Abstract The aim of this paper is to evince the reasons why the viewers tend to ‘root for the bad guy’ in House of Cards in spite of his amoral undertakings. It delves into the linguistic, pragmatic and cognitive strategies employed by the protagonist, Frank Underwood, to ‘transport’ the audience in the narrative while distancing them from moral judgment. It is shown that the ‘Para-Social Relationship’ he constructs with the audience invites them to adapt to his goals and perspective, guiding their emotions and reactions, distracting them from ethical matters through generalised impersonalised aphorisms and transgressive humour. Lastly it proposes a three-level model of producing/viewing processes that are specific to House of Cards, highlighting the way the protagonist’s manipulation of audience involvement breaks apart in the last seasons, as the production crew alters the Frank-audience relationship.
{"title":"Strategies of involvement and moral detachment in House of Cards","authors":"Sandrine Sorlin","doi":"10.1515/JLS-2018-0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/JLS-2018-0002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The aim of this paper is to evince the reasons why the viewers tend to ‘root for the bad guy’ in House of Cards in spite of his amoral undertakings. It delves into the linguistic, pragmatic and cognitive strategies employed by the protagonist, Frank Underwood, to ‘transport’ the audience in the narrative while distancing them from moral judgment. It is shown that the ‘Para-Social Relationship’ he constructs with the audience invites them to adapt to his goals and perspective, guiding their emotions and reactions, distracting them from ethical matters through generalised impersonalised aphorisms and transgressive humour. Lastly it proposes a three-level model of producing/viewing processes that are specific to House of Cards, highlighting the way the protagonist’s manipulation of audience involvement breaks apart in the last seasons, as the production crew alters the Frank-audience relationship.","PeriodicalId":42874,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF LITERARY SEMANTICS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2018-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/JLS-2018-0002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49180531","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract This paper applies the politics-based theory of Discourse Space to a literary text in order to investigate its flexibility and possible contribution to literary interpretation. As a case study, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s short story, “A very old man with enormous wings” has been selected; this story most obviously evolves out of dichotomies on both inter- and intra-character levels. The theory’s proximization model is the main core of the analysis based on which the role of the deictic centre in positioning the story’s entities is accentuated. The analysis shows that despite its advantages, the proximization model needs to be expanded in order to accommodate the variety of deictic centres which any literary text, unlike political discourse, has. A comparison between Discourse Space Theory and narratology shows the inadequate attention the latter assigns to the axiological and evaluative role of the deictic centre in the story.
{"title":"Proximization and literature: Marquez’s “a very old man with enormous wings”","authors":"Roghayeh Farsi","doi":"10.1515/JLS-2018-0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/JLS-2018-0004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper applies the politics-based theory of Discourse Space to a literary text in order to investigate its flexibility and possible contribution to literary interpretation. As a case study, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s short story, “A very old man with enormous wings” has been selected; this story most obviously evolves out of dichotomies on both inter- and intra-character levels. The theory’s proximization model is the main core of the analysis based on which the role of the deictic centre in positioning the story’s entities is accentuated. The analysis shows that despite its advantages, the proximization model needs to be expanded in order to accommodate the variety of deictic centres which any literary text, unlike political discourse, has. A comparison between Discourse Space Theory and narratology shows the inadequate attention the latter assigns to the axiological and evaluative role of the deictic centre in the story.","PeriodicalId":42874,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF LITERARY SEMANTICS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2018-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/JLS-2018-0004","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42202395","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Stanley Kubrick’s anti-war film Full Metal Jacket (1987) dramatically represents US Marine Corps basic training during the Vietnam War as both gruelling and brutalising. The brutal, linguistically aggressive and physically intimidating scenes purport to detail the dehumanising process that Marine Corps recruits were put through in preparation for combat during that period. In the film, the recruits are trained by Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, played by the actor R. Lee Ermey, who is himself an ex-Marine Corps drill instructor (1965–1967) and who also served in Vietnam in 1968. As a result of his experience as an instructor, Ermey was given free rein by Kubrick to write his own dialogue for the abusive barrack room and field training scenes in order to lend the drama an air of authenticity (see Ermey 2017). Within the fictional world of the film, the intense training and disciplinary regime ultimately causes one recruit, Private Leonard Lawrence, to crack psychologically. Private Lawrence is nicknamed ‘Gomer Pyle’ by Hartman upon their first meeting, this name being a direct allusion to the hapless character of the same name who was a US Marine recruit in the sitcom Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C., which ran from 1964–1969 – contemporaneously with the time period in which Full Metal Jacket is set. This insulting allusion is merely the start of a long line of linguistically impolite/aggressive and ultimately physically aggressive interactions which Lawrence/Pyle suffers at the hands of Hartman, both directly and, later in the film as a result of Hartman’s orchestrations, from the other recruits. Under this unrelenting barrage of impoliteness, aggression, and abuse, Lawrence/Pyle eventually shoots Hartman dead before turning his rifle on himself and committing suicide. Thus, the film argues that the dehumanising effect of the basic training, which was ostensibly carried out to toughen up and mentally prepare conscripted recruits for combat in Vietnam, had a profound, brutalising and (potentially) utterly destructive effect on those subjected to it. In this article, we explore the creative linguistic aggression displayed by the character of Hartman. We focus particularly on the reasons underlying the creativity of Hartman’s impoliteness and aggression, and argue that these are essentially to foreground the seriousness of the training regime which the recruits must follow.
摘要斯坦利·库布里克（Stanley Kubrick）的反战电影《全金属夹克》（Full Metal Jacket，1987）戏剧性地再现了美国海军陆战队在越南战争期间的基础训练，既艰苦又残酷。残酷、语言攻击和身体恐吓的场景旨在详细描述海军陆战队新兵在那段时间为战斗做准备时所经历的非人化过程。在电影中，新兵由演员R·李·埃尔米扮演的枪手中士哈特曼训练，他本人是前海军陆战队训练教官（1965年至1967年），1968年也曾在越南服役。由于他作为一名教官的经历，库布里克让埃尔米自由地为虐待性营房和野外训练场景写下自己的对话，以赋予戏剧真实感（见埃尔米2017）。在电影的虚构世界里，紧张的训练和纪律制度最终导致一名新兵，二等兵伦纳德·劳伦斯，心理崩溃。二等兵劳伦斯在他们第一次见面时被哈特曼戏称为“Gomer Pyle”，这个名字直接暗指1964年至1969年情景喜剧《美国海军陆战队戈默·派尔》中的一名不幸的同名角色，该剧与《全金属夹克》的故事发生在同一时期。这个侮辱性的暗示只是一长串语言上不礼貌/攻击性和最终身体上攻击性互动的开始，劳伦斯/派尔直接受到哈特曼的伤害，在电影后期，由于哈特曼的精心策划，也受到其他新兵的伤害。在这种无情的无礼、侵略和虐待下，劳伦斯/派尔最终开枪打死了哈特曼，然后将步枪对准自己自杀。因此，这部电影认为，基础训练的非人化效果，表面上是为了让应征入伍的越南士兵坚强起来，并在心理上为他们做好准备，对那些受到基础训练的人产生了深刻的、残酷的和（潜在的）彻底的破坏性影响。在这篇文章中，我们探讨了哈特曼这个角色所表现出的创造性语言攻击。我们特别关注哈特曼不礼貌和侵略性的创造性背后的原因，并认为这些本质上是为了突出新兵必须遵守的训练制度的严肃性。
{"title":"Creative linguistic impoliteness as aggression in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket","authors":"Derek Bousfield, D. McIntyre","doi":"10.1515/JLS-2018-0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/JLS-2018-0003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Stanley Kubrick’s anti-war film Full Metal Jacket (1987) dramatically represents US Marine Corps basic training during the Vietnam War as both gruelling and brutalising. The brutal, linguistically aggressive and physically intimidating scenes purport to detail the dehumanising process that Marine Corps recruits were put through in preparation for combat during that period. In the film, the recruits are trained by Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, played by the actor R. Lee Ermey, who is himself an ex-Marine Corps drill instructor (1965–1967) and who also served in Vietnam in 1968. As a result of his experience as an instructor, Ermey was given free rein by Kubrick to write his own dialogue for the abusive barrack room and field training scenes in order to lend the drama an air of authenticity (see Ermey 2017). Within the fictional world of the film, the intense training and disciplinary regime ultimately causes one recruit, Private Leonard Lawrence, to crack psychologically. Private Lawrence is nicknamed ‘Gomer Pyle’ by Hartman upon their first meeting, this name being a direct allusion to the hapless character of the same name who was a US Marine recruit in the sitcom Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C., which ran from 1964–1969 – contemporaneously with the time period in which Full Metal Jacket is set. This insulting allusion is merely the start of a long line of linguistically impolite/aggressive and ultimately physically aggressive interactions which Lawrence/Pyle suffers at the hands of Hartman, both directly and, later in the film as a result of Hartman’s orchestrations, from the other recruits. Under this unrelenting barrage of impoliteness, aggression, and abuse, Lawrence/Pyle eventually shoots Hartman dead before turning his rifle on himself and committing suicide. Thus, the film argues that the dehumanising effect of the basic training, which was ostensibly carried out to toughen up and mentally prepare conscripted recruits for combat in Vietnam, had a profound, brutalising and (potentially) utterly destructive effect on those subjected to it. In this article, we explore the creative linguistic aggression displayed by the character of Hartman. We focus particularly on the reasons underlying the creativity of Hartman’s impoliteness and aggression, and argue that these are essentially to foreground the seriousness of the training regime which the recruits must follow.","PeriodicalId":42874,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF LITERARY SEMANTICS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2018-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/JLS-2018-0003","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44838532","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract This paper focuses on the ways some recent British and Irish rewritings of the Bible estrange what has become the publicly accepted and dominant image of the biblical text. Recently, the Bible has been given the status of “home scripture” (Sherwood, Yvonne. 2012. Biblical Blaspheming: Trials of the Sacred for a Secular Age. Cambridge: CUP) and become a domesticated and conservative text, a rather placid cultural/literary monument, an important foundation of democracy, a venerable religious document judged more tolerant and liberal than other scriptures. Though the Bible used to be perceived as an explosive text, peppered with potentially offensive passages, today its enmity is neutralised either by linking the Bible with ancient times or by relating it to people’s religious beliefs and by entrenching its more scandalous parts within the discourse of tolerance. It is such an anodyne image of the Bible that the biblical rewritings of Roberts, Winterson, Barnes, Crace, Pullman, Tóibin, Alderman, Diski defamiliarize. By showing biblical events through the eyes of various non-standard focalizers, those novels disrupt the formulaic patterns of the contemporary perception of the Bible. It is through these strange perspectives that we observe the critical moment when the overall meaning and the role of the biblical text is established and the biblical story is actually written down. Importantly, it is also the moment when somebody moulds the scripture according to their ideas and glosses over all the complexities, violence and immorality related to the events the biblical text describes. Also, contemporary biblical rewritings defamiliarize the currently popular image of the Bible – that of a whitewashed text which inculcates morality, conserves social order and teaches love and tolerance, by employing images of disintegration, dirt and contagion as well as by constructing a figure of a fervent believer in the Bible and its ideas.
{"title":"Defamiliarizing the popular image of the bible in some contemporary rewritings in english","authors":"Ewa Rychter","doi":"10.1515/JLS-2018-0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/JLS-2018-0001","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper focuses on the ways some recent British and Irish rewritings of the Bible estrange what has become the publicly accepted and dominant image of the biblical text. Recently, the Bible has been given the status of “home scripture” (Sherwood, Yvonne. 2012. Biblical Blaspheming: Trials of the Sacred for a Secular Age. Cambridge: CUP) and become a domesticated and conservative text, a rather placid cultural/literary monument, an important foundation of democracy, a venerable religious document judged more tolerant and liberal than other scriptures. Though the Bible used to be perceived as an explosive text, peppered with potentially offensive passages, today its enmity is neutralised either by linking the Bible with ancient times or by relating it to people’s religious beliefs and by entrenching its more scandalous parts within the discourse of tolerance. It is such an anodyne image of the Bible that the biblical rewritings of Roberts, Winterson, Barnes, Crace, Pullman, Tóibin, Alderman, Diski defamiliarize. By showing biblical events through the eyes of various non-standard focalizers, those novels disrupt the formulaic patterns of the contemporary perception of the Bible. It is through these strange perspectives that we observe the critical moment when the overall meaning and the role of the biblical text is established and the biblical story is actually written down. Importantly, it is also the moment when somebody moulds the scripture according to their ideas and glosses over all the complexities, violence and immorality related to the events the biblical text describes. Also, contemporary biblical rewritings defamiliarize the currently popular image of the Bible – that of a whitewashed text which inculcates morality, conserves social order and teaches love and tolerance, by employing images of disintegration, dirt and contagion as well as by constructing a figure of a fervent believer in the Bible and its ideas.","PeriodicalId":42874,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF LITERARY SEMANTICS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2018-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/JLS-2018-0001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48976630","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract The problems of making and evaluating counterfactual claims about fictional characters cannot be adequately handled without taking into account the practices of literary criticism, interpretation, and re-creation. The direct-reference theory of names explains only a subset of the phenomena of fiction and explains away the rest as irrelevant or pseudo-problems, whereas some criticisms of that theory bring in metaphysical concepts that may obscure the issue. This paper suggests that the indeterminacy of fictions and the conventions of the aforementioned practices are sufficient basis for explaining and assessing such counterfactual claims. In this view, fiction ceases to be understood as a phenomenon sui generis; it is instead an institutionalized use of the stipulative or computational aspects of language that are at work in other areas as well. Thus, these results can be brought into line with recent ideas in the fields of the philosophy of mathematics, relevance theory, and cognitive studies.
{"title":"Counterfactual claims about fictional characters: philosophical and literary perspectives","authors":"Luis Galván","doi":"10.1515/jls-2017-0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jls-2017-0006","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The problems of making and evaluating counterfactual claims about fictional characters cannot be adequately handled without taking into account the practices of literary criticism, interpretation, and re-creation. The direct-reference theory of names explains only a subset of the phenomena of fiction and explains away the rest as irrelevant or pseudo-problems, whereas some criticisms of that theory bring in metaphysical concepts that may obscure the issue. This paper suggests that the indeterminacy of fictions and the conventions of the aforementioned practices are sufficient basis for explaining and assessing such counterfactual claims. In this view, fiction ceases to be understood as a phenomenon sui generis; it is instead an institutionalized use of the stipulative or computational aspects of language that are at work in other areas as well. Thus, these results can be brought into line with recent ideas in the fields of the philosophy of mathematics, relevance theory, and cognitive studies.","PeriodicalId":42874,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF LITERARY SEMANTICS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2017-11-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jls-2017-0006","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45595117","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract This paper investigates the ways in which immoral villains in contemporary fictional television are linguistically constructed as antiheroes that are appealing and even likeable to a wide mainstream audience. The underlying dataset comprises the first thirteen episodes of each of the three American TV series Breaking Bad, House of Cards, and Dexter. In order to highlight the equivocal status of the protagonists, this study adopts approaches from both cognitive semantics and register theory. The blending of mental spaces in utterances by the antiheroes underlines the fact that they oscillate between diverse social and cognitive domains. In addition, the protagonists are highly versatile in accommodating their linguistic registers to alternating situational contexts. As a result, they are framed as resourceful, multifaceted, and captivating individuals in a way that accounts for the tremendous pop-cultural impact and economic success of these TV shows.
{"title":"Constructing the antihero: Linguistic characterisation in current American television series","authors":"C. Schubert","doi":"10.1515/jls-2017-0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jls-2017-0002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper investigates the ways in which immoral villains in contemporary fictional television are linguistically constructed as antiheroes that are appealing and even likeable to a wide mainstream audience. The underlying dataset comprises the first thirteen episodes of each of the three American TV series Breaking Bad, House of Cards, and Dexter. In order to highlight the equivocal status of the protagonists, this study adopts approaches from both cognitive semantics and register theory. The blending of mental spaces in utterances by the antiheroes underlines the fact that they oscillate between diverse social and cognitive domains. In addition, the protagonists are highly versatile in accommodating their linguistic registers to alternating situational contexts. As a result, they are framed as resourceful, multifaceted, and captivating individuals in a way that accounts for the tremendous pop-cultural impact and economic success of these TV shows.","PeriodicalId":42874,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF LITERARY SEMANTICS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2017-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jls-2017-0002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47815558","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Elizabeth Is Missing by Emma Healey was published in 2014 and won the Costa Award for best first novel. Both humorous and sad, it has been categorised as literary fiction, detective fiction and a psychological thriller, and is thus a “hybrid” genre novel that is difficult to categorise neatly. The novel’s chief protagonist and narrator is Maud, who has dementia. As a narrator Maud is extremely unreliable and often forgets facts and events even as they are unfolding around her. Maud’s memories, however, have a much higher degree of specificity than her present day narratives: they are richer, more detailed, and therefore much more reliable, than the narrative of her current life. Consequently, the novel is characterised by a stylistic contrast between the vague and the specific, the remembered and the forgotten. In order to investigate this contrast, this paper argues that a stylistic account of Cognitive Grammar can shed further light on how Maud’s cognitive habits are represented in the novel, and are represented in the novel, and how these in turn impact upon text-world representation. The analysis draws upon Cognitive Grammar’s construal processes, in particular, to explore the fictive illustration of mind style – and of memory – in this literary context. Finally, this paper considers how one of the particular experiences of reading the narrative is dependent on the “layered construal” prevalent in the text, whereby a reader’s experience of the fictional world is continually contrasted with that of the narrator.
{"title":"Finding Elizabeth: Construing memory in Elizabeth Is Missing by Emma Healey","authors":"C. Harrison","doi":"10.1515/jls-2017-0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jls-2017-0008","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Elizabeth Is Missing by Emma Healey was published in 2014 and won the Costa Award for best first novel. Both humorous and sad, it has been categorised as literary fiction, detective fiction and a psychological thriller, and is thus a “hybrid” genre novel that is difficult to categorise neatly. The novel’s chief protagonist and narrator is Maud, who has dementia. As a narrator Maud is extremely unreliable and often forgets facts and events even as they are unfolding around her. Maud’s memories, however, have a much higher degree of specificity than her present day narratives: they are richer, more detailed, and therefore much more reliable, than the narrative of her current life. Consequently, the novel is characterised by a stylistic contrast between the vague and the specific, the remembered and the forgotten. In order to investigate this contrast, this paper argues that a stylistic account of Cognitive Grammar can shed further light on how Maud’s cognitive habits are represented in the novel, and are represented in the novel, and how these in turn impact upon text-world representation. The analysis draws upon Cognitive Grammar’s construal processes, in particular, to explore the fictive illustration of mind style – and of memory – in this literary context. Finally, this paper considers how one of the particular experiences of reading the narrative is dependent on the “layered construal” prevalent in the text, whereby a reader’s experience of the fictional world is continually contrasted with that of the narrator.","PeriodicalId":42874,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF LITERARY SEMANTICS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2017-01-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jls-2017-0008","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42850547","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Michael Burke Olivia Fialho Sonia Zyngier: Scientific Approaches to Literature in Learning Environments","authors":"Paul Sevigny","doi":"10.1515/jls-2017-0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jls-2017-0009","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42874,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF LITERARY SEMANTICS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2017-01-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jls-2017-0009","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46163330","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Marked linguistic structures in E. E. Cummings’ poetry have long been an issue within literary criticism and stylistics. In this sense, critical approaches to Cummings’ style have dealt mainly with grammar, lexis and morphology, while only few works have examined his graphology extensively. Departing from these trends, in this paper I analyse the use of unorthodox capital letters in 96 of his experimental poems. My aim is twofold: to identify the processes present in Cummings’ unconventional use of capital letters and to determine the effects observable in such unusual patterns. The analysis reveals that the foregrounding of capitals is materialized by the insertion of initial caps, middle caps, final caps, all caps or mixed caps where these are not expected or required. It also suggests that these unconventional patterns mainly emphasize certain elements within the poems, produce iconic effects, generate wordplay and create chaotic scenes. To a lesser degree, they also schematize words, lines or a whole poem, and reproduce differences in the tone of some poetic voices or depict elements that are capitalized in real life.
{"title":"‘nearerandnearerandNEARER’: Foregrounding effects of the unconventional capitalization in the experimental poetry of E. E. Cummings","authors":"E. Gómez-Jiménez","doi":"10.1515/jls-2017-0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jls-2017-0007","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Marked linguistic structures in E. E. Cummings’ poetry have long been an issue within literary criticism and stylistics. In this sense, critical approaches to Cummings’ style have dealt mainly with grammar, lexis and morphology, while only few works have examined his graphology extensively. Departing from these trends, in this paper I analyse the use of unorthodox capital letters in 96 of his experimental poems. My aim is twofold: to identify the processes present in Cummings’ unconventional use of capital letters and to determine the effects observable in such unusual patterns. The analysis reveals that the foregrounding of capitals is materialized by the insertion of initial caps, middle caps, final caps, all caps or mixed caps where these are not expected or required. It also suggests that these unconventional patterns mainly emphasize certain elements within the poems, produce iconic effects, generate wordplay and create chaotic scenes. To a lesser degree, they also schematize words, lines or a whole poem, and reproduce differences in the tone of some poetic voices or depict elements that are capitalized in real life.","PeriodicalId":42874,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF LITERARY SEMANTICS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2017-01-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jls-2017-0007","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45946463","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract The concept of an unreliable third-person narrator may seem a contradiction in terms. The very act of adopting a third-person stance to tell a story would appear to entail an acceptance of a basic need for truth-telling, a commitment to what Wayne Booth terms the implied author’s “norms of the work.” Nonetheless, in the essay that follows, three of Katherine Mansfield’s short stories – “A Cup of Tea” (1922), “Bliss” (1918) and “Revelations” (1920) – will be examined in order to demonstrate how the strategic suppression of the distinction between the voice of the narrator and that of the central character can lead to a strong sense of unreliability. In order to read such narratives effectively, the reader must reappraise the value of certain other stylistic elements, including the use of directives involved with directly quoted speech, seemingly minor discrepancies between adjacent sentences and, perhaps most importantly, the structure of the fiction itself. We contend that Mansfield’s use of this form of unreliable third-person fiction is her unique contribution to the short story genre.
{"title":"Unreliable Third Person Narration? The Case of Katherine Mansfield","authors":"Terence Patrick Murphy, Kelly S. Walsh","doi":"10.1515/jls-2017-0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jls-2017-0005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The concept of an unreliable third-person narrator may seem a contradiction in terms. The very act of adopting a third-person stance to tell a story would appear to entail an acceptance of a basic need for truth-telling, a commitment to what Wayne Booth terms the implied author’s “norms of the work.” Nonetheless, in the essay that follows, three of Katherine Mansfield’s short stories – “A Cup of Tea” (1922), “Bliss” (1918) and “Revelations” (1920) – will be examined in order to demonstrate how the strategic suppression of the distinction between the voice of the narrator and that of the central character can lead to a strong sense of unreliability. In order to read such narratives effectively, the reader must reappraise the value of certain other stylistic elements, including the use of directives involved with directly quoted speech, seemingly minor discrepancies between adjacent sentences and, perhaps most importantly, the structure of the fiction itself. We contend that Mansfield’s use of this form of unreliable third-person fiction is her unique contribution to the short story genre.","PeriodicalId":42874,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF LITERARY SEMANTICS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2017-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jls-2017-0005","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66951693","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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