The Routledge Handbook of Language and Creativity

Rodney H. Jones, Rodney H. Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317439950
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Creativity provides an introduction to and survey of a wide range of perspectives on the relationship between language and creativity. Defining this complex and multifaceted field, this book introduces a conceptual framework through which the various definitions of language and creativity can be explored.

Divided into four parts, it covers:

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• different aspects of language and creativity, including dialogue, metaphor and humour

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• literary creativity, including narrative and poetry

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• multimodal and multimedia creativity, in areas such as music, graffiti and the internet

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• creativity in language teaching and learning.

With over 30 chapters written by a group of leading academics from around the world, The Routledge Handbook of Language and Creativity will serve as an important reference for students and scholars in the fields of English language studies, applied linguistics, education, and communication studies.

Part I

Dimensions of language and creativity

1

Everyday language creativity

Janet Maybin

Introduction and definitions

In the context of a wider preoccupation with creativity in everyday social life, there has been increased interest among linguistic and discourse scholars in everyday language creativity, for example playful and humorous discourse, wit and irony, and artful performance, both online and off. There is, however, no clear-cut agreement about exactly what counts as creativity in this context. Some researchers focus primarily on formal poetic techniques; some take more multimodal or dynamic approaches; others are most interested in the interactional functions of language creativity and its potential for social critique (see Jones, Chapter 3; Sawyer, Chapter 4). In this chapter, I trace the emergence of a number of distinctive traditions of work that conceptualise and define everyday language creativity in different ways. I start with early twentieth-century Russian formalist ideas about poetics, which were incorporated in two subsequent streams of work in the second half of the twentieth century: first, in work on performance and critique, mainly within linguistic anthropology; and secondly, in more recent, interactionally focused studies in linguistics. Both of these streams of work have addressed sociocultural factors, with some researchers drawing on the Bakhtinian sociohistorical approaches that emerged around the 1930s in Russia and which were disseminated in the West from the 1960s. More recently, the post-structuralist turn in language studies has stimulated interest in more fleeting traces of creativity and their sociocultural consequences, and in creative links across languages, media, and cultural traditions, especially in multilingual and online contexts.

In one sense, a trajectory can be traced from the formalist focus on individual texts, through more contextualised studies of language creativity in performance and situated interaction, to current interests in its processual, emergent, and intertextual manifestations. However, all of these approaches continue, in many ways, to underpin contemporary work, and researchers often draw on a combination of these ideas, according to their interest. For the formalists, language creativity is associated with novel, striking linguistic techniques that draw attention to language itself as a form and a medium (Jakobson, 1960). Within linguistic anthropology, poetic verbal performance is also seen as foregrounded and reflexive, but performances emerge through the interaction between performer and audience, and are evaluated emically in relation to local values. Interactional linguistic approaches to language creativity have also expanded formalist definitions to embrace its sociocultural effects, for example how creative uses of language foster intimacy, negotiate identity, or convey social critique. Within more recent post-structuralist work, novelty and surprise are still important criteria, but here they are located not so much within the boundaries of individual texts as in processes of intertextuality, recontextualisation, and translation.

Formalist and sociohistorical roots

This section will briefly review two very different approaches, which have both provided key reference points for work on everyday language creativity. First, the Russian formalists and the Prague school of linguistics in the early twentieth century laid the foundations for the linguistic analysis of language creativity. Secondly, while not explicitly framed as a discussion of creativity, the Bakhtinian sociohistorical approach to language, which emerged in Russia around the same time, has also provided foundational ideas and concepts.

It is perhaps not surprising that the formalists, who set out a powerful and enduring agenda for literary studies and stylistics in Europe and North America, should also provide a starting point for work on vernacular language creativity. Ironically, they themselves had little interest in everyday language, other than as a contrastive foil against which they identified the special devices that they saw as producing literary language. Their initial interest was in the process of ‘defamiliarisation’, whereby writers make objects unfamiliar or ‘strange’ through the artful use of comparison, imagery, repeated rhymes and rhythms, and the manipulation of story into plot. Shklovsky (1917) argued that these artistic devices interrupt and block the audience’s usual assumptions, surprising them into more challenging and lengthy acts of perception, which produce a new, fresh perspective on the subject matter. Ideas about defamiliarisation are echoed in the Prague schools of linguistics’ discussion of ‘foregrounding’, or the precise ways in which words or phrases are made to stand out through an intentional aesthetic distortion of sounds, rhythm, and rhyme (Mukařovský, 1932). Jakobson, a central member of both the Russian formalist and Prague school who later brought their ideas to the United States, developed work on defamiliarisation and foregrounding further in his analysis of parallelism and deviation, again focusing on the creative manipulation of text. Parallelism (unexpected regularity) is based on the principle of equivalence at various linguistic levels, and can involve word repetition, alliteration and rhyme, or parallel grammatical structures. Deviation (unexpected irregularity) involves some aspect of language diverging from what is expected, for instance unconventional punctuation, metaphor, or genre mixing.

The formalists acknowledged that defamiliarisation and foregrounding can occur outside literature. For example, Shklovsky (1917) stated that defamiliarisation could be found in riddles and nonsense language, and indeed wherever there was language form. This point is more fully theorised in Jakobson’s (1960) functional theory of language use. Jakobson identified six language functions, including the poetic function, which he suggests is potentially present in all language use, but dominant in poetry, in which the signifier – language itself – is foregrounded through the sound and shape of words, syntactic patterning, or striking semantic connections. The poetic function can also be obvious in other contexts. For example, Jakobson discusses the use of rhyme and alliteration in the political slogan ‘I like Ike’, but on these occasions there is always some other, more important, language function foregrounded and the poetic function remains secondary. The other five functions of communication include the emotive function expressing the addressor’s attitude towards what he or she is speaking about (foregrounded in the ‘I like Ike’ example), and the conative function orientated towards the addressee, expressed in the vocative or imperative forms. The referential function orients towards the subject matter and context; the metalingual function focuses on the code (for example questioning the meaning of a word); the phatic function establishes or prolongs communication. Jakobson’s argument that all language, including literature, is amenable to linguistic analysis and that the poetic function is always potentially available could be seen as opening the door for the study of vernacular language creativity. Moreover, as Pratt (1977) points out, the six functions themselves are not purely linguistic: the referential and emotive functions carry additional information, respectively, about the context and about the inner state of the addressor. Thus, although Jakobson himself did not develop this point, his functional model also seems to suggest a need for a more contextually sensitive approach.

In contrast to the mainly textual focus of formalist accounts, the work of Jakobson’s Russian contemporary Bakhtin provides a much more sociohistorical theorisation of the inherently responsive and many-voiced nature of language use. Bakhtin, who both reacted against and was influenced by formalism and Marxism, argued that the aesthetics of language must have a social dimension. In the same way as an utterance is always co-authored by a speaker and listener, so a text or event becomes an aesthetic object through its contemplation as such by an author and a spectator, and is thus always essentially co-created (Bakhtin, 1923). Linguists seeking to develop more dynamic and sociohistorically grounded accounts of language creativity have drawn on Bakhtin’s view of language as a tumultuous, conflicted phenomenon, whereby opposing centrifugal and centripetal forces continually open up possibilities for change (Bakhtin, 1935). Creativity emerges here not so much through linguistic deviation and parallelism, but through the exploitation of the heteroglossic dynamics of language use (see Jones, Chapter 3). Thus, for instance, speakers and writers may manipulate the intertextual connotations of particular words or phrases, or recontextualise voices from one context to another, or animate a struggle between an authoritative narrator and the viewpoint of a character. Significantly, this Bakhtinian conception of language creativity necessarily takes the researcher beyond an analysis of the immediate spoken or written text to pursue a more sociohistorical understanding of indexical associations and intertextual connections of voices, genres, and languages.

Bakhtin’s (1935) insistence on the deep-reaching formal and semantic effects of intrinsic responsive and addressive impulses within the utterance is particularly relevant to what might be termed ‘dialogic creativity’ (see Sawyer, Chapter 4). For Bakhtin, meaning is not transmitted through language, but dialogically created between speaker and listener. Speakers may be creative in the manner in which they respond to a previous speaker, existing texts, or a prevailing genre, and they also display creativity in the ways in which they anticipate and pre-empt the response of an actual or implied audience. Dialogic relations are also evident between a speaker and the other voices that they may report or appropriate in creative ways, for example through what Bakhtin calls ‘stylisation’ whereby a voice is reproduced almost as if it were the speaker’s own, but with a ‘slight shadow of objectivation’ that signals the presence of another voice (Bakhtin, 1984 [1929]: 189), or through more distinct separation of a reported voice in irony or parody. Between the two poles of explicit separation and complete appropriation, Bakhtin (1935) suggests there are a number of hybrid forms in which speakers signal evaluative accent (that is, stance or perspective) through various kinds of double voicing.

Bakhtinian ideas have influenced strands of work on creativity in the West since the 1970s and are particularly influential in more recent post-structuralist work discussed below. Before considering recent studies, however, I will examine two streams of work that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century: first, the study of vernacular verbal performance; and secondly, research on the functions of creativity in everyday conversation.

Performance and critique

Reacting against the structuralist linguistics that had dominated the first half of the twentieth century, a movement emerged in the 1960s and 1970s led by anthropologists and linguists who wanted to develop a broader, multidisciplinary approach to the study of language in society. This approach involved a shift in attention from the linguistic system to the study of language in use, situated in ‘the flux and pattern of communicative events’ (Hymes, 1977: 5). In this section, I focus on work by Hymes and other anthropologists on verbal performance, also referring to Goffman’s dramaturgical analysis of everyday interaction and Labov’s linguistic account of conversational narrative. While these scholars were not focusing directly on creativity as a phenomenon, their work on performance and narrative has been foundational for researchers looking at creativity in everyday language.

Goffman (1959, 1967), who was primarily a sociologist, uses ‘performance’ as a dramatic metaphor for people’s presentation of themselves in a particular light to others, and to themselves, in the course of everyday social routines. His notions of ‘framing’, ‘face’, and ‘frontstage and backstage behaviour’ all involve speaker creativity. In terms of framing, Goffman argued that people tacitly agree (or may, on occasion, misunderstand) what is going on in a particular interaction, for instance, whether it constitutes a declaration of love, an argument, or an apology. Speakers may then strategically transform one frame into another, for example reframing an insult as a joke. Face refers to speakers’ images of themselves and others as, for example, knowledgeable, clever, brave, or competent, and is projected by means of the way in which they take up a particular position, or ‘line’, in an ongoing interaction. People experience strong feelings connected with face and may be creative in defending their self-image or those of other people, for example through the use of indirectness or ambiguity, hedging claims, joking to neutralise an offensive remark, or ridiculing themselves to repair a social gaffe. Shifting his attention from individuals to groups, Goffman extended his dramatic metaphor in studies of the contrast between carefully managed collaborative frontstage behaviour by professional teams, for example in a hotel or hospital, and their backstage behaviour when the team relaxed, talked ‘off record’, and prepared the frontstage show.

Within anthropology, the notion of performance was more linguistically theorised as a particular kind of creative language event. For a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Routledge Handbook of Language and Creativity
• Routledge Handbooks in English Language Studies
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I: Dimensions of Language and Creativity
• PART II: Literary Creativity
• PART III: Multimodal and Multimedia Creativity
• PART IV: Creativity in Language Teaching and Learning
• Index