Language and Literature最新文献

{"title":"Literary dynamics in The.PowerBook by Jeanette Winterson and Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood","authors":"Irene O’Leary","doi":"10.1177/09639470211059254","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470211059254","url":null,"abstract":"Interaction between text and reader is a prominent concern in stylistics. This paper focusses on interactions among stylistic processes and subconscious microcognitive processes that generate changes to narrative and interpretation during reading. Drawing on process philosophy and recent neuroscientific research, I articulate this dynamism through analysis of a brief narrative moment from each of The.PowerBook by Jeanette Winterson and Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. I argue that high densities of stylistic and microcognitive perturbations lead to frequent narrative and interpretive changes in the two moments. The analyses reinforce portrayals of reading as intensely complex, dynamic and changeable. Complexity, dynamism and mutability also characterise the stylistic changes in the two narrative moments. This paper advocates greater attention to the role of volatile stylistic and cognitive microdynamics in shaping the reading of prose fiction.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"31 1","pages":"325 - 344"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45355707","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":"Shakespeare sonnet reading: An empirical study of emotional responses","authors":"Orsolya Papp-Zipernovszky, Anne Mangen, A. Jacobs, J. Lüdtke","doi":"10.1177/09639470211054647","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470211054647","url":null,"abstract":"The present study combines literary theory and cognitive psychology to empirically explore some cognitive and emotional facets of poetry reading, exemplified by the reading of three Shakespeare sonnets. Specifically, predictions generated combining quantitative textual analysis according to the Neurocognitive Poetics model with qualitative textual analysis based on the Foregrounding assessment Matrix of sonnets no. 27, 60 and 66 are empirically tested by analyzing 45 subjects’ ratings of the three sonnets. Reflecting the differences in foregrounding potential of the three sonnets found in the textual analysis, we expected to find different reader responses, accordingly. Our dependent variables are well-established categories of emotional evaluation (e.g. valence and arousal) and cognitive, affective and aesthetic aspects of readers’ responses (e.g. liking and understanding) as well as less common ones (e.g. wonder, delight and mental images). The statistical analyses suggest that the type of foregrounding is more important than the number of foregrounded elements. This finding motivated further qualitative exploration of reader responses to open questions regarding mental images and perceived feelings. Comparing the free recall data about the feelings perceived in the sonnets with the ratings data about Valence and Arousal indicated that only the former one reflects a clear distinction between all three sonnets, whereas the readers’ overall evaluations did not sustain this variety of feelings. Multi-method, interdisciplinary research of this kind contributes to improving our understanding of the potentially unique mechanisms involved in poetry reception, and to forming more precise hypotheses for future experimental studies using, for example, eye tracking.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"31 1","pages":"296 - 324"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43212374","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 year’s work in stylistics 2020","authors":"Simon Statham","doi":"10.1177/09639470211056687","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470211056687","url":null,"abstract":"When I signed off the previous ‘Year’s work’ article I naively looked forward to a year ahead of restored travel to international conferences and other trappings of the ‘old normal’. Instead it has been another year of Zooming here and Teaming there and e-books and e-learning. All of this has brought such disruption and steep learning curves that, even amongst the few positives which academics may have found in our ongoing lockdown lives, we could be forgiven for not producing any new work at all. Not so stylisticians. To Simpson’s (2014: 4) three ‘Rs’, we can now add ‘resilience’, for stylisticians seem to have responded to the crisis of the pandemic by continuing to produce work of incredible breadth and depth. To paraphrase the epigraph from Bram Stoker, it is really wonderful how much resilience there is in stylistics. The same resilience cannot be necessarily attributed to me, so I wish to bring forward the disclaimer that often comes at the end of the ‘Year’s work’ that it is not possible to acknowledge all of the work produced in stylistics in a single year in a single article. Trying to be as comprehensive as possible has been complicated by the conditions of lockdown, for example where ‘remote access’ has not been granted or where publishers refuse steadfastly to stray from the new e-book obsession. Nonetheless the article aims to be a fairly thorough snapshot, if there is such a thing, into the resilient and unfaltering stylistics of 2020. As always, articles published in Language and Literature are not included in the references section to protect the impact factor of the journal but they are given with relevant volume and issue numbers so that readers can locate them. The sections into which the article is organised are not necessarily intended to indicate definitive","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"30 1","pages":"407 - 433"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-10-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48068189","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":"Features of orality in the language of fiction: A corpus-based investigation","authors":"Andreas H. Jucker","doi":"10.1177/09639470211047751","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470211047751","url":null,"abstract":"This paper explores the pervasiveness of features of orality in the language of performed fiction. Features of orality are typical of spontaneous spoken conversations where they are the result of the ongoing planning process and the interaction between the interlocutors, but they also occur in the context of performed fiction (movies and plays) and in narrative fiction (e.g. novels). In these contexts, they are not the result of the spontaneous planning process but are generally produced to imitate such processes. In this paper, I explore a small range of such features (contractions, interjections, discourse markers, response forms and hesitators) in four corpora of performed fiction that have recently become available (Corpus of American Soap Operas, TV Corpus, Movies Corpus and Sydney Corpus of Television Dialogue) and compare their frequency patterns with spontaneous face-to-face conversations in the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English and with narrative fiction and academic writing in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The results confirm that the selected features of orality are used regularly in performed fiction but less frequently than in spontaneous face-to-face interactions while they are rare in narrative fiction and almost entirely absent in academic writing. The results also show that the status of the transcriptions contained in these corpora needs to be assessed very carefully if they are to be used for a study of pragmatic features.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"30 1","pages":"341 - 360"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45309623","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":"Linguistic co-creativity and the performance of identity in the discourse of National Trust holiday cottage guestbooks","authors":"J. Gavins, S. Whiteley, Duygu Çandarlı","doi":"10.1177/09639470211047732","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470211047732","url":null,"abstract":"This article reports on some of the results of a project undertaken by researchers at the University of Sheffield with The National Trust in the UK, which seeks to examine the discourse found in guestbooks located in the Trust’s holiday rental cottages. Our key interests lie in the ways in which holidaymakers perform particular identities through the stylistic choices they make when writing entries in guestbooks, the role linguistic creativity plays in these performances, and the extent to which cognitive-linguistic analysis can help us understand guestbooks as socially and conceptually complex sites of linguistic interaction. Between 2014 and 2018, we collected over 800,000 words of data from 13 holiday cottages in two popular holiday regions in the UK: the Roseland Peninsula in South East Cornwall and the Port Quin area of Northern Cornwall. Our dataset was analysed and tagged using NVivo qualitative coding software, which enables the identification of both linguistic and non-linguistic features of the discourse and makes these items searchable. In the present discussion, we use Text World Theory to explore both the situational context of this discourse, or the ‘discourse-world’, and the conceptual structures, or ‘text-worlds’, which result from linguistic interaction in the minds of participants. We suggest that the unified examination of these two interacting levels of discourse enables a holistic investigation of the pragmatic and conceptual environment which surrounds the production and reception of the guestbook discourse; the linguistic and stylistic features of the texts themselves; and the mental representations that arise from them. In particular, we present a case-study analysis of the guestbooks of Caragloose, a three-bedroomed former farmhouse in South East Cornwall, which our study found to contain levels of linguistic creativity which were exceptional in our dataset. We outline the key stylistic features of this discourse and show how one collective linguistic endeavour in particular in Caragloose fosters an exceptionally experimental style across multiple entries. We reveal how the resulting discourse, although taking place between strangers separated in both time and space, exhibits a density of creativity more commonly associated with collaborative discourse produced between intimates in a face-to-face situation.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"30 1","pages":"381 - 406"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43672087","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":"Reading and analysing short story collections: An empirical study of readers' interpretation process of Benni's Il bar sotto il mare","authors":"Edward De Vooght, Guylian Nemegeer","doi":"10.1177/09639470211047817","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470211047817","url":null,"abstract":"This article confronts the theoretical tenets of reader-oriented short story collection theory and its implications for a literary analysis of Benni’s Il bar sotto il mare (1987) with the results of an empirical study of 12 readers. Through free recall tasks and open questions, we collected their recall of stories, specific passages, recurring topics and general interpretation to assess the processes of reticulation (i.e. searching for recurring elements in stories) and modification (i.e. modifying initial hypotheses based on the identification of new elements) advanced by Audet (2014). This confrontation revealed noticeably disagreeing results. Our findings suggest that flesh-and-blood readers adopt a more straightforward and intuitive approach when reading and interpreting collections as they are subject to a strong primacy effect, privilege personal appreciation of specific stories and passages, and rely on a disinclination to alter initial interpretative hypotheses. The findings pave the way for further investigation into the readers of SSCs.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"30 1","pages":"361 - 380"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49224587","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: Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction","authors":"Jun-xia Feng","doi":"10.1177/09639470211040737","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470211040737","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"30 1","pages":"308 - 312"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47084986","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: The poem as icon: A study in aesthetic cognition","authors":"Víctor Bermúdez","doi":"10.1177/09639470211040738","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470211040738","url":null,"abstract":"Fairclough N (1996) Border crossings: Discourse and social change in contemporary societies. In: Change and Language (BAAL 10): Multilingual Matters. Klemperer V (2000) The Language of the Third Reich. London: Athlone Press. Wales K (2008) Regional variation in English in the new millennium: looking to the future. In: Locher MA and Straessler J (eds) Standards and Norms in the English Language. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 47-68. Walters S (2020) The Borisaurus. London: Biteback.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"30 1","pages":"305 - 308"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45337889","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: Political English: Language and the Decay of Politics","authors":"K. Wales","doi":"10.1177/09639470211040722","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470211040722","url":null,"abstract":"beat poets, Dante and Petrarch, and the Confessions of St Augustine. All this of course establishes Dylan as a major artist. In contrast to these three dominant approaches to Dylan’s work, then, Hampton’s approach consists in exploring how ‘songs are made and how specific literary and musical techniques work to generate particular manifestations of style in song’ (p. 13). This emphasis on ‘style’ is of course from a stylistic viewpoint extremely promising. However, Hampton has a literary-critical rather than a stylistic understanding of ‘style’, seeing it in terms of how ‘artists manipulate different levels or historically defined registers of representation’ (p. 13), and of ‘the conventions that dominate a particular moment’ (p. 16). Despite his emphasis on ‘close analysis’ (p. 9), however, Hampton has disappointingly little to say about how Dylan’s songs really work–as complex linguistic phenomena. Hampton’s focus is primarily on how Dylan relates to other artists, and the trajectory of his analyses is always towards the thematic or meaningful level of the songs. As a consequence, he does not deal in any great depth with how Dylan creates meaningful effects by manipulating the sonic and syntactic levels of language. One important feature of Dylan’s work to which Hampton pays little or no attention, for example, is the way that Dylan manipulates his singing voice in order to create sonic ambiguity: it is very often simply impossible to be sure of what he is singing. For instance, the song ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ (the song to which Hampton devotes the most attention) contains a number of sonically ambiguous lines: does Dylan sing, ‘They never did like mama’s homemade dress, papa’s banquet wasn’t big enough’ (as I always thought) or ‘They never did like mama’s home address, papa’s bank book wasn’t big enough’ (as the official lyrics attest)? My point is that an approach rooted in stylistics rather than the close-analysis tradition of literary criticism would be able to say much more about how Dylan’s songs really work. Hampton’s book, then, is a timely reminder of why Dylan’s work matters, and his approach manages to avoid the usual pitfalls of Dylan criticism. It made me appreciate once more the depth and complexity of Dylan’s oeuvre (which has been the soundtrack to most of my life), and provided me with new insights into many of the songs. It certainly differs from, and is better than, most other work on Dylan. But there is still a book on Dylan to be written from the more fruitful perspective of stylistics.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"30 1","pages":"301 - 305"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48784276","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 patient act of adjustment’: Subjectivisation, adjectives and Jane Austen","authors":"Victorina González-Díaz","doi":"10.1177/09639470211023245","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470211023245","url":null,"abstract":"Previous scholarship on Jane Austen has often commented on the moral overtones of her lexical choices; more specifically, the fact that “incorrect” lexical innovations and fashionable words (i.e. new usages) tend to be deployed as part of the idiolect of foolish, gullible or morally reprehensible characters. By contrast, ethically sound characters normally move within the limits of established (‘old’) usages and the “correct” Standard English repertoire. Taking the historical linguistic concept of subjectivisation as starting point, this case-study explores the use of two adjectives (lovely and nice) in Austen’s novels. The article (a) demonstrates that a straightforward socio-moral classification of ‘old’ and ‘new’ word-senses in Austen’s fiction is not fully adequate and (b) advocates, in line with recent scholarship, a more nuanced approach to the study of her fictional vocabulary, where old and new senses of a word (in this case, lovely and nice) move across the idiolect of different character-types for ironic, character- and plot-building purposes.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"30 1","pages":"276 - 298"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/09639470211023245","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43266445","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}