The Linguistic turn in literary criticism and
philosophy
I. Philosophy and language
Nietzsche: genealogical method; hermeneutics of
suspicion
“What, then, is truth? A mobile army of
metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms
– in short, a sum of human relations which have
been poetically and rhetorically enhanced,
transposed, and embellished, and which after long
use seem fixed, canonical and binding to a people;
truths are illusions which we have forgotten are
illusions; metaphors which are worn out and
without sensuous power, coins which have lost
their picture and now matter only as metal, no
longer as coin.”
Logical positicism (Rudolf Carnap: “For logic,
actual language is never sufficiently perfect”);
Wittgenstein: philosophy is a critique of language
Novalis: “What we speak about is not present, is
not in our possession”.
The prisonhouse of language (J. Hillis Miller:
“Language is an airy and spacious prison, but it
remains a prison all the same”
“Language is a universal prostitute” (Karl Kraus)
Michel Foucault: the crisis of language – the
centrality of literature
Friedrich Schiller: poetic beauty is “the free autoaction (öncselekvés) of nature in the hobbles of
language”
II. The linguistic turn in literary criticism
Novalis: “Language strives to have nothing to do
with anything but itself – that is what makes it
such a wonderful and inexhaustible mystery”
Russian Formalism (and Czech and Polish)
Petersburg: OPOJAZ; Moscow Linguistic Circle
Viktor Shklovsky (Tristram Shandy and the
Theory of the Novel; How Don Quijote Was
Made), Osip Brik, Boris Eichenbaum (Az
irodalmi elemzés), Yury Tinyanov (Az irodalmi
tény), Boris Tomashevsky, Viktor Zhirmunsky
(Irodalom, poétika; Roman Jakobson (Hang –
jel – vers, 1972; A költészet grammatikája,
1982);
Vladimir
Propp
(A
népmese
morfológiája, 1995)
Symbolism: Potebnya; Futurism: Khlebnikov,
Mayakovsky
1. The Subject of Literary Scholarship
Eichenbaum: “The basis of our position was
and is that the object of literary science, as such,
must be the study of those specifics which
distinguish it fromany other material”
Jakobson: “The object of the science of
literature is not literature, but literariness – that
is, that which makes a given work a work of
literature”
The immanence of literature – The liberation of
the word
zaum - “meaning beyond reason” (suprarational
meaning)
2. Content and form
Shklovsky: “‘Artistic’ perception is that
perception in which we experience form –
perhaps not form alone, but certainly form.”
Lotman: form and content – life and living
tissue
3. Device or technique (priyom)
Defamiliarisation (ostranenie)
Shklovsky: “art exists that one may recover the
sensation of life; it exists to make one feel
things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of
art is to impart the sensation of things as they are
perceived and not as they are known. The
technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’
to make them difficult, to increase the difficulty
and length of perception because the process of
perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must
be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the
artfulnessof an object; the object is not
important.”
Jan
Mukařovsky:
foregrounding
(aktualizacije): the aesthetically intentional
distortion of linguistic components”
Narrative devices: fabula and sjuzet
Tomashevsky: “the fabula is the aggregate of
motifs in their logical, causal-chronological
order; the sjuzet is the aggregate of those same
motifs but having the relevance and the order
which they had in the original work ... [T]he
aesthetic function of the sjuzet is precisely this
bringing of an arrangement of motifs to the
attention of the reader. Real incidents, not
fictionalised by an author, may make a fabula. A
sjuzet is wholly an artistic creation.”
4. System, function
Tinyanov: “The work of art is not a closed
symmetrical whole, but the unfolding of a
dynamic unity; what we have between its
elements is not the static sign of equality and
correlation, but the dynamic sign of interrelation
and integration.”
“Each work of art is an unbalanced system,
where the stucturing principle is not dissolved in
the material; the two do not exactly ‘agree with’
each other, their relationship is excentric: the
structuring principle becomes visible through the
material.”
motivation
5. Interpretation
Boris Eichenbaum “How Gogol’s The Overcoat
Was Made”
Jan Mukarovsky
American New Criticism
John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn
Warren (Agrarians); Cleanth Brooks, W. K.
Wimsatt; René Wellek, Murray Krieger (Related
names: Yvor Winters, Kenneth Burke)
Journals: Southern Review (Brooks and Warren,
1935-42); Kenyon Review (Ransom, 1939- )
Textbooks: Brooks and Warren: Understanding
Poetry (1938), Understanding Fiction (1941)
Key Books: Ransom: The New Criticism (1941);
Brooks: The Well-Wrought Urn (1949); Wimsatt:
The Verbal Icon (1958); Tate: Essays of Four
Decades (1968); Krieger: The New Apologists for
Poetry (1956); Wimsatt and Brooks: Literary
Criticism: A Short History (1957); Wellek and
Austin Warren: Theory of Literature (1949)
W.K.Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley: “The
Intentional Fallacy”
„Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a
machine. One demands that it work. It is only
because an artifact works that we infer the
intention of the artificer. ‘A poem should not
mean but be.’ A poem can only be through its
meaning  since its medium is words  yet it is,
simply is, in the sense that we have no excuse for
inquiring what part is intended or meant... Poetry
succeeds because all or most of what is said or
implied is relevant; what is irrelevant has been
excluded, like lumps from puddings and 'bugs'
from machinery. In this respect poetry differs
from practical messages, which are succesful if
and only if we correctly infer the intention.”
A poem is not the author’s: “it is detached from
the author at birth and goes about the world
beyond his power to intend about it or control it.”
Wimsatt and Beardsley: “The Affective
Fallacy”
Brooks: “The Heresy of Paraphrase”
structure: “The structure meant is a structure of
meanings, evaluations, and interpretations; and
the principle of unity which informs it seems to
be one of balancing and harmonizing
connotations, attitudes, and meanings.”
Brooks: Irony is “the most general term that we
have for the kind of qualification which the
various elements in a context receive from the
context.” The result is “a unification of attitudes
into a hierarchy subordinated to a total and
governing attitude.”
The structure does not unite the conflicting
elements “by the simple process of allowing one
connotation to cancel out another, nor does it
reduce the contradictory attitudes to harmony by
a process of subtraction. The unity is not a unity
of the sort to be achieved by the reduction and
simplification appropriate to an algebraic
formula. It is a positive unity, not a negative; it
represents not a residue but an achieved
harmony.” (Brooks)
Tate: poetry “is a way of knowing something: if
the poem is a real creation, it is a kind of
knowledge that we did not possess before. It is
not knowledge ‘about’ something else; the poem
is the fullness of that knowledge.”
Structuralism and semiotics
1. Structuralist linguistics. Ferdinand de
Saussure:
langue — parole
Langue: “It is a fund accumulated by the
members of the community through the practice
of speech, a grammatical system existing
potentially in every brain, or more exactly in the
brains of a group of individuals; for the language
is never complete in any single individual, but
exists perfectly only in the collectivity”
(Saussure)
Noam Chomsky: (transformational) generative
linguistics
deep structure — surface structure
two axes of language: syntagmatic —
paradigmatic
The double nature of language:
a, Language as a system of differences.
Phonological model
“In the language itself, there are only
differences. Even more important than that is the
fact that, although in general a difference
presupposes positive terms between which the
difference holds, in a language there are only
differences, and no positive terms. Whether we
take the signifier or the signified, the language
includes neither ideas nor sounds existing prior
to the linguistic system, but only conceptual and
phonetic differences arising out of that system.
In a sign, what matters more than any idea or
sound associated with it is what other signs
surround it.” (Saussure)
phoneme – broken down into “distinctive
features” (Jakobson)
b, semiotic nature (the ability of lang. To refer to
the world)
Sign: signifier — signified (+ referent)
2. Structural anthropology
Claude
Lévi-Strauss:
The
Elementary
Structures of Kinship; The Savage Mind;
Structural Anthropology
“‘Kinship systems’, like ‘phonetic systems’, are
built by the mind on the level of unconscious
thought.”
3. Semiotics as the study of culture (Roland
Barthes’s Fashion as a System and
Mythologies) “as soon as there is society, every
usage is converted into a sign of that usage”
history (Michel Foucault); psychoanalysis
(Jacques Lacan); psychology (Jean Piaget);
film theory (Christian Metz)
4. Structuralist poetics and criticism
Czech
and
Polish
structuralism:
Jan
Mukařovsky, Roman Ingarden (The Literary
Work of Art, 1937)
Tzvetan Todorov (The Grammar of Decameron
[1969], The Poetics of Prose [1971]), Algirdas
Greimas (Structural Semantics [1966]), Julia
Kristeva (her early work) Gérard Genette
(Figures 1-3 [1966-72]), Michael Riffaterre
(The Semiotics of Poetry, 1978), Umberto Eco,
Seymour Chatman (Story and Discourse
[1978]), Jonathan Culler (his early work, esp.
Structuralist Poetics, 1975)
“the structuralist moment” (Paul de Man): to
conceentrate on the code for its own sake
a, linguistic criticism (Roman Jakobson)
definition of “literariness”; poetic function of
language; selection axis – combination axis
b, Yuri Lotman: literature as a second-order
semiotic system; literary competence
entropy
Barthes: What interests structuralist poetics
“will be the variations of meaning generated
and, as it were, capable of being generated by
works; it will not interpret symbols but describe
their polyvalency. In short, its objects will not be
the full meanings of the work but on the contrary
the empty meaning which supports them all”
(Critique et vérité)
c, narratology, narrative grammar; Vladimir
Propp: The Morphology of Folktales (1928)
7 roles and 31 functions
Structuralist reading:
- surface – depth
- eliminating referentiality (Barthes: “Narrative
does not portray or imitate anything; … In a
narrative, nothing happens from a referential
point of view. What happens (ce qui arrive) is
language itself, the adventure of language”
- eliminating the subject as source of meaning
(Lévi-Strauss: “We are not, therefore, claiming
to show how men think in the myths, but rather
how the myths think themselves out in men and
without men’s knowledge”)
- freezing narrative, eliminating temporality,
historicity and context (parole)
Manfred Frank: “Following structuralism,
understanding a text would amount to the
uncovering of the principles of its construction”
Literature
as
privileged,
enlightened
language
Rilke: “The poet’s task is increased by the
strange obligation to set apart his word from the
words of everyday life thoroughly and
fundamentally. No word in the poem is identical
with the same-sounding word in common use
and conversation”.
(Mary-Louise Pratt: “the poetic language
fallacy”
Barthes: Writing Degree Zero – density of the
poetic word
“Each word is an unexpected object, a Pandora’s
box from which fly out all the potentialities of
language”
Susan Sontag; Mallarmé: the task of poetry is to
purify, by means of words, our world that is
shackled by words; art must launch a total
assault on language
Todorov: “Literature … exists precisely as an
effort to say what ordinary discourse cannot and
does not say. … It is only by virtue of this
difference from everyday discourse that
literature aan come into being and exist”
Julia Kristeva: Revolution in poetic language
J. Hillis Miller: the linguistic moment
Paul de Man: unlike everyday and scientific
language, literature begins on the far side of the
knowledge (of the non-coincidence of sign and
referent); the only form of language free from
the fallacy of unmediated expression (Blindness
and Insight)
A literary text is any text that signifies its own
rhetorical mode and prefigures its own
misunderstanding
Fictionality
Two ways of looking at literariness:
1. Formal, linguistic criteria (rhyme, tropes)
2. Fictionality (modality)
Aristotle: poiesis (the poet: maker of stories)
two functions of language: rhetorics and poetics
mimesis can be translated as „fiction”
Genette: intransitivity (pseudoreference)
Fiction – fingere (dheigh ~ dough)
Truth and fictionality
„Sachez-le: ce drame n’est ni une fiction, ni un
roman. All is true.” (Balzac: Père Goriot)
„imaginary gardens with real toads in them”
(Marianne Moore)
„It was Napoleon who had such a passion for
chicken that he kept his chefs working around
the clock.” (Winterson: The Passion)
Historical – imaginary – supernatural entities
„All happy families are more or less disimilar;
all unhappy ones are more or less similar”.
(Nabokov: Ada)
Reference and fictionality
Searle: fiction is pretended reference
Strawson: fiction is neither true nor false
Nelson Goodman: description-of-Pickwick
Thomas Pavel: the truth of literary texts „is not
recursively definable from the truth of the
individual sentences that constitute them”.
segregationalists – integrationalists
Meinong: object = list of propositions (Borges:
„Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”)
Pragmatic views of fictionality
(Saul Kripke, Hilary Putnam, John Dewey,
Richard Rorty, Nelson Goodman)
„narrative truth” is that which works (Arthur
Danto, psychoanalysis)
Anthropological views
Wolfgang Iser: real – fictive (fictionalising act)
– imaginary
Fictitionality and literary criticism
John Searle: there is „a priori no textual
property, syntactical or semantic, that will
identify a text as a work of fiction”
Gregory Currie: „facts about style, narrative
form, and plot structure may count as evidence
that the work is fiction, but these are not the
things that make it so”
Jakobson: poetic function ≈ fictionality
Textual markers of fictionality?
„Once upon a time”; „Hol volt, hol nem volt”
citation, intertextuality, parody (Don Quijote)
salient structures
„Under the branch hung eighteen great
homemaker nuts. Hollowed out they were, and
cemented into place with cement distilled from
the acetoyle plant. ... From the thick foliage
nearby came a tumbler, flying to the girl’s
shoulder. The tumbler rotated, a fleecy umbrella,
whose separate spokes controlled its direction.
… Under the leaf, a trappersnapper had moved
into position, sensing the presence of prey
through the single layer of foliage.” (Brian
Aldiss: Hothouse)
„This new world weighs a yatto-gram. But
everything is trial-size; tread-on-me tiny or
blurred-out-of-focus huge. There are leaves that
have grown as big as cities, and there are birds
that nest in cockleshells. On the white sand there
are long-toed clawprints deep as nightmares, and
there are rock pools in hand-hollows finned by
invisible fish.” (Winterson: The Stone Gods)
Realism, verisimilitude and fictional truth
„One evening of late summer, before the
nineteenth century had reached one-third of its
span, a young man and woman, the latter
carrying a child, were approaching the large
village of Weyon-Priors, in Upper Wessex, on
foot.” (Hardy: The Mayor of Casterbridge)
„Strether’s first question, when he reached the
hotel, was about his friend; yet on his learning
that Waymarsh was apparently not to arrive til
evening he was not wholly disconcerted.”
(Henry James: The Ambassadors)
„Ten more glorious days without horses! So
thought Second-Lieutenant Andrew ChaseWhite, recently commissioned in the
distinguished regiment of King Edward’s Horse,
as he pottered contentedly in a garden on the
outskirts of Dublin on a sunny Sunday afternoon
in April nineteen sixteen.” (Iris Murdoch: The
Red and the Green)
„I am alone here now, under cover. Outside it is
raining, outside you walk through the rain with
your head down, shielding your eyes with one
hand while you stare ahead nevertheless, a few
yards ahead, at a few yards of wet asphalt; …
Outside the sun is shining, there is no tree, no
bush to cast a shadow, and you walk under the
sun shielding your eyes with one hand while you
stare ahead, only a few yards in front of you, at a
few yards of dusty asphalt.” (Alain RobbeGrillet)
Michel Riffaterre: verisimilitude is an effect
the epic preterite (Barthes)
free indirect discourse
incompleteness
Roland Barthes: the „reality effect”
„an old piano supported, under a barometer, a
pyramidal heap of boxes and cartons” (Flaubert:
Un coeur simple)
Transgression in culture, language and
literature
1. The anthropological perspective; the
dynamics and politics of transgression
“Remember, and fear to transgress” (Milton,
Paradise Lost, VI.1)
„The law brings wrath, but where there is no law
there is no transgression” (Rom 4.14)
law vs. desire, sacred vs. profane, transgression
vs. transcendence
the dynamics of transgression: waste, excess,
non-productive expenditure (potlatch)
„any act of expressive behaviour which inverts,
contradicts, abrogates, or in some fashion
presents an alternative to commonly held
cultural codes, values and norms, be they
linguistic, literary or artistic, religious, social
and political”; „not just the infraction of binary
structures, but movement into an absolutely
negative space beyond the structure of
significance itself” (Barbara Babcock; Peter
Stallybrass and Allon White: The Politics and
Poetics of Transgression)
taboo and transgression; pleasure and anguish
(nullum crimen sine legen)
Georges Bataille: „a profound complicity of
law and the violation of laws”; „a taboo is there
in order to be violated”; transgression „suspends
the law without subverting it”
Michel Foucault: „Profanation in a world which
no longer recognizes any positive meaning in the
sacred  is this not more or less what we may
call transgression? In that zone which our
culture affords for our gestures and speech,
transgression prescribes … a way of
recomposing the empty form of the sacred, its
absence, through which it becomes all the more
scintillating” („Preface to Transgression”)
textual and political transgression
the subversion/containment controversy
Marcelin Pleynet: „In our time, no more
transgression, no more subversion”, only „a
parody of transgression, a parody of subversion,
a simulacrum.”
Jonathan Dollimore: „Resistance from the
margins seems to be doomed to replicate
internally the strategies, structures, and even the
values of the dominant.”
Georges Balandier: „The supreme ruse of
power is to allow itself to be contested ritually in
order to consolidate itself more effectively”
2. The poetics of transgression; language,
literature, transgression
„Language is a fascist” (Roland Barthes)
„A sentence is but a cheveril glove to a good
wit; how quickly the wrong side may be turned
outward … words are very rascals” (Feste in
Twelfth Night, III.1)
Harold Whitehall: „Literature is nothing but
organised violence on language”
Deviation/deviancy
„descriptive writing is very rarely entirely
accurate and during the reign of Olaf Quimby II
some legislation was passed in an attempt to put
a stop to poetic exaggerations and introduce
some honesty into reporting. Thus, if a legend
said of a notable hero that ’all men spoke of his
prowess’ any bard who valued his life would
add hastily ’except for a couple of people in his
home villagew who thought he was a liar, and
quite a lot of other people who never really
heard of him.’ Poetic simile was strictly limited
to statements such as ’ his mighty steed was as
fast as the wind on a fairly calm day, say about
Force Three’, and any loose talk about a beloved
having a face that launched a thousand ships
would have to be backed by evidence that the
object of desire did indeed look like a bottle of
champagne.” (Terry Pratchett, The Light
Fantastic)
decorum
„First follow NATURE, and your Judgment
frame
By her just Standard, which is still the same;
Unerring NATURE, still divinely bright,
One clear, unchang’d, and Universal Light,
Life, Force, and Beauty, must to all impart,
At once the Source, and End, and Test of Art.
Art from that fund each just supply provides,
Works without show, and without pomp
presides
...
Some, to whom Heav’n in wit has been profuse,
Want as much more to turn it to its use;
For Wit and Judgment often are at Strife,
Tho’ meant each other’s Aid, like Man and
Wife.
’Tis more to guide than spur the Muse’s Steed,
Restrain his Fury than provoke his Speed;
The wing’d Courser, like a gen’rous Horse,
Shows most true Mettle when you check his
Course.
Those RULES of old, discover’d not devised,
Are Nature still, but Nature methodiz’d:
Nature, like liberty, is but restrain’d
By the same laws which first herself ordain’d.
Hear how learn’d Greece her useful rules
indites,
When to repress and when to indulge our flights:
...
Just precepts thus from great examples giv’n,
She drew from them what they derived from
Heav’n.
(Alexander Pope: An Essay on Criticism)
solecism, anacoluthon, aposiopesis, pleonasm
Strategies: thematic (e.g. obscenity)
vs. Formal/linguistic deviation
adiectio, detractio, transmutatio
inversion, hybridity, imitation, excess
„He caressed and parted with his fleshy folds …
her lank loose, nearly lumbus-length (when she
threw back her head as now) black silks as he
tried to get at her bed-warm splenius.” (V.
Nabokov: Ada)
„The sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy; he wis
trembling. Ah wis jist sitting thair, focusing oan
the telly, tryng not tae notice the cunt. He wis
bringing me doon.” (Irvine Welsh:
Trainspotting)
“Fog was so dense, bird that had been disturbed
went flat into a balustrade and slowly fell, dead,
at her feet. There it lay and Miss Fellowes
looked up to where that pall of fog was twenty
foot above and out of which it had fallen,
turning over once. She bent down and took a
wing then entered a tunnel in front of her, and
this had DEPARTURES lit up over it, carrying
her dead pigeon.” (Henry Green: Party Going)
hybridity
“to break the pentameter, that was the first
heave” (Ezra Pound, Canto 81)
“the oily smoothness of the usual five-foot
iambic meter” (B. Brecht)
“What are we doing here, that is the question”
(Vladimir in Waiting for Godot)
„The waiting gull, a greater intellect, was too
nervous of the bodies in the dunes to help itself,
just yet, to any of their titbits on display, the wet
and ragged centres of their wounds, the soft
flesh of their inner legs, their eyes, the pink parts
of their mouths.”
„No one had plugged their leaking rectums with
a wad of lint, or taped their eyelids shut, or
tugged against their lower jaws to close their
mouths. No one had cleaned their teeth or
combed their hair.” (Jim Crace: Being Dead)
imitation
Augusto Roa Bastos: Yo el supremo
parody
excess
Antonin Artaud: „This is now the only use
which language can have: an instrument of
madness, of uprooting of thought, of revolt, a
labyrinth of unreason, not a dictionary into
which the pedants who dwell on the banks of the
Seine direct their mental contractions.”
abstract vs. material language, dictionary vs.
scream; language and the body
„ ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre
and gimble in the wabe: / All mimsy were the
borogoves, / And the mome raths outgrabe.”
(Lewis Carroll: „Jabberwocky”)
„riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of
shore to bend of bay, brings us by a
commodious vicus of recirculation back to
Howth Castle and Environs.” (Joyce: Finnegans
Wake)
Julia Kristeva: chora (Revolution in Poetic
Language)
Jean-Jacques Lecercle:
Language of délire
Rhetoric and tropes
“the poet is a penguin” (e. e. cummings)
“metaphors are much more tenacious than facts”
(Paul de Man)
RHETORIC AND THE ANTI-RHETORICAL
STANCE
art of eloquence  classification of tropes
invention, disposition, memory, elocution,
delivery
Petrus Ramus (1546): dialectic  rhetoric
(matter/content  form)
“up rose
Belial, in act more graceful and humane;
A fairer person lost not Heav’n, he seem’d
For dignity compos’d and high exploit:
But all was false and hollow; though his Tongue
Dropt Manna, and could make the worse appear
The better reason, to perplex and dash
Maturest counsels: for his thoughts were low;
…yet he pleas’d the ear
And with persuasive accent thus began.”
(Milton: Paradise Lost, II, 108ff)
Francis Bacon: “men began to hunt more after
words than matter”
The Sophists  Socrates (in Plato’s Gorgias):
“There is no need for rhetoric to know the facts
at all, for it has hit upon a means of persuasion
that enables it to appear in the eyes of the
ignorant to know more than those who really
know.”
Plato (in Phaedo): “the man who plans to be an
orator ‘need not’ learn what is really just or true,
but only what seems so to the crowd”.
Cato: rem tene, verba sequentur (‘seize the
thing, the words will follow’)
Quintilian (and Cicero): “No man can speak
well who is not good himself” (eloquence
follows from good character and grasp of truth)
Aristotle: rhetoric is predicated on “the defects
of the hearers” (Rhetoric)
Puritan ideal of the “plain style”
“painted sermons” are “like the Painted Glass in
the windows that keep out the Light” (Richard
Baxter)
“Eloquence, like the fair sex” (John Locke)
Bishop Thomas Sprat (1667): praising the
members of the Royal Society for rejecting “all
the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of
style: to return back to primitive purity, and
shortness, when men delivered so many things,
almost in an equal number of words. They have
exacted from their members a close, naked,
natural way of speaking: positive expressions;
clear senses; a native easiness: bringing all
things as near the Mathematical plainness, as
they can.”
RHETORIC AS THE STUDY OF TROPES
Figure (e.g. ellipsis, parallelism, congeries) vs.
trope
Theories
of
metaphor
(meta-pherein,
tra(n)slatio)
Aristotle: “metaphor consists in giving (or
transferring: epiphora) the thing a name that
belongs to something else; the transference
being from genus to species a, or from species
to genus b, or from species to species c, or on
grounds of analogy d” (Poetics)
a “the ship lying still in the harbour”
b “10.000 noble deeds perpetrated by
Odysseus”
c “I could not digest the information”
d “ ‘Tis the yeares midnight, / and it is the
dayes” (John Donne)
substitution  deviation  interaction
“we find poetic truth struck out by the collision
rather than the collusion of images” (Cecil Day
Lewis)
I. A. Richards: tenor, vehicle, ground
„the fringed curtains of thine eyes” (The
Tempest, I, ii)
classical view (decoration) – Romantic view
(vehicle of truth, essence of language)
Cognitive theory (love is…; death is…; life
is…;)
“What thou art we know not;
What is most like thee?”
(Shelley, “To a Skylark”)
Aristotle: “strange words simply puzzle us;
ordinary words convey only what we know
already; it is from metaphor that we can get hold
of something fresh” …“a good metaphor implies
an intuitive perception of the similarity in
dissimilars”
Paul Ricoeur: metaphor is the process by which
discourse unleashes the power that fictions have
to redescribe reality
metaphor ~ fiction; poetic reference, discovery
metaphor ~ model  Suzanne Langer: “every
new idea assumes the form of a metaphor”
“Every man is an island”
„If music be the food of love, play on
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.”
(Twelfth Night, I.i)
„My head is a city, and various pains have now
taken up residence in various parts of my face. A
gum-and-bone ache has launched a cooperative
on my upper west side. Across the park,
neuralgia has rented a duplex in my fashinable
east seventies. Downtown, my chin throbs with
lofts of jaw-loss. As for my brain, my hundreds,
it’s Harlem up there, expanding in the summer
fires. It boils and swells. One day soon it is
going to burst.” (Martin Amis: Money)
I have „these perverse thoughts, these crashers,
dossing in my head. With their milk cartons on
the windowsill and their damp double-mattresses
on the floor, they grow in confidence every day.
They were nervous at first, it’s true, but no one
has tried very hard to evict them and they’re
used to the uncertainty, they are used to living
rough.”
Literal and figurative language
Fr. Nietzsche: „What, then, is truth? A mobile
army of metaphors, metonymies, and
anthropomorphisms  in short, a sum of human
relations which have been poetically and
rhetorically
enhanced,
transposed,
and
embellished, and which after long use seem
fixed, canonical and binding to a people: truths
are illusions which we have forgotten are
illusions; metaphors which are worn out and
without sensuous power, coins which have lost
their picture and now matter only as metal, no
longer as coin.” („On Truth and Lies in an
Extramoral Sense”)
Man: the „metaphorical animal”
Concepts: the residue of figures
Is all language figurative?
“Imagine, then, a flat landscape, dark for the
moment, but even so conveying to a girl running
in the still deeper shadow cast by the wall … an
idea of immensity, of distance” (Paul Scott: The
Jewel in the Crown)
Metaphor and other tropes
“Here lay Duncan,
His silver skin laced with his golden blood,
And his gashed stabs looked like a breach in
nature
For ruin’s wasteful entrance” (Macbeth II, iii)
„The heart, poor fellow,
pounding on his little tin drum
with a faint death beat
The heart, that eyeless beetle,
enormous that Kafka beetle
running panicked through his maze,
never stopping one foot after the other
one hour after the other
until he gags on an apple
and it’s all over.” (Anne Sexton)
simile (less effective?)
 LLRH’s red cape: „it was red, red as the Swiss
flag,
yes it was red, red as chicken blood” (Anne
Sexton)
 the wolf „was as heavy as a cemetery”
„Richard turned forty. Turned is right. Like a
half-cooked steak, like a wired cop, like an old
leaf, like milk, Richard turned.” (Martin Amis:
The Information)
 „the earth is blue like an orange” (Paul Éluard)
prosopopoeia, allegory, symbol, synaesthesia,
oxymoron, paradox, zeugma, euphemism
 “War is peace” (Orwell: Nineteen EightyFour)
„He was fast asleep,
dreaming in his cap and gown,
wolfless” (Anne Sexton)
metonymy
 ships sail the sea – keels plough the deep
 „an aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick”
(W. B. Yeats: „Byzantium”)
 „Grandmother looked strange,
a dark and hairy disease it seemed” (Anne
Sexton: „LRRH”)
 “we have been created of dust and into dust
shall we return”
- candle in a churchyard
synecdoche
catachresis (“the ships ploughed the sea”; to
grasp; mother tongue)
„I am a string strung over wide, roaring
resonances.
Things are hollow violins / full of groaning
dark” (R. M. Rilke)
reliteralisation
“Sometimes I feel that life is passing me by, not
slowly either, but with ropes of steam and sparkspattered wheels and a hoarse roar of power or
terror. It’s passing, yet I’m the one who is doing
all the moving. I’m not the station, I’m not the
stop: I’m the train. I’m the train.” (Martin Amis:
Money)
Metaphor (tropes) and narrative
iconicity
Paul Ricoeur: plot as trope (peripeteia) parables
David Lodge: metaphorical and metonymical
narratives
fantasy vs. trope
„This summer the roses are blue” (Breton)
Discourse and literature
I. story/discourse (histoire/discours,
fabula/sjuzet)
II. Michel Foucault (The Archeology of
Knowledge; The Order of Things; The History
of Sexuality)
“A statement is always an event that neither the
language (langue) nor the meaning can quite
exhaust.”
discourse – truth, knowledge, power
Discourse: “a regulated practice that accounts
for a number of statements”
“practices which systematically form the objects
of which they speak”
Edward Said: Orientalism
Literature as discourse; circulation
(commentary, academic discipline); the book
and the oeuvre
III. Mikhail Bakhtin
slovo
dialogicity: „the word is born in a dialogue as a
living rejoinder within it; the word is shaped in
dialogic interaction with an alien word that is
already in the object”
heteroglossia (raznorecie) „Every word gives off
the scent of a profession, a genre, a current, a
party, a particular work, a particular man, a
generation, an era, a day, and an hour. Every
word smells of the contexts in which it has lived
its intense social life; all worda and all forms are
inhabited by intentions” (intertextuality)
polyphonic novel: „a plurality of independent
and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a
genuine polyphony of fully valid voices”
a, voices of characters (discourses)
“Indeed I have little doubt,” said Flora, running
on with astonishing speed, and pointing her
conversation with nothing but commas, and very
few of them, “that you are married to some
Chinese lady, being in China so long and being
in business and naturally desirous to settle and
extend your connexion nothing was more likely
than that you should propose to a Chinese lady
and nothing was more natural I am sure than that
the Chinese lady should accept you and think
herself very well off too, I only hope she is not a
Pagodian dissenter.” (Little Dorrit, Book I, Ch.
13)
“The major characteristics discoverable by the
stranger in Mr. F’s Aunt, were extreme severity
and grim taciturnity; sometimes interrupted bu a
propensity to offer remarks, in a deep warning
voice, which, being totally uncalled for by
anything said by anybody, and traceable to no
association of ideas, confounded and terrified
the mind. Mr. F’s Aunt may have thrown in
these observations on some system of her own,
and it may have been ingenious, por even subtle;
but the key to it was wanted.” (Little Dorrit)
b, extraliterary discourses (letters, diaries etc.)
„it seems as if the novel is denied any primary
means for verbally appropriating reality, that it
has no approach of its own, and therefore
requires the help of other genres to re-process
reality; the novel has the appearance of being
merely a secondary syncretic unification of other
seemingly primary verbal genres”
c, literary discourses (parody, pastiche etc.):
„Tristram Shandy is the most typical novel”
(Shklovsky)
Representations of the other’s voice:
stylisation, skaz, parody; hybridisation
1. „The conference was held at four or five
o’clock in the afternoon, when all the region of
Harley Street, Cavendish Square, was resonant
of carriege-wheels and double-knocks. It had
reached this point when Mr. Merdle came home,
from his daily occupation of causing the British
name to be more and more respected in all parts
of the civilised globe, capable of the
appreciation of world-wide commercial
enterprise and gigantic combinations of skill and
capital. For though nobody knew with the least
precision what Mr. Merdle’s business was,
except that it was to coin money, these were the
terms in which it was the last new polite reading
of the parable of the camel and the needle’s eye
to accept without enquiry.” (Little Dorrit, Book
I, Ch. 33)
2. “As a vast fire will fill the air to a great
distance with its roar, so the sacred flame which
the mighty Barnacles had fanned caused the air
to resound more and more, with the name of
Merdle. It was deposited on every lip, and
carried into every ear. There never was, there
never had been, there never again should be,
such a man as Mr. Merdle. Nobody, as
aforesaid, knew what he had done; but
everybody knew him to be the greatest that had
appeared.”
3. “Physician had engaged to break the
intelligence in Harley Street. Bar could not at
once return to his inveiglements of the most
enlightened and remarkable jury he had ever
seen in that box, with whom, he could tell his
learned friend, no shallow sophistry would go
down, and no unhappily abused professional tact
and skill prevail (this was the way he meant to
begin with them); so he said he would go too,
and would loiter to and fro near the house while
his friend was inside.”
Ambiguity, humour and literature
ambiguity; vagueness; obscurity; contradiction;
„In the beginning was the pun.” (Beckett,
Murphy)
„Nothing ruins a joke more completely than
linguistic analysis.” (D. Crystal)
relativity (heavy people – light elephants);
lexical under-determination (animal, car); deixis,
indexical words
„The Forest of Skund was indeed enchanted, and
was also the only forest in the whole universe to
lexical  referential  syntactic („I once shot an
be called  in the local language  Your Finger
elephant in my pajamas” – Groucho Marx)
You Fool, which was the literal meaning of the
polysemy, homonymy, homophony
„The brown cat sat on the red mat.”
William Empson: ambiguity is „when
alternative interpretations might be offered
without sheer misreading”
Paul de Man about grammar and rhetoric;
rhetorical questions („What is the difference?”)
„O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the glance?”
(Yeats: „Among School Children”)
word Skund. … When the first explorers arrived,
they filled in the blank spaces on their maps by
grabbing the nearest native, pointing at some
distant landmark, speaking very clearly in a loud
voice, and writing down whatever the bemused
man told them. Thus were immortalised in
generations of atlases such geographical oddities
as Just a Mountain, I Don’t Know, What?, and,
of course, Your Finger You Fool.”
(Terry Pratchett: The Light Fantastic)
„’You’re strangers?’ said the man.
’Actually we know one another quite ’
Twowflower began, and fell silent.”
Bishop Wilkins (1668), Rudopf Carnap and
logical positivism
The utopian language „takes away one’s
freedom to decide what one wishes to ’mean’ by
a word”
S. Rushdie: „I must work fast, faster than
Scheherezade, if I am to end up meaning  yes,
meaning  something. I admit it: above all
things, I fear absurdity”. (Midnight’s Children)
Ambiguity in literature
Coleridge: „poetry gives most pleasure when
only generally and not perfectly understood”.
rhetorical category: amphibole, syllepsis, pun
opera aperta (Umberto Eco); represented
objectivities (Roman Ingarden); allegory vs.
symbol
„I expired at two o’clock of a Friday afternoon
in the month of August, 1869, at my lovely
suburban home in Catumby.” (Machado de
Assis, Epitaph of a Small Winner)
„That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the
cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds
sang.” (Shakespeare, Sonnet LXXV)
„Bacchus that first from out the purple grape,
Crushed the sweet poison of misused wine”
(Milton, „Comus”)
„When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide,
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more
bent
To serve therewith my maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide,
Doth God exact day-labour, light denied,
I fondly ask; but Patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts, who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best, his state
Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.”
Tűnődöm olykor, mért szállt rám homály
Éltem felén? E tág föld vak legén
Talentumom tétlen mért rejtem én,
Mely így elásva bennem kész halál?
Ha majd a számonkérő óra száll,
Uram feddése nem lesz-é kemény?
’Mit kezdjek így, ha nincs munkámra fény?’ 
Lázongok halkan. Ám vigaszt talál
Türelmem és szól: ’Senki sem viszen
Méltó munkát Elé. Csak tűrd szelíd
Igáját, úgy a jó. Hisz ő a szent
Király. A szárazföldön és vizen
Sürögteti szolgái ezreit,
S az is cselédje, ki csak vár s mereng.” (Tóth
Árpád ford.)
Humour
cultural embeddedness  pragmatics of humour
 verbal mechanisms
Mr. Stevens in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of
the Day (bantering)
(1) Bergson (automatism, „the mechanical
encrusted on the living”)
„Officer accepting bride”
spoonerism: „You have deliberately tasted two
worms and you can leave Oxford by the town
drain.”
Jack aranylovon érkezett, Joe ezüstön, Charles
bronzon.
Be alert! England needs lerts.
According to Freud, what comes between fear
and sex?
Nothing is kinder to the hands than Fairy Liquid,
so next time you wash the dishes, use nothing.
Marriage is not a word, but a sentence.
Harwich for the continent, Frinton for the
incontinent.
Karl Marx’s grave  another Communist plot.
Education kills by degrees.
Tóth Gyula bádogos és vízvezetékszerelő.
What is a myth?
(2) Contrast theory (incongruity, discrepancy)
(Plato, Kant)
portmanteau words (slithy); anachronism;
anticlimax
zeugma (It was feared that the rioters might
break the Queen’s peace and a few heads)
(3) Defamiliarisation theory; relief (release)
„’What shall we do?’ said Twoflower.
’Panic?’ said Rincewind hopefully.”
reliteralisation; caricature, jokes and tropes
Jean Paul Richter: a metaphor is a priest in
disguise who will join any copule in marriage
(Vischer: „ especially couples whose marriage is
frowned upon by their respective families”)
(4) Superiority theory (Hobbes, Freud)
irony, parody, imitation
baring the artifice, breaking the frame; playing
with clichés; allusions
„’You read much, John?
’Read what?
’Fiction.
’Do you?
’Oh sure. It gives me all kinds of ideas. I like
the sound and the fury,’ he added enigmatically.
That’s what rerading does to you: you start
saying things like that. (Martin Amis: Money)
„Ankh-Morpork! Pearl of cities!
This is not a completely accurate description, of
course  it was not round and shiny  but even
its worst enemies would agree that if you had to
liken Ankh-Morpork to anything, then it might
as well be a piece of rubbish covered with the
diseased secretions of a dying mollusc.”
„It was a still night, tinted with the promise of
dawn. A crescent moon was just setting. AnkhMorpork, largest city in the lands around the
Circle Sea, slept.
That statement is notreally true.
On the one hand, those parts of the city which
normally concerned themselves with, for
example, selling vegetables, shoeing horses, …
on the whole, slept. Unless they had insomnia.
Or had got up in the night, as it might be, to go
to the lavatory. On the other hand, many of the
less law-abiding citizens were wide awake and,
for instance, climbing through windows that
didn’t belong to them, slitting throats, mugging
one another… But most of the animals were
asleep, except for the rats. And the bats, too, of
course. As far as the insects were concerned…
The point is that descriptive writing is very
rarely entirely accurate, and during the reign of
Olaf Quimby II some legislation was passed in a
determined attempt to put a stop to this sort of
thing and introduce some honesty into reporting.
Thus, if a legend said of a hero that ’all men
spoke of his prowess’ any bard who valued his
life would add hastily ’except for a couple of
people in his home village who thought he was a
liar, and quite a lot of other people who had
never really heard of him”. Poetic simile was
strictly limited to statements like ’his mighty
steed was as fleet as the wind on a fairly calm
day, say about Force Three’, and any loose talk
about a beloved having a face that launched a
thousand ships would have to be backed by
evidence that the object of desire did indeed
look like a nottle of champagne.
Quimby was eventually killed by a disgruntled
poet during an experiment conducetd in the
palace grounds to prove the disputed accuracy
of the proverb ’The pen is mightier than the
sword’, and in his memory it was amended to
include the phrase ’only if the sword is very
small and the pen is very sharp’.
So approximately sisxty-seven, maybe sixtyeight, percent of the city slept.”
„’A necromancer!’ said Rincewind.
The old woman across the fire shrugged and
pulled a pack of greasy cards from some unseen
pocket.
Despite the deep frost outside, the atmosphere
inside the yurt was like a blacksmith’s armpit
and the wizard was already sweating heavily.
Horse dung made a good fuel, but the Horse
People had a lot to learn about air conditioning,
starting with what it meant.
’What’s neck romance?’ she whispered.
’Necromancy. Talking to the dead,’ he
expalined.
’Oh,’ she said, vaguely disappointed.
They had dined on horse meat, horse cheese,
horse black pudding, horse d’oeuvres and a thin
beer that Rincewind didn’t want to speculate
about.”
The paradoxes of the performative
Performativity: linguistics – cultural theory
(Judith Butler)
Speech-act theory and literature
Felicity conditions (Grice)
J. L. Austin: „A performative utterance will, for
example, be in a peculiar way hollow or void if
said by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in
a poem, or spoken in soliloquy. This apples in
any and every utterance – a sea-change in
special circumstances. Language in such
circumstances is used not seriously, but in ways
parasitic upon its normal use – ways which fall
under the doctrine of the etiolations of
language.”
Literary language use: parasitic, derivative, nonserious, pretence (Searle), quasi-speech acts
(Richard Ohmann)
Paradoxes of the performative
Failures of performative speech acts: misfire or
abuse
Constative – performative
Locution,illicution, perlocution („It is raining”)
„It is extremely sweet to seduce a young
beauty’s heart to submission, through a hundred
flatteries ... But once you are master, there is no
more to say, nor anything left to wish for; the
best part of the passion is spent” (Molière: Don
Juan)
Promise –épouser (spondere)
“Promise me friendship, but perform none,”
(Timon to Alcibiades (Timon of Athens, IV, iii)
Austin: “Very commonly the same sentence is
used on different occasions of utterance in both
ways, performative and constative, … the thing
seems hopeless from the start” (How to Do
Things With Words).
Word magic (incantation, spell, etc.)
“Let there be light;” “Let there be a firmament in
the midst of the waters”; “Let us make man in
Our image, according to Our likeness” (Gen. 1:
3, 6, 26). “In the beginning was the Word, and
the Word was with God” (John 1: 1).
“man lives from every word that proceeds from
the mouth of the LORD” (Deut. 8:3).
Jesus; thr truth of the gospels
Declarations: Austin’s exercitives (“a decision
that something is to be so”); here “saying makes
it so” and “we bring about changes through our
utterances”
John Searle: “Declarations bring about some
alternation in the status or condition of the
referred to object or objects solely by virtue of
the fact that the declaration has been
successfully performed.”
We, therefore, the Representatives of the United
States of America, in General Congress,
Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of
the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do,
in the Name, and by Authority of the good
People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and
declare, That these United Colonies are, and of
Right ought to be Free and Independent States,
that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the
British Crown, and that all political connection
between them and the State of Great Britain, is
and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as
Free and Independent States, they have full
Power to levy War, conclude Peace contract
Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all
other Acts and Things which Independent States
may of right do. (Thomas Jefferson, The
Declaration of Independence)
Sandy Petrey: “It was through speaking in the
name of the American people that the delegates
produced a people to name; it was by invoking
an authority that they established an authority to
invoke.”
Derrida: the signers “do not exist as an entity,
the entity does not exist before this declaration,
not as such. If it gives birth to itself, as free and
independent subject, as possible signer, this can
hold only in the act of signature. The signature
invents the signer.”
The “Proclamation” of Eugene Jolas of 1929
(from the avant-garde magazine transition:
“[...] we hereby declare that
1. THE REVOLUTION IN THE ENGLISH
LANGUAGE IS AN ACCOMPLISHED FACT.
2. THE IMAGINATION IN SEARCH OF A
FABULOUS WORLD
UNCONFINED.
IS
AUTONOMOUS
AND
[...]
6. THE LITERARY CREATOR HAS THE
RIGHT TO DISINTEGRATE THE PRIMAL MATTER
OF WORDS IMPOSED ON HIM BY TEXT-BOOKS
AND DICTIONARIES.
7. HE HAS THE RIGHT TO USE WORDS OF
HIS OWN FASHIONING AND TO DISREGARD
EXISTING GRAMMATICAL AND SYNTACTICAL
LAWS.”