The Text and Beyond: Essays in Literary Linguistics

Bernstein.

PART 1

Text and Context

In the years of New Criticism, the study of literature focused on the text as artifact, for the most part disregarding contexts of production and reception. Broadly speaking, meaning was presumed to reside within the text, and the language of the text was regarded as a static object, steadily poised awaiting interpretation.

Such perception of language and literature gave way to a systemic approach. Structuralist linguistics, beginning with Ferdinand de Saussure in the early part of the twentieth century, regarded every word as part of a system of language. Structuralist poetics, emerging in the 1970s in the United States but evident a decade earlier in the writings of Russian, Czech, and French theorists, regarded every literary work as part of a system of literature. Structuralism, as applied both to language and literature, saw elements fitting together in an orderly way like pieces of a puzzle so that the whole picture could be seen, the whole truth be known. Structuralism stressed ideal speakers (authors) and ideal hearers (readers), whose knowledge of the system made possible unaltered transmission of the text.

Today literary theorists ask whether a reader can, in fact, perceive unchanged a writer’s message. If a text cannot be regarded as transmitting meaning, if words are not the arbitrary conveyers of that meaning, then Saussurian linguistics would seem irrelevant to the study of literature. But other areas of linguistics do address the same questions asked by literary theorists. Discourse analysis, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics all are concerned with meaning as it derives from the context of language. Applied to literature, those disciplines can help explain the contribution of context to the understanding of text. The first essay of this volume explores how linguistic criticism, in seeking meaning outside the text, complements the aims of literary theory.

The Contextualization of Linguistic Criticism

CYNTHIA GOLDIN BERNSTEIN

Until very recently linguists have been reluctant to admit literary studies to their discipline, and literary theorists have been even less welcoming of linguistic criticism. These attitudes derive from two presumptions that have long separated literary and linguistic studies. First, linguists have presumed literary language to be unnatural language and thus to lie outside the domain of linguistics. The discipline restricted its field of study to natural language, that is, speech. Only recently have linguists come to recognize that literature, too, is a natural use of language and that the study of literature lies properly within the bounds of linguistics.

The second presumption, held by literary theorists, has been that linguistics lacks the tools needed to examine anything but features contained within the text. As literary theory moved further from text-centered New Criticism, linguistics was presumed to have even less to contribute toward its aims. In actuality, though, linguists have been developing the tools to study precisely those cultural and psychological features of language that concern literary theorists today.¹ Without the contributions of linguistics, the postmodern study of literature is incomplete.²

The presumption that excluded literature from linguistic study can be traced to the beginnings of modern linguistics. It is inherent in Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, first published in 1916; to the extent that the Course accounted for writing at all, it was as the representation of oral language. Sound, according to Saussure, is the natural bond, the only true bond between signifier and signified (46). He argues that speech alone is the province of linguistics: The linguistic object is not defined by the combination of the written word and the spoken word: the spoken form alone constitutes the object (45).

Written language is similarly excluded from the development of speech-act theory in the 1960s. J. L. Austin (1962) and John Searle (1969) argue that utterances in literature cannot be said to have the same relation to the world that ordinary utterances do. Illocutionary force—stating, requesting, thanking, blessing—can be named as an expression of the speaker’s intent vis-à-vis the listener; but what can be the relevance of such force to literary language? Richard Ohmann (1971) addresses this question by defining literature in relation to its illocutionary force: "A literary work is a discourse whose sentences lack the illocutionary forces that would normally attach to them. Its illocutionary force is mimetic" (14, italics in original). This definition, with its notion that written language imitates spoken, contains echoes of Saussure. It gives primacy to the spoken as the origin of illocutionary force and takes no account of the potential force of the text vis-à-vis the reader.

The presumption excluding literature from linguistic study has not gone unchallenged. Roman Jakobson argues for inviting literature into the linguistic fold in his Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics, delivered to the Conference on Style at Indiana University in 1958 and published two years later. Calling it the right and duty of linguistics to take charge of the investigation of verbal art in all its compass and extent, he blames prior reluctance to do so on the poetic incompetence of some bigoted linguists (377).

Saussure’s exclusion of written language from linguistic study is refuted by Jacques Derrida. In Of Grammatology, Derrida disputes Saussure’s premise that the spoken form alone constitutes the object of linguistics (quoted in Derrida 1974, 30). Contending that there is no linguistic sign before writing (14) and that language is a possibility founded on the general possibility of writing (52), Derrida refuses to accept the notion that written language is simply the representation of oral language.

Written language, others have argued, is not merely mimetic in its illocutionary force. Wolfgang Iser (1978) contradicts Austin’s and Searle’s exclusion of literature from speech-act theory on the basis that literary language "takes on an illocutionary force, which not only arouses attention but also guides the reader’s approach to the text and elicits responses to it (61–62). Mary Louise Pratt (1977), posits the term display texts" to refer to speech acts—such as stories, poems, or jokes—characterized by their tellability. Using Searle’s (1976) taxonomy, she classifies these as representative. A good case can be made, though, for considering them as a separate category. Display texts are not subject to the truth conditions of ordinary assertions; they are judged or described, instead, by their success or failure in entertaining, grabbing attention, and so on. The notion of a display text category is important in giving literature a place within the larger context of language use. Literature has the power not only to represent the speech acts of everyday life but also to be a channel of expression for the concerns of the social context in which it is produced.

Modern linguists have begun to appreciate the value of the literary text in supplying linguistic data. Historical linguists have always done so, for the diachronic study of language prior to the twentieth century had no alternative to written data. From written texts one could, to a certain extent, infer the spoken language. Texts can do more than that, though. Even when spoken alternatives are available, there is no need to limit the understanding of language only to its oral representation. B. A. Fennell, in this volume, illustrates how the study of Gastarbeiterliteratur (German Immigrant Worker literature) can contribute to pidgin and creole theory. Her argument: literature is linguistic data.

At the same time linguists have come to accept literature as part of their domain, many literary theorists have come to realize that linguistic approaches have much to offer. The supposition mentioned earlier, that linguistic criticism seemed limited to textual studies, harks back to Jakobson. Jakobson’s discussion gives the impression of discourse-centered criticism, of criticism aimed at context as well as text, when he writes, Insistence on keeping poetics apart from linguistics is warranted only when the field of linguistics appears to be illicitly restricted, for example, when the sentence is viewed by some linguists as the highest analyzable construction . . . (352). However, Jakobson’s own application of linguistics to literature is neither so broad nor so bold as his argument would suggest. His definitions of poetics and linguistics are structuralist ones: Poetics deals with problems of verbal structure, just as the analysis of painting is concerned with pictorial structure. Since linguistics is the global science of verbal structure, poetics may be regarded as an integral part of linguistics (350). Verbal structure, then, is what Jakobson supposes to be the common ground of poetics and linguistics. The message for its own sake (356) is the poetic function of language. The approach is reminiscent of New Criticism. Indeed, in Closing Statement, Jakobson’s linguistic approach to poetry stresses meter, rhyme, syntax, semantics, phonology, and figurative language.

These topics still represent a substantial contribution of linguistics to literary criticism—William Chisholm, in this volume, affirms his approach to be unabashedly Jakobsonian—but they are not the only ones that linguistics has to offer. Other approaches, ones that may be more compatible with recent developments in literary theory, have broadened the scope of linguistic criticism.

The archetypal application of Jakobson’s methods may be found in Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss’s (1962) analysis of Baudelaire’s Les Chats. What Michael Riffaterre (1966) objects to in that application is the omission of the reader’s response as a determinant of meaning. Riffaterre’s analysis addresses the communication model introduced by Jakobson (1960):

Jakobson’s model associates six factors with a corresponding set of functions (indicated, above, in parentheses). Jakobson defines the POETIC function as centering on the message: "The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination (358). In other words, the POETIC function focuses not on the poet’s selection of words from among possible ones (i.e., paradigmatic choices), but on the organization of those words into sequences within the text (i.e., syntagmatic choices). The sense of Jakobson’s assertion is well illustrated by Melissa Monroe (in this volume): it is Marianne Moore’s combinations of words—in odd and intriguing compounds—that call attention to the MESSAGE of her poetry. Riffaterre, however, argues that the poetic function is not only the message but the whole act of communication." He claims, in fact, that MESSAGE and ADDRESSEE are the only required factors in communication: the ADDRESSER in a poem is absent; and CONTEXT, CONTACT, and CODE are all part of the message or of the interaction between MESSAGE and ADDRESSEE. For the poetic text, then, according to Riffaterre’s analysis, what matters is the reader’s response.

The usefulness of reader-response criticism has been established through a profusion of works appearing in the 1970s and 1980s, which I shall not retrace here.³ Consideration of the reader, though, has led to a broader understanding of context. Derek Attridge (1987) asks, [H]ow might we follow through the implication, suppressed in Jakobson, that readers are active in determining what is poetry and what is not? (23). The answer: We would need some account of the role of ideology, of gender, of institutional practices, perhaps of the unconscious, and we would need to take account of our own position as culturally and ideologically situated readers (23). The direction of linguistic criticism during the 1980s and its course for the 1990s lie in the relation between the language of a text and its social and discursive contexts.

Linguists have come to approach the literary text not so much as the message for its own sake, but, to use the definition of Robert Scholes (1982), as the product of a person or persons, at a given point in human history, in a given form of discourse, taking its meanings from the interpretive gestures of individual readers using the grammatical, semantic, and cultural codes available to them. A text, Scholes adds, always echoes other texts, and it is the result of choices that have displaced still other possibilities (16). The relation of the codes of the literary text to the codes of culture or to the codes of other texts has been the business of semiotic criticism—as elaborated, for example, by Barthes (1974) or Riffaterre (1978, 1987). Like reader-response criticism, semiotic criticism sees a work of literature as no more isolated than any other form of communication from the circumstances that surround its production or reception.

Linguists today, like their counterparts in literary theory, see meaning as contextual. Colin MacCabe (1985) puts it this way:

[T]he relations of the meanings of a text to its socio-historical conditions (of both production and reception) are not secondary but constitutive. . . . [T]here is no such thing as meaning in so far as the term assumes an entity independent of the different ideological, political or theoretical positions which inform language and the different institutional conditions of utterance. It is not that a word has different meanings for different speakers but that the same lexical item appears in different discourses. (124)

Similarly, Roger Fowler (1986) considers it fundamental to linguistic criticism to see the text in relation to the social, institutional, and ideological conditions of its production and reception (12). The point is that many linguists do not consider language to exclude context; on the contrary, meaning itself depends upon what Fowler calls the "pragmatic dimensions of language" (11). To incorporate pragmatics, in its broadest sense, into a model of linguistic criticism is to relate language to the social, historical, cultural, political, and psychological contexts of writer and reader.

The trend toward contextualization has not been met with approval in all quarters. Seymour Chatman (1990)—in an article appearing in the first of three issues of Poetics Today devoted to Narratology Revisited—argues that narratologists should oppose the Contextualists (e.g., Pratt 1977). He objects, in particular, to Pratt’s use of the Labovian model of narrative (Pratt 1977, 38–78). Derived from interviews with inner-city teenagers, the model posits six components of narrative structure: abstract, orientation, complicating action, result or resolution, evaluation, and coda (Labov and Waletzky 1967; Labov 1972). Chatman disputes Pratt’s claim that the abstract, which Labov defines as a brief summary introducing most natural narratives, can be supplied by the title of the work; Tom Jones, after all, is the main character’s name, not the theme of the work. Furthermore, the title is outside the narrative proper, and Labov’s model cannot account for the multiple voices of a literary text. In response to Chatman’s criticism, it must be noted that Labov and Waletzky did not intend their model to apply to such complex structures as myths, folk tales, legends, histories, epics, toasts and sagas (12). Their original work was based on six hundred interviews, and they were looking for the most basic common elements within them. Nevertheless, their model can account for multiple voices in the context of everyday narratives. Context often supplies the abstract and even the evaluation: a question is asked; other stories on the same theme are being told; indications of approval or disagreement are made by listeners. In that way, other voices are often accounted for in the Labovian model.

In general, narratology has moved away from its strictly structuralist position. Gérard Genette (1990) and Dorrit Cohn (1990), writing in the second volume of the Poetics Today series, apply the methods of narratology to nonfictional texts, investigating signs that distinguish fact and fiction. Gerald Prince (1991), in volume three of the same series, points out that the classical narratologist practically never ponders . . . the relations of the narrative text with truth or falsehood, the nature of the fictional as opposed to the real (543). Yet he, like Riffaterre (1990) in Fictional Truth, argues that narratology today must ask such questions in order to fit into a general semiotics (551).

Like narratology, stylistics has evolved to account also for the contextualization of the literary act. Nils Erik Enkvist (1991) captures this contextualization of linguistic criticism in his definition of style: Style is an impression triggered off by textual features governed by a situation-based strategy. Style, according to this definition, is a parallel distribution process, penetrating simultaneously the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of the text. Earlier, Enkvist (1964) had defined style as an aggregate of the contextual probabilities of linguistic [phonological, grammatical, and lexical] items (28). The earlier definition centers on quantitatively determined norms and variations from those norms.⁴ The change from an aggregate-based process to a parallel distribution process represents a new emphasis on discourse-centered stylistics (see also Enkvist 1990).

The shift in emphasis from primarily phonological, grammatical, and lexical structures to discourse structures is a recent one. In general, essays in collections of the 1970s and early 1980s—such as Freeman (1970, 1981); Fowler (1975); and Leech and Short (1981)—were not centered on discourse. The shift might be represented best by the titles of two collections of essays: Ronald Carter’s Language and Literature: An Introductory Reader in Stylistics (1982), and Carter and Paul Simpson’s Language, Discourse and Literature: An Introductory Reader in Discourse Stylistics (1989). The addition of the word discourse to the title and subtitle of the later work suggests a shift in emphasis represented also by Leo Hickey’s Pragmatics of Style (1989) and Timothy Austin’s Poetic Voices: Discourse Linguistics and the Poetic Text (1994). Other collections reflect continuing interest in the concerns of discourse-based criticism: Literary Pragmatics (1991), edited by Roger Sell; Language, Text and Context (1992), edited by Michael Toolan; and Dialogue and Critical Discourse (1993), edited by Michael Macovski. Toolan’s (1992) volume is published as part of Routledge’s Interface Series, edited by Ron Carter, whose stated purpose is to examine topics at the ‘interface’ of language studies and literary criticism and in so doing build bridges between these traditionally divided disciplines.

A new tradition is bringing the disciplines together. The Poetics and Linguistics Association, chaired by Ron Carter, is one of several organizations promoting a dialogue between linguistics and literature. Others include the Literary Pragmatics Research Group, established by Roger Sell at Åbo Akadami in Helsinki; the Programme in Literary Linguistics, established by Colin MacCabe in 1983 at the University of Strathclyde, which sponsored the 1986 conference The Linguistics of Writing, the proceedings of which were published a year later (Fabb et al. 1987); and the International Association of Literary Semantics, which sponsored a 1992 conference on the topic. The Modern Language Association, too, has its Division on Linguistic Approaches to Literature, which sponsors several sessions at the national meetings each year. Journals such as the Journal of Literary Semantics, Style, and Language and Style provide continuing outlets for linguistic criticism. Nationally and internationally, then, linguistics and literary theory are no longer divided disciplines but interdependent fields of study that require each other’s insights for meaningful access to literary texts.

Notes

1. Beaugrande (1992) provides a cogent analysis of how trends in linguistic studies emphasizing text linguistics and discourse analysis parallel trends in literary studies. The object of study is perceived not as a "written (and presumably closed) artifact but as an open-ended transaction."

2. Brief portions of this essay appeared in Bernstein (1990).

3. On reader-response criticism, see Bleich (1978), Chatman (1978), Genette (1980, 1988), Fish (1980), Mailloux (1982), Ong (1975), Prince (1980), Rabinowitz (1977), Wilson (1981). Jane P. Tompkins (1980) offers a useful collection of reader-response approaches. See Robert M. Fowler (1985) for descriptions of implied reader, narratee, and ideal reader. See T. Austin (1984) on native reader and Bernstein (1987) on internal audience.

4. An updated approach to the study of norms in various discourse genres is the focus of Biber (1988).

References

Attridge, Derek. 1987. Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics in Retrospect. In The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments Between Language and Literature, ed. Nigel Fabb, Derek Attridge, Alan Durant, and Colin MacCabe, 15–32. New York: Methuen.

Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. New York: Oxford UP.

Austin, Timothy R. 1984. Language Crafted: A Linguistic Theory of Poetic Syntax. Bloomington: Indiana UP.

———. 1994. Poetic Voices: Discourse Linguistics and the Poetic Text. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P.

Barthes, Roland. 1974. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang. Translation of S/Z. Editions du Seuil, 1970.

Beaugrande, Robert. 1992. Discourse Analysis and Literary Theory: The Rapprochement of Linguistics and Literary Studies. Paper presented at the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics, Gainesville, Fla., April 4, 1992.

Bernstein, Cynthia. 1987. The Internal Audience in Literary and Rhetorical Discourse. Ph.D. diss., Texas A&M U.

———. 1990. Linguistic Approaches to Literature: Beyond the Text. Introduction to Special Issue of South Central Review 7 (Summer): 1–4.

Biber, Douglas. 1988. Variation Across Speech and Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Bleich, David. 1978. Subjective Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.

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Carter, Ronald, and Paul Simpson, eds. 1989. Language, Discourse and Literature: An Introductory Reader in Discourse Stylistics. London: Unwin Hyman.

Chatman, Seymour. 1978. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP.

———. 1990. What Can We Learn from Contextualist Narratology? Narratology Revisited I. Poetics Today 11 (Summer): 309–28.

Cohn, Dorrit. 1990. Signposts of Fictionality: A Narratological Perspective. Narratology Revisited II. Poetics Today 11 (Winter): 775–804.

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Enkvist, Nils Erik. 1964. On Defining Style. In Linguistics and Style, ed. John Spencer, 1–56. London: Oxford UP.

———. 1990. Stylistics, Text Linguistics, and Text Strategies. Hebrew Linguistics 28–30:7–22.

———. 1991. On Re-Defining Style. Paper presented at the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics. Knoxville, Tenn., April 5, 1991.

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———. 1986. Linguistic Criticism. Oxford: Oxford UP.

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———. 1981. Essays in Modern Stylistics. London: Methuen.

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———. 1988. Narrative Discourse Revisited. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell UP. Translation of Nouveau discours du récit. Editions du Seuil,