A Humanizing Literary Pragmatics

A Humanizing Literary Pragmatics PDF Author: Roger D. Sell
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027262020
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
In much of his earlier work Roger D. Sell was shaping literary studies, historical perspectives, and pragmatics into a fluent interdisciplinarity. This enabled him to explore the fundamentally human relationships which develop between literary writers and those who respond to them. Literary writers, through their handling of deixis, evaluative and modal expressions, tellability, politeness norms, and genre expectations, activate the same interpersonal function of language as do other language users, and respondents’ hermeneutic contextualizations of literary texts are no less standard as a pragmatic procedure. Not that context is completely determinative. In Sell’s account, human beings are profoundly influenced by society, but can sometimes enter into co-adaptations with it. Like other people, literary writers and their respondents are “social individuals”, who themselves benefit from respecting each other’s relative autonomy. As well as explaining these theoretical positions, the papers selected here offered critical re-assessments of some major writers, including Chaucer and Dickens. They also suggested new ways of dealing with literary texts in literary and language education at all levels.

A Humanizing Literary Pragmatics

A Humanizing Literary Pragmatics PDF Author: Roger D. Sell
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027262020
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 410

Get Book

Book Description
In much of his earlier work Roger D. Sell was shaping literary studies, historical perspectives, and pragmatics into a fluent interdisciplinarity. This enabled him to explore the fundamentally human relationships which develop between literary writers and those who respond to them. Literary writers, through their handling of deixis, evaluative and modal expressions, tellability, politeness norms, and genre expectations, activate the same interpersonal function of language as do other language users, and respondents’ hermeneutic contextualizations of literary texts are no less standard as a pragmatic procedure. Not that context is completely determinative. In Sell’s account, human beings are profoundly influenced by society, but can sometimes enter into co-adaptations with it. Like other people, literary writers and their respondents are “social individuals”, who themselves benefit from respecting each other’s relative autonomy. As well as explaining these theoretical positions, the papers selected here offered critical re-assessments of some major writers, including Chaucer and Dickens. They also suggested new ways of dealing with literary texts in literary and language education at all levels.

Literary Communication as Dialogue

Literary Communication as Dialogue PDF Author: Roger D. Sell
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027260575
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 439

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Book Description
As traced by Roger D. Sell, literary communication is a process of community-making. As long as literary authors and those responding to them respect each other’s human autonomy, literature flourishes as an enjoyable, though often challenging mode of interaction that is truly dialogical in spirit. This gives rise to author-respondent communities whose members represent existential commonalities blended together with historical differences. These heterogeneous literary communities have a larger social significance, in that they have long served as counterweights to the hegemonic tendencies of modernity, and more recently to postmodernity’s well-intentioned but restrictive politics of identity. In post-postmodern times, their ethos is increasingly one of pleasurable egalitarianism. The despondent anti-hedonism of the twentieth century intelligentsia can now seem rather dated. Some of the papers selected for this volume develop Sell’s ideas in mainly theoretical terms. But most of them offer detailed criticism of particular anglophone writers, ranging from Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and other poets and dramatists of the early modern period, through Wordsworth and Coleridge, to Dickens, Pinter, and Rushdie.

The Rhetoric of Literary Communication

The Rhetoric of Literary Communication PDF Author: Virginie Iché
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000536068
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Building on the notion of fiction as communicative act, this collection brings together an interdisciplinary range of scholars to examine the evolving relationship between authors and readers in fictional works from 18th-century English novels through to contemporary digital fiction. The book showcases a diverse range of contributions from scholars in stylistics, rhetoric, pragmatics, and literary studies to offer new ways of looking at the "author–reader channel," drawing on work from Roger Sell, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, and James Phelan. The volume traces the evolution of its form across historical periods, genres, and media, from its origins in the conversational mode of direct address in 18th-century English novels to the use of second-person narratives in the 20th century through to 21st-century digital fiction with its implicit requirement for reader participation. The book engages in questions of how the author–reader channel is shaped by different forms, and how this continues to evolve in emerging contemporary genres and of shifting ethics of author and reader involvement. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars interested in the intersection of pragmatics, stylistics, and literary studies.

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Dialogue

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Dialogue PDF Author: Edda Weigand
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317612590
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
The Routledge Handbook of Language and Dialogue is the first comprehensive overview of the emerging and rapidly growing sub-discipline in linguistics, Language and Dialogue. Edited by one of the top scholars in the field, Edda Weigand, and comprising contributions written by a variety of likewise influential figures, the handbook aims to describe the history of modern linguistics as reasoned progress leading from de Saussure and the simplicity of artificial terms to the complexity of human action and behaviour, which is based on the integration of human abilities such as speaking, thinking, perceiving, and having emotions. The book is divided into three sections: the first focuses on the history of modern linguistics and related disciplines; the second part focuses on the core issues and open debates in the field of Language and Dialogue and introduces the arguments pro and contra certain positions; and the third section focuses on the three components that fundamentally affect language use: human nature, institutions, and culture. This handbook is the ideal resource for those interested in the relationship between Language and Dialogue, and will be of use to students and researchers in Linguistics and related fields such as Discourse Analysis, Cognitive Linguistics, and Communication.

Beyond Babel

Beyond Babel PDF Author: Tom Clark
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027256993
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
The contribution that scholarly organizations make to the study of languages and literatures is a service to the value of systematically learning and using meaning—understanding that meaning operates in systems. Constructively speaking, these organizations support the teaching and research of our world’s experts in grammar, genre, medium, production, reception, exchange, critique, appreciation, and so on. More defensively, they are bulwarks against systems of misinformation, against the empowerment of misrepresentation and distrust between people. The chapters in this volume range from the Old Testament to Facebook and from East Asia to West Africa via Australia, the Americas, and Europe. The scholarly strength forged across that range speaks to similar strengths that so many scholarly organizations devoted to studies in languages and literatures have cultivated and maintained—often in the face of government indifference or hostility towards the Humanities. Beyond Babel makes a powerful case for their potential.

The Ethics of Literary Communication

The Ethics of Literary Communication PDF Author: Roger D. Sell
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027271682
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Viewing literature as one among other forms of communication, Roger D. Sell and his colleagues evaluate writer-respondent relationships according to the same ethical criterion as applies for dialogue of any other kind. In a nutshell: Are writers and readers respecting each other’s human autonomy? If and when the answer here is “Yes!”, Sell’s team describe the communication that is going on as ‘genuine’. In this latest book, they offer new illustrations of what they mean by this, and ask whether genuineness is compatible with communicational directness and communicational indirectness. Is there a risk, for instance, that a very direct manner of writing could be unacceptably coercive, or that a more indirect manner could be irresponsible, or positively deceitful? The book’s overall conclusion is: “Not necessarily!” A directness which is truthful and stimulates free discussion does respect the integrity of the other person. And the same is true of an indirectness which encourages readers themselves to contribute to the construction and assessment of ideas, stories and experiences – sometimes literary indirectness may allow greater scope for genuineness than does the directness of a non-literary letter. By way of illustrating these points, the book opens up new lines of inquiry into a wide range of literary texts from Britain, Germany, France, Denmark, Poland, Romania, and the United States.

Pragmatics and Fiction

Pragmatics and Fiction PDF Author: Jon-K. Adams
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027225443
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 85

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Book Description
This study is intended to design measures for ethnographic description including speech acts in an etic instrumental approach, oriented toward an analysis of the functions of communicative events in relation to the ongoing stream of behavior. A revised taxonomy of speech acts is applied to an empirical corpus and is shown to produce a systematic set of behavioral measures which are potentially productive for cross-cultural comparison.

Humane Readings

Humane Readings PDF Author: Jason Finch
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027254346
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
"This verse marks that" : the Bible, editors, and early modern English texts / Helen Wilcox -- Humanized intertexts : An iconospheric approach to Ben Jonson's comedy, The case is altered (1598) / Anthony W. Johnson -- Appearance and reality in Jane Austen's Persuasion / Tony Lurcock -- Green flowers and golden eyes : Balzac, decadence and Wilde's Salome / Sven-Johan Spånberg -- "When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean" : Power and (mis)communication in literature for young readers / Maria Nikolajeva -- Place and communicative personae: how Forster has changed Stevenage since the 1940s / Jason Finch -- Tony Harrison and the rhetorics of reality / Tony Bex -- Truthful (hi)stories in Michael Ondaatje's Anil's ghost / Lydia Kokkola -- Pragmatic Penelope or timeless tales for the times / Gunilla Florby -- Three fallacies in interpreting literature / Bo Pettersson

Pragmatics of Fiction

Pragmatics of Fiction PDF Author: Miriam A. Locher
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110431092
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 628

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Book Description
Pragmatics of Fiction provides systematic orientation in the emerging field of studying pragmatics with/in fictional data. It provides an authoritative and accessible overview of this versatile new field in its methodological and theoretical richness. Giving center stage to fictional language allows scholars to review key concepts in sociolinguistics such as genre, style, voice, stance, dialogue, participation structure or features of orality and literariness. The contributors explore language as one of the creative tools to craft story worlds and characters by drawing on concepts such as regional, social and ethnic language variation, as well as multilingualism. Themes such as emotion, taboo language or impoliteness in fiction receive attention just as the challenges of translation and dubbing, the creation of past and future languages, the impact of fictional language on language change or the fuzzy boundaries of narratives. Each contribution, written by a leading specialist, gives a succinct, representative and up-to-date overview of research questions, theories, methods and recent developments in the field.

Literature as Communication

Literature as Communication PDF Author: Roger D. Sell
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9781556198397
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
This book offers foundations for a literary criticism which seeks to mediate between writers and readers belonging to different historical periods or social groupings. This makes it, among other things, a timely intervention in the postmodern "culture wars," though the theory put forward will be of interest not only to students of literature and culture, but also to linguists. Sell describes communication in general as strongly interactive, as very much affected by the disparate situationalities of "sending" and "receiving," yet as by no means completely determined by them. Seen this way, men and women are both social beings and individuals, capable of empathizing with sociohistorical formations which are alien to them, sometimes even to the extent of changing their own life-world. By treating literary activity as communicational in this same dynamic sense, Sell radically modifies the main paradigms of twentieth-century literary theory, casting much new light on questions of genre, interpretation, affect and ethics.