Pragmatic Literary Stylistics

S. Chapman, B. Clark, S. Chapman, B. Clark

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137023278
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Théorie de la critique littéraire

In considering the ways in which current theories of language in use and communicative processes are applied to the analysis, interpretation and definition of literary texts, this book sets an agenda for the future of pragmatic literary stylistics and provides a foundation for future research and debate.

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Introduction: Pragmatic Literary Stylistics

Siobhan Chapman and Billy Clark

Pragmatics is an aspect of the study of language in use. It is concerned with how language users interact, communicate and interpret linguistic behaviour. Literary stylistics is the study of how close attention to language use can contribute to accounts of how texts are understood and evaluated. Yet despite the apparent overlaps and commonalities of interest between the two disciplines, there has, until now, been relatively little work that brings them together, or that explores the interface between them. This interface is central to the ten separate essays brought together in this volume, all representative of recent significant developments within the field that we are here naming ‘pragmatic literary stylistics’.¹

Pragmatic literary stylistics is developing within the framework of a broader range of work which has been termed the ‘cognitive humanities’ (examples of work in this area include: Turner 1998, 2006; Hogan 2003; Palmer 2004, 2010; Zunshine 2006, 2012; see also the recently established research network at: http://coghumanities.com). Like other areas of the cognitive humanities, pragmatic literary stylistics draws on a number of more established fields. Stylistics is an interdisciplinary enterprise which involves applying ideas from linguistics in the study of how texts are produced, understood and evaluated, and in addressing theoretical questions associated with this. It necessarily has many branches, both because of the wide range of genres, modes and purposes of the texts that are the object of study for stylistics, and because of the variety of frameworks from linguistics within which they can be analysed. Pragmatic literary stylistics is one such branch. Both adjectives are necessary to identify it; not all pragmatic stylistics focuses on literary texts, and not all literary stylistics applies ideas from pragmatics. The theoretical and analytical tools of stylistics in general and of pragmatic stylistics in particular can be applied to any kind of text. Literary texts, meanwhile, can be discussed in relation to a wide range of descriptive and analytical tools developed in linguistics, for instance, in relation to their semantic, grammatical, phonological or lexical properties. In principle all types of analysis might play a role in the discussion of any linguistic text and in practice any such discussion is likely to involve more than one type of analysis. The essays collected here are distinguished by the fact that some specific area of linguistic pragmatic theory plays a key role in their analysis of one or more literary text or texts.

In this introduction, we offer a brief overview of the development of pragmatic theory and of some of its main present-day branches. We consider some of the pioneering and the more recent ways in which individual researchers have experimented with applying different areas of pragmatic theory to the analysis of literary texts and we examine the very recent increase in interest in this area which is reflected in this collection. We then outline what we see as some of the fundamental assumptions, or underlying tenets, which characterise our understanding of pragmatic literary stylistics. It is these assumptions that we envisage will drive future initiatives and shape the future development of the field. The introduction concludes with brief summaries of the individual chapters.

The motivating force behind the initial establishment and the subsequent development of modern pragmatics was to find a systematic explanation for observable differences between literal, linguistic meaning (a notion which has been problematised in more recent work) and the meanings that particular utterances can convey in context. Individuals working in pragmatics have pursued such an explanation for a variety of reasons; they have variously been driven by philosophical, linguistic or sociological interests. But the shared goals of pragmaticists have been to establish the ways in which what words literally mean and what speakers may use them to mean may differ, to identify some principles or norms of language use which might explain those differences, and perhaps to offer some explanation as to why such differences typically occur in various communicative situations.

In the middle part of the 20th century, Oxford philosophers J. L. Austin and H. P. Grice separately established some central tenets and introduced some signal terminology of pragmatics. Work over the past several decades has questioned, revised and extended Austin’s and Grice’s specific ideas, but their work remains foundational to the discipline. Austin (1962) established the basis of what has become known as Speech Act Theory when he drew attention to what he saw as a generally overlooked distinction between what words mean, a matter of their form, and what they may be used to do, a matter of their function. Austin distinguished further between linguistic meaning (which he termed the ‘locutionary act’ on any occasion of speaking), the function of an utterance intended by the speaker (the ‘illocutionary act’) and the outcome, result or effect on the hearer of the utterance (the ‘perlocutionary act’). To use one of Austin’s own examples, if a speaker utters ‘You can’t do that’, it is possible to report the locutionary act simply by stating what words were spoken and specifying the references of ‘you’ and ‘that’. To report the illocutionary act, however, it is necessary to refer to what the speaker was doing in using those words: for instance ‘He protested against my doing it’. To describe the perlocutionary act, it is necessary to describe what happened to the hearer next: ‘He checked me’, ‘He stopped me’, or perhaps ‘He annoyed me’ (Austin 1962: 102).

Grice (1975, 1989) distinguished ‘what is said’ on any particular occasion of utterance from ‘what is implicated’, introducing the technical term ‘implicature’ to describe the very specific type of non-literal meaning with which he was concerned. For Grice, implicatures typically arise as a result of a mutual, if tacit, expectation of cooperation between speaker and hearer; the hearer can justifiably assume that the speaker is abiding by a general principle of cooperation, which is further elaborated in terms of specific maxims relating to the quantity, quality and relation of information given and the manner in which that information is expressed. Apparently overt or ostentatious breaches, or ‘flouts’, of the conversational maxims, resulting in the need for the hearer to reconsider or reinterpret what has been said, will typically explain how and why many conversational implicatures occur. For instance, Grice suggests that a statement such as ‘War is war’, a tautology which is apparently entirely uninformative, flouts assumptions concerning the quantity of information speakers are expected to offer. Rather than simply dismiss this utterance as uncooperative, the hearer is likely to seek an alternative interpretation that is informative and therefore cooperative and will access various implicatures about the nature of war and the speaker’s attitude to it (Grice 1989: 33).

Since Austin and Grice, pragmatics is usually divided into two groups: ‘neo-Gricean’ approaches such as those developed by Horn (1984, 1988, 1989, 2004) and Levinson (1987, 2000) which assume a set of principles sharing properties of Grice’s maxims, and ‘post-Gricean’ approaches such as relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995) which do not. Neo-Gricean frameworks differ from each other in many specifics of terminology and in how they partition types of meaning, but they generally share a commitment to some version of the distinction between ‘what is said’ and ‘what is implicated’. They attempt to establish general principles which explain the various ways in which these types of meaning may differ, while trying to reduce Grice’s list of maxims to a more modest and more clearly motivated number; Horn’s pragmatic system, for instance, has two principles, the Q-Principle and the R-Principle, while Levinson’s has three, the Q-, I- and M-Principles. Approaches such as relevance theory are termed merely ‘post-Gricean’ since the pragmatic principles they propose are not ‘maxim-like’. In the case of relevance theory, the two key principles are understood as lawlike generalisations about human behaviour. The Cognitive Principle of Relevance is a generalisation about cognition in general (claiming that cognitive processes are geared towards the maximisation of ‘relevance’ as defined by the theory). The Communicative Principle is a generalisation about the processing of ‘ostensive-inferential’ communication (which is seen as giving rise to fairly precise expectations of relevance). A third area of work, on politeness (now often termed ‘im/politeness’ since the focus is as much on how utterances can be seen as impolite as on how they can be seen as polite), draws partly on Austin’s classification of utterances into different types of speech acts and partly on Goffman’s (1955) work on the notion of ‘face’ as adopted and developed in the work of Brown and Levinson (1987). It is usually associated with Gricean or neo-Gricean frameworks (see, for example, Culpeper 1996, 2011; Bousfield 2008; Bousfield and Locher 2008), but there has also been post-Gricean work on politeness (e.g. Escandell-Vidal 1996, 1998; Jary 1998; Nowik 2005, 2008; Christie 2007). Im/politeness theory is concerned with the various ways in which speakers may choose to defend or attack different aspects of their own face and that of other participants in a communicative situation, the consequences these choices have for how different types of acts are performed and their social impact.

These various branches of pragmatics are fundamentally theoretical in nature, concerned with general questions of how meaning is to be analysed, demarcated and explained. But each framework has been applied to a range of different text and discourse types, and almost from the start this has included the analysis of literary texts. Just a year after Grice’s theory of conversation first appeared in published form, van Dijk suggested that the Gricean maxims ‘partly concern the structure of the utterance itself, and might therefore be called “stylistic” ’ (van Dijk 1976: 44); he argued in favour of exploring the potential of a Griceanstyle approach to the analysis of the interaction between writers and readers of literary texts. This type of approach has been sustained over the decades (e.g. Pratt 1977; Gautam and Sharma 1986; Cooper 1998; Blake 2002). As pointed out by Leech and Short (1981: 231–254), a Gricean approach can be applied both to interaction between writers and readers and to interaction between characters (any account of the latter, of course, being necessarily embedded within an account of the writer–reader interaction).

Similarly, the potential of relevance theory to offer insights into the reception and interpretation of literary texts was recognised from the start. Sperber and Wilson (1995: 202–224) discuss ways in which the theory can account for the effects of different stylistic choices and discuss the ‘poetic effects’ associated with weak implicatures. They do not themselves apply relevance theory to the analysis of any specific literary texts, but this was quickly taken up in subsequent work (e.g. Pilkington 1992, 2000; Blakemore 1993, 2008, 2009; Clark 1996, 2009; MacMahon 1996, 2001, 2007, 2009a, 2009b; Keeble 2005; Blass 2006; Bursey and Furlong 2006). There has, in contrast, been surprisingly little work in pragmatic stylistics situated within a neo-Gricean framework, but there is some evidence of a recent growth in interest in this area; for example, possible applications of neo-Gricean developments to literary stylistics have been explored by Israel (2011) and Chapman (2012).

Politeness theory has proved a valuable framework for analysing literary texts from a range of different genres. Work in this area has generally considered how awareness of and response to various types of face-related behaviour established in literary texts can affect how those texts are structured, narrated or constructed. Some of this work has focused on relationships that are established between narrators and readers, and how the presumed face needs of these two participants in the communicative interaction are addressed (e.g. Sell 1985; Simpson 1989). Other work has used politeness theory to describe and explain the development of relationships between characters, often the driving forces of change and of plot (e.g. Culpeper 1998; Blake 2002; Bousfield 2007; Bousfield and McIntyre 2011). While work on pragmatic literary stylistics has continued throughout the years, there has been an increased interest in this area in recent years and an associated increase in the variety of pragmatic frameworks employed and text types analysed. A Pragmatic Stylistics Special Interest Group was established at the Poetics and Linguistics Association in 2010 and has since run three workshops. This followed a one-off workshop at Middlesex University in 2008 and a number of workshops and conferences have focused on this area since, including a panel at the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) in Manchester in 2011, conferences in Nitra in 2008 and 2013, and a workshop at Sussex University in 2012. Morini (2009) developed a sustained analysis of a single author drawing on pragmatic theory. A mainstream stylistics journal, Journal of Literary Semantics, recently dedicated a special issue to inference and implicature in literary interpretation (Caink and Clark 2012).

There have, however, been surprisingly few publications which reflect the range of potential offered by pragmatic literary stylistics. Despite the appearance of it as an element of other texts (e.g. Lambrou and Stockwell 2007), we know of only one other edited collection focusing entirely on literary pragmatics (Sell 1991) and the present volume is the first collection to reflect the recent increased activity in this area. Apart from its relative novelty, the breadth of papers gathered in this volume represents a significant contribution to this developing research area. It contains work based on all of the approaches outlined above and concerned with the genres of prose, poetry and drama. It also exemplifies another type of broadening of interest in the field.

Like literary stylistics and other forms of stylistics in general, pragmatic literary stylistics has so far tended to focus on interpretation. This collection, too, includes a number of studies that concentrate on possible interpretations of specific literary texts, or on the elucidation of actual interpretations and responses from previous readers, critics and reviewers. However, the studies presented here reflect a recent broadening of the scope of work in this area and, as discussed below, the topics covered are not restricted to consideration of interpretations.

We have made several key assumptions in developing our own work on pragmatic literary stylistics and in preparing this volume. One is that the aim of pragmatic literary stylistics, like that of stylistics in general, is not to offer new readings or to suggest interpretations or evaluations that have not been identified by literary critics and other readers. Rather, the aim is to understand and explain how such readings, interpretations and evaluations arise, develop and spread. Most of the studies in this volume draw on what has been said by critics and reviewers of the texts under discussion. A striking feature of this approach is the way in which pragmatic theory can often explain and substantiate such responses and intuitive interpretations. The terminology and explanatory mechanisms developed in the largely theoretical and relatively abstract discipline of pragmatics are often capable of elucidating why readers respond to texts as they do. This is one way in which linguistic theory can profitably interact with the actual business of producing and interpreting language by actual users for communicative purposes. We should add that, despite this general assumption and perhaps in tension with it, we believe that ideas from pragmatics could potentially play a role in adjudicating between competing interpretations.

Another key assumption concerns theoretical and methodological eclecticism. There is a growing commitment in various branches of linguistic analysis to the idea that theorists and analysts should be open to a wide range of possible approaches, adopting frameworks which seem to help with addressing specific questions rather than sticking closely to one approach (see, for instance, Jeffries 2000). Like many stylisticians, we endorse this view and believe that different approaches should not necessarily be seen as ‘competing’ approaches from which a ‘winner’ needs to be chosen. Rather, we would suggest that specific approaches adopted should be those which seem to provide insights into the specific phenomena being considered. The final assumption we discuss here is our belief that work in pragmatic literary stylistics can constitute not only an application of specific pragmatic theories but also a way of shedding light on their nature and, to some extent, of testing them.

We are both aware of and interested in the apparent tensions between the assumptions identified above: that pragmatic literary stylistics is not in the business of generating interpretations but that it may nevertheless adjudicate between interpretations, and that pragmatic literary stylistics is rooted in theoretical eclecticism but is also a potential tool for testing and evaluating specific theories. We consider the discussion and possible resolution of these tensions to be important topics in the ongoing development of the discipline of pragmatic literary stylistics; we briefly expand on this below.

We are consistent with many other contemporary stylisticians in supporting the view that the task of stylistics is primarily to explain how different audiences arrive at the understandings that they do rather than to generate readings. While work in literary studies has often aimed to generate readings or interpretations, for example by considering texts in the light of particular frameworks adopted from elsewhere (such as psychoanalysis, Marxism or structuralism), work in stylistics aims rather to account for ways in which readers respond to texts whether or not they are aware of particular literary interpretative or linguistic frameworks. Pragmatic stylistics can play an important role here since it has something to say about how particular sets of contextual assumptions interact with linguistically encoded meanings to give rise to interpretations. Contrasting interpretations might arise when the contextual assumptions accessible to different readers are significantly different. An obvious example would be where allegorical interpretations depend on the accessibility of specific sets of contextual assumptions; for a recent discussion (in French) of a text with allegorical interpretations, see Hamilton and Crisp’s (2013) discussion of Jean Paul Sartre’s Les Mouches. Les Mouches is an adaptation of the Greek Electra myth (represented in Ancient Greek drama by Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles) which can be understood allegorically by audiences who notice connections with the occupation of France during the Second World War. Audiences without access to contextual assumptions about the occupation, and the fact that Sartre wrote his version during the period of the occupation, might not arrive at the allegorical understanding.

Despite our endorsement of this fairly standard view in stylistics, we believe that techniques from pragmatic stylistics might be used for the secondary task of developing arguments in support of particular readings. While such arguments have not been developed in much detail so far, Durant (2010) develops arguments about how ideas from the study of linguistic meaning in general can be used in developing understanding of particular kinds of contested meaning and of contributing to adjudications among contested interpretations. His discussion suggests further ways in which this might be achieved in future work. A key aspect of this work will involve consideration of the cultural contexts in which work is produced and understood, which is a topic addressed in some of the chapters gathered here (particularly those by Peplow and Warner).

As we have said, we also endorse arguments for theoretical eclecticism, such as those developed by Jeffries (2000). As Jeffries points out, the development of scientific theories is always an ongoing process. A new theory rarely invalidates all aspects of previous theories and is not generally assumed to be ‘correct’ or final. She takes as an example the emergence of Einstein’s theory of relativity:

One non-linguistic example of this is Newtonian physics, which was superseded by Einstein’s theory of relativity. The Newtonian model still works for calculations within a certain range of space and speed, and to that extent is still used for practical purposes like aeroplane flight and even getting rockets to the moon. What Einstein did, however, was create the model needed for calculations of speed nearer to the speed of light and useful, therefore, for longer journeys into space.

(Jeffries 2000: 5)

She goes on to suggest that we can even adopt assumptions we do not believe for some purposes, for example reasoning as if the Earth were flat when reading maps in many contexts.

When work in stylistics is concerned with specific aspects of production or response, the main aim is to account for the phenomenon being explored rather than to develop as accurate a theory as possible. The question to ask when analysing a text is not whether the theory being applied is ‘correct’ (strictly speaking, a better theoretical model than alternatives) but whether it helps to explain the particular features being considered. To take one simple example, we might be able to develop a useful account of an ironic utterance using either Grice’s account, which is based on the assumption that irony flouts a maxim of quality (roughly, that the speaker is purporting to say something false in order to implicate an opposite proposition), or using the relevance-theoretic approach based on the notion of echoic use (roughly that the speaker is implicitly expressing a dissociative attitude to an implicitly attributed proposition). The decision about which framework to use for this purpose can be separated from the task of assessing how well each approach accounts for irony in general.

However, we also believe that stylistic analysis has a role to play in testing particular theoretical frameworks. To risk stating the obvious, any framework which constantly failed to be applicable in describing aspects of textual production or interpretation would not look convincing as a theoretical approach. More significantly, the resistance to analysis of particular phenomena might suggest amendments to current theories. It is easy, for example, to find examples of irony which cannot be accounted for using the traditional Gricean approach in which the communicator is seen as implicating the opposite of what she purports to be saying. Another example can be found in recent work by Carston (e.g. Carston 2010) which aims to develop the relevance-theoretic account of metaphor in the light of examples which do not seem to be fully accounted for by existing relevance-theoretic approaches. Examples she considers include extended metaphors where the literal understanding of expressions seems to play a role in comprehension.

An example in this collection is Chapman’s application of neo-Gricean pragmatics to a particular issue in a particular literary text. The main analytical focus of the chapter is the potential of the text to communicate attitudes to a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction: Pragmatic Literary Stylistics
• 2. The Art of Repetition in Muriel Spark’s Telling
• 3. ‘Oh, do let’s talk about something else-’: What Is Not Said and What Is Implicated in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September
• 4. Before and After Chekhov: Inference, Interpretation and Evaluation
• 5. Outsourcing: A Relevance-Theoretic Account of the Interpretation of Theatrical Texts
• 6. Relevance Theory, Syntax and Literary Narrative
• 7. Negation, Expectation and Characterisation: Analysing the Role of Negation in Character Construction in To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee 1960) and Stark (Elton 1989)
• 8. Intertextuality and the Pragmatics of Literary Reading
• 9. ‘I’ve never enjoyed hating a book so much in my life’: The Co-Construction of Identity in the Reading Group
• 10. The Narrative Tease: Narratorial Omniscience, Implicature and the Making of Sensation in Lady Audley’s Secret
• 11. Literature as Discourse and Dialogue: Rapport Management (Facework) in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s ‘Blackeye and His Donkey’
• Bibliography
• Index