Download
1 / 41
710 likes | 1.72k Vues
Antar Abdellah. Poetic language. Introduction. This chapter will explore poetic language as a type of language commonly associated with poetry genre. In order to explore what constitutes poetic language, considering inherency perspective ,such as Formalism , is quite necessary.
E N D
AntarAbdellah Poetic language
Introduction • This chapter will explore poetic language as a type of language commonly associated with poetry genre. • In order to explore what constitutes poetic language, considering inherency perspective ,such as Formalism, is quite necessary. • We could also think about poetic language in terms of its effect on us. (cognitive) • Moreover, in line with a sociocultural perspective, we might also recognize that what gets regarded as poetic can change over time and will probably continue to do so. Consider the two poems below :
1-Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? • Thou art more lovely and more temperate: • Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, • And summer’s lease hath all too short a date; • 2-Yir eyes ur eh • a mean yir • pirit this • wey • ah think yir • byewtifl like ehm
This chapter , then, looks at the relationship between poetic language and the kind of literariness found in richly descriptive passages in some narrative fiction, literariness that can be regarded as in a sense poetic despite the absence of formal line arrangements. • So can poetic language be judged as having aesthetic value?
structuralism The ideas of paradigm and syntagm, as well as others in Saussure (1915), laid the foundation for an approach to studying literature known as structuralism, which reached a peak in the 1960s. In structuralism, interest focuses not so much on evaluating literary texts but rather on exploring their structural patterns. Structuralism was influenced by both Russian and Prague School Formalism and so Jakobson’s work provides a kind of bridge between these traditions.
Lexical deviation • The third way in which writers can produce foregrounding through lexical deviation is by the use of affixation [the addition of a prefix or suffix to an item already in the language] and compounding ,i.e. the joining together of two or more items to make a single compound one [Leech 1969].
B- Semantic Deviation • Semantic deviation can mean non-sense or absurdity. In semantic deviation, it is important to deal with tropes [foregrounding or irregularities of content]. According to him, they are classified largely into three sections:
A- Semantic Oddity • Semantic oddity means semantic bizarreness of expression. There are five types of semantic oddity: • Pleonasm: the use of more words than is necessary for clear expression: examples are black darkness, or burning fire • , periphrasis: a device by which grammatical meaning is expressed by one or more free morphemes: more happy. • and tautology : an unnecessary repetition of meaning, using dissimilar words that effectively say the same thing: save and except, this day and age. have semantic redundancy, and • oxymoron: combining contradictory terms; pretty ugly, hot ice. • and paradox : a statement or proposition that seems self-contradictory or absurd but in reality expresses a possible truth. “My nose will grow now”. have semantic absurdity, which entail irreconcilable of meaning or reference.
B- Transference of Meaning • According to Leech’s classification, transference of meaning is classified into four types of figurative language: • Synecdoche: a term for a part of something is used to refer to the whole of something, or vice-versa; the white house declared.. • metonymy: a term denoting one thing is used to refer to a related thing; lend me your ears • metaphor: he is a lion • and simile: he is like a lion.
C. Honest Deception • Leech classifies the term honest deception into three types: • 1) Hyperbole (Exaggeration): The bag weighed a ton. • 2) Litotes (understatement); she is not unattractive. • 3) Irony: situation in which there is an incongruity between the literal and the implied meaning.
As per Leech, these types are all connected in a sense that they misrepresent the truth : hyperbole distorts by saying too much, litotes by saying too little and irony often takes the form of saying or implying the opposite of what one feels to be the case. • Honest deception means these three types of semantic deviance misrepresent the truth for the sake not of deception, but of literary purpose.
D- Phonological Deviation • To a large extent, the implicit phonology is determined by choice of words and structure at the syntactic level, where it can be regarded as an important ingredient of stylistic value . • However, since the writing system is in many respects a system for representing the sound pattern of speech, a further source of phonological effect is graphology.
F- Morphological Deviation • Morphemes are the building blocks for words, bookshelf, for instance, consists of two morphemes (book) and (shelf). • One way of producing deviation at a morphological level is by adding an ending to a word not normally be added to for example: perhapless mystery of paradise. • Another way of producing foregrounding through the use of lexical deviation is by the use of an invented morpheme. • For example museryroom. In fact, there is no such word as a museyroom
How to measure literariness? • In terms of linguistic forms, it would seem unreasonable, for example, simply to total the number of creative features used in a particular text. • Whether a text is literary is unlikely to derive simply from the presence of more or fewer literary features. • The concept of a cline, or sets of clines, may suggest a level of precision in the identification of literariness that cannot be attained in practice. • Carter identifies six features and claims prototypical literary texts possess most of them, • i.e. 1-medium independence, 2-genre-mixing, • 3-polysemy, 4-displaced interaction, 5-text patterning as well as 6-high semantic density
1-Medium dependence • The concept of medium dependence means that the more literary a text, the less it will be dependent for its reading on another medium or media, for instance, abbreviations, illustrations and pictorial supplements. • Yet, this is not to suggest that it cannot be determined by external political or social or biographical influences. • No text can be completely autonomous that it refers only to itself nor so rich that a reader‘s own experience of human rights it refers to.
2- Genre-mixing • Genre is a French term derived from the Latin genus, generis, meaning "type," "sort," or "kind." • It designates the literary form or type into which works are classified according to what they have in common, either in their formal structures or in their treatment of subject matter, or both. • Genre-mixing recognizes that the full, unrestricted resources of the language are open to exploitation for literary ends.
3- Semantic density • Semantics is the study of meaning, it focuses on the relation between signifiers, like words, phrases, signs, and • signified / symbols, and what they stand for. • The semantic density of something is the measure of how much information it conveys in relation to its size or duration. The higher the semantic density, or the more semantically dense something is, the more information it packs into the given space or time. • A text that is perceived as resulting from the additive interaction of several linguistic levels is recognized as more literary than a text where there are fewer levels at work or where they are present but do not interact as densely.
5- Displaced interaction • A displaced interaction in a text allows meanings to emerge indirectly and obliquely. What we traditionally regard as literary is likely to be a text in which the context-bound interaction between author and reader is displaced. • ومن يفز بحبيب الله يأتمم
6- Text patterning • At the level of text, effects can be located which can help us further differentiate degrees of literariness. • In the speech, patterning at the level of text appears by virtue of repetition of the particulars of the avenue is shown below: • Go back to Mississippi, • go back to Alabama, • go back to South Carolina, • go back to Georgia. • The main effect of cross-sentential repetition here, reinforced by repeated syntactic patterns of clauses and tenses, is to represent the lingering presence and progress of the movement as if the readers were actually engaged in a journey. • مُتَفَرِّدٌ بصَبَابَتي ، مُتَفَرِّدٌ. بكَآبَتي ، مُتَفَرِّدٌ بعَنَائِي.
Reading B • Ronald Carter’s argument is based on a cline of literariness. He identifies six features and claims prototypical literary texts possess most of them. • Carter’s focus in this extract is an inherency-based one and he subsumes a number of Formalist poetic criteria/ concepts. • Carter indicates that Literariness is not just about formal features but also how these set up indirect meanings, the text’s ‘unstated content’, or how a text ‘reinforces content’.
For this to occur the text requires the reader not just to skim the ‘surface’ of a text but to involve themselves in the generation of such indirect meanings. • And for this to happen effectively, literariness in the text needs to be achieved skillfully by the author. • There is no sharp cut-off between literary and non-literary texts and prototypical literary texts, even if not poems, contain poetic elements. • Also from an inherency perspective, the cline of literariness can account for why certain works of non-fiction can be seen as literary works. • Consider the text below:
About Little Italy NYC • Walking beside the narrow, cobblestoned streets beneath the fire escapes of turn-of-the-century tenements, you’re tempted by the sights, sounds and smells of Italian cuisine and culture emanating from the restaurants surrounding you at every step. Here at Little Italy NYC, we’re bringing it all to you! See our restaurant list and map to visit many of these restaurants online. Get an idea for the restaurant that’s right for you and your family and friends. And when you arrive in little Italy, you can say ‘you’ve been here before.’
In this text there is a fair degree of sound patterning. • This density of sound patterning interacts with the density of the syntactic arrangement of sights, sounds and smells of Italian cuisine. • There would seem to be a deliberate attempt to construct text to reinforce meaning; and these levels of phonology and syntax reinforce meaning associated with restaurants • The text has semantic density. There is some text patterning too, for example, the parallelism of the imperatives “see our list” and “get an idea”. There is also some genre-mixing in the use of the representation of direct speech with the more ‘poetic’ first sentence, • However, the text is explicit about its medium dependence and facilitates this through a web-link. There is little obvious polysemy.
4. Assessing literary value • Probably the most celebrated bad poet in the English language is the Scot, William McGonagall. He is associated with a subgenre, doggerel [free verse], or very bad poetry. • However Paul Werth (1976) argues that a Jakobsonian stylistic methodology reveals levels of literariness in a McGonagall poem that would be found in a Shakespeare sonnet. • So why might one poem be regarded as better than another? The answer is connected in part with how a text is crafted to guide the reader to link levels of literariness and then go on to infer ‘unstated content’. • Richard Bradford (1997) argues that it is possible to use stylistic analysis to enable judgments as to why one text carries more literary value than the other.
Evaluative stylistics (Reading C) • In order to assess a literary work, Bradford seeks out the double-pattern in it : the relationship between its literary form on the one hand and its non-literary form and content on the other. • Bradford argues that the quality of a literary work should be judged in relation to the balance between these two dimensions. • Bradford uses ‘resistance to closure’ as a criterion to evaluate Adcock’s literary text as better than Cartland’s. • This criterion can distinguish between literary texts in terms of value. If a literary work is polysemic to different people across time and space, it has more value than one which is monosemic. • the use of poetic devices in McGonagall’s poem seems to have no purpose other than make it sound and look like a poem.
Conclusion • This chapter has investigated a characterization of poetry from an inherency perspective. • While the Formalists introduced useful concepts and techniques of analysis which have been drawn upon extensively in stylistics, their relevance is more often than not to poetry and particular examples of it. • However, poetic language in poems is not the only form of literariness. • The scope of inherency analysis has been extended to account for poetic literariness in certain passages of narrative fiction, by drawing on Ronald Carter’s cline of literariness. • Moreover, literariness is not just about examining text-intrinsic properties. It is also about how the craft of a text leads readers to infer unstated content. • Finally, the chapter looked at the issue of literary value.
