Pub Date : 2022-04-29DOI: 10.1177/09639470221090865
Eri Shigematsu
Present-tense narration has become a prevalent narrative style in English literature over the past few decades. This narrative style tended to be considered unnatural and odd in narrative theory in the late twentieth century (Cohn, 1999; Fludernik, 1996), since using the present tense to describe events at the story level of narrative was regarded as incongruous with the traditional story-telling convention of ‘live now and tell later’, in which the present tense is generally associated with the narrator’s deictic centre at the level of discourse. In contemporary present-tense narratives, however, the present tense is often employed as a narrative tense that develops the narrative plot-line, making the unmistakable demarcation between story and discourse impossible by means of tense. As a case study, this paper examines the narrative effects of using present-tense narration in Ali Smith’s How to Be Both (2014). It demonstrates how in this novel, the unique handling of the narrative present tense serves to achieve the particular effects of blurring levels between experience and narration as well as past and present. These effects can only be appreciated by reconsidering the relationship between story and discourse and by clarifying the connection between the functions of present-tense narration and the novel’s central theme, being both. Suggesting that the narrative present tense has varied functions in this novel, such as figural and retrospective, this paper illustrates that the diverse usage of the narrative present tense adds to the unclear distinction between narrative levels.
在过去的几十年里，现在时态叙事已经成为英语文学中流行的一种叙事风格。这种叙事风格在20世纪后期的叙事理论中被认为是不自然和奇怪的(Cohn, 1999;Fludernik, 1996)，因为在叙事的故事层面使用现在时来描述事件被认为与传统的“活在当下，以后再讲”的讲故事惯例不协调，在传统的讲故事惯例中，现在时通常与叙述者在话语层面的指示中心联系在一起。然而，在当代现在时叙事中，现在时经常被用作发展叙事情节线的叙事时态，这使得故事和话语之间的明确界限不可能通过时态来区分。本文以阿里·史密斯(Ali Smith)的《How to Be Both》(2014)为例，考察了现在时叙事的叙事效果。它展示了在这部小说中，对叙事现在时的独特处理如何达到模糊经验与叙述以及过去与现在之间层次的特殊效果。只有重新思考故事与话语的关系，厘清现在时叙事功能与小说中心主题之间的联系，才能理解这些效果。本文认为，叙事性现在时在小说中具有具象性和追溯性等多种功能，叙事性现在时使用的多样性加剧了叙事层次的模糊。
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Pub Date : 2022-04-11DOI: 10.1177/09639470221090384
Simone Rebora, Massimo Salgaro
Josefine Mutzenbacher oder die Geschichte einer Wienerischen Dirne von ihr selbst erzählt, published in Vienna in 1906, represents one of the most fascinating cases of attribution of authorship in German literature. Although Josefine Mutzenbacher is usually attributed to Felix Salten, the author of the world-famous Bambi (1923), the novel’s authorship has never been confirmed, and many other candidates have been named as potential authors. Among them is Arthur Schnitzler, who published Reigen, a cycle of amorous adventures in Viennese society, in 1903. Some scholars, instead, have attributed the novel to such lesser-known writers as Ernst Klein and Willi Handl. The controversy surrounding the authorship of Josefine Mutzenbacher was the starting point for our stylometric analyses, and our results help to answer some unresolved questions in a debate that has lasted for more than 100 years. The analyses were performed using the R package Stylo, which enables an efficient application of Burrows’ Delta and its variants. Focusing on both the entire text and on the final pages, two different types of analysis were carried out: one combines 1200 different stylometric methods to compare the candidate authors Salten, Schnitzler, Bahr, Altenberg, Hofmannsthal, Klein and Handl; the other verifies the attribution using the ‘impostors’ method. The results show that the most probable author is Felix Salten, while none of the candidates could be identified as the author of the final pages, confirming the hypothesis that the text was left unfinished by Salten and completed by an as-yet-unidentified ghost-writer.
1906年在维也纳出版的《Josefine Mutzenbacher oder die Geschichte einer Wienerischen Dirne von ihr selbst erzählt》是德国文学中最引人入胜的作者归属案例之一。虽然约瑟芬·穆岑巴赫通常被认为是世界著名的小鹿斑比(1923)的作者菲利克斯·萨尔滕，但这部小说的作者身份从未得到证实，还有许多其他候选人被提名为潜在的作者。亚瑟·施尼茨勒(Arthur Schnitzler)就是其中之一，他于1903年出版了《雷根》(Reigen)一书，讲述了维也纳社会的风流韵事。相反，一些学者认为这部小说出自恩斯特·克莱因(Ernst Klein)和威利·汉德尔(Willi Handl)等不太知名的作家之手。围绕Josefine Mutzenbacher作者身份的争议是我们文体分析的起点，我们的结果有助于回答持续了100多年的争论中一些未解决的问题。分析是使用R软件包Stylo进行的，它可以有效地应用Burrows ' Delta及其变体。重点关注全文和最后几页，进行了两种不同类型的分析:一种是结合1200种不同的文体测量方法来比较候选作者Salten, Schnitzler, Bahr, Altenberg, Hofmannsthal, Klein和Handl;另一个使用' impostors '方法验证属性。结果显示，最有可能的作者是菲利克斯·萨尔滕，而没有一个候选人被确定为最后几页的作者，这证实了萨尔滕未完成文本并由尚未确认身份的代笔人完成的假设。
{"title":"Is Felix Salten the author of the Mutzenbacher novel (1906)? Yes and no","authors":"Simone Rebora, Massimo Salgaro","doi":"10.1177/09639470221090384","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470221090384","url":null,"abstract":"<p><i>Josefine Mutzenbacher oder die Geschichte einer Wienerischen Dirne von ihr selbst erzählt</i>, published in Vienna in 1906, represents one of the most fascinating cases of attribution of authorship in German literature. Although <i>Josefine Mutzenbacher</i> is usually attributed to Felix Salten, the author of the world-famous <i>Bambi</i> (1923), the novel’s authorship has never been confirmed, and many other candidates have been named as potential authors. Among them is Arthur Schnitzler, who published <i>Reigen</i>, a cycle of amorous adventures in Viennese society, in 1903. Some scholars, instead, have attributed the novel to such lesser-known writers as Ernst Klein and Willi Handl. The controversy surrounding the authorship of Josefine Mutzenbacher was the starting point for our stylometric analyses, and our results help to answer some unresolved questions in a debate that has lasted for more than 100 years. The analyses were performed using the R package Stylo, which enables an efficient application of Burrows’ Delta and its variants. Focusing on both the entire text and on the final pages, two different types of analysis were carried out: one combines 1200 different stylometric methods to compare the candidate authors Salten, Schnitzler, Bahr, Altenberg, Hofmannsthal, Klein and Handl; the other verifies the attribution using the ‘impostors’ method. The results show that the most probable author is Felix Salten, while none of the candidates could be identified as the author of the final pages, confirming the hypothesis that the text was left unfinished by Salten and completed by an as-yet-unidentified ghost-writer.</p>","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-04-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50167623","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-06DOI: 10.1177/09639470221080800
M. van Driel
Genre definitions by Swales (1990) and Miller (1984) include the communicative purpose of a text as an indicative feature of its genre. Genre studies have also identified how expert members of discourse communities possess professional expertise in genre styles. This article shows that beyond discourse community expert members, ordinary audiences also have conceptions of genre and use those conceptions to evaluate texts. Through a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of listener reviews of the true crime-comedy podcast My Favorite Murder, the analysis shows that negative reviews view the true crime-comedy categorisation as two separate genres, evaluating the podcast based on expectations of true crime and expectations of comedy. Positive reviewers accept the true crime-comedy genre as a new, mixed genre and evaluate the podcast from an in-group perspective, identifying themselves as members of the My Favorite Murder discourse community. Through this analysis, I show that audiences implement some form of genre analysis in text evaluations and that membership of the discourse community influences how they apply genre expectations to evaluations of texts.
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Pub Date : 2022-01-28DOI: 10.1177/09639470211072171
Lydia Kokkola, Ulla Rydström
Learning a foreign language provides an entry point into the lives of cultural ‘others’, as does the reading of realistic fiction. Responding to the challenges of both tasks requires concerted cognitive effort, but also creativity. First, individuals need to override the automatic tendency to prioritise their own point of view and then, at least temporarily, imagine themselves into another’s position. When reading fiction, focalisation determines whose views the readers can access, but point of view is implicit in all language. L2 learners need to recognise and imitate the world view implicit in the target language. In this article, we present both skills – empathy and mimicry – as acts of creative cognition that develop from responding to literature. This article examines works of fiction written by 15–16-year-old Swedish learners of English in response to a short story by Salman Rushdie. The story contains culturally specific information, and the ending encourages readers to recognise their own assumptions alongside the focalising character. The study draws on cognitive narratology to examine the Swedish learners’ fiction in terms of empathy and mimicry. The aims of the analyses are to determine how the short story and task design promote creative cognition, and to identify where the learners reveal a lack of understanding or an over-reliance on stereotypes.
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Pub Date : 2022-01-27DOI: 10.1177/09639470211072162
M. Burke
This article studies the popular children’s book The Gruffalo (1999) written by Julia Donaldson and illustrated by Axel Scheffler. Its popularity is attested to by the fact that the book has sold over 13.5 million copies and has been translated into more than 80 different languages. The question that this article seeks to address is, to what extent has the language and style of The Gruffalo played a part in these commercial and cultural achievements? The article primarily explores the phenomena of meter, rhyme, rhythm and lexical repetition from interrelated linguistic and stylistic perspectives. It also brings these findings into a dialogue with some of the precepts and principles from both classical rhetoric and modern orality theory, especially pertaining to memory and delivery. Having weighed the linguistic evidence, the supposition is put forward that it is highly probable that the motivated language choices that have been made by the author, and the way those choices have been arranged and deployed in the story, have played a substantial role in the book’s success.
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Pub Date : 2022-01-19DOI: 10.1177/09639470211072170
K. Wales
Despite the importance of child characters in the novels of Charles Dickens, his association with children’s literature is often forgotten, and his A Child’s History of England, first published in instalments in his journal Household Words ( January 1851 to December 1853), has frequently been ignored by critics. The aim of this article is to re-evaluate its achievement as an extended piece of story-telling, taking into account the particular context of the writing of juvenile histories in the early 19th century and their likely readership. My approach takes as its starting point Phelan’s (2017) framework which views narrative as a rhetorical action, and which is focused on purpose, resources and audience. I propose two main resources or strategies, interlocutory role-play and dramatization, which contribute to the work’s distinctive style; at the same time as they confirm the narrator’s ethical values as a historian for children.
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Pub Date : 2022-01-18DOI: 10.1177/09639470211072163
Wouter Haverals, Lindsey Geybels, V. Joosen
In the field of children’s literature studies, much attention has been devoted to investigating differences between children’s and adult literature. Works of crosswriters, authors who write for both readerships in different works, are an excellent source for this research. This article applies stylometry, the computational method of analysing style, to the oeuvres of 10 Dutch and English crosswriters to trace potential differences in their individual style and similarities between the authors. The analyses also take into account the age of the intended reader (as listed in the paratext) and the publication date, to study the influence these aspects have on writing style. Four case studies zoom in on a specific author or age category of the intended readership to study general tendencies as well as outliers. The results from the stylometric analyses are complemented with peritextual information about the author’s view on style and writing for readerships of different ages. The main conclusion drawn from the case studies is that the style of the texts usually correlates more strongly with the age of the intended reader than with the time period in which it was written. Young adult literature clusters more closely with adult literature. The style associated with a younger readership is distinct in the oeuvres of most authors studied in this article and even transcends the differences between authors.
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Pub Date : 2022-01-18DOI: 10.1177/09639470211072154
A. Čermáková, Michaela Mahlberg
In this paper, we study gendered patterns of body language descriptions in children’s fiction. We compare a corpus of 19th-century children’s literature with a corpus of contemporary fiction for children. Using a corpus linguistic approach, we study gendered five-word body part clusters, that is, repeated sequences of words that contain at least one body part noun and a marker of gender. Our aim is to identify and describe differences between the description of male and female body language across both corpora. We find that in the 19th century, there are not only fewer clusters for female characters, but the functional range of these clusters is also limited. The contemporary data suggests a trend for male and female clusters to become more similar with the clusters illustrating an increasing range of options for the description of female characters and their interactional spaces.
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Pub Date : 2022-01-13DOI: 10.1177/09639470211072153
M. Burke, Karen Coats
This article constitutes an introduction to the five articles that appear in this special issue. This framing process starts by highlighting the sparse, yet important, work that has been conducted over the past 20 years on children’s literature in the field of stylistics. The focus in the article then turns to a more general discussion of the language of children’s literature. Here, in this chronological overview of language usage in books written for children, an outline is sketched from the writers and philosophers of the enlightenment up to contemporary debates on literacy, cognition and theory of mind. In the section that follows, the five studies that appear in this special issue are briefly synopsized. What becomes apparent is the wide range of methodological approaches that have been taken by the scholars in question to analyze the texts that are under investigation, in both quantitative and qualitative ways. The article ends with a plea for more stylistic work to be conducted in the areas of both children’s literature and young adult fiction. This is especially pertinent because stylisticians possess the key linguistic and analytic skills and tools to help, in interdisciplinary settings, to address current social, emotional and cognitive challenges pertaining to child development through literacy and through reading in particular.
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Pub Date : 2022-01-05DOI: 10.1177/09639470211062705
Matthias Bauer, Judith Glaesser, A. Kelava, Leonie Kirchhoff, Angelika Zirker
This article introduces a test for literary text comprehension in university students of English as a second language. Poetry is especially suited for our purpose since it frequently shows features that offer challenges to comprehension in a limited space. An example is Shakespeare’s Sonnet 43, on which our test is based: it is suited for assessing not only if a text has been understood but also the ability of respondents to reflect on their own comprehension skills. We show that the test’s psychometric properties are satisfactory, and we demonstrate its validity by analysing relevant external indicators. Thus, we can show a direct link between general reading experience and text comprehension as tested: the more students read, the better do they perform. The collaboration of literary studies with psychometrics moreover allows for a statistically valid identification of specific challenges to comprehension and thus advance our knowledge of what readers find difficult. This will be of interest not only in a hermeneutic and linguistic perspective but also with a view to addressing those difficulties in an educational context. For example, asking someone whether they have understood an utterance (in this case: a line of poetry) does not elicit reliable answers. Being able to say how one has established the meaning of a line seems to be a more reliable indicator of actually having understood it.
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