Sometimes people motivate you, sometimes they challenge you, sometimes they inspire you, and sometimes they do all three at once. Ruqaiya Hasan falls into the last category. It is impossible to capture the huge impact that her work has had and will continue to have on a wide range of people and areas of research. In this volume, we attempt to capture just a small snapshot of her impact on the study of verbal art.

Having begun her academic life in the study of verbal art, Hasan was never to work professionally as a linguist in this specialist area of the discipline. The study of literature had almost the status of hobby, while, in her institutional position, she diversified into studies of children’s stories, mother-child talk across distinct class settings, the language of globalization, and discourse in educational settings. She studied and wrote on discourse from two languages, her mother tongue Urdu, and her second language, English, in which she lived most of her academic career. She worked on every linguistic scale: on sound patterns, lexis and grammar, on semantic units, and contextual phenomena.

There are challenges, and opportunities, that are peculiar to the teaching of literature. These challenges – and the academic rewards – are what I wish to illustrate and reflect upon in this opportunity to write on topics in arts and humanities, particularly in relation to my teacher and career mentor, Ruqaiya Hasan. I will set off from a summary statement that I have arrived at through my experiences working in literature and linguistics. I will then work more directly through examples to bring my initial claims about literature ‘down to earth’.

This paper reports recent findings in ongoing research into the limits of applying the methods of corpus linguistics (CL) to the analysis of ‘verbal art’ using Hasan’s Systemic Socio-Semantic Stylistics framework (SSS), a knowledge of which will be in part presumed and where possible cross-referenced in the volume. The text investigated is Coetzee’s novel Foe – a post-colonial rewriting of Robinson Crusoe (RC). Focus is on the evaluation of the notion of truth in Foe by means of appraisal systems and identification of appraisers, appraisees/eds, and what Thompson calls the ‘Russian Doll’ dilemma. The comparative word and keywordlists compiled, for both Foe and RC as reference corpus, reveal potentially relevant lexical items, including silence/word/story/tru* (truth/true/truly), subsequently analyzed in concordances for meaningful clause as exchange/interaction patterns and significant textual location. Such bases for comparison entailed carefully developed annotation schemes tested by significant inter-rater reliability. Findings bring us closer to the novel’s Theme, tentatively formulated as the complex and relative connection between silence/words, authorship (in both fiction and history) and veracity. They also show how CL plays a valuable instrumental role in SSS: a means for identifying significant features which, however, call for further ‘armchair’ scrutiny and the vital linking up to the text’s ‘context of creation’.

The very simple and non-specific title of this essay is chosen in homage to Hasan’s chapter “The analysis of a poem” from Language, Linguistics and Verbal Art (1985, Ch. 2). To me, there are two ways (at least) of reading Hasan’s title. Firstly, it suggests that what will follow is an instance of literary stylistics – an analysis of a single poem, for the purpose of elucidating the meanings of that poem, and how that poem makes those meanings. Secondly, it suggests an outline of some aspect of a theory of literary stylistics – the system, as it were – an outline of the method for analysis any poem – “here is how to analyse a poem”. Hasan’s chapter fulfils both of these interpretations: it obviously provides the analysis of a single poem (Les Murray’s “Widower in the country”), but it also, because it lays out so clearly the components of the analysis and Hasan’s interpretation of literary meaning based on the “patterning of patterns” (Hasan 1985, 96) displayed by that analysis, serves as a guidebook for others to perform similar careful analyses and interpretations. Despite the parallelism in the title, the current chapter is unlikely to answer these two meanings in quite the same way that Hasan’s chapter does. While it does present an analysis of a particular sonnet – Auden’s “Who’s who” – and does so in enough detail that it could serve, as Hasan’s analysis and interpretation does, as a model for how to analyse a poem using the methods of systemic functional linguistics, it will not specifically function as a methodology for how to analyse a sonnet, in particular.

In a particularly revealing interview from 1977, fiction writer Peter Carey was asked how a reader should approach his stories, namely Conversations with Unicorns. Carey replied: Well, I’d hope that the reader would approach them in a relaxed sort of way, hoping to be amused, or diverted. When he’d finished the story I’d hope he’d have found something new to think about. If I’d really done what I wanted to do he’d keep on thinking about the story for weeks, from time to time. If I was successful beyond my wildest dreams I would have given him (or her) something that would alter his (or her) perception of the world. (Ikin 1977, 38). It is remarkable just how accurately Carey’s comment seems to reflect the compelling nature of his short stories. Rubik (2005) has investigated the haunting effect of Carey’s stories in terms of cognitive schemata and Coste (2003) has argued that the inherent ambiguity of Conversations with Unicorns resists generic classification. A number of critical works mention the story (Ahearne 1980, Hassall 1994, Krstovic 2010, Pons 2001, Snodgrass 2010, Turner 1988) but none deal with it in any significant amount of detail, and until now, there has been no attempt to conduct a stylistic reading of this fascinating and under-studied story. Approaching the text from a systemic functional perspective, I investigate the powerful aesthetic quality of the story in terms of prominent linguistic patterning occurring across various linguistic systems.

This chapter retraces Simone de Beauvoir’s experience with language and literature from childhood to adulthood as construed in the first volume of her memoirs “Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée” (1958). Using Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), it explores transitivity patterns in passages where Beauvoir talks about her experience of/with literature. It focuses in particular on experiential roles assigned both to literature and to Beauvoir as she interacts with literature. It also explores the processes in which literature and Beauvoir are involved. The aim is to show that Beauvoir’s view of literature as an activity and a tool for change in the world is reflected in her choice of linguistic patterns. In addition, the analysis reveals the growth of Beauvoir from a child with a passion for books to a writer who would become one of the most influential of the 20th century. Hasan’s (1985) model for the analysis of verbal art serves as point of departure to our analysis and gives us the means to discuss how the Theme of language as action is symbolically articulated by foregrounded experiential patterns in Beauvoir’s memoires.

In this chapter, I twist together two different strands of Ruqaiya Hasan’s work: her work on verbal art and her work on the semiotic codes found in the language of the home. I begin with Virginia Woolf’s observation that Jane Austen could not simply appropriate the “male” clause complex of the elaborated registers used by Johnson and Gibbon to write the novels of conversation and free indirect discourse which we read today. Jane Austen had to develop new kind of “shapely” sentence. This raises three intriguing questions, to which Ruqaiya Hasan’s two strands of systemic functional linguistics can tell us a great deal in answer. Firstly, what makes the clause complexes typical of Johnson and Gibbon “male”? I find that it was an elaborated register, characterized by heavy nominalization, relational verbs, and parallelism, often using antithetical polarity, which heretofore had not been associated with the novel. Secondly, how does the Austenian sentence stand out in contrast? Using the “back yard” SFL methods as well as the more sophisticated UNAM Corpus Tool that allows us to compare whole texts, I find that Austen made a clear—even slightly exaggerated—distinction between the narrator and the characters, using much shorter turns with that focused heavily on interpersonal meaning in the latter. Thirdly, what does this distinction signify for the exclusiveness of male discourse and the historic transition towards universal literacy that we see with the rise of female readers and female writers? The answer appears to be that it at first merely served to cast a slightly parodistic light on narration, but that later it began to allow the thoughts of the characters to penetrate the narration itself, and transformed “narrative” into intra-personal, self-directed dialogue. This penetration of the elaborated register by the restricted register—the permeation of the thoughts of the narrator by the thoughts of characters —represented, despite the well-known social conservatism of Jane Austen, a revolutionary move which decisively placed new semiotic means in the hands of women.

This paper explores the verbal reproduction of emotional states as a resource for the negotiation of master identities in fiction. The focus of interest is the role played by evaluative language as a bonding mechanism, one of the resources authors use to construe a community of shared values with their readership. The contemporary Spanish novel ‘Los mares del Sur’ (Vázquez Montalbán 1979) has been chosen as an instance of the negotiation of identity and identities (mainly social and generational) taking place in post-Francoist crime fiction. The novel was translated into English (1986) and into German (1985 and 2013); by comparing these re-instantiations with the source text, we observe different approaches to preserving the indices of identity negotiation. In the two samples analyzed, one recreating anger, the other recreating nostalgia, resources are different. The first one, characterized by judgment, presents social stereotypes, items that are value-laden, heteroglossic and culture-bound, hence difficult to translate in their complexity both in English and in German. The second sample lexically creates a mood of heaviness that explicitly appraises objects in the protagonist’s individual experience but implicitly links with the collective historic memory of the losing side in the Spanish war. In the English translation, the tendency toward textual standardization, through the editing of repetitions and the normalization of syntax, changes the fabric of nostalgia.

Hasan’s framework of verbal art has provided a fresh perspective on literature as a dynamic variety of language use. Building on this foundation, this article intends to show how metaphors and their patterning help construct deeper meaning and thus contribute to the artistic status of texts. On the basis of (lexical) metaphorical instantiations in selected works which have been deemed literature for centuries such as Beowulf and metaphysical poetry, it is argued that the symbolic articulation of the theme has recourse to particular metaphorical conceptualisations, and their realisation as sequences and layers in the text, respectively. To that end, it is suggested to open the SFL basis of Hasan’s semiotic system to the cognitive approaches of conceptual metaphor and blending theory. It shows that abstract blending, for which conceptual metaphors can be inputs, is suited to establish a complementary perspective to Hasan’s. Blends are ‘acted out’ and triggered via language, and it is blend stability that serves to achieve what has been termed consistency of pattern foregrounding. In this regard, it is confirmed that the socio-temporal distance of the example texts under concern challenges the modern recipient in terms of theme identification and, hence, appreciation of the texts as Hasanian works of art.

Comparatively little systematic research has been done in openings in fiction, although beginnings of narratives are very important for steering the reader’s perception and interpretation. The purpose of this article is to provide a fresh view on this field by approaching it from a systemic functional perspective. The article proceeds on the assumption that narrative beginnings are systemic because their writers must choose from a system of alternative strategies: The expository information must be conveyed either in a concentrated, continuous initial block or in smaller units over several pages, and the story must start either ab ovo or in medias res. In addition to that, narrative openings have to fulfil three general functions – that of enacting a bond between narrator and reader ( = the social function or “narration-frame”), that of conveying meanings about an outer or inner world ( = the experience-conveying function or “story-frame”) and that of suggesting an intended interpretation ( = the textual function or “theme-frame”). While traditional narratives tend to fill these frames on the first pages, modern narratives often keep many slots of the frames open for a long time to activate their readers and make them guess and grope for possible meanings.

In this pilot study we investigate the conceptualization of fictional story worlds with a focus on fantastic worlds. An eye-tracking experiment was devised to test the reading of texts involving different types of transition into secondary fantasy worlds. Additional interview data revealed that the participants’ constructions of secondary worlds are largely a response to the lexico-grammatical patterning of the textual stimuli. In the process of describing the fantastic, the secondary world is widely constructed as a conceptualization of a non-normal version of the primary world, or as a world from which primary-world elements are absent. Readers tend to take up the author’s offer of ‘otherness’ to amplify and generalize this otherness. This study is an investigation of particularities in the make-up and the understanding of fictional worlds. By putting the focus on story worlds of the fantastic, we intend to shed light on authors’ and readers’ constructions of secondary-world settings and in particular, the nature of the reader’s transition into the secondary world. In this regard, special emphasis will be put on tools of foregrounding the elements that deploy, from a primary-world perspective, ‘non-normality’ or ‘magic’ in the textual stimuli.

In order to consider the possible future directions of linguistic analyses of literature* utilizing Hasan’s framework, it is worth pausing for a moment to consider what has been gained from analyses that have already been conducted? We could simply be content with discussing literature and arriving at its deep meaning(s) without doing the kind of meticulous analysis that Hasan has demonstrated, and that her framework demands. So the question arises: what has been the point of those analyses and have they delivered anything of interest that is worth pursuing? In order to answer this question, this chapter briefly presents some key highlights of Hasan’s ideas on verbal art and the application of these by various scholars. The chapter does not propose to conduct an in-depth description and evaluation of these applications. Rather, the brief overview provides a background against which future research might make sense. The overview is organized in terms of the following general domains: i. The place of verbal art in society, ii. Theory, models, corpora and tools, iii. Verbal art and pedagogy, iv. Hasan’s verbal art framework and other theories and approaches and, v. Verbal art and translation.

Sometimes people motivate you, sometimes they challenge you, sometimes they inspire you, and sometimes they do all three at once. Ruqaiya Hasan falls into the last category. It is impossible to capture the huge impact that her work has had and will continue to have on a wide range of people and areas of research. In this volume, we attempt to show just a small snapshot of her impact on the study of verbal art. On Verbal Art reflects on and celebrates the contribution that Professor Ruqaiya Hasan made to research on linguistic approaches to verbal art and includes contributions by scholars from around the world. The volume gathers together researchers with different perspectives, different views and different approaches to verbal art and aims to provide an inspiration to others to continue the work that Hasan began. One of the lasting insights emerging from Hasan’s work on verbal art is the extent to which it informs analysis and theory. This volume brings together chapters that offer a detailed account of Hasan’s contribution to the study of verbal art, chapters that pay tribute to Hasan by adopting some of her central notions such as foregrounding, symbolic articulation, theme and secondary semiosis to inform their analyses, chapters that take Hasan’s thinking as a starting point to explore new methodological approaches for the investigation of verbal art, and finally chapters by scholars who are new to Hasanian thinking and afford fresh perspectives that build bridges to related approaches. It is also hoped that this volume will encourage new research and promote the reading or re-reading of Hasan’s tremendous work in this area. We look forward to new challenges, arguments, extensions and applications.

Sometimes people motivate you, sometimes they challenge you, sometimes they inspire you, and sometimes they do all three at once. Ruqaiya Hasan falls into the last category. It is impossible to capture the huge impact that her work has had and will continue to have on a wide range of people and areas of research. In this volume, we attempt to show just a small snapshot of her impact on the study of verbal art. On Verbal Art reflects on and celebrates the contribution that Professor Ruqaiya Hasan made to research on linguistic approaches to verbal art and includes contributions by scholars from around the world. The volume gathers together researchers with different perspectives, different views and different approaches to verbal art and aims to provide an inspiration to others to continue the work that Hasan began. One of the lasting insights emerging from Hasan’s work on verbal art is the extent to which it informs analysis and theory. This volume brings together chapters that offer a detailed account of Hasan’s contribution to the study of verbal art, chapters that pay tribute to Hasan by adopting some of her central notions such as foregrounding, symbolic articulation, theme and secondary semiosis to inform their analyses, chapters that take Hasan’s thinking as a starting point to explore new methodological approaches for the investigation of verbal art, and finally chapters by scholars who are new to Hasanian thinking and afford fresh perspectives that build bridges to related approaches. It is also hoped that this volume will encourage new research and promote the reading or re-reading of Hasan’s tremendous work in this area. We look forward to new challenges, arguments, extensions and applications.