{"title":"You as a stylistic vector of otherness: from self-ascription to enactment in Kincaid (1988), Adichie (2009) and Azumah Nelson (2021)","authors":"Sandrine Sorlin","doi":"10.1515/jls-2024-2001","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Based on a theoretical pragmatic model (Sorlin, Sandrine. 2022. <jats:italic>The stylistics of ‘you’. Second-person pronoun and its pragmatic effects</jats:italic>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), this article compares the use of the second-person pronoun in three different narratives written by Black writers: Jamaica Kincaid’s essay, <jats:italic>A Small Place</jats:italic> (1988), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short story “The Thing Around Your Neck” (2009) and Caleb Azumah Nelson’s first novel <jats:italic>Open Water</jats:italic> (2021). It highlights how the racial nature and assumed universality of <jats:italic>you</jats:italic> is exposed in the texts and argues that the pronoun works as a powerful vector of otherness, bringing the (white Western) reader to experience racism in most intimate terms. The three texts propose varied stylistic constellations that draw on the flexibility of the pronoun in terms of potential reference, entailing different positionings of audiences, going from “self-ascription” (Wechsler, Stephen. 2010. What ‘I’ and ‘you’ mean to each other: Person indexicals, self-ascription, and theory of mind. <jats:italic>Language</jats:italic> 86(2). 332–365) to “enactment” (Caracciolo, Marco. 2014. <jats:italic>The experientiality of narrative</jats:italic>. Berlin: De Gruyter; Popova, Yanna B. 2015. <jats:italic>Stories, meaning and experience: Narrativity and enaction</jats:italic>. London & New York: Routledge). The article also evidences how the inter/intra-personal pronoun triggers a blurring of traditional stylistic and narratorial labels and lines. Lastly, from an enactive perspective that sees reading as an intersubjective participatory act where meaning emerges in the very interaction between a teller and a reader, this article sees communicating as an act of coordination based on the metaphor, <jats:sc>communicating is dancing</jats:sc>, inspired by Azumah Nelson’s rhythmic novel.","PeriodicalId":42874,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF LITERARY SEMANTICS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2024-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"JOURNAL OF LITERARY SEMANTICS","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jls-2024-2001","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Based on a theoretical pragmatic model (Sorlin, Sandrine. 2022. The stylistics of ‘you’. Second-person pronoun and its pragmatic effects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), this article compares the use of the second-person pronoun in three different narratives written by Black writers: Jamaica Kincaid’s essay, A Small Place (1988), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short story “The Thing Around Your Neck” (2009) and Caleb Azumah Nelson’s first novel Open Water (2021). It highlights how the racial nature and assumed universality of you is exposed in the texts and argues that the pronoun works as a powerful vector of otherness, bringing the (white Western) reader to experience racism in most intimate terms. The three texts propose varied stylistic constellations that draw on the flexibility of the pronoun in terms of potential reference, entailing different positionings of audiences, going from “self-ascription” (Wechsler, Stephen. 2010. What ‘I’ and ‘you’ mean to each other: Person indexicals, self-ascription, and theory of mind. Language 86(2). 332–365) to “enactment” (Caracciolo, Marco. 2014. The experientiality of narrative. Berlin: De Gruyter; Popova, Yanna B. 2015. Stories, meaning and experience: Narrativity and enaction. London & New York: Routledge). The article also evidences how the inter/intra-personal pronoun triggers a blurring of traditional stylistic and narratorial labels and lines. Lastly, from an enactive perspective that sees reading as an intersubjective participatory act where meaning emerges in the very interaction between a teller and a reader, this article sees communicating as an act of coordination based on the metaphor, communicating is dancing, inspired by Azumah Nelson’s rhythmic novel.
期刊介绍:
The aim of the Journal of Literary Semantics is to concentrate the endeavours of theoretical linguistics upon those texts traditionally classed as ‘literary’, in the belief that such texts are a central, not a peripheral, concern of linguistics. This journal, founded by Trevor Eaton in 1972 and edited by him for thirty years, has pioneered and encouraged research into the relations between linguistics and literature. It is widely read by theoretical and applied linguists, narratologists, poeticians, philosophers and psycholinguists. JLS publishes articles on all aspects of literary semantics. The ambit is inclusive rather than doctrinaire.