Language and Verbal Art Revisited
Linguistic Approaches to the Study of Literature
Edited by
Donna R. Miller [+–]
University of Bologna
Donna R. Miller holds the Chair of English Linguistics at the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures of the University of Bologna, where she heads the Research Centre for Linguistic-Cultural Studies (CeSLiC). Her research has focused on register analysis in institutional text types, her corpus-assisted investigations exploring the grammar of evaluation in terms of APPRAISAL SYSTEMS. Recently she has been investigating the Hasanian model of ‘verbal art’. She is co-author of Language and Verbal Art Revisited (with Monica Turci, Equinox Publishing, 2007).
Monica Turci [+–]
University of Bologna
Monica Turci is Assistant Professor of English at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literature of the University of Bologna. Her publications include the volume, Approaching That Perfect Edge. A Study of the Metafictional Writings of Michael Ondaatje 1967-1982, 2001, and articles on the relation between language and literature: “Recasting Translation and Migration: Les Murray’s Translation from the Natural World”, 2004; “‘Remembering in translation’: Language and memory in Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation”, 2004; and “Questions of Style in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”.
PAPERBACK EDITION PUBLISHED JULY 2010
This volume, meant for both specialists and non-specialists, will appeal to both the growing number of scholars working in, and students needing to investigate, the field of literary linguistics, or stylistics.
Inspired by Ruqaiya Hasan’s conviction that, […] in verbal art the role of language is central. Here language is not as clothing to the body; it IS the body.” (1985/1989: 91), the papers are on a wide variety of aspects of the language-literature connection, and approach it from diverse perspectives and methodological frameworks, including Systemic Functional Linguistics, pragmatics, corpus linguistics, ethnolinguistics, cultural and translation studies.
A wide range of literary genres and world literatures are analyzed, including Shakespeare’s plays; modern Austrian authors writing in German (e.g., Thomas Bernhard); Perrault’s Histoires et contes du temps passé and their translations by Angela Carter; the Spanish poets of the Generación del ‘50; Malaysian-Singaporean poets in English; Anglo-American Modernist poets (Frost, Stevens, Pound and Lawrence) and novelists (Woolf and Conrad); a short story by Marina Warner and Turkish-German narrative by Feridun Zamo?lu; The Gospel of St. John and Harry Potter.
Separate introductions to each of the contributions seek to guide above all the non-specialist reader by describing and comparing the frameworks that the volume comprises. A general introduction diachronically traces key moments in the development of the study of the language of literature seen as socio-cultural practice.
Table of Contents
Prelims
Acknowledgements vii – vii
University of Bologna
Donna R. Miller holds the Chair of English Linguistics at the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures of the University of Bologna, where she heads the Research Centre for Linguistic-Cultural Studies (CeSLiC). Her research has focused on register analysis in institutional text types, her corpus-assisted investigations exploring the grammar of evaluation in terms of APPRAISAL SYSTEMS. Recently she has been investigating the Hasanian model of ‘verbal art’. She is co-author of Language and Verbal Art Revisited (with Monica Turci, Equinox Publishing, 2007).
List of Contributors viii – viii
University of Bologna
Donna R. Miller holds the Chair of English Linguistics at the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures of the University of Bologna, where she heads the Research Centre for Linguistic-Cultural Studies (CeSLiC). Her research has focused on register analysis in institutional text types, her corpus-assisted investigations exploring the grammar of evaluation in terms of APPRAISAL SYSTEMS. Recently she has been investigating the Hasanian model of ‘verbal art’. She is co-author of Language and Verbal Art Revisited (with Monica Turci, Equinox Publishing, 2007).
Introduction
Introduction [+–] 1 – 12
University of Bologna
Donna R. Miller holds the Chair of English Linguistics at the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures of the University of Bologna, where she heads the Research Centre for Linguistic-Cultural Studies (CeSLiC). Her research has focused on register analysis in institutional text types, her corpus-assisted investigations exploring the grammar of evaluation in terms of APPRAISAL SYSTEMS. Recently she has been investigating the Hasanian model of ‘verbal art’. She is co-author of Language and Verbal Art Revisited (with Monica Turci, Equinox Publishing, 2007).
University of Bologna
Monica Turci is Assistant Professor of English at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literature of the University of Bologna. Her publications include the volume, Approaching That Perfect Edge. A Study of the Metafictional Writings of Michael Ondaatje 1967-1982, 2001, and articles on the relation between language and literature: “Recasting Translation and Migration: Les Murray’s Translation from the Natural World”, 2004; “‘Remembering in translation’: Language and memory in Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation”, 2004; and “Questions of Style in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”.
What we’d like to do in this introduction to the volume is to, firstly, give a general schematic overview which very briefl y traces some of the major approaches to literature that have played a role in bringing us to where we are today regarding the linguistic analysis of verbal art. At the same time, we will make clear where we stand on the disputes surrounding that approach and argue the case for such analysis as a socio-cultural practice, or a special brand of ‘stylistics’.
1
Macquarie University
Ruqaiya Hasan, who died in 2015, was a professor of linguistics who taught and held visiting positions at various universities in England. Her last appointment was at Macquarie University, Australia, from where she retired as Emeritus Professor in 1994. Throughout her career she researched and published widely in the areas of verbal art, culture, context and text, text and texture, lexicogrammar and semantic variation.
Read her obituary here
Hasan’s paper has been deliberately positioned fi rst in the volume, as it intimately addresses the most vital theoretical and methodological issues concerning the book’s general topic, and does this in such a way that the paper also serves as an essential background to the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL)-based contributions which follow, but not solely. She begins with underlining the complexity of the nature of the activity of engaging with literature, admitting that the multiplicity of resources that supports the creation of a literary artifact also implies that there will necessarily be many different ways of doing this.
2
University of Bologna
Donna R. Miller holds the Chair of English Linguistics at the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures of the University of Bologna, where she heads the Research Centre for Linguistic-Cultural Studies (CeSLiC). Her research has focused on register analysis in institutional text types, her corpus-assisted investigations exploring the grammar of evaluation in terms of APPRAISAL SYSTEMS. Recently she has been investigating the Hasanian model of ‘verbal art’. She is co-author of Language and Verbal Art Revisited (with Monica Turci, Equinox Publishing, 2007).
Donna R. Miller’s research focuses, in a Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) perspective, on text and discourse analysis (often corpus-assisted) and ESP: political, deliberative, juridical and literary varieties principally. In this paper, she investigates the hypnotic rhythmic quality of the style of D. H. Lawrence, beginning with the description/explanation which Lawrence himself had offered.
3
Macquarie University
David Butt is associate Professor in linguistics at Macquarie University and for more than a decade has been the Director of the University Research Centre for Language in Social Life (CLSL: now a Research Network). This Centre has conducted projects across communities and institutions for which functional linguistics provided significant evidence about the management of change.
Through the Centre, he has been actively engaged with professionals in medicine (surgery and psychiatry), counselling, care for people with disabilities, intelligent systems design and brain sciences, cultural analysis (literature, theatre, world Englishes), complexity theory and ‘smart spaces’, Vygotskian approaches to education and training, financial reporting, courtroom
explanations and forensic evidence, media and journalism, and child language development (in the traditions of Trevarthen and Halliday). The Centre has also investigated the interrelations between linguistics, verbal art (especially poetry), philosophy and the arguments of natural sciences (viz biology; genetics; and physics). The Centre has actively promoted educational developments in various cultures beyond Australia – Singapore, India, and especially with Timor and in Indonesia. David has published extensively on verbal art and has conducted many research projects and classes
on the subject.
Through the Centre, he has been actively engaged with professionals in medicine (surgery and psychiatry), counselling, care for people with disabilities, intelligent systems design and brain sciences, cultural analysis (literature, theatre, world Englishes), complexity theory and ‘smart spaces’, Vygotskian approaches to education and training, financial reporting, courtroom
explanations and forensic evidence, media and journalism, and child language development (in the traditions of Trevarthen and Halliday). The Centre has also investigated the interrelations between linguistics, verbal art (especially poetry), philosophy and the arguments of natural sciences (viz biology; genetics; and physics). The Centre has actively promoted educational developments in various cultures beyond Australia – Singapore, India, and especially with Timor and in Indonesia. David has published extensively on verbal art and has conducted many research projects and classes
on the subject.
In this article, Butt offers a linguistic analysis of a selection of Modernist literature texts that is based on the assumption that there are several ‘complementarities’ between science and verbal art.
4
University of Bologna
Monica Turci is Assistant Professor of English at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literature of the University of Bologna. Her publications include the volume, Approaching That Perfect Edge. A Study of the Metafictional Writings of Michael Ondaatje 1967-1982, 2001, and articles on the relation between language and literature: “Recasting Translation and Migration: Les Murray’s Translation from the Natural World”, 2004; “‘Remembering in translation’: Language and memory in Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation”, 2004; and “Questions of Style in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”.
In this article, Turci makes a contribution to the still ongoing debate concerning the relation among Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, representations of the African continent and the phenomenon of Imperialism. She does so through an analysis of the lemma dark*, and its diverse word forms, as it is reiterated throughout this novella.
5
Projection in literary and in non-literary texts [+–] 115 – 148
University of Padua (retired)
Carol Taylor Torsello retired in 2009 from her position as full professor at the University of Padua, Italy, where she taught English language and linguistics.
The article does not aim at presenting the various descriptions of this linguistic phenomenon which can be found in the literature, although the author’s profound knowledge of these is clearly a resource which strengthens her approach and method. What she aims to do is to provide corpus evidence from some literary and non-literary texts, to show how, with what frequency, and in relation to which strategies of the authors, this linguistic device actually occurs.
6
Collocation as the determinant of verbal art [+–] 149 – 180
University of Zimbabwe
The initial section of Louw’s paper illustrates the theoretical premises of his analysis and focuses on the fi gures of Jakobson and Firth. Louw writes that Jakobson’s article entitled ‘Poetry of grammar and grammar of poetry’ (1968) shows that his investigative technique was very close to that of Firthian stylistics. At the same time, however, he also argues that Jakobson’s work managed only a glimpse into the possibilities offered by the notion of ‘context of situation’ as theorised by Malinowski and Firth, and that, as a consequence, his theory of poetry is marred by this serious limitation.
7
Ute Heidmann,Jean-Michel Adam £17.50
Heidmann and Adam’s article proposes the use of both the tools of linguistics and a comparative literary analysis in order to fashion and illustrate an interdisciplinary and analytical method that combines textual and discourse analysis.
8
Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milan
Mirella Agorni has a PhD in Translation Studies from the University of Warwick, UK, and has published widely in the fi eld. Her research concentrates predominantly on literary translation, and focuses on translation theory and both the history and teaching of translation. In this paper, she manages to bring together these diverse strands into one coherent and convincing whole.
9
University of Salzburg
In this paper, Betten looks closely at non-standard syntax in modern German prose writing, a phenomenon that is all the more worth noting, as it took some hundred years for German literary prose to get to the point where style experimentation became an issue. But even then, in the first half of the twentieth century it was the traditional art of refi ned normative language use which Thomas Mann’s prose style represented once again, though probably for the last time, in its ultimate perfection.
10
Kanak sprak: the linguistic features of Turkish migrants’ communicative style in Feridun Zaimoğlu’s works [+–] 234 – 252
University of Bologna
Moraldo’s article provides a linguistic analysis of the novels of German-Turkish writer Feridun Zaimoğlu, born in Turkey in 1964. Like the characters he portrays in his novels, Zaimoğlu has been living in Germany for most his life and was raised in a multilingual and multicultural environment.
11
Debating the function of language in poetry: meta-textual musings in the Spanish 50s generation [+–] 253 – 270
University of Bologna
In her paper, she lucidly combines the fi rst and last of these interests by inquiring into how the poetic practice of the poets of the Spanish 1950s’ generation was accompanied by, indeed inextricably mingled with, profound refl ections upon their use of language and its very role in their art. These compelling ‘meta textual musings’, as she calls them, are clearly much more than that: they are authentic and insightful theoretical meditations – genuine ‘poetics’, which were often appended to their artistic publications and which critics have actually often considered more interesting than that artistic production itself!
Index
Author Index [+–] 271 – 275
University of Bologna
Donna R. Miller holds the Chair of English Linguistics at the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures of the University of Bologna, where she heads the Research Centre for Linguistic-Cultural Studies (CeSLiC). Her research has focused on register analysis in institutional text types, her corpus-assisted investigations exploring the grammar of evaluation in terms of APPRAISAL SYSTEMS. Recently she has been investigating the Hasanian model of ‘verbal art’. She is co-author of Language and Verbal Art Revisited (with Monica Turci, Equinox Publishing, 2007).
index
Subject Index [+–] 276 – 287
University of Bologna
Donna R. Miller holds the Chair of English Linguistics at the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures of the University of Bologna, where she heads the Research Centre for Linguistic-Cultural Studies (CeSLiC). Her research has focused on register analysis in institutional text types, her corpus-assisted investigations exploring the grammar of evaluation in terms of APPRAISAL SYSTEMS. Recently she has been investigating the Hasanian model of ‘verbal art’. She is co-author of Language and Verbal Art Revisited (with Monica Turci, Equinox Publishing, 2007).
index
ISBN-13 (Hardback)
9781845530945
Price (Hardback)
£70.00 / $90.00
ISBN-13 (Paperback)
9781845539092
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ISBN (eBook)
9781845535735
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Publication
01/04/2007
Pages
296
Size
234 x 156mm
Readership
academics
Illustration
13 black and white line drawings
