‘Producers’, ‘Receivers’ and ‘Rest of the World’?

Or Explore it using the ‘Overviews’ that preface each theory. what kinds of insights into the text do you think each theoretical approach might facilitate? Which theoretical approach promises to most directly extend and enhance your current interpretation of the text?

(d) Look at the ‘Sonnets by various hands’ (5.1.2). From your initial understanding, which of these texts speaks most directly to which theoretical approach? Also consider to what extent all such approaches to this kind of text (sonnets) might be compelled to engage with with, say, ‘Formal’ aspects (highlighted in 3.3) and ‘Linguistic and Stylistic’ aspects (see @ 3.10 below). Does this mean in effect that there  are ‘theories for texts’ – like ‘horses for courses’ . . .?    

(e) What do you think are the advantages and disadvantages of taking a single theoretical approach when approaching a text? Try listing them with in two columns with a particular text and theory in mind. Add other columns or shapes if that will help.

(f) What, then, might be the advantages and disadvantages of combining a range of theoretical stances when approaching a text? Again try listing them with some particular theories and a particular text in mind; though in this case you may well need more columns than two and shapes other than straight lines. Go on to read the part called ‘The new Eclecticism?’ (3.9). See how far you agree. And consider whether you might prefer other configurations than, say, ‘Ethics, Aesthetics, Ecology’. 

(g) Try creating a broad ‘history’ of theories on a timeline and a rough ‘geography’ of theory on a map by using the ‘Overviews’ of the sections in Part Three. What. does the timeline reveal to you about the relationships between theories, and their relations to the evolution of post-Enlightenment thinking? What does the map reveal to you about the cultural contexts of these theoretical approaches?

(h) Make up an ‘-ism’, an ‘–ic’ – or just a very long phrase – to characterise the kind(s) of theory or approach you reckon you currently hold, or at least would like to claim you do. Be seriously playful about this and be both ready to use some of the names of the games around (see those listed in Part Three for a start) and to venture some of your own. Doing this with others is revealing as well as great fun.

Here are some relevant web links:

‘Introduction to Modern Literary Theory’, by Kristi Siegel (2006) http://www.kristisiegel.com/theory.htm

‘Literary Theory’, video lecture series by Paul H. Fry (2011) http://academicearth.org/courses/literary-theory

The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory, e-book edition ed. by Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth, and Imre Szeman (2005) http://litguide.press.jhu.edu/

‘Literary Theory’, by Vince Brewton (2005) http://www.iep.utm.edu/literary/

@ 3.1.3 Hamlets – Shakespeare’s and others’

This prelude further explores The not-so-strange case of ‘Shakespeare’s Hamlet’ featured in the book as a classic focus for various kinds of theory and approach (3.1). This is done both analytically and actively, critically and creatively, by attempting to see what other people have made – and you yourself might still make – of some of the many ‘Hamlets’ before and after Shakespeare’s. These extend from Saxo Grammaticus’s Latin version and Kyd’s lost play on the subject through to modern stage versions by Stoppard and Marovitz and classic film version by Olivier and Kozintsev. There is a practical and scholarly comparison of the performance possibilities and textual authority of the so-called ‘bad quarto’ and ‘folio’ versions of Shakespeare’s play as such (including the radically different versions of the ‘To be or not be’ speech); and a persistent engagement with what the play can be made to do (not just is) and therefore with theorising in action, dynamic and multiple – not just Theory in the abstract, static and monolithic. This Prelude therefore carries through the abiding concern with Interpretation in the fullest Critical and Creative sense in the previous part (Part 2 ), especially the crucial significance of kinds of Adaptation and continuation in particular and Re-reading and re-writing in general (see @ 2.3 and @ 2.4).

The following Hamlets activity is an outline of the core materials presented at length and in detail in the ‘Extended work-out: Reproducing Hamlet’ in Rob Pope, Textual Intervention: Critical and Creative Strategies for Literary Studies, London and New York: Routledge, 1995, pp, 163—81. This outline is designed to give a strategic sense of the kinds of technique and text in play, with pared-down instructions and mere snippets of text. It gives the essential idea and may be adapted for other materials, dramatic and otherwise. For a much fuller sense of the immediate application to Shakespeare, with extensively quoted texts, consult the extended work-out in the above book.

1. Play for performance or Text for reading?  We begin with two versions of Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy – in this case, just the first three lines:

Version A: First Quarto (1603)

Hamlet:        

To be to not to be, I there’s the point,

To Die, to sleepe, is that all? I all:

No, to sleepe, to dreame, I mary there it goes,  [. . .]

(Though often called the ‘Bad Quarto’, this seems to have been copied ‘live’ or be from actors’ parts – hence the note-form ‘I’ for ‘Aye’. It may thus be closer to an actual performance.)

Version B: Second Quarto (1604) / First Folio (1623)  

Hamlet:          

To be, or not to be: That is the question:

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, […]

(This is the familiar ‘diplomatic’ edition combining two sources which may each claim greater textual authority. Together, however, these do not necessarily represent any actual early performance.)   

From this, extending to the whole soliloquy, there flows a discussion of the respective claims of ‘dramatic text for performance’ and ‘literary text for reading’. These claims should be tested on the lips and ears as well as the eyes. This leads to an examination of the very various claims, aims and discourses of, respectively, textual scholars, literary critics, actors and theatre directors: Hubler, Holderness and Loughrey, Brook, Rylance and others. (Often, it seems, it comes down to a matter of ‘horses for (dis)courses’.)    

2. ‘Novel’ responses

How might Hamlet’s soliloquy crop up in a novel (or film)? In what context – read or performed or seen?  And with what dramatic effects and narrative functions – all of which might be incidental or oblique to Shakespeare’s words? Have a go at imagining and beginning to draft some such episode or scene before reading on.

Whatever you have come up with might then be compared with, say:

(i) the scene  in Chapter 31 of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860—1), where a melodramatic sketch from ‘Hamlet’ is being put on before a popular, high-spirited and very vocal audience:

Whenever that undecided prince had to ask a question or state a doubt, the public helped him out with it. As for example: on the question whether ‘twas nobler in the mind to suffer, some roared yes, and some no, and some inclining to both opinions, said “toss up for it”; and quite a debating society arose.

(ii) the episode in Maya Angelou’s autobiographical novel I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Virago Press, 1969, pp. 177—8), where a young black boy, Henry Reed, is having to deliver the same Shakespeare soliloquy to demonstrate his skill in elocution on speech day in an all-black Southern States College in 1940. He is speaking immediately after a white senator has patronised the audience with much talk of black people doing well in sport and popular music. One of the audience is the young Maya Angelou, and this is what she wrote about it much later:

There was shuffling and rustling around me, then Henry Reed was giving his valedictory address, ‘To Be or Not To Be’. Hadn’t he heard the white folks? We couldn’t be so the question was a waste of time. Henry’s voice came out clear and strong. Hadn’t he got the message? There was no ‘nobler in the mind’ for Negroes because the world didn’t think we had minds, and they let us know it. ‘Outrageous forune’? Now, that was a joke.

3. ‘Critical’ responses

Such vividly re-dramatised and re-narrativised – specifically novelistic – responses as those above may then be compared with the more abstract pronouncements of professional critics. Beginning, for instance, with some of the more famously authoritative voices of the early 20th-century – characteristically, all male and all white:

Hamlet most brings home to us the sense of the soul’s infinity, and the sense of the doom which not only circumscribes that infinity but appears to be its offspring . . . (A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 1905, p.128) 

‘To be or not to be, that is the question . . .’ These unmodulated changes from storm to calm smack a little – and are meant to – of ‘madness’. But how the man’s moral quality shows in the fact that he can thus escape from his suffering to this stoically detached contemplation of greater issues. . . . (Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare, 1930, p.70)

Hamlet’s bafflement at the absence of objective equivalent to his feeling is a prolongation of the bafflement of his creator in the face of his artistic problem [...] ‘expressing emotion in the form of art’ […] a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events, which shall be the formula of this particular emotion. . . . (T.S. Eliot, ‘Hamlet’ 1919)

So what might be your critical, pronouncements on this soliloquy? Would they espouse similar ethics and aesthetics . . . politics and poetics? And what would be gained and lost by them being (like the three immediately above) offered in the abstract and, as it happens, in brief extract? Conversely, what might be the advantages and disadvantages of airing your views of Shakespeare in expressly narrative contexts (such as those offered by Dickens and Angelou in section 2 above)? 

4. Further activities

Words always arise in some world; they also make worlds of their own. The challenge for both writer and reader is not so much to separate ‘word’ from ‘world’ but to try to see – and say – what complex dynamic between and within them is in play at any particular time, in and around what particular text. It’s a question, in short, of which wor(l)d?

The other activities in ‘Hamlets’are directed towards these ends. They include:

• classic de- and re-constructions of Shakespeare’s play, including this soliloquy, such as those by Charles Marovitz and Peter Brook (Hamlet: The Collage, 1966) and Tom Stoppard (Rosencrants and Guidenstern Are Dead, 1966 – the classic instance of background-foreground, minor-major character, plot/sub-sub-plot reversal); also classic film versions such as those by Olivier (1947 – melodramatically psychological) and Kozintsev (1963 – phantasmagorically political). 
• expressly socialist, feminist and post-colonial rewritings and reproductions of it, such as those by Brecht, Jelinek, Césaire, as well as various pidgin English and creole versions from The British Solomon Islands and the Cameroon.
• invitations to put yourself (and other people) in the final ‘Horatio-role’ of final reporter and relater of what happened in Hamlet.

Indeed, picking up that last point, the act of relation, fully grasped, always involves relating something to someone, so it is always in some sense an observer-participant activity. Put another way, communication in the fullest sense always involves telling and showing as well as understanding and empathising. That is why interpretation, also fully grasped, has to be constantly alert to objective-subjective dimensions: to be, in short, a theoretical-practical activity.

Theory—Practice         Objective—Subjective           Critical—Creative

(Re)reading—(Re)writing       Observing—Participating      Seeing—Saying  . . .

These continue to be the axes on which the present approach turns. 

@ 3.2. PRACTICAL CRITICISM AND (OLD) NEW CRITICISM

Activities

(a) Same text, different analyses. Analyse the same text in two (or more) ways: once using the ‘How to practise Practical Criticism and New Criticism’ method; again drawing on the accompanying notes and, if you wish, one of the other ‘How to practise . . . ’ frameworks supplied in Part Two (Feminist, Marxist, Poststructuralist, etc.). (If this is being done in class, different groups can work on different analyses simultaneously.) Go on to compare the various analyses and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.

Suggestions: Poetry: ‘They flee from me’ (5.1.1); ‘My mistress’ eyes’ (5.1.2 ); ‘I am – yet what I am’ (5.3.4 ); ‘Dialogue’ (5.3.4). Prose: Carter, ‘The Werewolf’ (5.2.1) Austen, Pride and Prejudice (5.3.2). Drama: Russell, Educating Rita (5.3.1); Beckett, Not I (5.3.3). 

(b) Attempt a New Critical analysis of an advert, a news report, a transcript of an interview, a soap opera script. How far do you get? What problems do you encounter? What other kinds of knowledge and skill do you feel you need to draw on?

Suggestions: the Clarins advert (5.4.4); the Guardian stories (5.2.5).

Discussion

Debate the following positions for, against and alternative (i.e. by fashioning a different proposition). Wherever possible, support your arguments by reference to specific texts, authors, periods, genres and media.

• though cultures have changed and will change, poems remain and explain.

William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, ‘The Affective Fallacy’(1949) in Lodge (1972: 357)

(ii)   New Criticism . . . was a recipe for political inertia.

Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1996: 43)

• Review one of the analyses you have created employing Practical Criticism and New Criticism in response to (a) and/or (b). What, if anything, did you consciously put aside while using this approach?
• How far do you feel Practical Criticism and New Criticism are possible?
• Consider the ways in which Practical Criticism and New Criticism can correspond with other theoretical approaches to texts.
• Imagine you are I. A. Richards or William Wimsatt. What specific criticisms might you levy at each different theoretical approach outlined in Part 5?    

Here are some relevant web links:

‘Introduction to Practical Criticism’, (2011) http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/classroom/pracrit.htm

‘Tips on Practical Criticism, for Students of English’, J. H. Pryyne (2007) http://babylon.acad.cai.cam.ac.uk/students/study/english/tips/praccrit.pdf

‘Introductory Chapter to Practical Criticism’, I. A. Richards (1929) http://www.ua.es/personal/jalvarez/PDF/Richards_1.pdf

@ 3.3 FORMALISM INTO FUNCTIONALISM

Activities

(a) Use the above ‘How to practise . . . ’ framework to develop a Formalist and/ or Functionalist analysis of any ‘literary’ text you are studying. Alternatively, analyse one of these: Wyatt’s ‘They flee from me’ (5.1.1); Dickinson’s ‘I’m Nobody’ (5.3.4); Nichols’s ‘Tropical Death’ (5.4.5); Brontë’s Jane Eyre (5.2.3).

(b) Take a small sample of what you consider ‘familiar’ ‘ordinary’, ‘non-literary’ language (e.g. a scrap of conversation, a bit of a newspaper story, a few entries from a telephone directory; cf. 5.3.1; 5.2.6). Now think how you might re-present or refashion this material so as to make other people see it afresh, in ways not dulled by routine. Consider anything from changes in punctuation, visual presentation and delivery, through tinkering with individual words and phrases, to full-scale transformation of text and context. In short, attempt to defamiliarise the piece. Go on to reconsider just how ‘ordinary’ the sample of language was that you started with. How far was it already in some sense patterned and structured? And what grounds are there for labelling your transformation of it ‘literary’?

Discussion

(i) The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception.

Victor Shklovsky, Art as Technique (1917), in Rice and Waugh (2001: 50)

(ii) Any object and any activity, whether natural or human, may become a carrier of the aesthetic function.

Jan Mukarovsky, Aesthetic Function: Norm and Value as Social Facts (1936: 6)

• Construct a formalist and a functionalist reading of a) any text from Part 5, and b) the next textual advert you encounter (e.g. an advert on a leaflet, a poster, a web page), and go on to consider the following questions:
• What are the main differences between the formalist and functionalist observations in each case?   
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of each approach in each case?
• How do formalist and functionalist approaches relate to practical criticism and new criticism?

Here are some relevant web links:

‘The Literary Criticism Web: Formalism’ by Thomas E. Fish and Jennifer Perkins (2006) http://english.ucumberlands.edu/litcritweb/theory/formalism.htm

‘On Semiotics and Structuralism in Literary Theory and Criticism’, an online bibliography by J. A. Garcia Landa (n.d.) http://www.unizar.es/departamentos/.../Critics.../z.On.Structuralism.doc

‘Functionalism’ Ned Block (n.d.) http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/functionalism.html

@ 3.4 PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACHES

Activities

(a) Draw on the ‘How to practise . . . ’ guidelines to help frame a psychological analysis of a text and/or author that interests you. (Suggested focuses in Part Five are: McDonagh, The Pillowman (5.3.3); Beckett, Not I (5.3.3); Queen, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ (5.1.5 ); Kelman, How late it was, how late (5.3.2).)  Whatever and whoever you choose, find out as much as you reasonably can about the lives of the people involved.

(b) ‘I’dentities: selves and others Read Rich’s ‘Dialogue’ or Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library (both in 5.3.4) weighing precisely where ‘you’ stand in relation to the relationships presented. How do the identities – especially the sexual identities – of the various figures involved prompt you to review your own identity? With whom or what do you identify as ‘self’? Whom or what do you identify as ‘other’?

Discussion

(i) our actual enjoyment of an imaginative work proceeds from a liberation of tension in our minds [ . . . ] thenceforward to enjoy our own daydreams without self-reproach or shame.

Sigmund Freud, Creative Writers and Day-dreaming (1908) in Lodge (1972: 41–2)

(ii) ‘Psychoanalytic criticism [ . . . ] addresses the genesis of the self as revealed in literature and the arts [ . . . ] in all of which there is the attempt to insert the subject into the social.

Elizabeth Wright, ‘Psychoanalytic Criticism’ in Coyle et al. (1990: 774)

(iii) literature reveals a certain knowledge, and sometimes the truth itself, about an

otherwise repressed, nocturnal, secret and unconscious universe. Julia Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’ (1981) in Belsey and Moore (1997: 212)

• Most psychological analyses depend heavily on biographical research using a variety of resources. What kinds of problems, and possibilities, can you see with this kind of research and deduction?
• How far is the subject of a reading experience, and of an analytical approach, the reading self, and how far is it the author’s self? How (far) can (and should) the roles of the two be distinguished and disentangled within psychological analyses?
• Does your experience of reading literature affirm the poststructuralist and postmodern ideas of the instability of the self? In other words, do you find your ‘I’dentity easily, dramatically, transiently, rarely or radically influenced by texts you read? How far do you believe yourself to be conscious of such impact?

Here are some relevant web links:

‘The Freud Web’, various authors (various dates) http://www.victorianweb.org/science/freud/

‘Sigmund Freud – Online Resources’ various authors (2011) http://www.freudfile.org/resources.html

The Interpretation of Dreams, 3rd edn., by Sigmund Freud, trans. by A. A. Brill (1911), e-book available at http://www.psywww.com/books/interp/toc.htm

@ 3.5  MARXISM, CULTURAL MATERIALISM AND NEW HISTORICISM

Activities

(a) Drawing on the above ‘How to practise . . . .’ framework, sketch a Marxist (Cultural Materialist or New Historicist) analysis of a text that you are currently studying. Alternatively, focus on one in Part Five. Either way, you will need to find out about the author’s life and times and the text’s moments and modes of production and reception. Go on to weigh the strengths and weaknesses of this approach. (Suggested focuses in Part Five: Hands, ‘A Poem, . . . by a Servant Maid’ (5.1.3 ); McEwan and Roy (5.2.5); Kelman (5.3.2); The Flobots (5.1.5).)

(b) Rewrite part of a text which you find politically fascinating and yet frustrating. Attempt to brush it ‘against the grain’ and explore some of its ‘gaps and silences’. (This might take the form of adaptation, change in point of view, altered ending, etc.; see 2.3.) Add a commentary on your processes of research, reflection and rewriting.

Discussion

(i) Traditional literary critics have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.

Adapted from Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (1845); ‘traditional literary critics’ substituted for ‘philosophers’

(ii) the histories we reconstruct are the textual construct of critics who are, ourselves,historical subjects.

Louis Montrose,‘The Poetics and Politics of Culture’ in Veeser (1989:23)

(iii) There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ VI

(Benjamin [1939] 1970: 248)

• Consider a play written some decades (or even centuries) ago. Explore the relationship between the different socio-cultural moments and modes of production, and the relationship between these and its reception. Which dynamic between context and literary work is most interesting to you? In other words, within which socio-cultural and historical context did the play resonate in ways which appeal to you?
• Try to pictorially map out the relationships between each of the figures and movements within Marxism, Cultural Materialism and New Historicism. It may help you to focus on the main foci of each in order to draw out their nuances.
• Which approaches do you think need to be most explicitly self-conscious in order to achieve their aims – psychological approaches, or Marxist, cultural materialist and new historicist approaches?
• What possible overlap or alignment do you see between each of the Marxist approaches (socialist realism, socialist post/modernism, and democratic multiculturalism) and feminist and postcolonial approaches?
• Just as most psychological analyses depend heavily on biographical research using a variety of resources, most new historicist analyses draw heavily upon historical evidence and research. Could this be considered interdisciplinary, and if so what are the advantages and disadvantages of this kind of interdisciplinarity?

Here are some relevant web links:

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1944) ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’, transcribed by Andy Blunden (2005) http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm

‘General Introduction to Marxism’, Dino Franco Felluga (2002) http://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/marxism/index.html

‘Marxist Criticism (1930s – present)’ Allen Brizee and J. Case Tompkins (2010) http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/722/05/

@ 3.6 FEMINISM, MASCULINITY AND QUEER THEORY

Activities

(a) Apply the ‘How to practise a feminist analysis . . . ’ method to a text by a woman and a relatable text by a man (e.g., texts which treat similar topics or belong to the same period but different genres). Compare your analyses with other people’s and consider how far you can or cannot achieve consensus on matters of women and men, writing and reading. (Suggestions from Part Five: Milton and Agbabi (5.1.1); Pope and Hands (5.1.3); Behn and Defoe or Coetzee (5.2.2); William and Dorothy Wordsworth (5.4.1); Carter (5.2.1) and McDonagh (5.3.3).

(b) Compare the dialogue in Hollinghurst’s The Swimming Pool Library (5.3.4 c) with that in Rich’s ‘Dialogue’ (both in 5.3.4). Consider in what ways your own sexuality is put on the line by reading these texts. Alternatively, compare the representations of (non-) human sexuality in the science fiction of Dick and Le Guin (5.2.4).

(c) Looking or looked at? Doing or done to? Speaking, spoken to or spoken about? Put these questions to the representation of women and men in any text which interests (and perhaps irritates) you. Go on to consider how you might rewrite part of it so as to challenge and change the roles and perspectives it offers. (Texts commonly chosen in Part Five include: Shakespeare (5.1.2 ); Rhys (5.2.3) and Beckett (5.3.3).

Discussion

Support your arguments, where possible, with references to specific authors, texts, periods, genres and movements.

(i) notions of ‘women’s’ or ‘feminine’ language just aid and abet anti-feminist

thinking.

Deborah Cameron, The Feminist Critique of Language (1998: 11)

(ii) when we look at women writers collectively we can see an imaginative continuum, the recurrence of certain patterns, themes, problems and images from generation to generation.

Elaine Showalter, A Literature of their Own (1977: 10)

(iii) revision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.

Adrienne Rich, ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision’ (Rich [1971] 2001)

(iv) the inquiry into both homosexuality and gender will need to cede the priority of both terms in the service of a more complex mapping of power that interrogates the formation of each in specified racial regimes and geopolitical spatializations.

Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter (1993: 240)

(v) men should take seriously at last the ‘hetero’ in heterosexuality, which means the heterogeneity in us, on us, and . . . give up . . . that oppressive representation of the sexual as act, complementarity, two sexes, coupling.

Stephen Heath, ‘Male Feminism’ in Jardine and Smith (1987: 22)

• Consider the assumptions and concerns expressed in summaries of dominant Western feminisms in relation to non-Western texts you have read and non-Western ways of life you are aware of. In what ways do Western feminisms cohere with, neglect, diminish or disapprove of any ways of life of women of particular classes, ethnicities, religions, and nations? What may be the major clashes with non-Western women’s ways of life? Can there be such a thing as transnational feminism, and, if so, what would it look like?
• Compare the constructs of women and of men in the following popular magazines, available online:

‘Elle’ @ www.elle.com

‘Take a Break’ @ www.takeabreak.com

‘Cosmopolitan’ @ www.cosmopolitan.com,

‘Glamour’ @ www.glamourmagazine.co.uk,

‘Woman & Home’ @ www.womanandhome.com, and

‘The Lady’ @ www.lady.co.uk.

Here are some web-sites relevant to the present theories and approaches:

 ‘Feminist Literary Criticism’, by Dr. Kristin Switala (2009) http://www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism/lit.html

‘The Ironic Dream of a Common Language for Women in the Integrated Circuit: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s, or a Socialist Feminist Manifesto for Cyborgs’, Donna Haraway (1984) http://www.egs.edu/faculty/donna-haraway/articles/donna-haraway-the-ironic-dream-of-a-common-language-for-women-in-the-integrated-circuit/

‘Philosophy and Feminist Theory Sites’ (2007) http://womenst.library.wisc.edu/philos.htm

@ 3.7 POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND POSTMODERNISM  

Activities

(a) Binary oppositions, violent hierarchies and the play of differences. Begin by analysing Shakespeare’s ‘My mistress’ eyes’ (5.1.2 ) and Defoe’s or Coetzee’s Robinson Crusoe (5.2.2) – or any other text that interests you – in terms of binary oppositions (e.g. black v. white, man v. woman, speaking v. spoken to, etc.). Examine how far each of these oppositions is weighted towards one of the polarities, thereby instituting a ‘violent hierarchy’. Finally, consider all the ways in which your reading of the text exposes plural differences beyond those of simple opposition.

(b) Practising Postmodernism. Speculate how you might turn one of the clusters of texts in Part Five into part of a postmodernist multimedia event, e.g., on the Wordsworths (5.4.1); on Brooke and Owen (5.1.2 and @ 5.1.2). Add a commentary explaining your aims and rationale.

(c) Attempt to apply the ‘How to practise Poststructuralism ...’ method to a twentieth-century post/modernist text (e.g. Beckett’s Not I, 5.3.3) and a nineteenth-century classic realist text (e.g. Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, 5.3.2). What strengths and weaknesses show up in the method when you do this? And is there any sense that it suits certain kinds of text – and perhaps certain genres and periods – better than others?

Discussion

(i) [Poststructuralism is] the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin . . .

Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’ 1966, in Lodge and Wood (2008)

(ii) [Deconstructive] readings and interpretations have a tendency to end up all looking the same, all demonstrating the ceaseless play of the signifier and nothing much else.

Jeremy Hawthorn, A Concise Glossary of Contemporary Literary Terms (1994: 149)

(iii) The point is that we are within the culture of postmodernism to the point where a facile repudiation is as impossible as any equally facile celebration of it is complacent and complicit.

Fredric Jameson, ‘Ideological Positions in the Postmodernism Debate’, in Lodge and Wood (2008)

(iv) The current post-structuralist/postmodern challenges to the coherent, autonomous subject have to be put on hold in feminist and postcolonial discourses, for both must first work to assert and affirm a denied or alienated subjectivity: those radical postmodern challenges are in many ways the luxury of the dominant order which can afford to challenge that which it securely possesses.

Linda Hutcheon ‘Circling the Downspout of Empire’ (1989) in Williams and Chrisman (1993: 281)

• Consider the main concerns of poststructuralism and postmodernism as outlined in the book. Think back through your experiences of texts written across the last centuries, perhaps using the examples provided in Part Five of the book. What traces of these same concerns can you find in texts, moments and theoretical approaches that precede those of the late twentieth century? In what (similar and different) ways are these concerns manifest? What do these links and traces suggest about the evolution of literary movements, and about our relationships to words and to literature?
• Consider how the poststructuralist approach could be employed in the service of a feminist or postcolonial approach.

Here are some relevant web sites:

‘Post-structuralism’, by Jan Rybicki (2003) http://www.ap.krakow.pl/nkja/literature/theory/post-structuralism.htm

‘Structuralism and Post-structuralism’, by Willy Maley (2008) http://www.ualberta.ca/~rmorrow/Resources/Structuralism-Post-definiti.pdf

‘Postmodernism’, by Gary Aylesworth (2010) http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/

@ 3.8 POSTCOLONIALISM AND MULTICULTURALISM

Activities

(a) Compare the ways in which ethnic differences are complicated and compounded by those of gender, class and age in a couple of the following post/colonial texts: Tan and Kipling (5.2.1); Fugard (5.3.3); Achebe(5.4.5).

(b) Draw on the questions and suggestions in ‘How to practise postcolonial approaches in a multicultural context’ to help frame a response to any text which interests you in these respects. (Kipling’s Muhammed Din (5.2.1) offers a thorough work-out.)

(c) Rewrite the extract from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (‘I Call Him Friday’, 5.2.2) so as to explore alternative subject positions and perspectives. Consider changes of genre, medium and period, too, if you wish. Add a commentary on the problems and possibilities encountered. (Later, see Holdsworth and Coetzee – also 5.2.2 – for versions done by someone else. Again, consider what other options are still possible.)

Discussion

(i) English the subject is the place where a fundamental question about intercultural relations is being addressed.

Colin Evans, English People: The Experience of Teaching and Learning English in British Universities (1993: 213)

(ii) Post-colonialism [is] an always present tendency in any literature of subjugation marked by a systematic process of cultural domination through the imposition of imperial structures of power.

Viyay Mishra and Bob Hodge, ‘What is Post-colonialism’ in Williams and Chrisman (1993: 284)

(iii) The challenge of postcolonial literature is that by exposing and attacking anglo­centric assumptions directly, it can replace ‘English literature’ with ‘world literature in English’.

John Docker, ‘The Neocolonial Assumption in University Teaching of English’ (1978) in Ashcroft et al. (1995: 445)

(iv) All of us, in some sense, belong to the diaspora; every nation is hybrid, becoming more so as migration increases.

Dennis Walder, Post-Colonial Literatures in English (1998:199) 

• In Salman Rushdie’s article ‘The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance’, published in The Times (UK) for 3 July 1982 (p.8), he writes of the way in which some recent literature written in postcolonial nations incorporates local languages and dialects, letting the languages interact with each other. Read the examples of such writing in Part Five (e.g. Achebe, 5.4.5; Tutuola, 5.3.2). Consider the ways in which this is and isn’t a ‘writing back’.
• Is postcolonial criticism essentially colonial criticism, inescapably bound up in Western, post-enlightenment ways of thinking and being? Does it / can it escape being so?
• Consider English in its current form as a result of various colonisations of the United Kingdom. How have various other countries and languages contributed to current English positively and perhaps negatively?
• What do languages reveal about geopolitics?
• What are the ethical (and other) ramifications of translating literature into other another language?
• In 2011 there are more people learning English in China than there are in England. What impact do you think this might have on English language and literature?
• If you were to construct a multicultural anthology of contemporary poetry written in your country of birth, which poets and poems would you include and why?

Here are some relevant web sites:

‘Contemporary Postcolonial and Postimperial Literature in English’, by George P. Landaw et al. (n.d.) http://www.postcolonialweb.org/

‘The Imperial Archive: Key Concepts in Postcolonial Studies’, by Sinead Caslin (n.d.) http://www.qub.ac.uk/imperial/key-concepts/feminism-and-postcolonialism.htm

Index of ‘Colonial/Postcolonial Websites’, by Mitsuharu Matsuoka (1998) http://www.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/postcolonialism.html

@ 3.9  NEW ECLECTICISM?  ETHICS, AESTHETICS, ECOLOGY . . .

Further Discussion

• What relationships can you draw between an ethical approach to literature and Marxist and feminist approaches? Comment on one of the texts within Part Five of the book (for example, the extract from Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library, 5.3.4) from each of these three standpoints, and compare the light cast upon the text in each case.
• Which other theoretical approaches are ethical, aesthetic and ecological approaches most closely tied to, and how?
• What do you anticipate are the advantages and the disadvantages of an eclectic approach?
• Try organising your own configuration of theoretical interests and commitments in the form of, say, three or four lists (as at the end of 3.9) or some other shape such as a compass or map (e.g. 6.2.1 and see 1.2.4).

Here are some relevant web sites:

List of resources on ‘Ethics and Literature’, Susanna Onega et al. (n.d.) http://cne.literatureresearch.net/Ethics-and-Literature/ethics-and-literature.html

‘Aesthetics and Literature: a Problematic Relation?’ Peter Lamarque (2008) http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/3502/1/Lamarque_2007_Aesthetics.pdf

@ 3.10 LINGUISTICS, STYLISTICS AND COGNITIVE POETICS

Overview

Stylistics is the study of language in literature. It seeks to account for the interpretative effects of a text through close study of its linguistic detail, such as syntactic structuring, semantic deviation, deixis, modality, etc., often working through inferred interpretative cohesion of foregrounded features. Stylistics uses models and approaches from various fields in linguistics to help draw out how a specific arrangement of linguistic motifs and structures facilitates and generates certain aesthetic and hermeneutic effects, to analyse the functioning of textual features as triggers for and constraints upon interpretation. The term stylistics is also sometimes used to describe critically reflexive development of linguistic tools through literary application (this usually being called linguistic stylistics), or the use of linguistic tools to analyse literary or poetic features (e.g. metaphor) within naturally occurring language and non-fictional texts (e.g. conversations, advertisements, political speeches). In this respect, stylistics very much perceives the literariness of language as scalar rather than binary (e.g. literary vs. non-literary language and texts).

Stylistics can be traced back to aspects of classic rhetoric in its concern with dispositio (arrangement), and elocutio (style), and ethos and pathos (the audience’s perception of the moral character of the speaker, and the audience’s emotions as aroused by the affective power of the speech, respectively, the ‘speaker’ function in literary contexts being performed by narrators and characters more than authors directly). The lineage of contemporary Stylistics, however, is more markedly twentieth century, descending from the evolutions in approaches to language in literature within Structuralism, Russian Formalism, Prague School Functionalism, through Practical and New Criticism, and on through Reader Response Theory. Equally influential, though, are parallel advances from structuralist to poststructuralist notions of meaning and communication within linguistics, such as the move from descriptive grammars like Chomsky’s generative grammar (which sought to define the ‘deep’ and ‘surface’ structures of all grammatical sentences) to Halliday’s functional grammar (which emphasised the pragmatic dimensions of language in its communicative context). Contemporary stylistics is most directly influenced by late twentieth century discourse pragmatic-oriented developments in sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and discourse analysis (the study of the interpersonal, transactional, context-bound aspects of communication between addresser and addressee).

Stylistics selectively adopts, adapts and appropriates a range of concepts and models from philosophical, practical and socio- linguistics to investigate the interpretative impact of various linguistic features employed within literature. A few of the features sometimes focussed upon are accommodated within traditional literary study, such as literary linguistic means of deviation and foregrounding (for example, sound pattering through assonance and alliteration, lexical deviation such as neologisms, semantic deviation in the form of metaphors, etc.), due to the common theoretical ancestry of many literary critical approaches in Formalism and Functionalism. Many other features attended to by stylistics, however, can only be accounted for and analysed using linguistic concepts and models. For example, acute analysis of the inference and interpretation of subtexts within conversations between characters requires use of models of the functions of features of naturally occurring conversation drawn from pragmatics. The aim of stylistics is to provide a less subjective, more principled and retrievable account of the interpretative effects of literary texts through a more textually sensitive, systematic and socio-linguistically informed analysis of their linguistic features.

Just as it has many roots, contemporary stylistics has many branches, of which cognitive poetics is perhaps the most radical. Cognitive poetics has evolved as part of the late twentieth century ‘cognitive turn’. Research within the fields of cognitive linguistics, artificial intelligence, and psycholinguistics has, since the 1970s, been providing empirically-based models of the perceptual categories and mental structures employed by the embodied human mind in the act of processing language. These models have been appropriated within cognitive poetics to explore the mental processes behind interpretation of stylistic features. Cognitive poetics goes beyond stylistic accounting for literary interpretation via linguistic models to investigate the commonalities and idiosyncrasies in reading experiences based on cognitive scientific insights into the relationships between the mind, language and the world.

Key terms: cohesion; deviation; defamiliarisation; discourse analysis; drama; foregrounding; form and function; inference; LANGUAGE; LITERATURE; narrative; poetics; pragmatics; RHETORIC; stylistics; versification

Major figures and models

The following is a brief survey of a small selection of the linguistic and cognitive linguistic concepts and models which are most prominent within stylistics and cognitive poetics.

Foregrounding, Deviation and Parallelism

The FORMALIST and FUNCTONALIST notion of foregrounding, itself informed by early twentieth century gestalt psychology, is perceived by many stylisticians to be the dominant means of readerly inference of interpretative significance. Foregrounding in literature is created through the creation and exploitation of patterns and systems within language use, and perceived deviation from those patterns. Parallels can be constructed through patterning and repetition of structures (as in rhyme schemes and repeated syntactic positioning), prompting the reader to seek semantic associations and interpretative links between the paralleled features. The patterns appealed to can be external to the text itself, e.g. conventional syntactic structures, standard lexical constructions, use of capitalisation, or internal to the text, such as a poem’s metrical scheme, the lexical field of an extract of fiction, or its mode of narration (e.g. third person, retrospective, non-intrusive, omniscient). Patterns, and deviations from patterns, can occur at all linguistic levels (the level of discourse, syntax, semantics, graphology, lexis, morphology, or phonetics). The Stylistic approach hypothesises that readers will generally seek an interpretative connection between foregrounded features, guided by an assumption of authorial intention.

Literary Point of View: Deixis, Modality and Transitivity

Deictic language (pronouns, demonstratives, spatial and temporal adverbs, and the like, the meaning of which is dependent on the context of use), plays a significant part in the construction of the locations, points of view, and interrelations between narrators, characters and narratees within scenes and within and across diegetic levels of literature. The role of modality, expressed through modal auxiliary verbs (expressing duty, desire, and belief), in the communication of narratorial and character point of view has also been fruitfully investigated by stylisticians. Transitivity analysis explores the structures and functions of processes (expressed through verbs) within clauses, stylistic analysis of which likewise gives insight into the strategic portrayal of acts, agents, character behaviour, etc.

Literary Pragmatics: Conversation Analysis, Speech Acts, Politeness, Conversational Implicature, and Speech and Thought Presentation

Pragmatics is concerned with the meaning of an utterance in relation to its context.

Various models of communication are offered under this umbrella term. Conversation Analysis investigates turn-taking, topic-control, and non-fluency features (interruptions, false starts and the like), while study of Speech Acts explores the relationships between propositional structures, intended and perceived meaning, and effect. Politeness can be probed through observation of covert and overt threats to negative and positive face. Stylistic analysis of literary representations of character dialogue (e.g. within novels and drama) using these concepts and models can account for the ways in which inferences are evoked regarding the relationships between characters (in terms of power, intimacy, etc.,) and the contribution of such conversations to characterisation. Conversational implicature – the communication of meaning through the adherence to and flouting of conversational maxims in accordance with an overarching assumption of communicative co-operation (the cooperative principle) – can be analysed to reveal inferable assumptions, presuppositions and subtext within character interactions, as well as within author-reader communication. Lastly, the representation of characters’ speech and thought (e.g. direct, indirect and free indirect speech and thought represented through variations in use of reporting clauses, speech marks, different degrees of narratorial mediation of thought, marked by first and third person reference, for example) can be analysed to explicate different aspects of characterisation (including characterisation of the narrator).

Figure and Ground, Schema, and Conceptual Metaphors

Figure and Ground relations are the embodied mind’s way of perceiving foregrounding and deviation. In exploring foregrounding, cognitive poetics identifies the set characteristics of a figure (textual or abstract) which enable it to be perceived as such and distinguished from a ground, and enable attention to be attracted to the former. Schema Theory offers a model of the means by which the mind organises and efficiently recalls, utilises, and adapts packages of knowledge (schemas) based on dynamic experience. Cognitive poetics explores how such schemas can be linguistically evoked and reinforced or refreshed by literary experiences. Conceptual Metaphor Theory, on the other hand, analyses the text-driven selective mapping of properties of source and target domains evoked by metaphorical linguistic constructions, and, on the basis of re-occurring conceptual metaphors, investigates the underlying intercultural cognitive models that may determine the nature of and paradigmatic relationships between certain concrete and abstract concepts.

Deictic Shifting and Text Worlds

Deictic Shift Theory and Text World Theory explore higher linguistic levels to map out the ways in which the reading mind processes deixis, and the ways in which it maps out, conceptually navigates, and keeps track of the various discourse levels within literature. Deictic Shift Theory asserts that in order to comprehend deictic cues the reader has to conceptually project to the deictic centre of the speaker (e.g., a narrator or character), and argues that the processing of deictic language plays a significant part in the sense of immersion and transportation so often anecdotally reported of the experience of reading literature. Text World Theory traces the ways in which a literary text distinguishes different levels of the story (i.e., the discourse world, the text world and various potential types of subworlds), their properties (e.g., participants, location), and the processes that take place within them (e.g., events, thoughts). 

How to practise Stylistics and Cognitive Poetics...

Most stylistic analyses will either focus on one specific linguistic feature or model, or be of the ‘eclectic’ kind, probing a range of features, according to what the reader feels is most interpretatively significant within a particular text. Begin by reading through the text, and note down your initial interpretative impressions. Then, try to account for your interpretation through analysis of the linguistic features of the text, by considering the following questions:

• What deviation occurs in the text? Is it internal or external? At what linguistic level does it occur? Are there any parallelisms, and at what level do they occur? How do these foregrounded features work individually and together to influence your interpretation?

• How do deixis, modality and transitivity contribute to your conceptual construction and interpretative impressions of the fictional world of the story, its characters and their interrelations?

• What aspects of literary pragmatics are at play, and how do they affect your interpretation of characters and their relationships?

• What other linguistic features of the text do you notice, and how do they shape your reading of the text?

Use the insights gained to augment and systematically account for your interpretation. Then, consider, which of the four linguistic foci was most useful in this account?

To move into cognitive poetic analysis, you could consider

• What figure and ground relations underlie any foregrounding effects in the text?

• What schema are evoked by the text, and in what ways are they affirmed or refreshed? How is your interpretation shaped by the use of schema in the text?

• What conceptual metaphors are employed, if any, and what properties of each domain are mapped into the newly blended concept by each particular linguistic construction of a metaphor?

• What kinds of deictic shifting are required by the deictic language of the text, and what effect does this have on your interpretation of the text?

• How many and what kind of subworlds are involved in the text, and how does your navigation of them influence your interpretation?

Example

Read ‘Sonny’s Lettah’, by Linton Kwesi Johnson (available on this website @ 5.2.1b).  Do this in the first instance without reading the accompanying notes. Sketch out an initial interpretation, and go on to explore that interpretation through (selective or comprehensive) application of the above questions and suggestions. Then, compare your responses to those below.

‘Sonny’s Lettah’ is political protest poem written in response to the metropolitan police’s racially prejudice exploitation of the Thatcherite re-introduction of the 1824 Vagrancy Act, known as the ‘sus’ law, enabling police to stop and search anyone merely on grounds of suspicion. Public perception of this racially prejudice misuse is believed to have contributed significantly to the Brixton riots of 1981. The poem is written in the Jamaican creole dialect, creating a culturally distinct voice which could be both alienating and engaging in its deviation from lexical norms and its internal consistency. Written in epistolatory form, the poem gives the reader a sense of overhearing a personal confession from son to mother. The protagonist’s attitude towards his crime is seems ambivalent, seemingly still shocked by having killed a policeman, but more ashamed of having broken his promise to his mother to protect his brother. He seems foremost sincerely apologetic for the strain his imprisonment will put upon his mother, and genuinely caring for his brother. Furthermore, the narrative is told in such a way as to emphasise the pace and injustice of the events, and so the reader is able to empathise with the speaker’s feelings and choices, and sympathise with his fate. A range of features seem to contribute to these impressions: this analysis will address those foregrounded through deviation and parallelism, and their effects.

The most striking aspect of this poem is its (external) deviation from standard British English spelling in partially phonetic representation of Jamaican patois. The poet has employed letters and morphemes more directly resembling the speech sounds of the creole, creating words such as ‘miggle’ for ‘middle’(l.20), and ‘likkle’ for ‘little’ (l.19), altering central consonants, shifting each to sounds articulated further back in the mouth than the dental plosives of the ‘standard’ pronunciation. This distinctly locates the speaker within a particular minority cultural group, and marks an appropriation of and adaptation to British culture, in the blending of accents and dialects.

The register of the poem deviates from both the formal expression with which the letter opens and closes, and the degree of familiarity that might be expected between mother and son. Through this the poet indicates a patent respect on behalf of the son for his mother, but affection also. It is also suggestive of an attempted impression of good literacy, undermined by the stilted nature of the expression of his greeting, imbued by the capitalisation of ‘Day’, lending both words of line 6 stress, and by the line breaks.

The patterning and deviation within line lengths contribute to the poem in other ways. The three eight-line central stanzas conveying the main action of the event are formed in alternating lines of iambic pentameter and catalectic anapaestic lines (albeit of varying length and feet). The tight rhyme scheme, predominantly monosyllabic lexical units and lack of punctuation keep the pace fast, echoing the pace of the action, conveying an impression of the speaker’s felt immediacy to it in the act of remembering. This is brought to a highly contrasting slow, and then a seeming halt, with the stanza of two lines, ‘an crash / an dead’, each single iamb left to resonate in the ensuing brief silences. Their metrical brevity is aided and emphasised by their grammatical deviation, ‘an crash’ contracting something possibly along the lines of ‘and there was a crash’, which the reader is left to fill in, and ‘an dead’, eliding ‘he was’, foregrounding the shock and horror of death itself more than the identity of the killed policeman.

Line lengths and grammatical deviation function, too, within enjambment, in lines such as ‘I remain / your son / Sonny’. The line ‘I remain’ possesses ‘double syntax’ in that it is meaningful on its own (as in ‘I remain’, I am still alive, at least, and in contrast to the policeman) and through revision with the continuation ‘your son’, associating ‘Sonny’s’ continued life and identity with his role as his mother’s son. This is affirmed in the ending on his name with the short trochaic line ‘Sonny’.

The name ‘Sonny’, being slang for the address ‘son’, casts the protagonist as akin to many other men, and thus many potential readers, suggesting each could easily be in his place if things were different. The deictic pronouns ‘I’ and ‘yu’ (‘you’) have a similar effect, being slippery referents, open to all takers. The term of address ‘mama’ is non-specific too, and could fit many readers. It marks, in British English, a childlike relationship, suggestive of a baby’s first words or pleading for attention, both re-evoking the reader’s sympathy for the protagonist, and affirming the centrality of this bond to his identity.

The medium of a letter within a poem deviates in some ways from both forms, but is effective in facilitating a sense of physical distance and emotional closeness, and the impression of the speaker’s isolation, along with foregrounding the nature of the communicational context. The letter is penned alone and sent out in hope of it being received. The poet’s simultaneous abidance by many conventions of literary versification mark it as a poem, and thus to be communicated to many, its impact as a protest dependent on it being heard.

In conclusion, while this stylistic analysis is in no way comprehensive, it does illustrate some of the ways in which deviation and parallelism at various linguistic levels function to foreground particular aspects of the poem, with the overarching effect of evoking sympathy for the speaker’s situation, and emphasising the shared, familial and human nature of his identity and behaviour, despite society’s alienation.

Activities

(a) Draw on the above ‘How to practise Stylistics and Cognitive Poetics’ guidelines to help frame a stylistic analysis of a literary text that interests you. If possible, find a literary critical response to the same text and compare your analyses.

(b) Use the guidelines to help frame a further stylistic and cognitive analysis of an advertisement in a magazine, a poster, or any other text in a public space (e.g. Clarins 5.4.4; street texts, 5.2.6). Consider the insights this facilitates.

Discussion

(i)  a principled analysis of language can be used to make our commentary on the effects produced in literary work less impressionistic and subjective.

Carter (1982: 5-6)

(ii) one does not need to know linguistics in order to read and understand literary works

Traugott and Pratt (1980:19-20)

Also see: PRACTICAL CRITICISM AND NEW (OLD) CRITICISM; FORMALISM INTO FUNCTIONALISM, and Part Two.

READING: Introductory: Carter 1982; Carter and Simpson 1989; Nørgaard, Busse and Montoro 2010*; Stockwell 2002*; Wales 2011*. Fuller studies: Culpeper, Short and Verdonk 1998*,Gavins and Steen 2003*;Gregoriou 2009*; Jeffries and McIntyre 2010*;Lambrou and Stockwell 2010*; Leech 1969; Leech and Short 2007*; Short 1996, Simpson 1993, 2004*; Toolan 1990*; Verdonk 1993*, 2002*; Verdonk and Weber 1995*. Anthologies: Carter and Stockwell 2008*; McIntyre and Busse 2010*.

*Bibliographic references further to those in the book

Bally, C. (1909) Traité de stylistique française, Heidelberg: C. Winter.

Carter, R. A. and Stockwell, P. (eds) (2008) The Language and Literature Reader, London: Routledge.

Culpeper, J., Short, M., and Verdonk, P. (eds) (1998) Exploring the Language of Drama: From Text to Context, London: Routledge.

Gavins, J. and Steen, G. (eds) (2003) Cognitive Poetics in Practice, London: Routledge.

Gregoriou, C. (2009) English Literary Stylistics, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Jeffries, L. and McIntyre, D. (2010) Stylistics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lambrou, M. and Stockwell, P. (2010) Contemporary Stylistics, London: Contimuum.

Leech, G. N. and Short, M. (2007) Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose, 2nd edn, London: Longman.

McIntyre, P. and Busse, B. (eds) (2010) Language and Style, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Nørgaard, N., Busse, B. and Montoro, R. (2010) Key Terms in Stylistics, London: Continuum.

Simpson, P. (2004) Stylistics: A Resource Book for Students, London: Routledge.

Spitzer, L. (1948) Linguistics and Literary History: Essays in Stylistics, Princeton: Princeton University Press. 

Stockwell, P. (2002) Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction, London: Routledge.

Toolan, M. (1990) The Stylistics of Fiction, London: Routledge.

Wellek, R. and Warren, A. (1966) The Theory of Literature, 3rd (rev.) edn., London: Jonathan Cape.

Widdowson, H. G. (1975) Stylistics and the Teaching of Literature, London: Longman.

Ullmann, S. (1964) Language and Style: Collected Papers, New York: Barnes & Noble.

Verdonk, P. (2002) Stylistics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Verdonk, P. and Weber, J.-J. (eds) (1995). Twentieth Century Fiction: From Text to Context, London: Routledge.

Verdonk, P. (ed.) (1993). Twentieth Century Poetry: From Text to Context, London: Routledge.

Here are some relevant web sites:

‘A Brief History of Stylistics’ http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/stylistics/introduction/history.htm

Traité de stylistique française, by C. Bally (1909), e-book available at http://www.archive.org/details/traitdestylist01ball

‘Aspects of Cognitive Poetics’, by Reuven Tsur (2003) https://www2.bc.edu/~richarad/lcb/fea/tsur/cogpoetics.html