Language and Literature最新文献

{"title":"The creation of Chinese personae in Steinbeck’s fiction","authors":"Shu Zeng","doi":"10.1177/09639470221115033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470221115033","url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses Steinbeck’s linguistic creation of Chinese personae in his fiction, which develops from the early practice of using silence in ‘Johnny Bear’ (1938) to chronologically progressive engagement with Chinese Pidgin English (CPE) in Cannery Row (1945) and East of Eden (1952). This change is evident from the increase of CPE dialogues in his later works and best exemplified in the turn to taking non-standard English as a key concern by investing style-shifting with stylistic and thematic meaning in East of Eden. Silence and implicatures are strategically employed in ‘Johnny Bear’ to keep the narrative suspense and broach the antinarratable subject of interracial romance and illegitimate pregnancy so as not to offend the reader. Steinbeck’s later experimentation with CPE demonstrates conformity and discrepancy with sociolinguistic observations, whilst in his representation of CPE the author uses metalanguage to guide readers towards a better understanding of this language variety and a sympathetic interpretation of the Chinese characters. Existing alongside real sociolinguistic systems, the ficto-linguistic system in Steinbeck’s fiction subtly critiques the supposedly ‘correct’ language expected of ethnic groups and skilfully denounces discriminatory racial distinctions. The author’s incorporation of Chinese presence and CPE into his writings serves the grander scheme of scrutinizing American identity and society.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"32 1","pages":"78 - 97"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48090142","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Contemporary present-tense fiction: Crossing boundaries in narrative","authors":"Reiko Ikeo","doi":"10.1177/09639470221117674","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470221117674","url":null,"abstract":"The use of the present tense as the primary narrative tense has become a commonly encountered phenomenon in contemporary fiction. The textual effects of the use of the present narrative tense, however, have not yet been fully explored. This paper first reviews how the use of tenses contributes to constructing narrative worlds, focusing on three facets of narrative: the relationship between the narrator and the narrated, time frames within the narrative and characters’ discourse embedded in narrative. Then, using corpus data which includes both present- and past-tense fiction, I will show that the boundaries and distinctions which are consistently taken for granted in past-tense narrative can be blurred, crossed within narratorial structures and partly expanded at a meta-textual level from written discourse to spoken discourse.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"32 1","pages":"98 - 128"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-08-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48976173","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Panoramic social minds: Social minds manipulations in ‘A Mother’","authors":"Zhijun Zhang, Shisheng Liu","doi":"10.1177/09639470221114718","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470221114718","url":null,"abstract":"‘A Mother’ by Joyce tells of Mrs. Kearney’s effort in enhancing her daughter’s musical reputation during the Irish Revival, revolving around a conflict between Mrs. Kearney and a male-dominated group at concerts. Although some studies tend to view Mrs. Kearney as a dominant female and others take her as a victim of gender discrimination, there is no interpretation from the perspective of social minds. This article aims at using social mind theory to explore how the characters manipulate social minds against each other for their own purposes. It is found that Joyce deploys ‘covert double cognitive narrative’, a new paradigm of social minds, to propel the plot, and utilizes behaviourist narration and dialogue predominantly in rendering social minds. Therefore, this new perspective commands a panoramic view of the social minds manipulations in ‘A Mother’. Tracing the social minds this way is essential in understanding the story, shedding light on the Irish cultural paralysis of the time.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"32 1","pages":"60 - 77"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-08-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48645054","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Review: Sensory Linguistics: Language, Perception and Metaphor","authors":"David West","doi":"10.1177/09639470221120449","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470221120449","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"31 1","pages":"455 - 457"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42003663","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Review: Storyworld Possible Selves","authors":"Fransina Stradling","doi":"10.1177/09639470221120450","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470221120450","url":null,"abstract":"so-called ‘synesthetic metaphors’ (such as sweet smell and loud colour) are neither synesthetic nor metaphorical. Rather, such adjectives as sweet and loud are ‘highly supramodal descriptors that encompass multiple senses’ (p. 238). Winter uses two arguments to back up this claim. One, ‘the involved perceptual modalities are highly integrated’ (p. 96), an observation that is the logical consequence of his rejection of the five senses folk model. In other words, since the senses are not discrete modalities, it serves no purpose to talk in terms of using one domain (e.g. the gustatory domain to which sweet belongs) to talk about another domain (the olfactory domain of smell). Two, ‘crossmodal uses simply follow from word-inherent evaluative meaning’ (p. 96), by which he means that an adjective such as sweet is used to talk about smell simply for its evaluative meaning, i.e. the fact that it has positive connotations. In other words, when we use what appears to be a synesthetic metaphor such as sweet smell, we do so because sweet is a positive adjective and not because sweet belongs to a different semantic domain to smell. As Winter points out, his ‘literal analysis of synesthetic metaphors’ has ‘far-reaching conclusions for lexical semantics and conceptual metaphor theory’, not least because it ‘compels us to see the continuity of the senses as reaching all the way down into the lexical representation of individual words’ (p. 238). This is a real and welcome challenge to conceptual metaphor theory with its implicit notion of discrete ‘domains’. Winter’s book, then, is valuable not least for its methodological rigour and its theoretical innovativeness. It provides sensory linguistics with a very firm foundation that future researchers can build upon. One possible path that sensory linguists might take (a path not signalled byWinter) is to explore (as Ullmann did in his 1945 article on Keats and Byron) how poetry in particular draws on the sensory nature of language. There are scattered references inWinter’s book to the important work in cognitive poetics of Reuven Tsur, but sensory linguistics would benefit from a much more sustained and comprehensive treatment of the sensoriness of poetic language.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"31 1","pages":"457 - 461"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46952637","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Character’s mental functioning during a ‘neuro-transition’: Pragmatic failures in Flowers for Algernon","authors":"Piergiorgio Trevisan","doi":"10.1177/09639470221114573","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470221114573","url":null,"abstract":"The representation of fictional minds that work in idiosyncratic ways has received significant attention in the past few decades, particularly regarding characters with some form of developmental delay or pathological disorder. The present paper attempts to investigate the mental functioning of the central character in Daniel Keyes’s widely acclaimed short-story Flowers for Algernon, which presents two versions of the same character: after being introduced as cognitively delayed and with a very low IQ, a futuristic treatment turns him into a neurotypical individual first, and into a genius later. With the unfolding of the plot, however, it soon becomes clear that the character’s mental gains are doomed to deteriorate by the end of the story, when he finds himself as cognitively delayed as he was at the beginning. By building on previous research, this paper is concerned with the effects of drastic changes in mind style in the course of the same story. More particularly, the final aim of this article is to study whether an abrupt shift in mind style may bear consequences on the character’s ability to interact with the other characters. Mental schemata and adherence/flouting of Grice’s maxims are closely investigated in the two versions of the characters, together with analyses of deictical patterns carried out by means of corpus techniques.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"32 1","pages":"46 - 59"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-07-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48811643","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Linking Emotions to Surroundings: A Stylistic Model of Pathetic Fallacy","authors":"Kimberley Pager-McClymont","doi":"10.1177/09639470221106021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470221106021","url":null,"abstract":"This article aims to provide a stylistically founded model of pathetic fallacy (PF hereafter). Pathetic fallacy is a Romantic literary technique used in art and literature to convey emotions through natural elements. This technique has been researched mostly from a literary viewpoint, but no linguistic model exists to define it. It is difficult to identify it precisely or consensually because definitions and uses vary, and it is often associated with other techniques (i.e. personification). Despite those inconsistencies, PF is likely to be taught as part of the Department for Education subject content in the English National Curriculum for students studying English Literature at GCSE and A Level. I thus conducted a survey of English teachers to collect data on PF, and based on their answers and suggested texts, created an updated stylistic model of PF using a combination of (cognitive) stylistic frameworks. The model defines PF as a projection of emotions from an animated entity onto the surroundings. I identify three ‘linguistic indicators’ of PF in my corpus: imagery, repetition and negation. I draw on metaphor research to further analyse the metaphorical nature of PF and its effects in texts from my corpus. Four effects of PF are identified: communicating implicit emotions, building ambience, building characters and plot foreshadowing.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"31 1","pages":"428 - 454"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-06-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45814545","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The restricted possible worlds of depression: A stylistic analysis of Janice Galloway’s The Trick is to Keep Breathing using a possible worlds framework","authors":"Megan Mansworth","doi":"10.1177/09639470221106882","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470221106882","url":null,"abstract":"This article uses a theoretical framework of possible worlds to explore the ways in which Janice Galloway’s novel about grief and depression, The Trick is to Keep Breathing, may elicit emotional responses in readers. I give an overview of some of the emotional responses expressed by readers by using online review data, before employing stylistic analysis to demonstrate how emotional effects may be created through the linguistic construction of degrees of possibility. Drawing on Possible Worlds Theory, I demonstrate how readers’ emotional responses may be linked both to the presentation of possibility and to the restriction of possibility. The combination of the empirical methodology utilised here alongside stylistic analysis allows me to harness the capacity of Possible Worlds Theory to cast light on constructions of textual possibility and actuality and to facilitate understanding of some of the mechanisms eliciting readers’ emotions.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"32 1","pages":"28 - 45"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-06-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46695851","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cognitive Grammar and Readers’ Perceived Sense of Closeness: A Study of Responses to Mary Borden’s ‘Belgium’","authors":"Marcello Giovanelli","doi":"10.1177/09639470221105930","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470221105930","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyses the degree to which readers report a perceived sense of closeness to the events depicted in ‘Belgium’, the opening story of Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone. Theoretically, I draw on Ronald Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar, which models language primarily through its notion of construal, an aspect of which claims that -ing forms impose an internal perspective on a scene that results in the interpretative effect of it being ‘close by’. This study tests this idea empirically by utilising a quantitative tool (Likert scale) to elicit two sets of verbal data, which are then analysed qualitatively. My analysis demonstrates that readers respond to the events in the story and articulate the relationship of particular language features to their responses in different – and often surprising – ways. The study is the first in stylistics to empirically test the interpretative effects of verb forms as theorised by Cognitive Grammar and thus contributes new knowledge both by exploring how the landscapes of First World War literature are experienced by readers and analysing how the language of those landscapes may give rise to particular reported effects.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"31 1","pages":"407 - 427"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-06-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43218317","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A pedagogical stylistics of intertextual interaction: Talk as Heteroglot Intertextual Study in higher education pedagogy","authors":"John Gordon","doi":"10.1177/09639470221095904","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470221095904","url":null,"abstract":"This article presents a pedagogical stylistics of intertextuality in interactive literary study talk. It analyses case study data representing one higher education seminar discussion, where a tutor and student interpret a focal text through reference to diverse intertexts. The article asks: How do participants enact intertextual literary analysis in conversation? How are intertextual voices introduced? How do intertextual voices relate to focal texts and position readers’ orientations to them? The transcript represents the interplay of participant and text voices around Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett. The article examines the intertextual invocations made by participants in interaction including their pedagogic function. It adopts a methodology combining pedagogical stylistics with a conversation-analytic mentality. Commentary adapts Lemke’s four categories of intertextual connection (cothematic, co-orienting, coactional and cogeneric) to describe functions of intertextual invocation in talk, adding two new categories of co-illumination and cogeneration. The results suggest participants in literary study talk use intertextual invocations to develop insights, position the responses of others and sustain co-constructed interpretation. The article proposes the term Talk as Heteroglot Intertextual Study (THIS) to describe this pedagogical format, with linked terminology to identify its multivocal, deictic and organisational traits. This pedagogical stylistics helps researchers and teachers describe and understand the development of intertextual analysis in literary study talk.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"31 1","pages":"383 - 406"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-05-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48437593","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}