DISCOURSE
by Don L. F. Nilsen
and Alleen Pace Nilsen
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More Fact than Fiction
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A Novel Perspective
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Reading and Writing
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What time is it?
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Capital D Discourse
• “Discourse with a big “D” is always
more than just language. Discourses
are ways of being in the world, or forms
of life which integrate words, acts,
values, beliefs, attitudes, social
identities, as well as gestures, glances,
body position, and clothes.”
(Gee 19)
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• “In the end a Discourse is a
`dance’ that exists in the abstract
as a coordinated pattern of
words, deeds, values, beliefs,
symbols, tools, objects, times,
and places in the here and now
as a performance that is
recognizable as just such a
coordination.”
(Gee 19)
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DIAGOLIC AND INTERTEXTUALITY
• “[A novel] is made in the
head, and has to be remade
in the head by whoever
reads it, who will always
remake it differently.”
(Byatt 214)
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THE GREAT CHAIN OF BEING
• God (of monotheism)
• gods (of polytheism)
• Human
• Animal
• Plant
• Manmade Objects
• Simple Objects (Natural)
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THE NATURE OF THINGS:
ATTRIBUTES AND BEHAVIORS
• God is omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent and immortal…
• god is an archetype (messenger, ruler…)
• Humans think, laugh, have language…
• Animals breathe, move, play, attack, eat, die…
• Plants are alive, face the sun…
• Concrete Objects are tangible
• Abstract Objects are intangible
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 In
this hierarchy, each
level encorporates all of
the features and behaviors
of all of the levels below it.
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MOVING UP AND DOWN THE
GREAT CHAIN OF BEING
• God = Deification
• god = deification (small d)
• Human = Personification or Anthropomorphism
• Animal = Disney Animation or Religious Animism
• Plant = Vivication
• Concrete Objects = Reification
• Abstract Objects
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INDETERMINACY OF
THE GREAT CHAIN OF BEING
• Depending on your belief system, you will structure
the Great Chain of Being differently in terms of the
following:
• God
• Society
• Computers
• Money
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SCRIPTS
• In all Western countries, the restaurant
script is very much the same. It involves
the following:
• Seating, Menu, Waiter, Meal, Payment,
Tipping, Departure
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SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF
• Addie Bundren, the main character in William
Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is dead during most of the
novel. She nevertheless dominates the plot and the
characters, as she had made Anse promise to bury
her in her birthplace, Jefferson, Mississippi.
• So when she dies, they have to carry her coffin sixty
miles over swollen rivers and submerged bridges.
The journey includes an unwanted pregnancy, the
drowning of mules, and Addie’s slowly decaying
corpse.
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• Chapter 40 of As I Lay Dying is entitled “Addie,” and
contains a monologue telling about Addie’s bitter life
and joyless marriage.
• It tells about “Addie’s alienation, her feelilng of having
been a stranger to her family all her life, and her wish to
punish her husband Anse for being an unintelligent,
devious, inflated self-centered, loveless man”
• It ends, “Anse. Why Anse. Why are you Anse.”
(Faulkner 165; Mey 245-246)
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But some critics are not able to
suspend disbelief:
• “Addie’s confessional, crucial as it is
to an understanding of the book, is
quite unwarranted from the point of
view of verisimilitude, since, when she
starts to speak, Addie has been dead
for five days.”
(Bleikasten 54)
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!TENDENCY
• Probably the most important aspect of any discourse
is its “tendency.” Discourse tendency relates to the
purpose of a discourse.
• Is the discourse designed to teach, to impress, to
entertain, or what. Any aspect of the discourse which
supports this tendency is good, and anything which
distracts from the tendency (or purpose) of the
discourse is bad.
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!!SOCIAL DISCOURSE
• This is what happened at a meeting of a tenure and
promotion committee some time ago.
• The committee was trying to decide whether several
articles written by an engineer on the subject of
prestressed concrete were original contributions or
“borrowed” from existing information. It was late in
the day, and the group needed some entertainment.
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!!!HOT-POTATO DISCOURSE
• One committee member commented, “Well, at least he’s steady.”
From across the table came, “Definitely one of the hard
sciences,” followed by comments from other committee
members: “Yes, very solid,” “A weighty topic?” and “Lots of
concrete data.”
• This discourse was generated by the entire group, and showed
in-group bonding. But there were also witty judgments
communicated in the flippant comments. But most importantly,
they demonstrated that a discourse can be generated by a group
as well as by an individual.
(Nilsen & Nilsen 294)
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POINT OF VIEW:
THE NOVEL:
THE AD:
THE TEXT BOOK:
ETHOS
PATHOS
LOGOS
TOUGH
SWEET
STUFFY
1ST PERSON
2ND PERSON
3RD PERSON
SUBJECTIVE
SUBJECTIVE
OBJECTIVE
INFORMAL
INTIMATE
FORMAL
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It is the language of intimacy, the language of no
pretentions. The words are simple and the grammar
is simple.
The writing is not planned, but just happens, in a
stream of consciousness kind of way—you are
there.
The sentences are short and choppy. If there is
conjunction it is coordination, not subordination.
It is the language of the loosened tie and the rolled up
shirt sleeves, with no pretentious multi-syllable or
low-frequency words.
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Being egocentric, it is subjective, and whether
it is written from the author participant or the
author omniscient point of view, it is
concerned with communicating people’s
innermost feelings.
Tough language is the language of fiction, and
therefore the process of “in medias res” is
totally appropriate to this style—”In the late
summer of that year we lived in a house in a
village that looked across the river and the
plain to the mountain.
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SWEET LANGUAGE
Sweet language is the language of
advertisers. Walker Gibson calls this
language AROMA (Advertising Rhetoric
of Madison Avenue).
Sweet language is listener-oriented in an
attempt to seduce listeners into buying
products they don’t want or need.
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It is language full of innovative spellings,
creative grammar, and wild punctuation.
Sweet writing contains many sentence
fragments, and would rather flaunt a
grammatical rule than conform to it:
“Winston tastes good like a cigarette
should. What do you want, good
grammar, or good taste?”
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• Sweet language is the language of sensationalism,
the language of superlatives and hyperbole.
• It is the language of diversion; it plays tricks on the
reader with its puns, its word coinages, its humor, its
packaging, its sex, and other aspects which have
nothing to do with the product itself.
• It is informal, or sometimes even intimate or cutesy
in tone.
• Contractions, clippings, blendings, and deletions
abound, making it all the more cryptic and intimate.
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STUFFY LANGUAGE
Where tough language is I-oriented, and
sweet language is you-oriented, stuffy
language is it-oriented.
It is the language of laboratory
experiments , of research papers and
theses and dissertations and scholarly
books, and academia in general.
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Stuffy language is highly grammatical and
highly formal.
The syntax contains a great deal of
subordination, and the sentences are
frequently long and complex.
Infinitives, gerunds, present and past participial
constructions, nominative absolutes, perfect,
progressive, and passive constructions are
almost totally confined to this style of writing.
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It is an impersonal style to the extent that firstperson pronouns are seldom allowed. For
this and other reasons, passive constructions
and impersonal constructions with abstract
subjects are common.
Stuffy language is also the language of
limitations, restrictions and qualifications
because the writer doesn’t want to make
claims beyond the evidence.
Limiting (as opposed to descriptive) adjectives
are frequent, as are prepositional phrases
and relative clauses.
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!THE BIRMINGHAM RIOTS:
REPORTED IN THREE DIFFERENT STYLES
STUFFY:
“The police and firemen drove hundreds
of rioting Negroes off the streets today
with high pressure hoses and an
armored car.”
(New York Times May 8, 1963)
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MORE INTERESTING:
“Three times during the day, waves of
shouting, rock-throwing Negroes had
poured into the downtown business
district, to be scattered and driven back
by battering streams of water from highpressure hoses and swinging clubs of
policement and highway patrolmen.”
(New York Herald Tribune)
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POETIC:
“The blaze of bombs, the flash of blades,
the eerie glow of fire, the keening cries
of hatred, the wild dance of terror at
night—all this was Birmingham,
Alabama.”
(Time, May 7, 1963)
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References:
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (trans. Vern W.
McGee). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1994.
Bleikasten, André. Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying.” Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 1973.
Byatt, A. S. Babel Tower. New York, NY: Random House, 1996.
Eschholz, Paul, Alfred Rosa, and Virginia Clark. Language Awareness.
Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009.
Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. New York, NY: Random House, 1980
[1930].
Gee, James Paul. Introduction to Discourse Analysis. New York, NY:
Routledge, 1999.
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Mey, Jacob L. Pragmatics: An Introduction, 2nd Edition. Oxford, England:
Blackwell, 2001.
Minsky, Marvin. “A Framework for Representing Knowledge.” In The
Psychology of Computer Vision. Ed: Patrick H. Winston. New York, NY:
McGraw-Hill, 1975, 211-277.
Nilsen, Alleen Pace, and Don L. F. Nilsen. Encyclopedia of 20th Century
American Humor. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000.
Raskin, Victor, ed. The Primer of Humor Research. New York, NY: Mouton
de Gruyter, 2008.
Schank, Roger C., and Robert P. Abelson. Scripts, Plans, Goals and
Understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1977.
Wright, Edmond. Narrative, Perception, Language and Faith. New York,
NY: Palgrave/MacMillan, 2005.
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