{"title":"Inner and outer worlds: speech and thought presentation in Mansfield’s Bliss","authors":"Annabelle Lukin, A. Pagano","doi":"10.1515/jls-2016-0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jls-2016-0007","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Despite renewed attention to Katherine Mansfield’s writing in recent years, her work continues to be read largely for “its political and emotional sensibilities and so seldom... for the controlled effects of stylistic detail” (New 1999. Reading Mansfield and metaphors of form. McGill-Queen’s Press-MQUP: viii). In this article we consider her story “Bliss” in relation to how Mansfield choreographs the interplay between the inner and outer worlds of the central character and the consequences of her textual crafting of this interplay for a reading of the theme of Mansfield’s story. We draw largely on what is now considered “classical” stylistics, that is, stylistics informed by a social-semiotic linguistics (e. g. Butt 1983. Semantic Drift in Verbal Art. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 61, 34–48; Halliday 2002. Linguistic Studies of Text and Discourse. Volume 2 in the Collected Works of M.A.K. Halliday. London and New York: Continuum; Hasan 1985. Linguistics, Language and Verbal Art. Geelong, VIC: Deakin University Press; Hasan 1996a. On Teaching Literature Across Cultural Differences. In J. James Ed., The Language-Culture Connection pp. 34–63. Singapore: SEAMEO; Leech and Short 2007. Style in Fiction. 2nd Edition. London. Longman; Semino and Short 2004. Corpus Stylistics: Speech, Writing and Thought Presentation in a Corpus of English Writing. London: Routledge; Sotirova 2013. Consciousness in Modernist Fiction: A Stylistic Study. Palgrave Macmillan; Toolan 2001. Narrative: A critical linguistic introduction. Second Edition. Routledge; Toolan 2007. Language. In D. Herman Ed., The Cambridge companion to narrative pp. 231–244. Cambridge University Press;). Given the extensive variety of contributions to “post-classical” or “cognitive narratology” e. g. (Herman 2007. Introduction. In D. Herman (ed.), The Cambridge companion to narrative. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press; McHale 2014. Speech Representation. In P. Hühn, J. C. Meister, J. Pier, & W. Schmid Eds., living handbook of narratology. Hamburg: Hamburg University. Retrieved from http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/; Palmer 2004. Fictional minds. University of Nebraska Press) we briefly comment on why we have not taken this direction in our analysis.","PeriodicalId":42874,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF LITERARY SEMANTICS","volume":"45 1","pages":"116 - 97"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2016-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jls-2016-0007","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66951413","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Nobody disappears. People don’t just disappear”: Repetition and negation as dialogic devices in Caryl Phillips’s “Northern Lights”","authors":"Daria Tunca","doi":"10.1515/jls-2020-2018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jls-2020-2018","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article investigates the literary significance of two linguistic devices, repetition and negation, in the fictionalized biography “Northern Lights” by British-Caribbean writer Caryl Phillips, a narrative that focuses on David Oluwale, a Nigerian immigrant to the UK who died as a result of police violence in Leeds in 1969. To recount Oluwale’s story, “Northern Lights” uses a non-linear structure that juxtaposes stylistically diverse material such as eyewitness testimonies, a history of the city of Leeds, administrative documents, and passages featuring an authorial figure who apostrophizes the dead Oluwale. Analysing linguistic patterns found within and across these different textual segments, this article argues that repetition and negation play a key role in generating forms of dialogism that, in turn, implicitly indicate how “Northern Lights” positions itself towards Oluwale and his controversial story. From a more broadly methodological perspective, the article seeks to advance knowledge of how negation and repetition, when jointly studied as pragmatic phenomena, can impact literary strategies of characterization and reinforce a text’s poetic effects.","PeriodicalId":42874,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF LITERARY SEMANTICS","volume":"49 1","pages":"1 - 25"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2016-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jls-2020-2018","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66951706","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"More on narrative closure","authors":"Tobias Klauk, Tilmann Köppe, Edgar Onea","doi":"10.1515/jls-2016-0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jls-2016-0003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this article, we shall contribute to the theory of narrative closure. In pre-theoretical terms, a narrative features closure if it has an ending. We start by giving a general introduction into the closure phenomenon. Next, we offer a reconstruction of Noël Carroll’s (2007. Narrative closure. Philosophical Studies 135. 1–15) erotetic account of narrative closure, according to which a narrative exhibits closure (roughly) if readers have a “feeling of finality” which in turn is based on the judgment that the presiding macro questions posed by the plot of the narrative get answered. We then discuss a number of questions raised by Carroll’s account, namely whether a definition of “narrative closure” based on his account is either too inclusive or too exclusive; whether narrative closure is a property of narratives or of plots; whether narrative closure comes in grades; whether “narrative closure” is a restrictive notion; and whether “narrative closure” should be ascribed online (incrementally) or on the basis of all-things-considered ex post interpretations. Our answers to these questions are couched in terms of refined definitions, for this allows us to keep track of the progress and facilitates comparisons between the different proposals developed. Finally, we offer a definition of “narrative closure” that summarizes our amendments to Carroll’s theory.","PeriodicalId":42874,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF LITERARY SEMANTICS","volume":"45 1","pages":"21 - 48"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2016-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jls-2016-0003","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66951475","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The two walking candles in James Joyce’s Ulysses","authors":"Shigeo Kikuchi","doi":"10.1515/jls-2016-0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jls-2016-0006","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Following the theory of textual thematization at the level of fictional narrative discourse (Kikuchi 2001, Lose heart, gain heaven: The false reciprocity of gain and loss in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen CII(4). 427–434; 2001, Unveiling the dramatic secret of “Ghost” in Hamlet. Journal of Literary Semantics 39(2). 103–117; 2012, O I just want to leave this place: Auden’s discourse of thematized self-alienation. Philologia 10. 61–72; 2013, Poe’s name excavated: The mediating function and the transformation of discourse theme into discourse rheme. Language and Literature 22(1). 3–8), this article examines how Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses are walking representations of “two candles” set at the head of a dying Dublin. This is one instance of a grand design which is repeated in many of his novels. In “The Sisters”, the first short story in Dubliners and the earliest work in which the grand design can be seen, the two candles are verbally placed at the head of the novel. Later in the story, this design reappears in the house of a dead priest where his two sisters, like the two candles, are holding a wake for him. In Ulysses, Dedalus and Bloom, after roaming through Dublin, stand side by side urinating outside Bloom’s house, like candles offered for one who has crossed the border from old life to new life. This scene presages Molly’s free flowing stream of consciousness in the last chapter, in which her thoughts flow across the syntactic demarcations between utterances, as if symbolizing the dissolution of borders. I shall discuss Joyce’s underlying intent in Ulysses by assuming that the stages in which Dedalus and Bloom roam through Dublin and then urinate together are the theme or topic, and that the demarcation-crossing of Molly’s stream of consciousness, namely, the resolution of the demarcation between the two distinct entities as represented by the two candles, is the rheme or comment on this theme.","PeriodicalId":42874,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF LITERARY SEMANTICS","volume":"45 1","pages":"77 - 89"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2016-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jls-2016-0006","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66951622","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ken Ireland: Thomas Hardy, Time and Narrative: a Narratological Approach to His Novels","authors":"N. Addison","doi":"10.1515/jls-2016-0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jls-2016-0005","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42874,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF LITERARY SEMANTICS","volume":"149 1","pages":"91 - 96"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2016-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jls-2016-0005","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66951554","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Textual properties and attentional windowing: A cognitive grammatical account of Gustav Hasford’s The Short-Timers","authors":"Parivash Esmaeili, F. Amjad","doi":"10.1515/jls-2016-0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jls-2016-0009","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Deploying a cognitive grammar perspective, this paper reads Gustav Hasford’s war narrative, The Short-Timers, as displaying the way attentional windowing is reflected in the language. We have taken the methodological decision of becoming cognitively sensitized to the linguistic texture of traumatically loaded episodes, with the aim of looking at the specific linguistic choices that the producer of literary language has made, and the role played by such linguistic choices in cueing the reader’s attention toward these event frames. Specifically, we demonstrate that confluence of windowing and nesting of attention with theories of conceptual metaphor, schema, and force dynamics can yield a fuller cognitive grammatical account of the foregrounded event frames. It is observed that allocation of salience to such event frames is greatly dependent on phraseology that has a high density of metaphoric constructions.","PeriodicalId":42874,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF LITERARY SEMANTICS","volume":"45 1","pages":"161 - 174"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2016-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jls-2016-0009","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66951508","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A semantic study of tense backshift and its literary effects in FID","authors":"Jiemin Bu","doi":"10.1515/jls-2016-0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jls-2016-0004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This study presents a semantically-oriented theoretical and descriptive study of tense backshift and its literary effects in FID. Based on Fludernik’s study (1993), the detailed linguistic indicators of FID are described in order to provide the criteria for data collection for this study. The data are FID passages collected from four canonical English novels: Austen’s Persuasion, Conrad’s Lord Jim, and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. A theory of tense semantics underlying FID is explored, and the literary effects of tense backshift in FID are examined. The results of this study show that: (1) the mechanism of tense backshift in FID is tense backshift from absolute tense defined by the default temporal reference point t0 in present time domain in the narrator’s intensional domain into relative tense defined by the central time of orientation in past time domain in the represented character’s intensional domain; and (2) the literary effects of tense backshift in FID, analysed in terms of relative past tense, relative lazy past tense, relative past progressive tense and relative past future perfect tense are shown to be effects of remoteness, terseness, close-up and irony respectively.","PeriodicalId":42874,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF LITERARY SEMANTICS","volume":"45 1","pages":"49 - 75"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2016-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jls-2016-0004","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66951539","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rethinking image schemas: Containment and Emotion in Greek Poetry","authors":"Cristóbal Pagán Cánovas","doi":"10.1515/jls-2016-0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jls-2016-0008","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Research on image schemas in language and cognition (containment, path, blockage, etc.) is largely based on de-contextualized linguistic expressions. This results in a view of image schemas as somehow detached from experience, constituting source domains for fixed conceptual projections from the concrete to the abstract. By showcasing creative examples of the poetics of containment throughout the long diachrony of Greek poetry, this article proposes that image schemas reflect the early attentional preferences of the human mind. These central features of image schemas are further selected for their suitability to create ad-hoc, non-perceptual meanings. Templates for conceptual integration involving image schemas also offer coherent patterns of variation, which opportunistically exploit arising connections with culture, context, and goals. Understanding the role of image schemas in meaning construction and verbal art requires the study of both the entrenched patterns and the know-how associated to their usage.","PeriodicalId":42874,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF LITERARY SEMANTICS","volume":"45 1","pages":"117 - 139"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2016-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jls-2016-0008","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66951451","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Being there yet not there: why don’t embodied responses to literary texts jar with one another?","authors":"Elspeth Jajdelska","doi":"10.1515/jls-2016-0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jls-2016-0002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Language and literature can stimulate the embodied resources of perception. I argue that there is a puzzle about why we experience sequences of these embodied responses as integrated and coherent, even though they are not anchored in space and time by a perceiving body. Some successions of embodied representations would even be impossible in real world experience, yet they can still be experienced as coherent and flowing in response to verbal texts. One possibility is that embodied responses to language are fleeting; they need not be integrated because they do not depend on, or relate to, one another as they would in perception. Yet it is the potential for embodied representations to linger and connect with one another which underlies new and persuasive embodied literary theories of vividness, narrative coherence and metaphor comprehension. Another possibility is that readers anchor their embodied representations in a notional human body, one endowed with superhuman powers, such as omniscience. But this account relies on implausible, post hoc explanations. A third possibility is that integrating embodied representations produced by language need be no more problematic than integrating the deceptively patchy information harvested from the environment by perception, information which gives rise to an experience of the world in rich and continuous detail. Real world perceptual cues, however, sparse though they might be, are still integrated through grounding in specific points in time and space. To explain the integration of embodied effects, I draw on sensorimotor theories of perception, and on Clark’s suggestion (1997, Being There. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) that language can be understood as an additional modality. In this light, the embodied simulations generated by literary texts can be integrated through patterning in a high dimensional, vector space neural architecture, a patterning which recalls real world experience but is specialised to the sustained experience of language itself. This account can help us understand what makes literary experience distinctive and unique.","PeriodicalId":42874,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF LITERARY SEMANTICS","volume":"45 1","pages":"1 - 20"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2016-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jls-2016-0002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66951465","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Matthias Bauer, N. Bade, Sigrid Beck, Carmen Dörge, Burkhard von Eckartsberg, Janina Niefer, Saskia Ottschofski, Angelika Zirker
{"title":"Emily Dickinson’s “My life had stood a loaded gun” – An interdisciplinary analysis","authors":"Matthias Bauer, N. Bade, Sigrid Beck, Carmen Dörge, Burkhard von Eckartsberg, Janina Niefer, Saskia Ottschofski, Angelika Zirker","doi":"10.1515/jls-2015-0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jls-2015-0010","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this article we analyse Emily Dickinson’s poem “My life had stood a loaded gun” using a specific methodology that combines linguistic and literary theory. The first step is a textual analysis with the methods of compositional semantics. The second step is a literary analysis enriching the literal meaning with information about the wider context of the poem. The division of these two steps reflects the distinction between an objective interpretation of the text based solely on the rules of grammar and a subjective reading which draws on various external fields of reference. In combining both steps, we show why some interpretations of the poem are more plausible than others and how different lines of interpretation are related to each other. However, it is not our aim to provide one definite interpretation of the poem or to favour one reading over the others. Rather, we wish to show how Dickinson’s use of specific grammatical mechanisms leads to a number of interpretations which are more or less plausible. That is, we identify plausible interpretations on the basis of grammatical evidence, and we relate these to each other by pointing at instances in the poem where a divergence of interpretations is possible (cases of ambiguity, for example). This method is helpful for literary studies since formal linguistics helps produce a systematic and non-arbitrary analysis, and it is helpful for linguistic analysis since it uncovers which violations of grammar do or do not disturb the interpretative process, and which kind of structures need pragmatic enrichment.","PeriodicalId":42874,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF LITERARY SEMANTICS","volume":"44 1","pages":"115 - 140"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2015-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/jls-2015-0010","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66951409","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}