The Writer’s Craft,

the Culture’s Technology

 1

Editor-in-Chief:
Donald C. Freeman, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Editorial Board:
Tom Barney, University of Lancaster
Isil Bas, Bogazici University, Istanbul
José Maria Fernández Pérez, University of Granada
Margaret H. Freeman, Myrifield Institute for Cognition and the Arts
Masako Hiraga, St. Paul’s University, Tokyo
John Robert Ross, University of North Texas
Olga Vorobyova, Kyiv State Linguistic University
Sonia Zyngier, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
 The Writer’s Craft,
the Culture’s Technology

2002
P
A L
A

Edited by

Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard

and Michael Toolan

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2005

Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of

“ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.

ISBN: 90-420-1936-0
Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2005
Printed in The Netherlands
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgements iii
Notes on Contributors v
Preface
Donald C. Freeman xi
Introduction
Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard & Michael Toolan, Editors xiii
Part I: The writer’s web
1. Anti-Laokoön: Mixed and Merged Modes of Imagetext
on the Web
George L. Dillon 1
2. Personal Web Pages and the Semiotic Construction of
Academic Identities
Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard 23
3. Hypertext, Prosthetics and the Netocracy: Posthumanist
Aspects of Jeanette Winterson’s The PowerBook
Ulf Cronquist 47
4. The Influence of Hypertext on Genre: Exploring Online
Book Reviews
Rosario Caballero 57
Part II: Textual and technological transitions
5. Visual Representation of Phraseological Metaphor
in Discourse: A Cognitive Approach
Anita Naciscione 71
6. A Structural Analysis of Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’
Ken Nakagawa 85
7. Seeing the Sea: Deixis and the Perceptions
of Melville’s Reader
Robert Cockcroft 97
ii Contents

8. Narratives of Transgression: Challenging the Boundaries

of Competent Discourses
Anna Elizabeth Balocco 109
9. The Translator’s Craft as a Cross-Cultural Discourse
Mirjana Bonačić 123
10. Illustrated Literature: Future Style, Fertile Spirit,
or Futile Waste?
Marika Schwaiger 139
Part III: Changing cultures of report
11. Who said that? Who wrote that? Reporting,
Representation, and the Linguistics of Writing
Geoff Hall 151
12. ‘Print Culture’ and the Language of the 18th-Century Novel
Joe Bray 167
13. Truth and Lies: The Construction of Factuality
in a Television Documentary
Susan Hunston 181
Part IV: Corpus-enabled stylistics
14. Technology and Stylistics: The Web Connection
Donald E. Hardy 195
15. How Playwrights Construct Their Dramatic Worlds:
A Corpus-based Study of Vocatives in Early
Modern English Comedies
Michi Shiina 209
16. Collocational Style in the Two Narratives of Bleak House:
A Corpus-based Analysis
Masahiro Hori 225

Bibliography 239

Index 257
 Acknowledgements

The authors and publisher wish to thank the following for permission
to use copyright material:

In Chapter 5, James Thurber, The Pet Department, for the use of the
illustration ‘The Thurber Carnival’; The Times, London, for the
reproduction of the Queen’s picture, published on April 22, 1999;
©Pugh/The Times, London, 1999, for permission to reproduce the
Pugh cartoon from The Times published on April 22, 1999, page 1;
TIME Reprints and Permissions for the ‘Image of House’ from TIME,
September 29, 1997.

Efforts have been made to trace copyright holders of all material

reproduced in this volume, but if any have been overlooked the
publisher will be pleased to rectify matters promptly.
This page intentionally left blank
 Notes on Contributors
Anna Elizabeth Balocco is an Associate Professor in the Graduate
Programmes in Linguistics and in English Language Literatures at the
State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where she teaches courses
on discourse analysis and on writing. Her published research includes:
‘Identity in Academic Discourse: Constructing an Insider’s Ethos in
Prose about Literature’ in Trabalhos em Lingüística Aplicada 40 (São
Paulo: Unicamp: 17-28 [2002]) and ‘Zones of Discourse Turbulence
in Narrative and Non-Narrative Texts’ in Crop 8 (São Paulo:
University of São Paulo: 297-309 [2002]).
[email protected]
Mirjana Bonačić is Head of English Studies in the recently
established School of Humanities (Studiji humanističkih znanosti) at
the University of Split, Croatia. She teaches courses in textual
interpretation and literary stylistics and translation. She has
publications in the areas of applied linguistics, stylistics, and
translation studies (among her articles in English are ‘Context,
Knowledge, and Teaching Translation’ in de Beaugrande, Robert, et
al. (eds) Language Policy and Language Education in Emerging
Nations (Stamford, CT: Ablex: 37-48 [1998]); and ‘Some Reflections
on the Relations between Language, Writing, and Translation’ in
Studia Romanica et Anglica Zagrabiensia 42: 37-48 (1997). Her
current research interest is in figurative language from the perspective
of translation.
[email protected]
Joe Bray teaches at the University of Stirling. His research and
teaching interests are in literary stylistics, narratology, and the 18th-
century novel. He is the author of The Epistolary Novel:
Representations of Consciousness (London: Routledge [2003]) and
co-editor (with Miriam Handley and Anne C. Henry) of Ma(r)king
The Text: The Presentation of Meaning on the Literary Page
(Aldershot: Ashgate [2000]).
[email protected]
vi Notes on Contributors

Rosario Caballero is a lecturer in the Department of Modern

Philology, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Spain. She is
particularly interested in discourse and genre analysis, and applied
cognitive linguistics (metaphor research in discourse contexts). Her
recent publications include: ‘Técnica del argumento y argumento de la
técnica: heterogeneidad, intertextualidad e interdiscursividad en un
texto informático’ in Revista Iberoamericana de Discurso y Sociedad
3(3): 11-37 (2001); ‘Metaphor and Genre: The Presence and Role of
Metaphor in the Building Review’ in Applied Linguistics 24(2): 145-
167 (2003); and ‘Talking about Space: Image Metaphor in
Architectural Discourse’ in Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 1:
87-105 (2003).
[email protected]

Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard, Professor of English Language

and Applied Linguistics at the Federal University of Santa Catarina,
Brazil, is now Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham,
England. She has published widely in the areas of critical discourse,
media, narrative, and gender studies. Her current research interests are
in social semiotics, visual communication, and identity in discourse.
She is the author of News as Social Practice (UFSC, 1997) and co-
editor of Texts and Practices: Reading in Critical Discourse Analysis
(London: Routledge [1996]). Her forthcoming edited book
(Basingstoke: Palgrave [2005]) with Rick Iedema is Identity Trouble:
Critical Discourse and Contested Identities.
[email protected]

Robert Cockcroft taught in the School of English Studies, University

of Nottingham, from 1965 to 2002. His research interests include
rhetoric and rhetorical stylistics, sea literature, and epic. He has
recently published Rhetorical Affect in Early Modern Writing:
Renaissance Passions Reconsidered (Basingstoke: Palgrave [2003]);
‘Putting Aristotle to the Proof: Style, Substance and the EPL Group’
in Language and Literature 13(3): 195-212; and an enlarged second
edition (with Susan M. Cockcroft) of Persuading People: An
Introduction to Rhetoric (Basingstoke: Palgrave [2005]).
[email protected]
 Notes on Contributors vii

Ulf Cronquist teaches in the Department of Literature, Gothenburg

University, Sweden. He received his Ph.D. in English from
Gothenburg and an M.A. in cognitive science from Lund University.
His current research project involves a re-evaluation of the role of
literature with special interests in hypertext, prosthetics, simulations,
and cognitive modeling. Some of his most recent writings are
Erotographic Metafiction: Aesthetic Strategies and Ethical Statements
in John Hawkes’s ‘Sex Trilogy’, Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis:
Gothenburg Studies in English 78 (2000); ‘Introducing Cognitive
Poetics to Literary Onomastics: The Example of John Hawkes’s Latin
Flower Names in The Blood Oranges’ (forthcoming in NAMES: A
Journal of Onomastics); ‘The Posthumanist Body in the Flesh:
Hypertext, Simulation and Prosthetics’ (forthcoming in The Flesh
Made Text 2003 conference proceedings).
[email protected]
George L. Dillon is Professor of English Language and Literature at
the University of Washington. He has written books on semantics, the
reading and writing of literature, expository prose, advice books, and
the discourses of academic disciplines. He continues to work on the
intersections of visual and verbal meanings and on electronic writing.
A good bit of his recent work has been published electronically, such
as ‘Dada Photomontage and net.art.’
[email protected]
Donald C. Freeman is Emeritus Professor of English at the
University of Southern California, Adjunct Professor of Linguistics at
the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and co-director of MICA,
the Myrifield Institute for Cognition and the Arts in Heath,
Massachusetts. His recent work has been in cognitive metaphor.
[email protected]
Geoff Hall is Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Applied Language
Studies (CALS), University of Wales Swansea. His research interests
are in discourse stylistics and language education. His recent
publications are: ‘Poetry, Pleasure and Second Language Classrooms’
in Applied Linguistics 24(3): 395-399 (2003); ‘The Year's Work in
Stylistics: 2002’ in Language and Literature 12(4): 357-372 (2003).
His forthcoming book, Literature in Language Education, will be
published by Palgrave in November, 2005.
[email protected]
viii Notes on Contributors

Donald Hardy teaches courses in linguistics at Colorado State

University. He has published widely in the areas of linguistics and
stylistics. His book, Narrating Knowledge in Flannery O’Connor’s
Fiction, was published in 2003 by the University of South Carolina
Press. His research interests are in computational stylistics and Perl
programming for natural language processing. He is currently at work
on a book on grammatical voice and the body in the fiction of
Flannery O’Connor.
[email protected]
Masahiro Hori is Professor of English Linguistics and Stylistics at
Kumamoto Gakuen University, Japan. His recent publications are:
Investigating Dickens’ Style: A Collocational Analysis (Basingstoke:
Palgrave [2004]); and ‘Collocational Patterns of -ly Manner Adverbs
in Dickens’ in Saito, Toshio, Junsaku Nakamura and Shunji Yamazaki
(eds) English Corpus Linguistics in Japan (Amsterdam: Rodopi: 149-
63 [2002]); he is also the co-translator (into Japanese) of Tobias
Smollett’s The Adventures of Roderick Random.
[email protected]
Susan Hunston is Professor of English Language at the University of
Birmingham. Her main areas of research are discourse analysis and
corpus linguistics. She has written Corpora in Applied Linguistics
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [2002]) and is co-author of
Pattern Grammar (Amsterdam: John Benjamins [1999]).
[email protected]
Anita Naciscione is Professor of English and Head of the Department
of Foreign Languages at the Latvian Academy of Culture, Riga,
Latvia. Her research interests lie at the interface of phraseology,
stylistics, and cognitive linguistics. She is concerned with the
cognitive processes of the mind, creative thinking, the role of
associations and the creation of a novel form and meaning in
discourse. She is the author of the book Phraseological Units in
Discourse: Towards Applied Stylistics (Riga: Latvian Academy of
Culture [2001]) and many articles on various aspects of the stylistic
use of phraseology. She is also the co-author of two Latvian-English
dictionaries.
[email protected]
 Notes on Contributors ix

Ken Nakagawa is Professor of English Philology and Stylistics at

Yasuda Women’s University, Hiroshima, Japan. His major
publications are: The Language of William Wordsworth: A Linguistic
Approach to Poetical Language (in Japanese) (Hiroshima: Research
Institute for Language and Culture, Yasuda Women’s University
[1977]); ‘The Vocabulary that Constitutes The Prelude’ in Studies in
Modern English: The Twentieth Anniversary Publication of the
Modern English Association (Tokyo: Eichosha: 457-47 [2003]), and
‘“Through” in The Prelude’ in Voyages to Conception: Essays in
English Romanticism (Tokyo: Kirihara Shoten: 118-33 [2005]).

[email protected]

Marika Schwaiger is a research assistant at the Department of

Phonetics and Linguistics of the University of Munich. For her M.A.
dissertation at the University of Munich, she is researching the
integration of young refugees, using sociological and political theory.
She is the author of Multimedia Training Materials on CD-ROM for
the publishing company Langenscheidt (Munich) and of Interactive
Training Materials for the Online Language Course uni-deutsch.de of
the Department of Language and Communication, University of
Munich.
[email protected]

Michi Shiina teaches at Hosei University (Tokyo, Japan) and is

currently a Ph.D. student at Lancaster University. Her main areas of
research and teaching are historical pragmatics, stylistics, discourse
analysis, sociolinguistics, cultural studies. Her main publications are
‘How Spouses Used to Address Each Other: A Historical Pragmatic
Approach to the Use of Vocatives in Early Modern English Comedies’
in Bulletin of the Faculty of Letters 48 (Tokyo: Hosei University: 51-
73 [2002]); and ‘Cultural Studies and Linguistics’ in Gengo 29(3)
(Tokyo: Taishukan: 30-35 [2000]).

[email protected]
x Notes on Contributors

Michael Toolan is Professor of Applied English Linguistics at the

University of Birmingham. A current research interest is patterns of
coherence and expectation in the reading of narrative fiction. His
Total Speech (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 1996) explored
aspects of integrational linguistic theory. Other recent books include
Language in Literature (London: Hodder [1998]), Narrative (2nd ed.;
London: Routledge [2001]), and the editing of a four-volume
anthology of seminal papers in critical discourse analysis (London:
Routledge [2002]).
[email protected]
 Preface
This book inaugurates PALA Papers, a series of volumes comprising
essays selected and edited from presentations at the annual
conferences of the Poetics and Linguistics Association. It appears in
the 25th anniversary year of PALA’s founding; its geographic and
intellectual range reflects the extraordinary growth of what began as a
small group of like-minded scholars, mostly from Great Britain, a
quarter-century ago.
The authors included in this volume, The Writer’s Craft, the Culture’s
Technology, represent countries from Brazil to Sweden and from the
United States to Japan; their essays discuss issues ranging from
Jakobsonian poetic analysis to textmontage on the World Wide Web.
Several of these papers discuss the phenomenon of globalisation; the
volume itself is a prime example of scholarly globalisation both for
PALA and the academic profession in general.
Books like PALA Papers are necessarily cooperative undertakings. I
am grateful to the contributors for their patience while we all coped
with the steep learning curve of contemporary technologies of
scholarly publishing. I am especially grateful to the volume editors,
Michael Toolan and Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard: PALA is
fortunate to have scholars of their standing as editors of this first
volume in our series. Thanks are also due to Margaret H. Freeman for
help in the final stages of preparing the manuscript.

Donald C. Freeman
Editor-in-Chief, PALA Papers
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Myrifield Institute for Cognition and the Arts
Heath, Massachusetts, USA
May 2005
This page intentionally left blank
 Introduction

The essays published here derive from papers given at the Twenty-
Second International Conference of the Poetics and Linguistics
Association (PALA) at Birmingham in April 2002. They address,
directly or indirectly, the main theme of that conference: the
interaction between literary creativity and a culture’s technological
affordances. The collection reflects the diversity of approaches
sponsored by PALA conferences, where the chief stipulation is simply
that a focus on the language of texts, systematically studied, is
maintained. We have divided the book, loosely and chiefly as a way of
postulating main trends, into four parts.
In the first part, The Writer’s Web, appear two papers, by Dillon and
Caldas-Coulthard, which were originally given as plenary lectures at
the conference, together with essays by Cronquist and Caballero.
In ‘Anti-Laokoön: Mixed and Merged Modes of Imagetext on the
Web’, George Dillon investigates the affordances of hypertext
reading. He begins by reminding us of the authoritative influence once
wielded by the high modernist segregation of words from visual
images (they might be ‘equal’; they had to be separate). In recent
decades, but obviously hastened by the accelerant digitisation, words,
images, sounds are mixed and merged in sense- and cognition-taxing
mélanges. The new media facilitate the handling of text, image, and
sound in ever more ingenious and widely available ways (every
[western] woman her own movie-maker). Here Dillon begins to spell
out some of those ways, and begins to think about the stylistics of
digital imagetexts. He describes in illuminating and entertaining detail
three particular tactics that move toward equivalence and fusion of
text and image (and sound). These he terms textmontage; the chaining
of words and images as hypertext anchors (image-text chains); and the
rendering of text as visual event through animation (dynamic
textmontage). An inescapable preoccupation is with the kinds and
functions and effects of links, and how they ‘re-establish the
xiv Introduction

readability of the visual world, at least in places, and the seeability of

words, to which we can add the hearability of words and images: we
can make literally speaking pictures’. One of the affordances of
hypertext links, then, is to weave fragments together into complex
signifying structures and to make us alert to how we are constantly
shifting interpretive rules and frames to make sense of our world. The
Web artworks scrutinised here, Dillon concludes, amount to
multimodal metaphysical conceits. And they seem to foster two
contrapuntal shifts: the physical/visual elements tend to be
apprehended as more metaphorical, while the textual/ verbal ones are
taken up as more a matter of design and performance, than they would
do elsewhere.
Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard’s paper, ‘Personal Web Pages and
the Semiotic Construction of Academic Identities’, examines the
effect of culture and gender on the discursive strategies used by Web
page writers to present themselves in terms of the narrativisation of
their lives and in terms of the multi-modal choices that help to create a
particular identity. She discusses in particular how participants in this
new genre of internet pages recontextualise in the public sphere a
fictionalised representation of themselves. In a virtual age, people
construct their identities through different media, and the internet is a
powerful source of self-identification. Identity construction is a
complex phenomenon, and people project in public spaces
idealisations of what they ‘think’ they are. The multitude of formats,
photographs, colour choice point to the hybrid formation of identity.
The online construction is an extension of the offline persona.
Institutions, she concludes, cannot control these self-representations.
There will always be a way out of the institutionalised corporate
‘image’. She also emphasises the importance of the study of
multimodality in the new communicative genres, since Web pages
combine language, image, and graphics into a single integrated text
structure; Web pages are interdiscursive, intertextual, dialogical, and
are also sites of engagement. It is through breaking down the
traditional hierarchical separation of different modes of representation,
Caldas-Coulthard claims, and focusing more on their roles in social
actions, social identities, and social practices that we will achieve a
true understanding of the society we live in – and virtuality for her, is
here to stay.
 Introduction xv

In ‘Hypertext, Prosthetics and the Netocracy’, Ulf Cronquist asserts

that the postmodern world of firewall-to-firewall technology causes
both autocracy and democracy to be supplanted by a ‘netocracy’ (of
which we are the ‘netizenry’). Relatedly, the old borders or identities,
(pre-)determined by nationality, sex, class, etc. are dissolving. The last
such frontier is our body itself. Cronquist sees all this being worked
through in Jeanette Winterson’s internet-set novel The PowerBook, in
which the multi-voiced narrator offers the reader ‘freedom for just one
night’. Cronquist examines the layered hypertextuality, extensive
prosthetics, and positional Netocracy that such ‘temporary freedom’
entails. But he does not want to overstate the case; he points out that
‘The PowerBook turns out to be a printed text that mimes hypertext –
the novel never radically questions its ontological status as a printed
text that mimetically represents reality’.
Rosario Caballero probes the influence of hypertext on genre,
specifically by examining some of the techniques and structures found
in a small corpus of 80 book reviews taken from online sources. Do
(online) reviews comprise a unified genre, or are they rather a group
of writing practices that might be regarded as genres in their own
right? The use of hypertext technology in online book reviews
highlights divergences already existing in practices of review-writing
and stirs them into new life. A particularly revealing aspect in this
regard is the system of links used by the online reviews in the corpus,
which are discussed in relation to two central parameters of genre –
audience and communicative purpose – and are found to play a
similarly significant rhetorical goal in hyperdiscourse interaction.
Part II of the collection, Textual and Technological Transitions,
comprises six papers which explore kinds of crossing or crossover in a
variety of texts and by various means.
Anita Naciscione discusses creative aspects of textual and visual
saturation in a multimodal discourse. Her approach is cognitive: it
proposes that the perception of an image, whether it is lexical or
phraseological, is a cognitive process, which creates a mental picture
in one’s imagination, a kind of visualisation in one’s mind’s eye.
Naciscione looks at some of the ways that familiar (even relatively
dead) metaphorical phrases get exploited, extended, glossed by visual
accompaniment, and so on, on particular occasions of use. Thus a
phrase like family tree is played with in a darkly humorous way by
xvi Introduction

Mark Twain when he suggests that his own family tree took a
distinctive shape (and then confirms this with a sketch unambiguously
depicting a gallows). Indeed there could be various creative
extensions, requiring imaginative interpretive visualisation on the part
of the addressee, of this stock phrase: the person who says ‘My family
tree has always been deciduous’, or the person tracing their own
ancestry who says that for many weeks of research they were ‘barking
up the wrong family tree’. And so on without limit. Naciscione’s
broad conclusion is that all such situated phrasal metaphorising is a
reflex of, and an aid to, cognitive articulation and development.
Ken Nakagawa’s essay on Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ is all about the
poet’s craft, and either structural or philological techniques of analysis
and reading, rather than technology. Insofar as the poem reports an
observer’s stimulation – by witnessing ‘a host of golden daffodils’ –
of reflection, thought, and memory on ‘that inward eye’, the poem
would seem to speak of the irrelevance, or at least mere contingent
impact, of technology. Humanly fashioned tools play not even an
indirect part in ‘Daffodils’; the speaker’s key tool is the eye. And
perhaps this applies more generally to the work of those designated
‘nature poets’. Nakagawa’s close attention to eye rhymes and
grammatical parallels may be felt by some to be old-fashioned (and
not merely ‘unfashionable’). But certain considerations speak in its
favour. For one thing, it is close to a dominant way of writing about
poems in British secondary schools (and no doubt elsewhere). For
another, it may manage to single out some of the material to which a
reader actually, wittingly or otherwise, is responsive. Indeed, to be
justified, it must so identify real sources of reader response. But
proving such influence – proving, for example, that readers take note
of the gay/gazed echo-rhyme, and that this recurrence reinforces (to
those readers) ideas of delight – is a difficult matter. Perhaps easier to
seek confirmation of are the larger movements, for example that
which Nakagawa notes from – and later back to – the solitude or
loneliness, and hinted melancholy, of the first and final stanzas, which
envelop stanzas of dancing bliss. Chafing at the ‘limits’ that a
structuralist analysis seems to impose, Nakagawa turns to a
philological reading, which highlights ‘dynamic movement’ in the
poem.
 Introduction xvii

In ‘Seeing the Sea: Deixis and the Perceptions of Melville’s Reader’,

Robert Cockcroft focuses on the dizzying use of deixis at important
narrative moments in Moby-Dick, where we, following our focalising
narrator Ishmael, seem to be deliberately disoriented, perceptually and
cognitively. Melville exploits linguistic resources which generally
assist us in the process of reading – deixis and story schemata – in
ways which give us the textual experience of being as lost and
insignificant as any Ishmael hallucinating while on watch at the top of
the masthead. As Ishmael memorably warns:
But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip
your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian
vortices you hover. And perhaps, at midday, in the fairest weather, with one
half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea,
no more to rise forever.
(Chapter 35: ‘The Masthead’)

Anna Elizabeth Balocco’s study is of ‘transgressive’ narratives,

published in a Brazilian magazine: stories in which Brazilian lesbian
women publicly affirm their sexual orientation. Balocco argues that
these narratives function as a resource through which social meaning
is attached to these women’s private experiences, enabling them to
structure their collective memory. At the same time, however, the
point of view which incorporates these narratives into our own
collective memories is fundamentally male: these women, who
represent so-called ‘chic lesbianism’, remain within the scope of the
male gaze and are easily eroticised as such. Thus the distinct
patterning of discourses in these narratives doubly inscribes the
informants as the Other of hegemonic discourses on sex and on
gender. The main theoretical assumption of Balocco’s paper is that
social identities, across different dimensions, are discursively
constructed. She claims that although storytellers challenge the
boundaries of ‘competent discourses’ constituted to erase cultural,
linguistic, ethnic, gender, or sexual differences, their narratives are
contained within a dominant code, which defines a particular type of
representation for homoerotic women.

In ‘The Translator’s Craft as a Cross-Cultural Discourse’, Mirjana

Bonačić emphasises the plurality of translational discourses derived
from a single original text by exploring how different frames of
reference are reflected in, or created by, the use of language during
xviii Introduction

translation. The text taken for exemplification is Frost’s ‘Nothing

Gold Can Stay’, and the translations of this poem into Polish and
Croatian. Bonačić makes a case for regarding translation as crucial
contemporary ‘work’ (which runs counter to the homogenised,
‘translation-less’, world promised or threatened by some versions of
globalism), going across and between languages, cultures, and
viewpoints. Translation’s work is part art, part technologically assisted
creativity. In some ways the translator is a representative figure of the
postmodern exile, always lonely and at home (like Heaney’s persona,
or, for that matter, Rushdie’s).

Just how significantly differently might students apprehend a

‘difficult’ text if they encounter it in a modified format, where the
written text is supplemented by comic-book-style illustrations? This is
the question Marika Schwaiger explores, using two groups of
German grammar-school students as her subjects, and Kafka’s Before
the Law (in text only and text-plus-illustrations formats) as the
‘difficult’ textual material. In addition Schwaiger asks such
scandalous questions as: Do literary classics appear, to today’s
students, to be not worth reading, due to their bygone textuality? Do
teachers need to contemplate ‘a kind of compromise between
yesterday’s literature and today’s students’ reading habits or their
perceptive faculties?’ Can we not only bring our student-horses to the
trough of literature, but actually get them to drink deep, if (and only
if?) we substitute water with diet Coke? Schwaiger is well aware that
her study invites further explorations. For example at the end of their
reading, recipients of both the text and picture-text versions could be
asked to produce their own drawings (of the Doorkeeper, for instance,
or of the face of the enquirer). It might be instructive to see what work
this produced – whether, for example, picture-text subjects’ depictions
tended to be slavish copies of the artwork previously presented to
them, and whether the drawings of the text-only subjects might be
judged to be more varied and imaginative than those of the other
group. Schwaiger is not afraid to assert (in particular circumstances, of
course) ‘unimodality bad, multimodality good’. But hers is by no
means a blanket endorsement of lit with pix; rather she closes by
recommending ‘a well-directed use of illustrations in specific
situations’ with young and inexperienced readers grappling with more
abstract or symbolic writing.
 Introduction xix

Papers in Part III, Changing Cultures of Report, are united in being

explorations of kinds of reporting and representation of others’ words
at different times and in different media – principally, contemporary
newspapers, contemporary documentary television, and 18th-century
fiction.
Geoff Hall revisits the issue of reported speech in newspaper stories.
It has long been noted (especially in British tabloid newspapers but in
the ‘quality’ broadsheets too) that quotations from people in the news
are frequently an edited record of what was actually said or written,
and are sometimes surprisingly inaccurate, or hypothetical. In view of
the extent of this rhetorically driven ‘creativity’, some theorists have
wondered how heavily we should focus on matters of ‘fidelity of
report’ as a benchmark and in some discoursal situations (legal,
political, book reviewing and criticism, and financial matters) a
required standard. Hall reviews the ‘going to war with Iraq’ narrative
and President Bush’s speech to the United States Congress in which
he identified Iraq, Iran, North Korea as ‘an axis of evil’, and alleged
that all three countries were linked with weapons of mass destruction.
What sort of link did he assert? Did these countries actually have such
weapons and could they deploy them rapidly; or did they merely want
them, and so were seeking them? As everyone can see, there are
significant differences here. But as Hall shows, journalism is routinely
a process of accumulation, cutting and pasting of other scribes’
fragments, and that even in purportedly direct report of a major
political speech, beamed around the world, not insignificant
differences and reformulations emerge or are fostered, as the spinning
requires. While Hall recognises that identification of key parameters
affecting faithfulness of representation has helped to give a more
nuanced picture, he suggests that there may still be room for a more
wide-ranging model of communication, in which stylistics adopts a
more elaborated linguistics of writing.
Joe Bray’s ‘“Print Culture” and the Language of the 18th-Century
Novel’ reflects on the fluidity and slipperiness of the ‘body’ of the
Pamela text, and its openness to readerly interpretations by Mr B. As
Bray shows, Mr B repeatedly conflates Pamela and her texts, and is as
infatuated by the one as much as the other, or by one because of the
other. But the ‘equivalence’ (to use a term put under pressure in the
Bonačić essay) of Pamela and the novel is by no means Mr B’s
xx Introduction

exclusive folly, but rather is quite openly and deliberately intimated,

in plot and detail, by Richardson: e. g., in the way Pamela ‘stitches’
various parts of her text ‘about her body’. Bray challenges the
assumption that digitised technology enables, in a way never before
imaginable, the permeability of text to text, and of authorial property
to readerly reinterpretation and alteration. He finds, in the use or
uptake of Pamela/Pamela, Richardson’s first novel or first heroine,
ample 18th-century evidence of quite similar trends. Of the re-
workings, the ‘spinning’, of the Pamela phenomenon (what he calls
‘the Pamela media event’) in the years surrounding its publication
Bray sees a forerunner of contemporary technology-driven
appropriations and decouplings of authorial intention from use or
interpretation. Pamela/Pamela seems to have appeared in at least as
many popular-cultural guises as Madonna or Princess Diana in our
own day. As a result of the proliferation of published ‘versions’,
irresolvable debates arose concerning Pamela’s destabilised
‘meaning’; but Bray goes on to argue that uncertainties of
interpretation and possibilities of misreading were actually inherent in
the text from the outset, in its first edition.
Susan Hunston’s ‘Truth and Lies: The Construction of Factuality in a
Television Documentary’ is an analysis of a television documentary
prompted by the publication of Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments, a
memoir of childhood in the Nazi concentration camps. In the
television documentary, two contradictory versions of an individual’s
life story are presented: version 1 tells of a young child who endured
and survived the Holocaust death camps, and lived to write a moving,
best-selling book about his experiences; version 2 tells of a man who
merely ‘imagined himself’ into the experience of being a Holocaust
victim and survivor, and wrote a bestseller out of that imagining.
Crucially, the documentary about Wilkomirski/Grosjean presents
these two versions in sequence without explicit narratorial guidance or
a viewer’s sense of narratorial inconsistency, incoherence, or
dishonesty. Without explicit narratorial help, the reader infers that
version 2 is true and corrective of the fabrications in version 1. Part 1
is reinterpreted by Part 2, Hunston suggests, and this in turn is
possible because the status of the utterances and the images in the first
part of the film are in fact epistemically indeterminate (between record
or mere reconstruction, and between narratorial averral and mere
attribution), and these indeterminacies are partially resolved by the
 Introduction xxi

(epistemically determinate) words and images in the second half of the

film. Hunston’s epistemic categories (record vs. reconstruction;
attributed vs. averred) usefully help to articulate how film-makers’
tellings of events can slip between truth and fiction.
In Part IV, Corpus-Enabled Stylistics, essays that discuss or
demonstrate the uses of corpora in stylistic studies are gathered
together.
Donald Hardy introduces and advocates use of his own text-analysis
program, TEXTANT, which he suggests circumvents some familiar
off-putting features of high-tech analytical programs. Even beginning
students can make headway with TEXTANT, while more advanced
users with particular needs can be accommodated by relatively easy
modifications of the program. The essay is of interest, too, as a report
on just how introductory graduate-level stylistics is taught in the
English department of an American university ‘having no linguistics
department but having a diffuse collection of linguists and linguistics
students across campus’. Hardy is sensibly aware that a text-analysis
program can easily become an end in itself, disastrously detached
from the ‘Why?’ of text analysis which prompted the development of
the software in the first place. He is also keenly aware that the
question why one might use software in text analysis cannot receive
one privileged answer, but different answers in different
circumstances. And of course certain kinds of text – a short poem by
Wallace Stevens, say – perhaps do not merit use of a text analysis
program at all, save indirectly (where patterns, frequencies,
collocations, etc. in comparator corpora are used to highlight features
that are normal or exceptional in the Stevens poem). But as Hardy
notes, TEXTANT (and other programs such as TACT and Wordsmith
Tools) are particularly useful in searches of large swathes of text (such
as all of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction) in ways that are humanly
difficult: e. g., searches for particular words or phrases in an entire
novel’s dialogue or narrative, or in the dialogue of one particular
character. These are small steps, and like corpus linguistics generally,
may be felt to lure the analyst into a distortingly ‘wordlist’ or
‘literalist’ view both of language and of literary creativity; at the same
time such searches and results create a way of viewing text-making,
and therefore of thinking about it, that was not hitherto practically
possible.
xxii Introduction

Michi Shiina’s essay uses a thorough classification of vocative types,

as found in a corpus of early modern English comedies, to show how
the rich variety of vocatives is exploited to present human networks in
their dramatic worlds. (Despite the radically different discourse
studied, there are affinities with Balocco’s essay, as both demonstrate
the variety of textual dimensions by means of which individuals’
identities are textually constructed, reflected, and even negotiated.) A
particular concern here is the kinds and meanings of vocatives
between husbands and wives among the gentry. Shiina notes that the
woman in such a relationship ‘is in a contradictory space’ in that the
power semantics would suggest she should use a deferential vocative
while the solidarity semantics might prompt use of the opposite. A
frequent solution is a formulation that combines premodifiers of
intimacy or endearment with a headword that attends to formality or
hierarchy, as when a wife addresses her husband as (my) dear Mr.
Strictland. Is there also some degree of accommodation on the
husband-to-wife side, where he says to her my Dear or poor Madam?
Masahiro Hori’s corpus-based study of the two intertwined narratives
of Bleak House (those of Esther, and of a heterodiegetic reporter for
whom all the characters are denoted by third-person pronouns:
hereafter abbreviated as EN and TN respectively) uncovers a number
of contrasting collocational characteristics of these two narrators’
voices. To begin with, Esther’s non-dialogue narrative is significantly
more repetitive, while the TN is significantly lexically richer, than its
partner. Unsurprising perhaps, but nevertheless reflective of Dickens’
skill. A variety of noted differences at the level of collocation are also
intriguing. Among oxymoronic NP collocations, for example, Hori
finds that Esther’s more often combine an inherently semantically
positive modifier with a semantically negative or undesirable
headword (e. g. good-natured vexation and similar, are far more
frequent than disagreeable gallantry and similar), while in the TN that
weighting is reversed, so that awful politeness, wicked relief, are more
frequent than phrases such as harmonious impeachment. Many have
felt that Esther is uncritical and self-effacing to the point of reader-
infuriating banality; the case for saying she is not must be strongest
where she resorts to figures such as the oxymoron. But it is striking
that even here, she appears less challenging than the TN: she inclines
towards charity in her judgements of circumstances, even problematic
ones (the vexation was good-natured), while TN in similar conditions
 Introduction xxiii

inclines towards criticism, even where the circumstances are

unproblematic.
The study of text has expanded rapidly over recent decades, and
during this period (as we can attest from the papers presented here) a
series of new theoretical influences and paradigms have come into
play. As we suggested earlier, this collection reflects the challenges
we face in the age of the new digital technology and multimedia: the
hypertext, the World Wide Web, the internet, and the issues related to
interactivity. What we have in this collection, therefore, is a range of
different approaches to the analysis of style, text, and imagetext, but
all concerned with the question of how literary or non-literary
creativity relates to a culture’s technological affordances.
We hope that the proposals and debates which are represented within
these 16 papers will be of assistance as we adjust, under pressure from
our changing cultures and technologies, our ways of reading and
producing text. We have to start to understand, as stylisticians and
discourse analysts, how multi-modal aspects of style and text design
and composition add meanings to the craft of the writer. Perhaps we
should begin thinking of a digital stylistics.
We cannot end this introduction without making special mention of
the exceptional contribution to the editing and preparation of this book
made by the series editor, Donald C. Freeman. When our own time,
energies, and technical resources for preparing this volume were all
spent, Don took over and piloted the project to its final condition,
where papers were presentationally uniform at a professional standard
of camera-readiness. Without Don’s enormous contribution the book
would have been at best a far inferior product, if it had appeared at all.
All involved in this book, and the series that it launches, are greatly in
his debt; but the present editors are especially so.

Michael Toolan
Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard
Birmingham, April 2005
This page intentionally left blank
 PART I

THE WRITER’S WEB

Anti-Laokoön:
Mixed and Merged Modes of Imagetext on the Web

George L. Dillon
Abstract
The new media facilitate the handling of text, image, and sound in digitised artworks
in ever more ingenious and varied ways; all such multimodal integrations run wholly
counter to the former high-modernist exclusion of words from visual images. Here I
discuss three of the means by which relations between text and image (and sound) are
being created in contemporary Web artworks: I term these textmontage, image-text
chains, and dynamic textmontage. Central to the reader/viewer’s processing of
hypertext is the cross-modal link. By comparison with the source-to-target inferential
bridge entailed in reading written text, when the link is from word to image or vice-
versa, the search domain is considerably larger and the process of ‘bridging’ tends to
make text-parts and image-parts exchangeable. Web artworks seem to foster two
receptive shifts, with the physical/visual elements tending to be apprehended as more
emblematic or metaphorical, and the textual/verbal elements as more a part of design
and performance, than they would do elsewhere. One of the affordances of hypertext
links, then, is to weave fragments together into complex signifying structures and to
make us alert to how we are constantly shifting interpretive rules and frames to make
sense of our world.
Key words: imagetext; dynamic textmontage; hypertext; Flash; links.

It was painting on canvas that was, I think, a faithful rendering of a photo with
a guy leaning against a pole smack in the middle, with the word ‘wrong’ at the
bottom. This is meta-discourse; I had never seen photographic meta-discourse
before. Not only did he use a dumb photo, he made a point of it by sticking a
word on it, because of course words were forbidden in photography (Rosler
1998: 38).

In an interview with Benjamin Buchloh, the photographer and

multimedia artist Martha Rosler describes the powerfully liberating
2 George L. Dillon

effect of seeing some of John Baldessari’s photographic work in 1968.

The of course reflects the power that the High Modernist ban on
mixing words and images most famously articulated in Clement
Greenberg’s ‘Towards a Newer Laokoön’ (Mitchell 1994: 35, 215ff.)
had over artists in the mid-20th century. Much has been written
subsequently about the breakdown of this Modernist stricture of High
(or museum-gallery) Art by the Conceptualists and many other artists
as well. The restoration of ‘imagetext’ to its rightful throne has been
proclaimed by W. J. T. Mitchell, and recently, Simon Morley (2003)
has written a history of 20th-century art as overthrowing the
segregation of word and image, confusing conventional relations
between them, and culminating in the practices of the new digital
media which bring into sight ‘the kind of universal language of which
the avant-garde once dreamed, a language based on the fusion of
words and images into a sign system that one enthusiast has called
“iconographics”’ (Morley 2003: 203). (The enthusiast is Nicholas
Negroponte.) And Morley sees yet farther that ‘eventually
digitalization may well do away with verbal language altogether’
(204) – which is no great loss, one supposes, for an art guy.
Despite his almost ecstatic embrace of the new digital technology – of
the World Wide Web, interactivity, hypertext, Photoshop, and the
whole shebang – Morley says little about actual pieces of work on line
or about how particular ‘fusions’ are accomplished. This is most
surprising to one coming from the language and literature side, where
fusions of disparate things are frequently described and closely
analysed. I agree with Morley that the new media facilitates the
handling of text, image, and sound in ways that continue and extend
the overthrow of Greenbergian separation and the mixing of word and
image in novel ways. In this article, I will try to spell out some of
those ways, and to begin thinking about the stylistics of digital
imagetexts. In particular, I will describe three tactics that move toward
equivalence and fusion of text and image (and sound): what I will call
textmontage, the chaining of words and images as hypertext anchors,
and the rendering of text as visual event through animation (dynamic
textmontage).
A terminological note: I am using the term montage in the sense of
photomontage or compositing, rather than in the cinematic sense of
 Anti-Laokoön 3

the juxtaposition of one sequence to the other. The line seems clear
enough, but becomes blurry when the text and frame are no longer
static, but animated, as is the case with dynamic textmontage. Also, by
text I mean written words; hence the montaging of text is visual. This
too becomes more complicated when the visual display is
accompanied by audio sequences of speech, which are verbal and text-
like in engaging us in processing language rather than images, but are
not visually represented and merged. To make analysis even more
complicated, the audio with some of the pieces we will look at is itself
an audio montage of voices, sounds, and tunes.
1. Textmontage
Among the many ways that artist-writers have begun to, or resumed
mixing image and text is a particularly merged style I am calling
textmontage. Only the most rabid and extreme Modernist would
insist that text and image never occur together, that all pieces be
entitled Untitled, or ‘Untitled, No. what-have-you’ on walls with no
legends or commentary, and with no exhibit catalogue or notes. There
are certain standard fixed places for words and they are basically
outside the frame. Things begin to be more seriously mixed when
words can get inside the frame and become part of the visual design.
Then we begin to see the words as shapes in relation to other shapes
and we flip back and forth between reading and seeing, often
frequently and quickly. The most common device is to simply write
the words over an image, where the words constitute a connected
message and can be read as a text. Victor Burgin did a whole series of
these in the early 1980s with white text placed in generally vacant
areas of black-and-white photographs. That too is not quite what I
mean by textmontage, not even if the text were to seriously overwrite
parts of the image (as is quite often done in far-out graphic design).
You start to have textmontage when the words are integrated into the
image usually with fading or transparency and soft edges. At the
extreme end, text becomes visual form and design, as in the
(nonelectronic) light sculptures in the new British Library, one of
which is depicted here in Figure 1. These sculptures are made of two
sheets of plexiglas with inscriptions appropriate to their disciplines
painted or etched on the back sides. The sheets are sandwiched
together to provide an image of a transparent page with writing on
both sides and are lighted on the edge so that the writing glows much
4 George L. Dillon

as it might on a computer display. This arrangement results in

reflections of the writing which appear as ‘ghosts’ or shadows.

Figure 1: Literature Display – British Library

 Anti-Laokoön 5

Talk about merging and integration of text and image is very nice, but
it is also easy to see the relation as one of competition (as Foucault
maintained in his little book on Magritte) – at least for real estate on
the canvas, page, or screen, if not semiotic hegemony. In the
following piece (‘The Shadow’) by Stef Zelynskyj, the text is viewed
as through a spyglass (note changes of scale) in fragments and further
fragmented by a tear that allows the landscape to show through. For
me, this display rouses a ferocious urge to recover and complete the
text, especially because it is almost possible to do that. The image thus
sets off an alternating between viewing image and reading for text. It
is not possible to do both at once: they are incompatible uses of the
eyes, visual cortex, and so forth. I went to a collection of Jonson’s
poetry and place the text in unmutilated form beneath the image:

Figure 2: Stef Zelynskyj – ‘The Shadow’

FOllow a shaddow, it still flies you;

Seeme to flye it, it will pursue:
So court a mistris, shee denyes you;
6 George L. Dillon

Let her alone, shee will court you.

Say, are not women truely, then,
Stil’d but the shaddowes of us men?
At morne, and even, shades are longest;
At noone, they are or short, or none:
So men at weakest, they are strongest,
But grant us perfect, they’re not knowne.
Say, are not women truely, then
Stil’d but the shaddowes of us men?

Fully restored and presented front and centre, this little misogynistic
conceit, so typical of its period, seems unspeakable and not at all
funny today. The visual erosion and tattering may represent not so
much the effect of time as the loss of the cultural assumptions that
sustained it and made it clever.

Figure 3: Ian Campbell – ‘Male Cliché’

 Anti-Laokoön 7

Figure 3 (‘Male Cliché’), one of several digital montages by Ian

Campbell, also fragments texts. In this case the texts are postings to
USENET groups that were found by putting the key words ‘male
cliché’ in a search engine. The snippets, rendered in several fonts but
especially Courier-looking ones evoking text consoles, manage only
phrases and simple clauses layered over the talismanic emblems of
maleness (the ball peen hammers) and torn cotton briefs. Indeed, it is
hard to imagine how much sustained text could fit on a screen with
strong images. But what the image gives us are just fragments of
gender stereotypes. Its timeliness may have passed; it is no longer
exhibited on Campbell’s website.

Figure 4: Eduardo Navas – Screen from ‘The Quixote’

One site that manages to have a lot of text and pieces of text with
images both ways is Eduardo Navas’ ‘The Quixote’. This edition of
Borges’ ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ wants to display two
languages (those of translation and original) and to use sentences as
panels superposed over a book image. The site divides the story into a
series of such pages. On all of them, the flow of text is interrupted at
the sentence, and the visual integrity of the text is reduced by making
the ‘pages’ transparent (and the type very large). However, Navas also
8 George L. Dillon

presents the connected text (albeit alternating Spanish and English

translation) in a pop-up window that can be positioned and scrolled
and is in a sense outside the design frame (though depicted here in the
lower left-hand corner of the main window – caution: this frame will
be blocked by popup blockers, which are set by default to ‘on’ these
days).

Figure 5: Geoff Broadway – ‘Mirage’

Another solution to including extended stretches of text in a visual
composition can be seen in Geoff Broadway's ‘The Glass’. This is a
series of six emblems (‘totem poles’, one of my students called them).
 Anti-Laokoön 9

These emblems exist in .html and Flash forms, the latter providing
support for a number of sound clips associated with regions of each of
the six emblems. These clips are activated by mousing over the
images, and there are some overlaps between regions so that
occasionally two clips can be heard at once. With Figure 5 (‘Mirage’),
which deals with Western constructions of The Arab, are four such
clips: associated with the riding horseman is the ‘Lawrence of Arabia’
theme song; another clip is of an Arab commenting (in English) on
certain stereotypes; yet another is a clip from a newsreel reporting
Israeli independence; and a fourth one is a segment of an ABC News
broadcast covering the return of the American troops from Operation
Desert Storm. One might hesitate to call this textmontage, since there
is no text competing and blending with the images in the visual
channel, but the sound and speech are still spatialised and a part of the
composition by virtue of the hotspots that activate it. (The volume of
the sound also appears to have a focal centre.)
As parts of these multimedia emblems, the words and images seem to
resonate with allusiveness and to interanimate each other, as I. A.
Richards used to say of words in poems. The visual contexts do draw
out and heighten some connotations of the words, and the words do
select certain aspects of the images over others. Ball peen hammers,
for example, take on quite a different aspect in a metal-working shop.
But these interlinked webs of association are not organised into
statements and claims on the one hand, or representations of the world
(or visual pattern and design) on the other. It can, however, convey a
certain take on the world, a certain positioning with respect to things
that may sometimes deserve to be called political or social critique,
though it is often hard to state in discursive prose what that
positioning is.1
It may be that textmontage will prove just a brief fad brought on by
the new technology for compositing layers and altering their opacity,
and that it will quickly come to seem jumbled both in conception and
the viewing, rather than the trigger for bits of stimulating semiotic
dexterity. Or, perhaps equally likely, it may be taken to convey a
certain contemporary look and start turning up on posters, adverts,
textbooks, and brochures, where it may only occasionally suggest the
richness of connection that we associate with a good poem. But there
does nonetheless seem to be much more to be explored in this vein.
2. Image-text chains and webs
Sooner or later, however, one come to the limits of what can be
contained on a single page and it is necessary to employ hypertext
10 George L. Dillon

links to set pages in a sequence (or sequences). The image anchors of

the links, which are often hot areas in the image rather than the entire
image, may take you to another image, or a piece of text, and similarly
with the text anchors. The effect is to make words and parts of images
interchangeable as links. I offer as a first example Doll Yoko and
Andi Freeman’s ‘Princess Zombie’, a smallish site that resists the
mediatising of Diana Spencer’s unfortunate end. The site is made up
of 14 full-screen images with hot spots (and sometimes a few words)
and 10 pages of text (with underlined link anchors). The hot spots
must be sought out with the mouse and we learn to find them on this
site by touching facial features (among other things) such as eyes, lips,
cheeks, and earrings. Indeed, eyes are everywhere on this site,
sometimes composited over other things. They are thematic to be sure,
but it is a little disconcerting to poke the cursor, which turns to a hand
with extended finger, into the eyes of the observers and mourners.
Many of the images are in fact photomontages with several layers of
partially transparent images – associated impressions, of the funeral,
as it were, since reduced opacity has long been linked to
dematerialisation and hence to memory, dream, and apparition. Figure
6 is entirely typical:

Figure 6: Doll Yoko and Andi Freeman – Screen from ‘Princess Zombie’
 Anti-Laokoön 11

Within these half-seen, glimpsed, remembered scenes and impressions

are one or two hotspots that trigger jumps: here the eye is one and the
scrawled ‘HELPLESS IN APAPTHY’ is the other. In general, the visual
parts of Doll Yoko’s images that are hot are visually salient parts of the
head, face, or hands. Also, she uses quite a number of sustained images
which are often hot and lace the visual pages together almost as the
hypertext cross references do. Neither images nor text are primary in
‘Princess Zombie’. All are just signs linking to signs.
To browse the next site, the viewer has to be somewhat more inventive in
finding and synthesising cues. ‘“Moles” is multi-media self-examination’,
Liz Miller says, calling it an autobiographical narrative, which is
promising a lot for a site that opens with a black screen and seven
thumbnail images which align themselves on the left to make up a table
of contents. Each of these if touched fills the main window with a large
version of itself partitioned into three sections. The central, slender
section of each is the clickable part and activates reloading with a bit of
narrative text appearing, usually over image and sometimes as a mouse-
over with one of the moles.

Figure 7: Liz Miller – Screen from ‘Moles’

One of the seven strands has some ‘refresh’ auto-loading, but the general
mode rewards engagements with the mouse in various ways: the effect is
sometimes of sliding panels that the viewer must pull back to read the text
12 George L. Dillon

behind them, sometimes of painting the screen with the mouse to trigger
mouse-overs, and often of touching the moles with the cursor to trigger
text or jump to the next screen. The bits of story are there, linked to the
moles, waiting to be released.
The seven narrative segments advance a theme of growing up, leaving
home, discovering attraction to women, wanting to and finally telling her
parents in a letter of her lesbian identification. Figure 7 illustrates how
this all works as technique and content.
The grey text-over in monospace type can be readily made out as the text of
the letter she has been struggling to write. The cursor is touching a mole on
her thigh and triggering the appearance of the text on the calf of the leg,
which describes her having written the letter. This is text that is written
upon and part of the body: experiences are recorded in the moles, the
maculae; touching them causes narratives of the experiences to appear on
the screen and on the body.

Figure 8: Caitlin Fisher – ‘Vanessa’ from ‘These Waves of Girls’

A third example of the technique of textmontage is the large, prize-winning
site ‘These Waves of Girls’ by Caitlin Fisher of York University.2 ‘These
Waves of Girls’ evokes the experiences inside and outside of school of the
narrator Tracey, a ‘bad cat’ (as one teacher calls her), who experiments
with other girls long before she begins to call herself lesbian.
 Anti-Laokoön 13

It is highly hypertextual and densely cross-linked, and linked as well by

repeated images, but since it does not tell one story but many, the
hypertext does not disrupt the story-telling, though it does disrupt any
master narrative of causation or development, there being on Fisher’s
view nothing anomalous or aberrant to explain. Indeed, cruelty and
baffled desire are as much themes as kissings and touchings, but my
female students inform me that this all is more or less in the realm of their
experience. Most of the action described is as reassuringly ordinary:
attending school, riding bicycles, going to camp, hanging out with
friends, playing party games. Somehow, filtered through the interface, it
is not boring or mundane but exciting and universal.
This transformation is largely the work of Fisher’s visual language for
memory. The images, which are a complete mix of digitally modified
photographs, drawings, and manipulable flash images (such as ones with
magnifying glasses, or which distort/ripple as you touch them with the
cursor), number well over two hundred, and they are recycled at different
sizes as well. Making the images of remembered childhood blurry, as
Fisher does, follows a long standing tradition (found, for example, in
Squier’s piece), but in that tradition they are usually also grey (or sepia-
toned), whereas Fisher punches up the saturation of the colours and
rotates their palates in denaturalising ways. She also pushes some to the
point of pixilation and the ghosts of excessive .jpg compression. She
inverts palates and applies ‘water-colour’ and ‘oil-painting’ filters. She
also crops many images so tightly that the effect is sometimes more of
glimpsing than seeing. We have not the distance even to see things whole,
much less to see them in perspective. Moreover, the general setup of the
screen is a set of frames with a central viewing window and wide margin
frames with a ‘menu’ style list of main topic links in the left margin frame
which open in the central window. These frames also have a common or
similar background images, thus providing a literal frame or context for
the central window. This framing context is so strong that one may view a
page and think it similar in theme and treatment to one that one has
already seen when in fact it is identical to the one that one has already
seen. And of course the recurrent images, in different scales and
locations, also function as ‘links’ to the other pages where they occur.
The bicycle drawing in Figure 8 is one such thread, and it is a hypertext
link in an image-text chain as well. The material in ‘These Waves of
Girls’ is presented as if remembered, or, at least, remembered by a
graphic artist.
14 George L. Dillon

There are certainly differences of technique among the three works

we have looked at, but strong common traits as well. All three net
artists use images to represent memories and perceptions rather than to
establish or document a public, historical world. As remembered
rather than freshly seen, they come intertwined with language, also
representing the remembered thoughts and events, and the triggers and
paths of association crisscross the boundaries of text and image.
A hypertext link minimally suggests connection: a kind of equivalence
– or continuation, development (relay), association, or perspective.
But to grasp the connection, we have to bridge the source and target.
This is of course true in writing as well, even when there is an explicit
connective word or words used, but the connective word or link
information points us in the intended direction and limits the search
for possible connections. And whether the link is from word to image
or vice versa, we still have to bridge them together; this bridging tends
to make text-parts and image-parts exchangeable. The hot spots of
hypertext anchors in text and in images are all regions on a surface,
and regions which do not have any inherent bounds other than those
set by the writer. Image-text links re-establish the readability of the
visual world, at least in places, and the seeability of words, to which
we can add the hearability of words and images: we can make literally
speaking pictures. These correspondences do not extend as a code
outside of the world of the particular work, but we can use various
heuristics in finding them, both in the concrete sense of finding the hot
spots in images and in the more abstract sense of finding a basis for a
link. One such is the heuristic of touching, which I think is always
simmering beneath the index-finger icon that signifies ‘you are in a
linked region’. When we touch someone’s eyes, we expect to see;
when we touch their ears, to hear, and their mouth, to speak. It is a
kind of probing, releasing touch, as when we read the body through
massage, probe for pain, or touch gingerly, not knowing what may
pop out.3 I don't mean that the semiotic modes themselves are fused –
they are still distinct and multiple, but effect of the free and rapid
movement from text to image to text to sound, etc. is to create the
effect of a super-semiotic system where there is no competition and no
gulf of incomprehensibility between reading, seeing, and hearing,
between diagrammatic abstraction and photographic realism, maps
and memoirs, news broadcasts and chronologies, theme songs and
 Anti-Laokoön 15

native dances. No one of these is authorial or authoritative, all must

answer the question: what is that doing here?
3. Dynamic textmontage
Thus far, we have been thinking of text as an element in a static visual
composition; one of the most attractive affordances of Macromedia
Flash, however, has proved to be its easy animation of lines and
blocks of text; a second attraction has been the easy syncing of sound
with scripted animation, and the ability to play concurrent tracks on
any platform and browser. Flash has become the online multimedia
medium par excellence: in the first four issues of Ctheory Multimedia,
for example, the great majority employ Macromedia Flash or
Shockwave. The great popularity of this software can be seen also in
the ‘Congruence’ branch of The Cauldron and Net and in the winners
and honourable mentions of recent net.art competitions.

Figure 9: Miranda and Neumark – Screen from ‘Machine Organs’

Issue 2 of Ctheory Multimedia contains Maria Miranda and Norie
Neumark’s ‘Machine Organs’ where words and phrases write over the
images of computer-organs accompanied by distinctly ‘bioform’
sounds and a montage of voices, whispers, and noises – lest, as it
were, that we in our rush to virtual life in virtual space forget ‘the
16 George L. Dillon

meat’. Figure 9 is a screen capture of one moment in the animation of

the ‘Heart Pump Machine’ – this pseudo-organ combines the heart and
liver to figure the computer as constantly working and as the seat of
emotions. There are three other ‘organs’: digestion (the computer as
‘hungry for information’), breath, and x-ray vision. The work is thus a
visual-textual-aural metaphor identifying the computer’s vital
processes in terms of ‘our own’. One might say that technically we
have gone beyond ‘textmontage’ in this case since we have added
another medium: sound clips of voices saying the words that over-
write the image are not ‘text’, which is verbal-visual, any more, but
verbal-auditory, and this verbal-auditory is accompanied by gurgles,
burps, sighs, gasps, pops, and sucking. These sounds are not synced to
the words or images – that is to say they are an independent channel,
as it were – but I am not sure that sounds can share the stage on an
equal footing with words and images because there is a very long
tradition of treating sounds as background and supportive rather than
bearing a primary theme (opera and other vocal music excepted). The
effect of the sounds here, however, is very much to merge, associate,
and evoke proximity to animate things; this effect is strongly
enhanced by the sounds and voices themselves overlaying each other
in a sound montage.

Figure 10: Jess Loseby – Screen from ‘Textual Tango’

 Anti-Laokoön 17

My second example of this new mélange of media is Jess Loseby’s

‘Textual Tango’ (snapshot in Figure 10), which repaints the screen
over and over with two texts of personal ads and lines from others.
One speaker is represented in red, one in green, but as the flow of text
continues, other texts enter, disintegrate, and drift or fade away, only
to be replaced with others asserting the desire to ‘find someone’. This
cascade mounts to two climaxes of speed and abundance synced to a
voice (Sting?) singing ‘Roxanne’, a song originally written by Sting
and performed by him and The Police, but featured recently in the
film Moulin Rouge with Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman. The
singer is a man who loves a prostitute and is promising her she need
not go into the street any more – a stern if not perhaps entirely
excessive comment on ‘the discourse of personal ads’.
In Figure 10, we see a moment approaching the climax of the piece,
where letters and words and phrases from other disintegrated personal
adverts float about like autumn leaves in the wind. One of the two
basic adverts is visible, but over it is being written the words of deep
demand, one word at a time. Here the words and letters both float and
appear with dominating insistence (large and red) in centre screen; in
other moments, the lines fly in from off-frame, giving screens like
Figure 11.

Figure 11: Jess Loseby – Screen from ‘Textual Tango’

18 George L. Dillon

Here again it might be argued that we do not have text being

montaged into a visual space, for they are the only visual elements in a
black space and they do not hold a stable position. We approach visual
poetry (‘vizpo’, Poems That Move), though the site is a critique of the
discourse of personal adverts, the words are all citational (or parodic),
and the rhythms of the piece are of their appearance, movement, and
disappearance.

Although ‘Textual Tango’ uses a very restricted palette and no image,

it does engross the eye with rhythmic movement. Even more austere is
the style of Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries (Marc Voge and
Young-hae Chang) which scrolls very large text (most often white
against black) very rapidly (like a reading tachistoscope) and closely
synced to a piece of classic jazz, not only by beat but by emotional
contours as well. YHCHI ‘do voices’ and evoke scenarios with an élan
that matches Joyce’s, parodying the epic narrator in Ezra Pound’s first
two Cantos, bar girls and businessmen, a subway attendant in Seoul
who taught Derrida the key of deconstruction, and Kim-il Sung. In
recent work, YHCHI have begun using songs, the words of which
frequently offer oblique or ironic contrasts to the lines of text scrolling
up the screen. For example, the Kim-il Sung piece (‘Cunnilingus in
North Korea’) delivers a message from the Dear Leader to South
Koreans (and presumably tout le monde since it is in English)
extolling the superiority of North Korean sexual experience over that
available under capitalism (itself a wonderfully daft parody of hard
ideological sell) while the audio track has Nina Simone singing ‘C-
line Woman’, a blues song celebrating a sexually powerful woman
(‘wiggle, wiggle, turn like a cat, / wink at a man and he wink back’).
The technique has points of similarity with ‘Textual Tango’, but
YHCHI’s ‘remixes’ have a special tendency toward cross-cultural
montage, as if the multiple coordinated modes of Flash afford
opportunities for displaying and celebrating fluency in numerous quite
disparate cultural idioms – the artistic response, YHCHI might say, to
globalisation. Fortunately, when viewing these works, one is already
on the Web, and typing into Google a line or two from an unfamiliar
song (such as, to me, ‘C-line Woman’, ‘Ramona’, or ‘Arirang’) will
tap the collective online wisdom of the globe, which on such points is
considerable.4
 Anti-Laokoön 19

4. Conclusion
Combining a very rapid scrolling tempo with multiple channels and
with culturally unfamiliar material pushes our capacities to process
what we see/hear to the extreme (and Flash cannot be paused or
rewound, only replayed). To read it at all requires one’s utmost,
focused, and sustained attention – well, sustained for three to five
minutes at least, which on the Web, that most distracting of places, is
a very long time. Clearly the contemporary Web enlarges the
possibilities for mixing text and image far beyond what Greenberg
might have imagined: dynamic textmontage represents the point of
furthest distance from the classical single-channel Modernist painting
presented in a museum – say the Rothko room – for absorption and
serene contemplation. Walter Benjamin realised that Dada – and even
more, cinema – challenged this ideal image of ‘the aesthetic’ in favour
of one that re-enacted the shocks of modern city life under conditions
of distraction (1966: §§14 and 15). Paradoxically, however, these
Flash works reward the concentration of some of their viewers with an
almost rapturous absorption. Others report migraine headaches.
I do not mean to suggest that these last pieces are the fullest
realisation of multimodal Web writing. They mark one extreme, and
while they may elicit concentration in their viewers, they are not
strong as objects of contemplation. Shockwave and Flash sites are
scripted and will run with little or no viewer input, casting the viewer
back in the role of spectator. But this software only affords
‘bombardment mode’; it does not force it on the artist, and it is also
possible to make sites where the viewer chooses the pace and
direction of movement: Broadway’s set of six emblems is done in
Director and Miller’s ‘Moles’ in Flash, and these intend a reflective
engagement with the viewer.
If we ask what engages the mind and eye in the pages and sites
discussed here and makes them more than text-with-illustration, we
can extract one or two traits: in these pages, the physical and visual
tend to move in the direction of emblem and metaphor rather than
providing anchors to a literal, concrete world, and the textual and
verbal shift from being pieces of speech acts to elements of design and
performance – each, one might say, by attraction to the other. These
disparate media and semiotic modes are yoked together with montage,
hypertext, or Flash into multimodal conceits which suggest the perfect
20 George L. Dillon

equivalence that Dr. Donne says we glimpsed in the person of

Elizabeth Drury:
We understood
Her by her sight; her pure and eloquent blood
Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought
That one might almost say her body thought.

Endnotes
1I am commenting here on Broadway’s M.Phil. thesis, which defends the claim that
the mode of ‘The Glass’ is realism.
2‘These Waves of Girls’ won the Electronic Literature Award in 2001 (with a purse of
$10,000).
3Caitlin Fisher’s ‘These Waves of Girls’ uses Java-like applets in Flash to make the
cursor-finger trouble reflections and palp a woman's breast.
4Another brief piece in this vein is Thomas Swiss’s (and Skye Giordano’s) ‘Genius’.

References
Benjamin, Walter. [1936] 1966. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction’ in Arendt, Hannah (ed.) Illuminations. New York: Schocken: 217-
51.
Foucault, Michel. [1973] 1983. This is Not a Pipe (tr. James Harkness). Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Mitchell, W. J. T. 1994. Picture Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Morley, Simon. 2003. Writing on the Wall: Word and Image in Modern Art. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Rosler, Martha. 1998. Positions in the Life World (ed. Catherine de Zegher).
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

URLs for pages discussed

Note: The illustrations are greyscale reproductions of screen captures. The reader is
urged to consult the original versions online.
Broadway, Geoff. ‘The Glass’. http://www.intentional.co.uk/glass/index.htm.
Campbell, Ian. ‘Male Cliché’. http://courses.washington.edu/hypertxt/cgi-
bin/book/wordsinimages/ianc_male.jpg.
Doll, Yoko, and Andi Freeman. ‘Princess Zombie’. http://dollyoko.thing.net//zombie/.
Fisher, Caitlin. ‘These Waves of Girls’. http://www.yorku.ca/caitlin/waves/.
Loseby, Jess. ‘Textual Tango’. http://www.rssgallery.com/textualtango.htm.
 Anti-Laokoön 21

Miller, Liz. ‘Moles’. http://helios.hampshire.edu/~elmIA/moles/.

Miranda, Maria, and Norie Newmark. ‘Machine Organs’. http://ctheory.library.
cornell.edu/art/11/.
Navas, Eduardo. ‘Q Story’. http://home.earthlink.net/~navasse/Qstory/once.html.
Swiss, Thomas, and Skye Giordano. ‘Genius’. Drunken Boat, 2. http://www.
drunkenboat.com/db2/s-g/s-g.html.
Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries. ‘Cunnilingus in North Korea’. http://www.
yhchang.com/CUNNILINGUS_IN_NORTH_KOREA.html.
Zelynskyj, Stef. ‘The Shadow’. http://courses.washington.edu/hypertxt/cgi-
bin/book/wordsinimages/szelynsky.jpg.
This page intentionally left blank
Personal Web Pages and the Semiotic Construction
of Academic Identities

Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard

Abstract
In 2002, The University of Birmingham started to standardise staff Web pages. For
the institutionalised world of universities, the creativity of the personal should be in
principle rejected since the corporate image has to take precedence over the
individual. However, what is happening in the virtual world is that the domain of the
private, even among members of institutions, is taking over, and personal Web pages,
created by individuals from all walks of life, present to the world discourses of the
self. New forms of virtual identities are therefore created daily.
In this chapter, I examine the effect of culture and gender on the discursive strategies
used by Web page writers to present themselves in terms of:
1. the narrativisation of their lives – what kinds of life events are given
prominence;
2. the multimodal choices – what kinds of pictures, colours, spaces, scenarios
help to create a particular character.
I also discuss the implications of this kind of one-sided interaction for discourse
analysis – the Web page addresser sends a message not to an implied audience but to
anybody out there in the world who happens to open her or his page. The strategies
used to address an unspecified audience are a question that we need to pursue in the
new virtual world of the Internet.
My interest here is in looking specifically at how participants in this new genre
recontextualise, in the public sphere, a fictionalised representation of themselves.
Through what seems to be a light and inconsequential ‘message in a bottle’ to the
world, social activity is presented, evaluated and possibly new norms of behaviour are
being created.

Key words: discourse; narrative; multimodality; virtual identities.

1. Introduction
Visual communication is central to the information society and to the
practices of Late Modernity. Pictures, photos, illustrations are
24 Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard

everywhere – they permeate our academic work, everyday lives, and

activities. It is common nowadays to refer to brand images, corporate
images, national images, and self-images. These are interwoven with
our professional and personal identities, and they are signposts to
lifestyles, cultures, and societies.
In his seminal book Ways of Seeing, John Berger (1972: 7) points out
that:
Seeing comes before words – the child looks and recognizes before it can
speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It
is seeing which established our place in the surrounding world. We explain
that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are
surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is
never settled. The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we
believe.
To look is an act of choice.

Scollon & Scollon (2003b) suggest that humanity has undergone at

least four ‘ages’ in its development: the oral, the literate, the
imagistic, and currently, the information age. For them, oral societies
were constructed through oral narratives; literate societies, through the
standardisation of genres and documentation (essays, plans, forms,
scripts, charts, tables, etc.); while the still-current imagistic society
constructs itself through the moving picture – the camera, the
analogue and the digital video. The information society, by contrast, is
constructed through the digital pathway that makes its meaning
through the combination of many semiotic resources. We take this for
granted. Meaning-making is dependent on the interplay of different
resources, and these surround us in our everyday life. New
technologies, especially the Internet and the World Wide Web, are
pushing forward, almost daily, new communication strategies and
people interact through these new resources.
According to NUA (a resource for Internet statistics run by INQUIRA,
NUA internet surveys – http://www/nua.com/surveys), an exact
estimation of how many people are online throughout the world is not
possible. However, they say, there are many surveys that use different
measurement parameters and from observing many of the published
surveys over the last two years, they claim that up to September 2002,
approximately 605.6 million people had online access worldwide.
 Personal Web Pages 25

Just one year later, Global Reach (Global Internet Statistics by

Language – www.glreach.com) gives us the following results:

Online Language Populations Total: 649 Million

(March 2003)

Language Percentage
Dutch 1.9
Russian 2.7
Portuguese 2.8
French 3.3
Italian 3.6
Korean 4.2
German 6.5
Spanish 8.1
Japanese 10.3
Chinese 11.9
English 35.2
The sheer numbers of people using virtual communication and the
affordances of the new media are producing a visual revolution, in
which everything from the structure of books to the layout of pages,
distribution of images such as photographs, illustrations or digital
backgrounds, and the use of typography and colour are brought to bear
on conveying specific meanings. Representation, modality and
multimodality therefore enter into the very constitution of things since
an object’s or idea’s meaning is shaped by the very process of
representing it by way of language or images or other semiotic
resources.
Representation for Hall (1997: 61) is the process by which members
of a culture use signs to produce meaning – ‘things, objects, people or
events do not have in themselves any fixed, final or true meaning. It is
us, in society, who makes things mean, who signify’.
Representation, as a cultural process, establishes individual and collective
identities, and symbolic systems provide possible answers to the questions:
who am I? what could I be? who do I want to be? (Woodward 1997: 14).

Modality is the concept used by communication specialists to talk

about different modes or codes of communication – speaking, writing,
26 Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard

using images, gestures, sounds, colour, drawings, etc. to communicate

a specific message.
Multimodality (Kress & van Leeuwen 2001: 20), the concept used by
semioticians and discourse analysts, on the other hand, is ‘the use of
several semiotic modes in the design of a semiotic product or event’.
Modes are resources for making meaning. The same meaning, in any
cultural domain, can be expressed in different semiotic modes –
(music can encode action, images can encode emotion). We would
miss out important aspects of a film without considering the role of
music in the ongoing narrative, for example, or of a magazine without
interpreting its pictures and illustrations. Therefore, for Kress and van
Leeuwen, the particular ways that modes are combined (they may, for
instance, reinforce or complement each other) will determined the
ways we receive and interpret a message. The authors claim that all
semiotic products and events are communicative since they undergo
processes of articulation, interpretation, and ultimately, use and action.
An important point to make is that all messages are multimodal since
all messages make use of multiple modes. Web pages are archetypal
examples of multimodal messages. Web authors use many semiotic
resources in their pages to communicate their identities – the language
used, the photos, the colours,1 the objects chosen and displayed, all
signify symbolically different aspects of their identities.
Multimodal analysis therefore is crucial for understanding and
interpreting the world. Our tendency so far as linguists, however, has
been to privilege written and spoken texts above all other modes, and
to consider objects, actions, and people as simply making up ‘the
environment in which the text comes to life’, as Halliday (1978: 25)
suggests.
The internet and the World Wide Web have changed our views
dramatically. As Kress & van Leeuwen (2001) have pointed out, the
desire for crossing boundaries inspired 20th-century semioticians to
develop new theoretical frameworks that are applicable to all semiotic
modes.
In this chapter, therefore, I will examine academics’ personal Web
pages in order to consider the multimodal discursive strategies used by
Web page creators to present themselves in terms of:
 Personal Web Pages 27

1. the narrativisation of their lives;

2. the multimodal choices that help to create a particular identity.
I will also want to point out the implications of this kind of one-sided
interaction for discourse analysis – the Web-page addresser sends a
message not to an implied audience but to anybody out there in the
world who happens to open her or his page. The strategies used to
address an unspecified audience are a question that we need to pursue
in the new virtual world of the Web.
My interest here is in looking specifically at how participants in this
new genre recontextualise (Bernstein 1981), in the public sphere, a
fictionalised representation of themselves. Through what seems to be
a light and inconsequential ‘message in a bottle’ to the world, social
activity is presented, evaluated, and possibly new norms of behaviour
are being created.
2. Personal Web pages – the personal in the public sphere – real
or fictional story telling?
On a day of internet surfing, I came across a page,
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/#who, by one of the members of the
University of Birmingham staff, a computational scientist named
Aaron. At first sight, this was an academic page, giving the internet
surfer information about the professor’s career, his publications,
courses given, etc. However, there was a link to family issues, which I
pursued. This hyperlink seduced me in many ways, especially for the
force of the narration. For many minutes, I followed attentively the
story being told. This was the ‘real’, not fictional, story of a young
man who died of cancer, Ben, retold by his father, the professor. I saw
Ben’s wedding photos, then the events of his illness, and finally, the
events surrounding his death at 34 years of age.
Many different semiotic resources were posted on this Web page –
photos of different occasions of the family life, a map of the cemetery
where Ben was buried, the speech delivered by his young wife during
his funeral, a poem read by a friend, etc. I was very touched by the
telling, so much so that I wrote to Aaron, who then wrote back to me
and sent my message to Ben’s wife, who then wrote back to me. There
has never been any face-to-face interaction with the participants of
this virtual exchange. This experience prompted me to look more
closely at the question of personalisation of the public space of the
28 Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard

University. My data for this paper are therefore restricted to academic

Web pages, especially those of the University of Birmingham – pages
of teaching staff, postgraduate students, and some technicians.
Academic pages should be in principle public statements, but as
Aaron’s page demonstrates, academics tend to use the public site to
include their private sphere in this kind of communication. Hence, my
interest in investigating more the question of how the personal
intrudes in the public world of academia and the multimodal resources
used by ‘webbers’ to achieve their goals. (According to a new report
from www.nua.com - Internet Surveys by Category, by January 2000,
19 million U. S. internet users, or 29 percent of the total number of
users, have personalised Web pages, and 88 percent of users believe
that personalisation is the best way for companies to learn about
consumers.)
The University of Birmingham index of individual Web pages linked
to departments listed, in April 2002, a total of 425 of which only 23
belonged to female academics. This seems surprising since I would
expect that many more women were actively involved in
communicating virtually. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Not
surprisingly, scientists, especially engineers, produce the majority of
pages. The arts academics tend to be much more parsimonious in their
production.
Before I start examining some examples of Web pages, I want to
consider briefly the question of computer mediation as communication
and the question of recontextualisation.

3. Computer mediation as communication, narration, and the

construction of identities
Over the past ten years, as Rodney Jones (2002) has pointed out, many
areas of investigation, especially in sociology, anthropology,
linguistics, cultural and communication studies became interested in
Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC). The internet and the
World Wide Web are producing new forms of interaction, both in the
business and personal spheres as well as new forms of social
organisation. New discursive practices have therefore been developed.
Jones points out that different professionals like linguists and
communication scholars concentrate on linguistic features (registers
and genres), sociologists and anthropologists are interested in the
 Personal Web Pages 29

development of online ‘communities and cultures’, while

psychologists focus on the cognitive aspects of computer-mediated
communication. Jones continues (2002: 3) that although there are
many perspectives on CMC,
the kinds of data that are gathered to answer these varied questions are
remarkably limited. Nearly all of the studies look for answers to their
questions in the words typed on the screen. Data typically take the form of
downloaded ‘logs’ of computer chat sessions or corpora of emails or Usenet
postings, and analysis is generally confined to those words. Interactions are
assumed to exist in a kind of virtual vacuum, identities are hardly ever linked
to the lives of the people producing the words, and communities and cultures
are generally seen to stop at the screen’s edge.
The main problem with looking at computer-mediated communication
in this way, he suggests, is that it ignores the importance of online
behaviour as well as the importance of semiotic meanings.
Another problem with such studies, Jones (2002: 3) suggests, is that
they tend to focus on the mediational means (Scollon 1998) ‘at the
expense of looking at the kinds of actions that are taken, leading them
into a kind of technological determinism in which actions are
interpreted only as “effects” of the media’. For mediational discourse
analysts (Wertsch 1991; Scollon 1998, 2001; Scollon & Scollon
2003a, 2003b), the main focus of interest is on the complex and
indirect connections between discourse and action – they propose the
notion that social identities and practices are not only realised in texts
since what goes on in social interaction is much more complex:
A mediated action is defined as a social action taken with or through a
mediational means (a cultural tool). All social actions are construed as
mediated actions, it being definitional that ‘social’ means socially mediated.
The principal mediational means (or cultural tool) of interest is language or
discourse, but the concept includes all objects in the material world including
other social actors. Within MDA [Mediated Discourse Analysis] there is no
action (agency) without some mediational means (i.e., the semiotic/material
means of communicating the action) and there is no mediational means
without a social actor (agency). (Scollon & Scollon 2003b: http://www.
gutenbergdump.net, valid in April 2002²)
If action is ignored in CMC then, researchers are examining culture in
the cultural tools (Wertsch 1991) instead of examining culture
through its relationships with action, agents, and tools.
The problem with the concentration purely on ‘mediational means’, as
Jones (2002) demonstrates very well in his research on Chinese
30 Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard

learners of English using ICQ, a chat and instant messaging software,

is that often what is sought by users of ICQ and other interfaces of this
type is not ‘communication’ at all, but rather ‘connectivity’, ‘social
presence’, or ‘play’. My computer conversations with Aaron
exemplify this point. We were connected somehow.
In order to overcome these limitations, I want to propose, based on
Jones’ research, another way of approaching my Web pages, one
which focuses not just on the texts people produce when they are
sitting in front of their screens, but on the multimodal resources used
to construct identities which the new media now make possible. These
identities are inevitably connected to the world outside the computer
screen.
By representing themselves in particular ways, a narrator ‘gives off’,
to use Goffman’s terms (1959), personal clues about the social role
performances he or she is making and this representation indexes
these invisible psychological or social cultural states.
Of this vast brave new world, I will concentrate on the question of
how identities are presented through multimodal aspects. These are
the questions:
• Are my webbers constructed as ‘characters’ or ‘idealisations’
differing from the actual person behind the keyboard? (For
example, the 2003 case of an American GI who, pretending to
be 19 years old, engaged through a chat room with a supposed
19-year-old English girl – he was 30 years old and she was 12
years old. He was then prosecuted for a criminal offence.)
• Alternatively, are they ‘hybrid extensions’ of their offline
identities?
For the most part, I want to claim, online identities are not purely
reflections of offline identities or complete reconstructions, but
recontextualisations, convenient hybrids of both processes whose uses
often have as much to do with what is happening in the offline social
life of users as their online social life.
3.1. Webbers’ identities and the question of recontextualisation
The discourse of personal Web pages is a discourse about social
practices which takes place outside the context of that practice and
 Personal Web Pages 31

within the context of another one – the virtual context. The process of
including one social practice into another is a recontextualisation, or
…a sequence of communicative activities which make the social practices
explicit to a greater or lesser degree. Social practices are things that people do,
with greater or lesser degree of freedom, fixed by custom or prescription, or
some mixture of these two. (van Leeuwen 1993: 30)

Texts and images are representations of given practices, not the

practices themselves. As soon as one writes or speaks about any social
practice, one is already recontextualising. The moment we
recontextualise, we are transforming and creating other practices.
Web pages are recontextualisations that not only represent social
practices, they also have to explain and legitimate – in other words,
they have to make explicit the ‘why’ of their representations.
In the corporate world of today’s universities, there is a pressure on
academics to communicate values, to advertise and ‘sell’ themselves.
They have to recontextualise their self-identities in order to do this.
Giddens (1991) says that in postmodern societies self-identity
becomes a reflexive project – an effort that we constantly work and
reflect on. We produce and revise a set of biographical stories – the
telling of who we are, and how we came to be where we are now.
Self-identity, then, is not a set of traits or observable characteristics. It is a
person’s own reflexive understanding of their biography. Self-identity has
continuity – that is, it cannot easily be completely changed at will – but that
continuity is only a product of the person’s reflexive beliefs about their own
biography. (Giddens 1991: 53)
A person’s identity is not to be found in behaviour, nor – important though
this is – in the reactions of others, but in the capacity to keep a particular
narrative going. The individual’s biography, if she is to maintain regular
interaction with others in the day-to-day world, cannot be wholly fictive. It
must continually integrate events which occur in the external world, and sort
them into the ongoing ‘story’ about the self. (Giddens 1991: 54)

For Giddens, then, the self is not something we are born with and it is
not fixed. The self is reflexively made, constructed by the individual
(Gauntlett 2002):
What to do, how to act, whom to be?
These are focal questions for everyone living in circumstances of late
modernity – the ones which on some level or another, all of us answer, either
discursively or through day-to-day social behaviour. (Giddens 1991:70)
32 Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard

However, as Lemke (http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jaylemke)

points out, identity construction is also a verbal and non-verbal
performance (of attitudes, beliefs, and values). People participate in
activities through interactions and practices, and this participation, he
argues,
constitutes and shapes a) identity choice, b) identity display, and c) identity
construction. Identity is thus a positioning of self or other in a system of
meaning-relations and in a network of material practices, including a system
of power relations..., and discourse in general serves to construct identity and
positioning with respect to this system of meanings.
What webbers do when they create their personal pages is to choose a
set of self-characteristics that are important for them (life moments
and achievements, relations, places and moments) and construe a
persona. From the multitude of identities that academic users have
available to them, I will discuss next two main kinds of identity
formation in virtual recontextualisations: narrators and characters.
3.2. Narrators as extensions of self and as characters
For the psychologist Kohut (1971), according to Barry O’Connor (in
www.selfpsychology.com), a sense of ‘self’ is
a fundamental aspect of our life experience, and integrated with the totality of
our life. It not only encompasses who and what ‘I am’, at critical stages of our
growth, but in addition it is the totality of the inner workings of our true-self.
One could say, that within the development experience of the human, which I
would argue lasts our entire lives. There are certain ‘way points’ that need to
be arrived at in terms of realizing ‘self-potential’. Significant others are an
essential aspect of our self development.
This of course commences at the very earliest stages of our existence with the
critical relationship with our mother, and with this the influence of our father
on both mother and ourselves. This is further complicated in the modern
environment with the diminishment of the nuclear family, and the re-
designation of what comprises a family, with or without societal support.

The principal description of the ‘self’, in my data, follows the pure

and minimal forms of identity representation:

• I exist.
• Here I am.
• My name is so and so.
• I come from such a place.
• This is my family.
 Personal Web Pages 33

• These are my things.

• These are my interests.

Consider these examples (given the space constraints, I will illustrate

with only a few pages):

Welcome to the

Who Am I?
I am just a normal (?) British bloke who happens to be called Rob Branston, but I
have nothing to do with the famous Branston Pickle. Now I have that sorted out and
just on the off chance that the odd person is continuing to have a look, I will tell the
rest of you a bit more about me. I am a 24-year-old Economist, researching for a
PhD in Industrial Economics at the University of Birmingham in the UK. I am
approximately 6 feet 4¼ inches tall (195cm to my metric orientated friends), have
short brown hair and green/hazel coloured eyes. If you really want you can see some
pictures of me, but I warn you that I am not at my finest!!
At the moment I am looking for a job, so I have been spending a great deal of my
spare time working on a page containing an academic orientated CV and information
about PhD. I have also made a more ‘city’ orientated CV as I am not sure what my
future direction will be. If you like what you read, why not send me an email? I have
also been spending a lot of time updating, expanding and enhancing the suite of
pages I created for L’institute – Institute for Industrial Development Policy and the
pages for L’institute – Ferrara Graduate School in Industrial Economics. As my
friend Don Fazio says, I’ve got some work to do now, so we'll continue this chat a
bit later ....

Webpage 1

How is Rob Branston construing his ‘self’? The answer to the

question ‘Who am I’ in this case, is linked, interdiscursively, with
material goods of a given society – you need to be at least Anglo-
Saxon, to recognise the illustration (Branston pickle) and understand
34 Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard

the semiotic value and pun of the naming approximation. Rob

Branston then becomes
just a normal British bloke who happens to be called Branston.
The representation of the pickle bottle is crucial for determining not
only the self-identity (normal) but also the national one (British).
Some other examples from the data reaffirm place of origin as an
important aspect of their identities. The webbers are ‘outsiders’ and
need to assert their foreignness:
I am a Venezuelan plant biologist.
I hail from a serene town Kovilpatti the ‘matchless town of matches’ in Tamil
Nadu.
Naming is a very important form of identification and webbers tend to
make sure their names are foregrounded, like these examples:
According to the Keirsey Temperament Sorter I’ve got a ENTP (Extraverted
iNtuitive Thinking Perceiving) personality type – this means I’m an Inventor
– who am I to argue?
I’ve an unusual surname - Pryke and so I’ve set up a web page listing other
Prykes on the net.
My name is Alberto and I’m Italian. I’m an Aerospace Engineer and for the
time being I’m working as Research Associate at the School of Electronic and
Electrical Engineering of the University of Birmingham. If you are interested
in knowing something more about me (for professional reasons only please,
I’m the happy husband of a wonderful young lady...) you can download my
Curriculum Vitae…
One thing that I would like to make clear is my surname, is it Cirre or
Cirre-Torres? Well, in Spain we use 2 surnames, the 1st is the surname of
your father and the 2nd of your mother. When I came here, I wrote my 2
surnames linked by a hyphen, so my 1st surname is Cirre and the 2nd is
Torres.

For some webbers the use of the language of ‘affect’ (Martin 2000) is
a strategy used to identify their selves:
I started writing this page during one lonely, homesick September night,
between a Volterra integro-differential equation and a multi-domain boundary
element approximation. Warmed only by a strong Italian coffee, with Elton
John filling the dark of my room, I was dreaming my dreams of far planets
and unknown realms, the depth of the ocean, the mystical power of ancient
oriental traditions.
This page is nothing but the pale shadow of my thoughts of that night, but if
even only one among you will find in it a reason to look further into the sky
and into himself, then this is one of the most important things I could ever do.
 Personal Web Pages 35

This kind of representation, in fact, reaffirms stereotypical

constructions of Latin people – emotional, perhaps ‘out of control’ –
the warm ‘Italian coffee, the homesickness, the darkness of the room’
construe the identity of the lonely student in a cold and foreign place.
Others identify themselves through humour generally using self-
deprecation:
Welcome to Derek’s Home Page. I’m Derek Carter, and at present I’m a third
year PhD student studying in the Department of Electronics and Electrical
Engineering at The University of Birmingham. Yes I’m yet another of those
boring engineers, and yes I do spend most of my time in front of computer
terminals. My field of research is parallel heterogeneous computer
architectures, sounds very impressive doesn’t it!
This negative appraisal (Martin 2000) is legitimised through a
cartoonesque representation of self:

Webpage 2

Kohut (1971) refers to self-object experiences, experiences (usually

with other people) that nourish the self and which define the
experience of the self and self-esteem. Significant others, like family
relations, are an essential aspect of our self-development. That is why
so many family relations are presented in Web pages – the self of the
36 Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard

webber is being represented through self-objects that reinforce her or

his own performances.
Photographs showing the webber within the family context are
therefore extremely common in my examples. Marriage photos or
simple stills of family groups recontextualise the webber as not only a
member of a group but also as belonging to a group. Not only parents,
siblings, partners, but even pets are introduced as parts of the self, as
the example below shows:

INFORMATION YOU REALLY WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT ME!!

This is us on our BIG Day!!

Hi! My name is Cathy Lowe, and up until 24th June 1995, I was known as Cathy Smart. I am
28 Years Old and married to Tony. We live in Birmingham and have done so for the last 5
years, well I say we, Tony has lived in Birmingham all his life, I moved all the way from
Solihull (for my sins) in 1992. I am a very lazy individual, much to my husband’s dismay, but
I occasionally get off my backside to go Swimming and the odd Step Aerobics Class. I enjoy
pottering around in the garden, especially since we had our Garden Pond re-built. I also enjoy
reading, once I’m into a good book I’m oblivious to everything around me, even my husband!!
We are both also Dog Lovers and up until a two years ago we had a BEAUTIFUL Alsatian
called RADAR, unfortunately we had to have him put to sleep as he was very ill, he was only
8 years old.

Here he is

Webpage 3
 Personal Web Pages 37

Physical appearance and embodiment seem to be one of the other

ways webbers recontextualise themselves – all my examples present
either a photo or an illustration of ‘self’, especially of the ‘face’.
Laurie, below, shows us a sort of ‘passport photo’ of himself, but he
self-evaluates his own appearance when he says, revealingly, at the
end of the page: ‘By the way, I have had a haircut’.

Webpage 4

What makes the ‘self’ a supposedly ‘real self’ in such situations is not
necessarily contingent on the realm of ‘facts’ or ‘personal
information’, but rather on the opportunities for users to create the
‘real selves’ they thought they ‘should be’ or ‘could be’, anchored in
the semiotic representations chosen, either verbal or non-verbal.

What is interesting about participants’ conception of their ‘online’

selves is that the complexity and multiplicity of these selves are seen
as features that actually make them ‘more real’ rather than ‘less real’.
Computer-mediated interaction for these participants, because of the
choices made, seems to be something which did not fragment their
sense of their ‘real selves’, but expanded it.

We have to see then, as Jones suggests, cyberspace, not as the site of

‘cyber society’ (Jones 2002), but regard it more as what Scollon
(1998) calls a site of engagement, a ‘field’ upon which multiple
actions, identities, and communities can be enacted.
38 Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard

The second identity type of construction I want to concentrate on is

character.

3.3. Character
Many of the concepts developed in narrative theory are not specific to
language. I want to point out here that the way narrators construct
characters (and consequently their life stories) is by the choice of how
they recontextualise themselves, in particular spaces, in particular
settings (like in a literary text). The spaces are created through the
representation of locations and objects. The dimension of the ‘activity’
being engaged in (what participants are doing when recontextualised)
is also very important – some characters are recontextualised as
moving in spaces, others as static and in particular positions.

By using especially the multimodal resource of photographs, narrators

construct through their choices of how to present themselves, a
particular version of the self, creating scenarios, spaces, and attributes.
The visual landscape is part of this characterisation. By interpreting
the way the narrators construe themselves via image, we recreate a
narrative of their lives – what they do, where they do it, who they
position themselves as in the social practices around them.

Photos are memorable – they represent a neat slice of time, not a flow.
Susan Sontag (1999) suggests that photos furnish evidence, a more
accurate relation to visible reality than other mimetic objects.
Coleman (1998: 57) adds that

Photographs however do not show how things look. What a photograph

shows us is how a particular thing or person could be seen or could be made
to look at a specific moment in a specific context, by a specific
photographer employing specific tools.

Photos are the most plausible and straightforward representations of

identity – part of our identity is an awareness of ourselves, as we
would want others to see us. The very artificiality of the pose (smiling
or not, looking at the camera or not) demonstrates the gap between the
way we are and the way we would like to appear as Barthes (2000)
suggests in his Camera Lucida. Certainly, the smiling face is an
attempt not only to produce a positive evaluation from gazers, but also
to interact with them.
 Personal Web Pages 39

However, albeit being faithful to the way we ‘look’, we have to

remember that, as Kress & van Leeuwen (2001) point out, in some
domains certain visuals are ‘truer’ than others. The authors call this
the coding orientation and this has to do with modality. Modality,
here, in the linguistic and semiotic sense, as Scollon & Scollon
(2003b, www.gutenbergdump.net) explain, is the word that

linguists and logicians use to talk about alternate realities. ‘Irrealis’ (not real)
contrasts with ‘realis’ (real). Ought contrasts with is, was, will be. Realis is
something ‘real’, ‘definite’, ‘perceived by the person speaking’. Irrealis is
‘imagined’, ‘unreal’, ‘indefinite’, ‘unknown’ or ‘unknowable’. The linguistic
and logical point of the distinction between realis and irrealis is that there is
no external truth or reality that is being referenced. It is the mode of
representation which is telling us what the producer of the language or image
wants us to believe.

Images can make the same distinctions in modality. They can

represent a person, a thing, or a space according to a scale of ‘it might
look like this’ to ‘it looks like this’. This is done through choices of
colour, hue, distance, focus, and vectors. However, a photograph tends
to make us believe that what we see is the reality in this sense. Visual
resources tend to be more ‘realis’ orientated than texts, which are
more easily ‘irrealis’ orientated, as Scollon & Scollon suggest (2003b,
www.gutenbergdump.net).

My argument here, when examining the photos used by webbers, is

that in fact, although these photos purport to be ‘realis’ representations
of self, what authors do is to construct, through choices in modality, a
‘characterisation’ of the self in terms of the ways their identities are
being displayed. The interesting point about the photographs below is
that although these Web owners are academics and the photos are
placed in academic Web pages, the visual/virtual landscapes chosen in
a sense construe specific characters and the discourses that surround
them – the discourse of action, the discourse of adventure. The
modalities chosen, especially colour ( in the original pages, blues,
reds, greens), produce ‘irrealis’ effects. What we have here are
therefore projections of ideal selves: the sportsman, the association
with a particular musician, are facets of hybrid ‘private’ identities that
also happen to be public (and academic). The examples below
illustrate these points:
40 Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard

Me, on my way to work!

Webpage 5

Webpage 6
 Personal Web Pages 41

4. Recontextualisation of interaction
I want briefly to look now at recontextualisations of verbal
interactions.
According to Jones (2002), the vast majority of people who engage in
computer-mediated communication regard it as an extension
(McLuhan 1994) of their ‘real-life’ social interactions rather than as
separate from them. Therefore, Jones concludes, the effects of CMC
are to ‘ground them more firmly within their existing material
communities and circumstances’ (Jones 2002: 5). Several of the
participants in his research, in fact, were quite adamant in rejecting the
traditional dichotomy of ‘actual’ and ‘virtual’ reality, insisting that
computer-mediated communication is as ‘real’ as anything else is (‘as
real as a telephone call’).
Contrary to my initial belief that Web page messages were sent to
unknown addressees, Web narrators in fact try to facilitate the
exchange of information among colleagues and peers and the sense of
social ‘connectivity’. Narrators are therefore agents acting upon the
world – they send messages to particular (not well-defined) people,
hoping to influence them in some way or other.
When asked about the recipients of their Web pages, one of the
writers I contacted replied:
I don’t have a clear idea, but I would include, in no significant order:
colleagues in the school, research students and undergraduates in the school;
colleagues in other universities around the world; potential collaborators in
many places, several types, in several disciplines; potential research students,
people who may be able to learn something from my research or contribute to
it by commenting or criticising; journalists who contact me to find out about
artificial intelligence or cognitive science; school teachers; school leavers
exploring the school’s web site and wanting to know what’s here; people
around the university interested in management issues; people who have heard
me give presentations and would like to see the slides (usually extended
versions); people who may be interested in a book I wrote in 1978, which
went out of print and is now free of charge online….

This is the testimony of another webber:

At first there was no audience, actually, but one has appeared for many of the
things there…[T]he idea was to make a brief visual essay using photos we had
to organize our own reflections about our pasts and see if that would help us
find connections…I have told a few students about them (the different pages)
as I try to introduce myself as broadly as possible to them thinking there’s no
42 Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard

way they could understand the academic slices of my life w/o knowing
something of the rest. But I don’t like to ramble on in a seminar about how I
wrangled horses as a teenager, so if it’s on the net I just say, ‘go take a look’
and get on with the subject. So I guess you could say that much of it, maybe
most of it is this: I make little essays, highly personal, about things I or we
think about or have done, put them on the net so our own kids and family and
a few friends can see them.
…what’s on my websites is the stuff that isn’t in my formal academic vita but
which is essential to understand what’s in the vita.
Incidentally, these pages are now found by search engines and visited by who
knows who. I average about 60,000 visits a year.

This shows that the message is addressed to targets, and not virtual
beings, out there in cyberspace. An interesting aspect of these
interactions however, is their spoken conversational features. Most of
the pages examined here have greetings, openings, closings,
apologies, and the address to a ‘you’. Consider for example:

• Hi, I am (name)…. How are you my friends all over the

world?
• Hello.
• Welcome!
• Hi, thanks for visiting this page!
• Want to know more about me? Well, then…come and browse
through then....
• Hi, have you found something?
• Welcome everybody. I’m sorry it’s taken such a long time, but
here at last are the beginnings of my web page, with pictures
showing highlights of the Big Day.
• Thank you for stumbling upon my humble website. I hope you
find something of interest while you're here.
• Do not forget to come back. See you next time.
• Hope you’re happy. Be nice to animals. And although this site
hasn’t got much, you never know.
• That’s all, folks.
In Late Modernity, the need to communicate/talk (although through
virtual media) continues to be part of people’s lives, even if people are
stuck in their houses in front of their computers. This is not very
 Personal Web Pages 43

different from old times, when people use to visit each other and chat
on verandas, at least in warm countries like my own.
One of the opening messages of Paul McIlvenny’s page
(http://ntpaul.sprog.auc.dk) summarises extremely well the
interdependency between the interactants in this virtual
communication:
You browse, therefore I am.
Through pseudo-interactions webbers seem to continue traditions of
diary or biography genres where people tell ‘whoever is out there’
about their personal experiences, their relationships. The informal
aspect seems to diminish the distance between writer and reader – you
are there, I do not know who you are. But somehow, like me and
Aaron, you browse and I exist. That is why, I think, there are so many
‘hi, hellos, goodbyes’, opening and closings in virtual interactions.
The material page is the mediational means for social action.

5. Final remarks
The University of Birmingham has now managed to standardise Web
pages to make them compatible with the corporate image of the
University. A corporate team produced a set of guidelines so that
webbers should maintain the same institutional ‘image’. The photos
should look the same, nothing that is ‘personal’ should be inserted into
the pages. This is the discourse of the institution trying once again to
standardise, paradoxically, presentations that have to do with people’s
lives and identities. By doing this, the institution tries once more to
exert control over its members.
However, from the examples discussed above, it seems that new
creative formats resist corporate discourses. Self-presentation has to
do with what we are, whom we deal with, and the choices we make in
life. People, as Lemke (2002) suggests, choose the ways they want to
display themselves and construct their identities. Identity construction
is a complex phenomenon and people project in public spaces,
idealisations of what they ‘think’ they are. The multitude of formats,
photographs, and colour choice point to the hybrid formation of
identity. The online construction is an extension of the offline persona.
And institutions cannot control these representations. There will
always be a way out of the institutionalised corporate ‘image’.
44 Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard

To conclude, I want to emphasise the importance of the study of

multimodality in the new communicative genres. Web pages combine
language, image, and graphics into a single integrated text’s structure.
They are therefore:
• interdiscursive: ‘positioned within multiple, overlapping and
even conflicting discourses’ (Scollon & Scollon 2003b,
www.gutenbergdump.net) – the discourses of the family, the
institution, and emotion;
• intertextual: they have links with other mass media, especially
with classical and modern narratives of all sorts – books, films,
comic strips, paintings, among others;
• dialogical: a means through which different kinds of
‘conversations’ can be established.
Web pages are also sites of engagement. In some ways, as Deborah
Tannen (2002, cited in Jones 2002: 9) points out, ‘Asking linguists to
pay less attention to texts is like asking astronomers to stop looking up
so much’. It is, however, only through breaking down the traditional
hierarchical separation of different modes of representation and
focusing more onto the social actions, social identities, and social
practices that we will achieve a true understanding of the society we
live in – and virtuality is here to stay. In the virtual world we live in,
there is no more looking back.
Endnotes
1
All the Web pages used in this chapter were in colour. Unfortunately, the illustrations
in this book can only be reproduced in black and white.
²One of the essential features of Web pages is their ephemerality. The authors alter
and delete items and even whole pages, as you will find if you attempt to follow this
reference, Scollon & Scollon (2003b, www.gutenbergdump.net). This page no longer
exists.
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Weiss, Gilbert, and Ruth Wodak (eds). 2002. Critical Discourse Analysis: Theory and
Interdisciplinarity. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Wertsch, James V. 1991. Voices of the Mind: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated
Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Woodward, Kathryn. 1997. ‘Identity and Difference’ in Woodward, Kathryn (ed.)
Culture, Media and Identities. London: Sage: 10-22.
 Hypertext, Prosthetics, and the Netocracy:
Posthumanism and Jeanette Wintersons
The PowerBook

Ulf Cronquist

Abstract
Our technological age is posthumanist. As far as identity and self may go, we can now
look in the rear-view mirror for essentialist notions of sex and social constructions of
gender. In our time there emerges a new being: the Netocrat. In posthumanism we are
beyond (ir)rational differences: we are all cyborgs, for better or worse, part for whole.
The final barrier against posthumanism and cybernetics, where resistance is futile, is
the notion that biological life must be protected from technology. In this paper,
against this background, I analyse Jeanette Winterson’s Internet novel The
PowerBook, particularly its ideology of freedom in cyberspace. The multi-voiced
narrator offers the reader ‘freedom for just one night’. But what is this freedom of or
from? Or inside? The implication that the body of a biological entity or social
construction can escape temporarily into a posthumanist world is interesting, but calls
for some examination as regards layered hypertextuality, extensive prosthetics, and a
positional Netocracy. I therefore examine Winterson’s text through current theoretical
works by N. Kathleen Hayles, Donna Haraway, Mark Poster, Caren Kaplan, among
others. Winterson’s narrator is the author of her own polyphonic body; s/he is not
born a machine, s/he is in the process of becoming one; s/he is not born a cyborg but
in the process of becoming a posthumanist Netocrat. I investigate here what
affordances and constraints define this design.

Key words: posthumanism; hypertext; prosthetics; gender/cyborg; Netizen/Netocracy.

Jeanette Winterson’s The PowerBook is an ‘Internet novel’, a product

of our technological age that is currently being defined, where the
multivoiced narrator repeatedly offers the reader ‘Freedom for just
one night’ (Winterson 2001: 3). S/he says: this ‘is an invented world.
You can be free for just one night’ (Winterson 2001: 4). You can
relax, undress, take off your body, and start a new story about your
self in the ‘long lines of laptop DNA’ (Winterson 2001: 4). This
temporary escape offered initially is relative to the past: somewhere in
48 Ulf Cronquist

the 60s we began taking off our clothes but we did not yet take off our
bodies; we began creating new stories in our minds, not yet using
laptop DNA but perhaps other mind-expanding substances like the
vinyl of ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’. Thus, some steps ahead,
we are now being prompted to undress and separate our body from our
mind to escape virtually, leave the flesh and its clumsy biology
somewhere else – to become digitally forwarded subjectivities.
But is the escape – even if it is just for one night – really an escape
from the body? Does freedom in cyberspace afford the ‘absence’ of
the body? How do we really consider information and technology in
relation to a virtually vanishing materiality – when at the same time
our branded laptops are being assembled by grossly underpaid
workers in Asian sweatshops (cf. Robbins 2002)? What happens in
language and literature when the humanist subject is no longer being
written on the body, when we are already cyborgs?
I investigate here what happens to ourselves as cyborgs, and similarly
bodily posthumanist aspects in Jeanette Winterson’s The PowerBook.
First, I comment on the construction of hypertext and how we
understand it in relation to previous fragmented literary forms.
Second, I consider – with references to Michel Foucault’s anti-
humanism (e.g. Foucault 1970) and Judith Butler’s theory of queer
performativity (Butler 1990, 2000) – how the Cartesian subject
became deconstructed in a process that foreshadows today’s liminal
posthuman subject. Thus I analyse posthumanism and its prosthetics
in relation to postmodernism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction.
Third, I look into the problematic concepts of Netocracy and Netizen
in our webbed era of globalisation – what it means that the
information age is built on exclusive and expensive platforms that
deny access to many individuals. I then finish with a section
(reconnecting to the Cartesian subject) on what the Information Age
has been doing with the cognitive (post)/human body.
1. Text and hypertext
What really constitutes a hypertext is not yet decided. But the term
‘hypertext’ describes highlighted text on a computer screen that we
click on with a computer mouse in order to reveal another chunk of
text, another link on our laptop screen; or, we associate it with any
kind of fragmented text that urges us to make links to other and yet
other fragments, like recurring metaphors or motifs, in a material
 Hypertext, Prosthetics and the Netocracy 49

paper-book reading process. Thus the whole of the Web is of course

one big indefinite hypertext, prefigured by our typical Modernist or
Postmodernist experimental, fragmented texts that offer never-ending
readings (like Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, or Pynchon’s Gravity’s
Rainbow), where we find interrelated events and parallel worlds side
by side in an unbounded continuum. There is a dividing line, however,
between poststructural theories of the ‘floating signifier’, which are
relatively dated in assuming that text is always printed – although we
could say that theorists like Barthes, Deleuze and Derrida foreshadow
the electronic hypertext, a media-specific analysis will reveal details
of how the electronic hypertext takes shape. N. Katherine Hayles
offers fascinating insights into this subject in her article ‘Flickering
Connectivities’ (Hayles 2000). She begins by stressing that Vannevar
Bush, generally credited with having invented the term ‘hypertext’, is
not talking about hypertext as electronic but as mechanical (Bush
1945).1 Hayles makes an outline for a general definition where
hypertext is characterised by possible multiple ways of reading, some
kind of linking mechanism, and the relation of textual chunks. Since a
dictionary, for example, offers a multitude of readings with linking
mechanisms and chunks of text, it can be classified as a hypertext.
Hayles, who calls for a medium-specific analysis, outlines the
characteristics of electronic hypertexts especially with reference to the
notion of the cyborg, cognitive environments, analogous sameness,
and digital coding. One of the overriding aspects she discusses is the
difference between the flatness of the printed text and the depth of the
electronic text that operates in three dimensions. There is an inevitably
dynamic action involved when using a computer screen – and the time
aspect: it takes less time to click with your mouse, compared to
looking up a footnote at the end of a book or leafing through a
dictionary. Jay Bolter (1991) claims that hypertext makes many of the
difficult, abstract, postmodern, deconstructive ideas (cf. e. g. Barthes,
Derrida, Deleuze) an everyday experience. Thus, our understanding of
the relations between printed fragmentary text and electronic
hypertext is a key issue.
As Hayles points out, some texts today, for example Don DeLillo’s
Underworld (1997), imitate electronic hypertexts (Hayles 2000). At a
first glance, this is also exactly what Winterson’s The PowerBook
does. In the table of contents that initially addresses the reader’s eyes,
50 Ulf Cronquist

there are computer key-words like OPEN HARD DRIVE, NEW

DOCUMENT, VIEW AS ICON, EMPTY TRASH, and QUIT,
SAVE. On the inside of the cover there is a picture of a Macintosh
PowerBook laptop with the key sentence ‘Freedom just for one night’
coming towards the reader on the screen. On the back inside there is
the same laptop screen saying: ‘You can change the story. You are the
story.’ The paratextual effect is somewhat banal since freedom and
storytelling are, of course, not dependent on virtual space technology.
Also if one begins to read the novel expecting to find new and
innovative writing that utilises or problematises electronic hypertext
one might be disappointed. The chapters read like chapters in any
Modernist or Postmodernist fragmented text. It is only the frame of
narration that asserts that the characters in the novel live in an
electronic age. The PowerBook turns out to be a printed text that
mimes hypertext – the novel never radically questions its ontological
status as a printed text that mimetically represents reality.
2. Prosthetics and the body
As regards the humanist and posthumanist subject, the line of thought
to follow is from the Cartesian cogito to 20th-century theorisation:
postmodernist images of the self; poststructuralist displacement;
feminist questioning of the biological subject (sex/gender); queer
theory that destabilises any notion of some kind of ahistorical matrix
for the subject. And today: cyberpunk in its modal subjectivities, our
limbs extending into digital space.
Put in another way: we have now yielded to the universal relativity of
cultural constructions – we accept that we speak from moveable
pragmatic platforms where we all are constructivists (constructing our
bodies). In Simians, Cyborgs and Women (1991), Donna Haraway
makes us focus our attention again and again on the category of
‘Nature’ being non-existent outside language and history. Similarly,
Judith Butler’s queer/gender theories make clear that rather than
getting stuck with the opposition sex/gender, we should be aware that
there is no ahistorical platform that produces gender and identity: on
the contrary, anything or anybody is possible through the
constructedness of non-referential performativity. And posthumanly
put, before Butler, Foucault prophesied that ‘man would be erased,
like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’ (Foucault 1970: 387).
 Hypertext, Prosthetics and the Netocracy 51

But at the same time as poststructural deconstructive thought urges us

to put the biological body into parenthesis, there is of course also a
struggle going on for our bodies, especially so among the hard
sciences and scientists. Prozac is designed to keep us happy and
productive; Viagra is produced to keep us happy and procreative. The
final frontier when it comes to our bodies has to do with hard
computer science, of course: how we will connect our virtual bodies in
cyberspace. Today our post-poststructural identities can literally,
virtually, float in relatively uncontrolled chains of signification, and
each individual example of mankind can now become, very palpably,
that space which is not space, a part of the text and hypertext that is
non-referential text or hypertext. There is nothing except text,
hypertext, hypertext, text, except nothing is there. But is this really for
everybody’s body?
Stone writes about how she fell in love with her prosthesis (Stone
1995). In The PowerBook, Winterson does not extend her body in any
such innovative way. The love story in the novel, like a soft-core
Hollywood movie, has two endings, one happy and one tragic. Her
metaphor for the fragmented stories that might or might not reach a
reader is the familiar one of a message in a bottle (Winterson 2001:
83). Sex is freedom is Utopia which can ‘never happen beyond bed’
(Winterson 2001: 175). Death and love, love and death: it is the same
quest for the Holy Grail. And we even find it: ‘Lancelot
fails…because he can’t distinguish between love’s symbol and what it
represents’ (Winterson 2001: 188). We find Winterson turning lead
into gold: the Holy Signifier turning into signified Grail.
3. Netocracy and its Netizens
If we are the new knights of the round table we also need to consider
the concept of the Netizen, and the possible future of a Netocracy.
There is an on-going public discussion as regards the electronic age
and the Internet: what it is doing to people, also the power of people –
and for some: possibilities of empowerment. This problematic area
concerns the general question what it means that certain people get
more space and freedom through digital communication while others,
in some places in the world, will not even make one phone call during
their lifetimes. Mobile citizenship is for those who can afford it. That
is, although radical forums exist on the Internet, and radical groups
and individuals can benefit from fast electronic communications, to
52 Ulf Cronquist

organise resistance against global capitalism – there may be much

more at stake. As Manuel Castells points out, political democracy in
nation-states is threatened not only by globalisation of economic
activities – but movements of resistance are also organised and
growing into powerful (and difficult-to-control) networks (Castells
1997). The oppositional forces both undermine our 20th-century sense
of political democracy from their different positions: as
technologically determined forces clash there is a fundamental crisis
for us all as to how we can perceive our ‘world citizenships’ and if we
can all become Netizens.
As poststructuralism and queer/gender theory take us beyond the
moment of the (Cartesian) humanist subject, so the present process of
technological posthumanism takes us beyond the very idea of the
rights of man. As Mark Poster stresses: ‘New democratizing principles
must take into account the cultural construction of the human-machine
interface…we may build new political structures outside the nation-
state only in collaboration with machines’ (Poster 2002: 99). Some
individuals see this developing area of prosthetics as quite
unproblematic, as if the basic point were that we have now left not
only sexual but also economic repression behind: here is our very
liberated brand new world with a very liberated social class: the
Netocracy. Bard and Söderqvist claim that after capitalism comes
Netocracy, consisting of people with great talents for the manipulation
of media, people who will control the new economy and the
governments – at the expense of those who lack skills in using the
latest technology (Bard & Söderqvist 2002). This is a challenging
vision in many ways of what comes after capitalism. Will global
networking in the future (that is already here) only consist of a rich,
technologically skilful part of the world’s population?
In The PowerBook there is really no dimension that historicises man’s
usage of machines; there is a lack of materiality in the critical sense.
At worst ‘freedom for just one night’ is an imaginary and regressively
ahistorical trip to Capri, a romantic island where a romantic couple
can develop their romantic relationship. ‘The air is like a kiss’
(Winterson 2001: 93) as the narrator lies on the bed in a hotel room
with her laptop. The narrator looks at the computer and wonders what
changes the world – what world? Which world? Whose? Her answer
is an ideal virtual reality: ‘It used to be that the real and the invented
 Hypertext, Prosthetics and the Netocracy 53

were parallel lives that never met. Then we discovered that space is
curved, and in curved space parallel lines always meet’ (Winterson
2001: 94).
Space. And space again, in Winterson’s (virtual) reality.
But where is the body?
4. If information wipes out the body?
We are now in an age where we move from the familiar trope of the
modernist bourgeois traveler through postmodern displacement to the
mobility of the interactive posthuman. But who is paying the price for
this – and where are we then, floating a-topically in cyberspace? Are
we out-of-the-body-experiencing this era of globalisation? Caren
Kaplan, who has investigated postmodern and posthuman questions of
travel (Kaplan 1996), now asks the question, how can we ‘theorize the
locatedness of travel in an era of globalization?’ (Kaplan 2002: 34) In
the here and now of displacement of corporeality, she points out:
Cyberspace may appear to be the ultimate vacation from the Puritan work
ethic and from grounded industries of liberal modernity, but a closer look
reveals location and materiality in the mobility and disembodied discursive
practices of new information technologies. (Kaplan 2002: 34)
In other wor(l)ds, we have to consider if information can lose its real
virtual body. Can there be jouissance in cyberspace – without
embodiment? Generally the answer must be no.
Donna Haraway warns us of the limitless possibilities for the subject
in the new technologies and claims that there is a risk of ‘unregulated
gluttony; all perspective gives way to infinitely mobile vision’
(Haraway 1991: 189). Haraway calls for a reconfigured socialist
feminist praxis of limited location and situated knowledge, even
‘when the other is our own machine’ (Haraway 1991: 189-90).
Similarly, Hayles (1999: 5) is concerned with the discourse of glib
techno-ecstasy and sees into the future of a dialectic embodiment:
If my nightmare is a culture inhabited by posthumans who regard their bodies
as fashion accessories rather than the ground of being, my dream is a version
of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies
without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied
immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human
being, and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of
great complexity, one on which we depend for our continued survival.
54 Ulf Cronquist

There is also always already a harsh materiality that prefigures our

electronic age of affluent economic digitality. Globalisation hurts, as
we know. The underpaid workers who assemble high-tech electronic
equipment suffer – their bodies are real and they are far from the
sublime trading of binary signs that is now building a New Empire.
The whole world now turning digits on the stock market and the value
of production is even more incommensurably separated from material
corporeality than before – this may be the exact meaning of the term
globalisation. To quote Julian Stallabrass: ‘clean, mobile cyberspace
forms can never show the material suffering behind a row of financial
figures, for this has been stripped away a long time ago in the very
collection of data’ (Stallabrass 1995: 9).
We are now like Mary Shelley’s scientist. Have we yet to see the
monster?
We are now like Plato with a laptop: our displaced images are
transforming into pure forms. Is this the end of the thing itself? Or is it
the beginning of a New Republic?
But, to quote Kaplan, ‘[s]imply stating distaste for a life as a bundle of
data is not very effective’ (Kaplan 2002: 37). New media offers
possibilities for the construction of new planetary political subjects,
i.e. netizens who will be multiple, dispersed, and virtual (Poster 2002:
103; cf. Lévy 1997).
However, Winterson’s novel is always already branded: it is a
PowerBook by Macintosh. Sold, advertised, produced: a daydream
nation logo (cf. Klein 1999). The browser she uses for her PowerBook
is Netscape. This is indeed monstrous.
And maybe this is Utopia. Winterson says:
QUIT.
REALLY QUIT?
RESTART.
SAVE/DELETE FILE.
Or
QUIT-DELETE
the-information-body-that-lost-its-body. As Hayles (1999) underlines
repeatedly: human consciousness is not disembodied, human
 Hypertext, Prosthetics and the Netocracy 55

consciousness cannot be downloaded into the empty shell of a

computer. In that sense, Winterson’s Utopia denies access to the body
and therefore her novel denies access to freedom – even if it is just for
one night. Thus, freedom in cyberspace does not afford absence of
body.

Endnotes
1
Vannevar Bush is credited with having first described ‘hypertext’ in 1945, but based
on microfilm. It was, however, Ted Nelson who coined the term, in a paper he
presented at a national conference of the Association for Computing Machinery in
1965. See www.xanadu.net and http://ted.hyperland.com/.

References
Bard, Alexander and Jan Söderqvist. 2002. Netocracy: The New Power Elite and Life
after Capitalism. London: Reuters.
Bolter, Jay. 1991. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of
Writing. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Bush, Vannevar. 1945. ‘As We May Think’ in The Atlantic Monthly 176:101-08.
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble. New York: Taylor & Francis.
__. 2000. Antigone’s Claim. New York: Columbia University Press.
Castells, Manuel. 1997. The Power of Identity. Oxford: Blackwell.
Foucault, Michel. 1970. The Order of Things. London: Tavistock.
Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature.
New York: Routledge.
Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthumans: Virtual Bodies in
Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
__. 2000. ‘Flickering Connectivities in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl: The
Importance of Media-Specific Analysis’. Online at: http://jefferson.village.
virginia.edu/pmc.contents.all.html. (consulted 22.02.2002).
Kaplan, Caren. 1996. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Poetics of Displacement.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
__. 2002 ‘Transporting the Subject: Technologies of Mobility and Location in an Era
of Globalization’ in PMLA 117(1): 32-41.
Klein, Naomi. 1999. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. New York: Picador.
Lévy, Pierre. 1997. Collective Intelligence. New York: Plenum.
Poster, Mark. 2002. ‘Digital Networks and Citizenship’ in PMLA 117(1): 98-109.
Robbins, Bruce. 2002. ‘The Sweatshop Sublime’ in PMLA 117(1): 84-97.
Stallabrass, Julian. 1995. ‘Empowering Technology: The Exploration of Cyberspace’
in New Left Review 211: 3-32.
56 Ulf Cronquist

Stone, Allucquere Rosanne. 1995. The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of
the Mechanical Age. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Winterson, Jeanette. 2001. The PowerBook. London: Vintage.
http//ted.hyperland.com/ (consulted 22.02.2002).
www.xanadu.net (consulted 22.02.2002).
 The Influence of Hypertext on Genre:
Exploring Online Book Reviews

Rosario Caballero

Abstract
The aim of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, it aims to shed light on the
influence of electronic technology and media (World Wide Web and hypertext) on a
particular genre, through the analysis of a small corpus of 80 book reviews taken from
online sources. Attention is focused on the use made by an established genre of
hypertext technology and its implications for the evolution and diversification of this
particular type of discourse activity. On the other hand, this analysis draws attention
to the problems involved in regarding the book review as a recognisable genre rather
than a group of writing practices that might be regarded as genres in their own right.
The use of hypertext technology highlights divergences already existing in these
practices and propels them into new life. A particularly revealing aspect in this regard
is the system of links used by the online reviews in the corpus, which are discussed in
relation to two central parameters of genre – audience and communicative purpose –
and are found to play a similarly significant rhetorical goal in hyperdiscourse
interaction.

Key words: hypertext; electronic genre(s); link rhetoric; genre variation and evolution.

1. Introduction
Computer Mediated Communication (henceforth, CMC) and its
prototypical hypertextual artifacts have deserved the attention of
scholars from different fields of research due to their quantitative and
qualitative impact on discourse interaction. Computers and electronic
webs have opened up access to information and communication by
breaking out spatial and temporal constraints, to the extent that they
are often praised as having ‘democratized, distributed, and interlinked
knowledge, teaching, learning, and expertise on a massive scale’
(Sussex & White 1996: 202). At the same time, our traditional concept
of text is being superseded by hypertext, a flexible, non-linear, and
intrinsically intertextual artifact made up by internally linked chunks
of information of various sorts which are, at the same time, externally
58 Rosario Caballero

linked to other similar chunks. As a result, texts are becoming the

virtual rather than physical supports for a hybrid mixture of language,
images, and sound. In short, the new technologies are affecting the
ways knowledge may be both constructed and transmitted, and are
leading to a redefinition of literacy, which now involves handling
different semiotic codes as well as having some kind of technical
expertise.
These questions have deserved the attention of genre scholars, who
have explored the impact of CMC and the virtual contexts in which it
takes place on what they call cybergenres, that is, genres emerging
first as a replication of already existing ones but evolving along newly
created parameters (Crowston & Williams 1997; Shepherd & Watters
1998). This is the case of well-established genres such as personal and
business letters which have given way to the less formal e-mail, of
personal narratives now turned into Web pages, and of the discursive
event known as e-chat.
As also happens with conventional genres, the rationale of
cybergenres rests upon several factors, among which rhetorical
purpose and intended audience are particularly determining. Indeed,
the impact of technology on these – and, hence, on the final result –
appears to be more salient in virtual contexts than in conventional,
written ones. When analysing cybertexts we must not only bear in
mind the purposes inherent to their generic affiliation, but also the
broader-in-scope goal(s) of the Web or virtual context where these
appear. Thus, although their acknowledged aim is to provide easy and
quick access to a vast amount of information in an organised way,
many websites and pages must also meet a number of commercial
demands which often impinge upon the textual artifacts posted in
them (consider, for instance, the large amount of advertising in most
texts in the electronic webs available). The concept of audience or
discourse community – now virtual community – has also changed: it
has broadened in scope and, as a result, the boundaries delimiting one
audience from another have become blurred. In fact, any computer
user or cybernaut may potentially become a member of the different
audiences at which cybertexts are targeted within the macro
‘hypercommunity’ favoured by the Net. A third factor affecting
cybergenres concerns technical and implementation issues, that is, the
different linking options in hypertextual artifacts.
 The Influence of Hypertext on Genre 59

A frequently discussed question – inextricably linked to those outlined

above – concerns the technology’s promise of an egalitarian share of
the new communication space, and the resulting emergence of a true
democratic cyber-community free from gender, power, race, or
political barriers. However, this remains largely an idealistic picture.
On the one hand, although access to information may be theoretically
free, its technical dependency makes it available for users within the
Western world rather than those from less technically developed
societies. At the same time, the different webs in cyberspace are not
only becoming more institutionally and commercially driven, but
make use of a technological jargon which may also work as an
excluding rather than including factor for many new users.
This paper brings in all these issues, framing them in the description
of the electronic version of such a recognisable genre and text type as
the book review. Attention is focused on the use made by the genre of
hypertext technology, and the implications of this use for the
evolution and diversification of this particular type of discourse
activity. The following questions make up the backbone of the
discussion:
• Does the application of hypertext technology illustrate generic
factors such as goal(s), intertextual relations with other texts,
audience construction; or, rather, does hypertext involve a
rationale of its own?
• Do topological changes affect our (formal and/or content)
knowledge of genre? In other words, how does hypertext enable
participation in the genre?
The paper is organised as follows: after a brief reflection on
theoretical and methodological questions, I provide an analysis of the
links in 80 book reviews from different online publications in order to
see which generic factors are most susceptible to being affected by the
new medium and technology. This is followed by a discussion of the
implications of hypertext for the genre under exploration.
2. Theoretical and methodological preliminaries
The starting assumption in the present discussion is that genre – in any
of its versions, electronic or otherwise – is a social and semiotic
construct instantiated by standardised communicative acts that result
from the interaction of writers and readers in given contexts through
recognisable textual artifacts. This definition pivots on three essential
60 Rosario Caballero

traits of genre. The first trait concerns its cognitive dimension, since it
is our knowledge of genres that enables us to recognise and participate
in them. Second, genres are self-generating in the sense that by
interacting with others through a given genre we are actually enacting
it according to a set of prototypical guidelines learnt from use. Finally,
as Berkenkotter & Huckin (1995: 24) point out, ‘to be fully effective
[...] genres must be flexible and dynamic, capable of modification
according to the rhetorical exigencies of the situation’.
The intrinsically dynamic nature of genres acquires larger proportions
in electronic or virtual environments due to several factors. The first
of these is the dynamic nature of the concept of audience which, as
pointed out earlier, is especially salient in cyberspace where it appears
broader in scope and somewhat hybrid in the sense that everybody
may potentially become a member of a virtual community or audience
at any time by a click of the mouse. Dynamism is also affected by the
convergence of several communicative purposes in electronic texts,
that is, the particular purposes of the genre, those of the online
publication, and the global aim of the mass medium itself. Finally, we
must also take into account the intrinsically dynamic nature of the
electronic medium, which, in Maingueneau’s (1998: 68) words is
affecting the ‘dématérialisation des supports physiques des énoncés’.
This dematerialisation of textuality is the result of the linking system
characterising hypertexts. Links are the connections between different
textual chunks or informational nodes enabling users to move within a
text (internal links) or go from that text to other texts posted in
hyperspace (external links). For the purposes of this paper, the interest
of links rests upon three aspects. First, links may expand the text’s
topics by linking topical key words with other texts dealing with
similar issues. Links may also provide readers/users with different
reading options according to their own interests and, in this sense,
have a bearing on text organisation. Finally, links may open discourse
spaces where writers and readers can engage in generic activity faster
and more actively than in traditional print practices. In other words,
the link system of online texts is what actually enables the interactive
and collaborative textual activity promised by hypertext and electronic
discourse. Hypertext allows the constructed or imagined reader and
the implied author to be less constructed and implied, and not only
favours quasi-simultaneous interaction, but may also foster a
reshaping of genre activity as it takes place.
 The Influence of Hypertext on Genre 61

In order to explore the effect of hypertext on generic activity I built a

corpus of 80 book reviews selected at random from four online
journals, namely, Architectural Record (architecture), Scientific
American (general or popular science), Psyche (neuroscience), and
Kairos (applied linguistics), all of them posted in the World Wide
Web (henceforth, Web). The analysis of the reviews in the corpus
focused on how links appear within the rhetorical structure of the
genre on the assumption that it is this structure that seems to be most
affected by hypertext. The links were analysed according to three
parameters, namely their destination route, their text-structural
position, and the communicative purpose underlying them – the
former related to the topical dimension of links, and the latter two
more rhetorically driven.
As described in Motta-Roth (1998), book reviews are relatively short
texts characterised by the communicative goals of describing and,
especially, evaluating new publications on a given field to a given
audience. These goals are reflected in their textual structure, which
rests upon three basic textual sequences devoted to different aspects of
the book under review. Thus, books are first introduced by Titles,
Leads, and an Introduction sequence where we may find information
about the topic covered by the book, its author and intended audience,
and the ways in which the work under evaluation may be related to
other books within the same field and/or dealing with similar topic(s).
The book is described in some detail in the Description part, where we
may find a general outline of the book contents, a brief summary of its
chapters, or a more in-depth description of a particularly outstanding
chapter or section. Finally, book reviews usually incorporate a Closing
Evaluation section recommending the book or disqualifying it, and
those in academic publications may also provide a reference list at the
end.
With this prototypical structure in mind, I explored the number and
characteristics of the links in the texts of the corpus. Concerning
quantification, the reviews with the largest number of links come from
Kairos (417 links) and Scientific American (102 links), followed by
those from Psyche (37 links) and Architectural Record (29).
Nevertheless, the real differences among the reviews appear to be
determined by qualitative issues such as the destination of the links
and the communicative purpose suggested by this route (both also
determining the insertion of links within the reviews’ structure). The
62 Rosario Caballero

rhetoric of links in the book reviews in the corpus is described in the

following section.
3. The rhetoric of links in electronic book reviews
The book reviews analysed yielded four broad types of links
according to destination or linking route and rhetorical purpose, which
I labelled as commercial links, situational links, informational links,
and hypertextual links. The distribution of links in the texts appears to
be motivated by both route and rhetorical purpose. A schematised
view of the types of links in the reviews analysed is provided in Table
1 below.
Table 1 Types of Links
TYPE OF LINK LINKS TO TOT. MAGAZINES % PER
LINKS PUB
Commercial Links 7.5% Sc. American 66%
Purpose: facilitate book • Publishing co. or Kairos 16%
purchase bookstore Arch. Record 11%
Psyche 7%
Situational links 26.4%
Purpose A: provide • Reviewer’s inst. Kairos 72%
additional information • Author’s inst. Arch. Record 13%
Psyche 13%
Purpose B: open • Reviewer’s e- Sc. American 2%
discourse spaces address
(interaction) • Author’s
e-address
• Publication
(review response)
Informational links 27.5%
Purpose A: promote • Related Web Kairos 45.3%
critical reading pubs. Sc. American 43.5%
Purpose B: online • Education sites Psyche 8.7%
tutorials (topic and Web • Orgs. (public) Arch. Record 2.5%
literacy) • Companies (pvt)
• Related pubs.
• ‘Cool’ stuff
Hyptertextual links 38.6% Kairos 100%
• Table of contents
• Book sections
(chaps, summaries)
• Glossary
• Quotes from book,
related works
• Expand reviewer’s
argument
 The Influence of Hypertext on Genre 63

Commercial links appear to be oriented towards facilitating the

acquisition or purchase of the book under assessment. Here the four
publications show some differences: whereas all reviews in Scientific
American are linked to a well-known online bookstore, those in the
other three journals are linked to various publishing companies related
to the academic world. Moreover, while the links in Scientific
American and Architectural Record can be found at the beginning of
the review (in what appears to be the online reference card of the
book), Psyche always incorporates them in the reference section at the
end of the reviews, and the few provided in Kairos are interspersed
throughout the reviews.
A second class comprises situational links, which may be further
classified into two types. On the one hand, we have those links that
provide additional information about the reviewers or the authors of
the books at issue, and often direct readers/users to their place of work
(usually, an academic institution) or Web pages. Apart from satisfying
the curiosity of readers, the information about reviewers may also
respond to the need of validating their status as evaluators or referees.
Accordingly, these links usually appear at the very beginning of the
review. A second set involves links to the e-mail addresses of
reviewers and authors, as well as review-response links enabling
readers/users to send their own comments to the magazine publishing
the reviews. Both types in this group may be discussed as opening
discourse spaces where authors and audiences can interact (e. g. praise
the work, counter-argue some of the claims sustained, add further
comments, and so forth). Especially interesting in this respect are links
to the e-mail of the author(s), as is the case of some reviews in Kairos.
These insert such links in the tables of contents of the books under
assessment, which not only enables readers to quickly spot the author
of every section in the book, but also offers them the possibility to
contact them as they go along the text. In contrast, review-response
links are always placed at the very end of the review or at the bar-side
option menu, which suggests that interaction is postponed until the
whole review has been read.
A third class concerns informational links, which may also be grouped
into two sub-classes. The first class involves links to papers or other
reviews related to either the review proper or to the book under
evaluation. Although their main purpose seems to be to provide
64 Rosario Caballero

readers with different views on the book (either backing up the

reviewer’s claims or contrasting different positions), they may also be
discussed as helping promote critical reading practices. These links
would thus play a role somewhat similar to that of references in an
academic paper. A second class includes links to (a) education sites,
(b) organisation sites, (c) private companies’ sites, (d) related
magazines or journals, and (e) what appears as ‘cool stuff’, usually
dealing with hypertext technologies and sites. All of them seem to
fulfil an explanatory or tutorial function: they are related to the topic
discussed in the book, and provide either background information on
it or expand pre-existing knowledge. In this respect, the links may also
be discussed as aimed at promoting two different (yet sometimes
related) kinds of literacy: topic literacy (in the traditional sense of the
term), and Web literacy, the latter being the purpose of all the links to
hypertext stuff in the various websites. Furthermore, irrespective of
the different aims, all the links actually point to one of the
acknowledged (and most celebrated) traits of the electronic medium:
that of being a macro intertext and knowledge repository. The point of
insertion of both types within the rhetorical structure of reviews seems
to corroborate the purposes suggested above. Thus, all the links to
related texts usually appear at the reference section of the reviews as
also happens with links promoting Web literacy (e. g. in Kairos). On
the other hand, links related to expanding knowledge on the topic
appear in the Introduction part, and are one of the characteristic
features of the reviews from Scientific American.
A final set involves hypertextual links. In principle, these are
structurally or text-oriented: they act as cues for the organisation of
the text, the whole structure usually being provided in an opening
screen or frame from which all the other nodes can be accessed. The
diverse reading routes thus signposted are devised by the author of the
review who, in this sense, foregrounds certain textual aspects/parts at
the expense of others according to his/her specific interests. However,
in true hypertextual fashion they are also ultimately reader-oriented
inasmuch as they also allow readers to build diverse reading paths
according to their own choices and liking. The insertion of these links
usually responds to the agendas of a number of magazines/journals
that aim at promoting hypertext literacy by putting it to work. Yet, this
may also put off readers since some of the texts are really difficult to
 The Influence of Hypertext on Genre 65

follow and may not meet the audience’s previous textual expectations
or default knowledge of the generic conventions of the texts.
The only journal exhibiting an extensive display of such links is
Kairos. The distribution of hypertextual links in the 20-text sample
from this journal is schematised below:

Table 2 Routes of hypertextual links

HYPERTEXTUAL LINKS (KAIROS) NUMBER OF LINKS
Table of contents 5
Sections of book (chapters, summaries) 137
Glossary 7
Quotes from book (or related works) 8
Nodes expanding reviewer’s argument 69

Of these five types of hypertextual links, the first four seem to respond
to the descriptive goal of the genre. Thus, the links that take
readers/users to the table of contents and to the different sections of
the books at issue may be seen as the electronic counterparts of the
textual sequence devoted to outlining the book and/or highlighting
some of its parts in the genre’s print version. On the other hand, the
links that lead to glossaries and quotes provide further description
when needed, even if these may also be used by reviewers to back up
their arguments, as also happens with print texts, especially academic
ones. Additionally, these links also help readers/users avoid scrolling
when reading online texts. In this regard, together with helping
reviewers overcome the spatial constraints characterising print texts,
such links also contribute to the hypertextual flavour of the reviews
incorporating them. Nevertheless, it should be noted that since
description and evaluation are sometimes difficult to distinguish (e. g.
highlighting parts of a book involves both description and evaluation),
some of the links in the first four categories may also be regarded as
responding to some kind of evaluative concern. In contrast, the fifth
type of link is essentially argumentative – that is, it appears to be used
for further expanding the reviewers’ commentary without interrupting
the general development of the review.
However, despite their higher hypertextual feel, not all the reviews in
Kairos are equally hypertextual or provide the same kind of
information. Thus, we may further distinguish between three types of
reviews according to a hypertextuality cline. In the first place, we
66 Rosario Caballero

have reviews that look like normal print texts even if somewhat more
schematic and, therefore, can be read as such. These are actually a
reduced version of a print review, the links usually expanding the
information thus summarised in a number of ways, especially the
reviewer’s argumentative line and personal comments.
Second, we find reviews that display a fairly patterned reading route
in a first screen or frame by means of well-ordered links with explicit
names. Here the links follow a review pattern although the reader is
always free to access the different parts of the texts as s/he likes best.
The last group concerns reviews which do not cue readers as to where
they should start or how to follow their line of description and
argument. These represent the most disturbing type, and illustrate the
hypertextual assumption that ‘literacy – in all its varied forms – keeps
us in motion’ (Alexander 2000). They often combine visual and verbal
information which, in certain cases, keeps changing until the user
clicks on one of the icons or cue words – often turning the reading of
the reviews into a playful activity.

4. Implications of hypertext in genre

In general, link quantification seems to corroborate the Web’s
acknowledged purpose of being a huge textual and informational
repository where everything is easily accessible: papers, public and
private information, bookstores, and so forth. This is illustrated by
links leading to educational and public sites maintained by
universities, governments, and various organisations, as well as by
links to other papers posted in the Web. These sites and papers are
usually related to the topic of the review which they help expand in a
substantial way.
Links are, nevertheless, seldom motivated by a single purpose, as is
also the case of any textual sequence in conventional, written texts
which usually illustrates a combination of communicative goals. In
other words, many of the links that apparently fulfil the descriptive
concerns of reviews may also be discussed as responding to other
needs and constraints, some of them related to the genre’s evaluative
purpose, and others pointing to some of the less informational aims of
the Web. The links leading to publishing companies and bookstores
are especially interesting in this respect, and particularly significant –
and noticeable – in those magazines with no other (or very few) links
 The Influence of Hypertext on Genre 67

to non-commercial sites. For instance, all the reviews published by

Scientific American in 2001 show a single link taking the audience to
a popular online bookstore, in clear contrast with those of 2000 which,
although always providing access to that store, also link the reviews
with different sites providing information of another kind. In this
respect, although the assessment in reviews in general does not
necessarily aim at the audience’s purchase of the book (i. e. it may be
borrowed from a library), the links to online bookstores suggest a
commercial purpose rather than a solely informative one.
All other links in the electronic reviews under focus are related to the
more specific evaluative concern of the genre to a greater or lesser
extent. For instance, the links that provide additional information
about reviewers also warrant their status and authority as reviewers,
and the links leading to related papers on the Web may also help
evaluation by promoting critical reading practices. In principle, these
would be more reader oriented since it is the forming of the audience’s
opinions that seems to be at work here. Finally, the kind of evaluation
implicit in the links referred to as situation links relates to the whole
situation created by the review genre. Here readers and authors are
provided with interaction spaces where the latter can put forward their
views and opinions on a given book and topic, and the former can
respond to those (agreeing with or contesting them). The only links
with a clearly evaluative role are those concerned with expanding the
reviewer’s argument, yet appear somewhat disguised within
descriptive stretches. These often appear inserted within the main
body of the review (i. e. as description develops) or as menu options at
the very end. In other words, the reviews appear as essentially
descriptive at first sight, and only after clicking certain words may
audiences access the reviewer’s opinions and judgements on the book.
Two basic questions arise from this brief discussion of the motives
underlying the rhetoric of links in electronic books reviews: How do
readers participate in the genre? Does the electronic version of the
texts meet their generic expectations? Of course, answering these
questions asks for a research different from the one presented here
(that is, a more user-centred exploration). However, we may still draw
a hypothetical picture of how the reader is constructed by the different
magazines, as is suggested by the way links appear in online book
68 Rosario Caballero

reviews (all of them consciously devised by their authors) and the

reading paths and interaction options enabled by them.
In this connection, assumptions about the non-expert nature of the
intended audience of publications such as Scientific American are
reflected in the links of reviews from this magazine. All of them help
extend the topic of the book under review by taking readers to related
texts in different websites sustained by well-known organisations (e.g.
NASA, medical associations, etc.). These topically driven links
provide information in a way print reviews cannot, and, in this sense,
compensate for their spatial constraints. The texts may be therefore
seen as motivated by an informative and pedagogical purpose similar
to that of the links’ destination sites, to the extent that many reviews
may well be regarded as online tutorials in their own right. In clear
contrast, specialised publications such as Psyche or Architectural
Record do not provide their expert audiences with extra information.
Rather, they appear to use the Web to speed up access to the different
magazine issues. Nevertheless, the links in their respective texts may
also be described as opening discourse spaces for academic discussion
which go beyond the possibilities of their print counterparts. Finally,
as also happens with Scientific American, the links do not affect the
rhetorical structure of the reviews. Therefore, audiences do not need to
be technically expert, or to make use of their knowledge of the genre
in order to deal with the texts and the topics developed in them. In
other words, although topics may be expanded endlessly by following
the links leading to other texts in the Web, readers/users may ignore
these and read the reviews as if they were conventional print ones.
Kairos offers a radically different picture. The acknowledged aim of
the journal is to promote hypertextual writing and reading practices,
bridge the gap between different semiotic modes, and, according to
the journal’s website (http://english.ttu.edu/kairos), ‘support the voices
of those too often marginalized in the academy, especially graduate
students and adjunct and other part-time faculty’. This agenda, openly
acknowledged by the journal itself in its website and illustrated by the
texts posted in the magazine, also presupposes a specific kind of
audience, which may be hypertextually literate or can gradually
become so by engaging with the texts in the journal. Most of these are
true exponents of hypertextual practices, and hence can be either
reconstructed by readers/users from their initial representation of the
 The Influence of Hypertext on Genre 69

genre – which, in this sense, gears their clicking sequence – or

constructed anew as they choose.
In short, the four publications under analysis illustrate how texts may
be hypertextually implemented and adjusted to an electronic
environment according to the goals intrinsic to their generic ascription
as well as to the idiosyncrasy of both the publications and media
disseminating them. Their different use of hypertext technology may
also provide insights into the general workings of the genre. In the
first place, it prompts discussion as to whether genre variation in the
case of book reviews is solely determined by field or discipline
variables, as suggested by scholars dealing with the print version of
the genre (see, for instance, Motta-Roth’s work [1998]). Indeed, the
texts in the corpus suggest that variation is also affected by audience
and goal factors. This may be illustrated by the links in electronic
reviews which, although they appear to leave their prototypical
structure unaffected, also reveal that the genre is susceptible to
evolving into different textual practices in time. As previously
discussed, the two extremes would be represented by Scientific
American and Kairos, the former evolving into a sort of online tutorial
and, thus, foregrounding the descriptive side of the genre versus its
evaluative role, and the latter playing up the evaluative component of
reviewing practices while also providing argumentation floors for the
two sides involved.
On the other hand, linking practices in electronic texts also foreground
the multidimensional and intrinsically dynamic nature of genres by
revealing the existence of several communicative purposes within the
same textual artifact in the first place. If this is important when
dealing with written texts due to their often heterogeneous nature, it is
a must in approaching online texts. Second, they not only allow
readers/users to actively engage with the genre, but favour a more
dynamic concept of audience or discourse community. Finally, they
challenge the concept of rhetorical structure as a unitary and
prototypical textual pattern, favouring instead flexible textual artifacts
that can be collaboratively constructed anew by both writers and
users/readers. The starting – and crucial – premise in researching
CMC and the different genres articulating it is, then, a concept of
genre rationale that rests upon a plurality of goals, audiences and
rhetorical structures. Regarding these three aspects as composites
70 Rosario Caballero

rather than singular concepts is a necessary prerequisite if we want to

successfully explore the possibilities afforded by electronic texts, and
how different agendas, expectations, and interests may determine
generic variation and evolution.

5. Conclusions
Online genres have a dual relationship with their medium of
transmission: if on the one hand hypertextual links help overcome the
typical space constraints of such a short genre as the book review, the
medium’s own idiosyncrasies mix with those of the genre itself,
affecting its variation and further evolution towards new forms. This
is more evident in those genre practices that share the websites’
purpose and intended audience, and, accordingly, are more adaptable
to it (the book reviews in Scientific American being a case in point).
The evolution and possible emergence of genres must therefore be
seen as a continuum, but one highly favoured by technological and
media issues.

References
Alexander, Jonathan. 2000. Review of The Emerging Cyberculture: Literacy,
Paradigm, and Paradox ed. Stephanie Gibson and Ollie Oviedo (Cresskill, NJ:
Hampton Press, 2000) in Kairos 6(1). Online at http://english.ttu.edu/
kairos/6.1/reviews/alexander/ (consulted 14.10.2001).
Berkenkotter, Carol, and Thomas Huckin. 1995. Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary
Communication. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Crowston, Kevin, and Marie Williams. 1997. ‘Reproduced and Emergent Genres of
Communication on the World-Wide Web’ in Proceedings of the 30th Annual
Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Maui (Hawaii): 30-39.
Maingueneau, Dominique. 1998. Analyser les textes de communication. Paris: Dunod.
Motta-Roth, Désirée. 1998. ‘Discourse Analysis and Academic Book Reviews: A
Study of Text and Disciplinary Cultures’ in Fortanet, Inmaculada, et al. (eds)
Genre Studies in English for Academic Purposes. Castelló, Spain: Universitat
Jaume I. Servei de Publicacions: 29-58.
Shepherd, Michael, and Carolyn Watters. 1998. ‘The Evolution of Cybergenres’ in
Proceedings of the 31st Annual Hawaii International Conference on System
Sciences. Maui (Hawaii): 97-109.
Sussex, Roland, and Peter White. 1996. ‘Electronic Networking’ in Annual Review of
Applied Linguistics 16: 200-25.
 PART II

TEXTUAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL

TRANSITIONS

Visual Representation of Phraseological Metaphor in

Discourse: A Cognitive Approach

Anita Naciscione

Abstract
This paper deals with the creative aspects of textual and visual saturation in a
multimodal discourse. It explores the benefits of the cognitive approach to the stylistic
aspects of language in use and focuses on perception and comprehension of the
textual and the visual. The perception of an image, whether it is lexical or
phraseological, is a cognitive process, which creates a mental picture in one’s
imagination, a kind of visualisation in one’s mind’s eye. A visual representation of the
image serves to create a new mode of narrative, which is both visual and textual.
Comprehension and interpretation rely on the ties between the visual and the verbal,
as well as the knowledge of the sociocultural background and the symbolic
implications. The visual representation of instantial stylistic use of phraseological
units has a semantic function: it enhances and interprets the image, creates a new
meaning and sustains figurative thought.

Key words: phraseological unit; instantial stylistic use; extended phraseological

metaphor; visual representation; stylistic awareness.

In this article I am concerned with some aspects of metaphorical

thought representation and the creative use of phraseological metaphor
in verbal and visual discourse. I rely on the achievements of cognitive
linguistics, which have made successive contributions to the
understanding of metaphor and thought, and the explorations of
metaphor as a major mode of conceptual organisation. Studies by
cognitive scholars in the 1980s and the 1990s have established
72 Anita Naciscione

metaphor as both a figure of thought and a linguistic entity (see Lakoff

& Johnson 1980; Paprotté & Dirven 1985; Lakoff 1986; Lakoff &
Turner 1989; Gibbs 1990; Gibbs [1994] 1999; Steen 1992; Steen
1994; Kövecses 2002 and many others). Cognitive study has added a
new dimension to discourse analysis and narrative comprehension (see
Emmott [1997] 1999; Freeman 2000; Burke 2003). The use of
metaphor has been recognised as part and parcel of cognition, a
revealing cognitive mechanism. I fully agree with Steen (1994: 3;
2002: 386) that metaphors need to be investigated from the cognitive
linguistic point of view, not only that of literary criticism, as it has
been the case traditionally. Cognitive linguistics has emerged as a
modern form of semantics (see Steen 1994: 8). In semantic research it
is crucial to see what happens to metaphorical meaning and follow its
change and development in discourse, including visual representation.
My aim is to explore the linguistic meaning of metaphor, especially its
semantic aspects: the instantiation and development of meaning in
discourse, the emergence of new associations or their chains, resulting
in the creation of successive sub-images, coupled with the visual
development of metaphorical meaning. Metaphor identification,
comprehension, and appreciation become more challenging and also
more interesting when metaphor is represented by a phraseological
unit1 (PU), not separate words. Gibbs notes that, contrary to the
traditional view that idioms, clichés, and proverbs are frozen semantic
units or dead metaphors, the evidence from cognitive linguistics and
psycholinguistics indicates that many of these conventional
expressions reflect metaphoric thought that is very much alive and
part of everyday conceptual systems (Gibbs [1994] 1999: 436).
Let me turn to an example of verbal and visual extension of
phraseological meaning as represented in Mark Twain’s humorous
sketch ‘A Burlesque Biography’. The meaning of the PU a family tree
is based on a common metaphorical mapping. In its base form2 the PU
is a conventional phraseological metaphor, available to users of
English. First the PU appears in core use,3 that is, in its most common
form and meaning. As the example shows there is no change in
phraseological meaning in the text; the figurative thought is neither
developed nor sustained:
 Visual Representation of Phraseological Metaphor in Discourse 73

a family tree4
Then for the next two hundred years the family tree shows a succession of
soldiers – noble, high-spirited fellows, who always went into battle singing,
right behind the army, and always went out a-whooping, right ahead of it.
Mark Twain, A Burlesque Biography, p. 178.

In cognitive psychology the image is generally viewed as a mental

representation, as a picture in the head. As Steen has pointed out,
when processing metaphors, readers are able to construct at least three
different kinds of mental representations: a linguistic representation of
the meaning of a metaphor, a conceptual representation of the
referential content, and communicative representation of the message
it is attempting to convey (Steen 1994: 168).
In discourse a phraseological image may be extended over longer
stretches of text, as it is in this sketch. The next paragraph contains
instantial stylistic use.5 A creative expression of a new idea is
achieved by an instantiation of an extended metaphor. The
metaphorical meaning is sustained, creating sub-images, which
become part of the associative metaphorical network sustained on the
basis of the image of the PU:
This is a scathing rebuke to old dead Froissart’s poor witticism that our
family tree n ev er h ad b u t o n e l i m b t o i t , an d t h at t h at o n e st u ck
o u t at ri g h t an g l e s, an d b o re fru i t w i n t e r an d su m m e r .
Twain, A Burlesque Biography, p. 178.
If the PU a family tree is in core use, it has only one meaning – a
scheme of one’s genealogical succession of ancestry. The base
metaphor6 stems from similarity and affinity of the two objects, i. e.
both have a trunk and branches. In the given context only one branch
or ‘limb’ is singled out, the only one which ‘stuck out at right angles,
and bore fruit winter and summer’. The latter metaphorical extension
is actually an allusion to another PU – a family (fruit) tree.7
Discourse comprehension and analysis imply identification of
instantial metaphorical meaning, which arises in a particular instance
of a unique stylistic application of a PU and results in significant
changes in its form and meaning determined by the thought expressed.
The instantial use of phraseological metaphor is one of the ways to
reflect a novel turn of thought in discourse. The words ‘poor
witticism’ act as a cue, prompting and supporting the metaphorical
network.
74 Anita Naciscione

Through instantial use the PU a family tree acquires the meaning of ‘a

gallows’ and turns into a contextual euphemism, resulting in the
euphemisation of the text. In this sketch the meaning of ‘a gallows’
becomes the semantic centre of the sketch. This meaning covers
practically the whole sketch (Twain 1961: 178-82), thus sustaining
metaphorical thought.
The image of the family tree has been extended and we see it in our
mind’s eye: we imagine it by forming a mental image. It is what I
would call mental visualisation. Actually we have to visualise each
time when we perceive or think of an image. We visualise figurative
meaning in our thoughts, as thought and imagination go together,
creating a mental picture, even if there is no visual representation in
the text.
In the sketch the extended metaphor of the family tree is followed by a
pictorial illustration. The visual lends a new dimension: it further
develops and reinforces the image, which the figurative meaning has
evoked.
It is not an illustration of
the base form of the PU as
it can be found in a
dictionary entry; it is a case
of creative visualisation.
The visual is, as it were, a
continuation of the verbal
text. The possibilities of
novel extensions of
metaphor in text have been
Twain, A Burlesque Biography, p. 178.
pointed out by many
PICTURE 1
cognitive linguists (see Lakoff 1986: 218-19). However, the visual
offers new opportunities. The visual representation of instantial
meaning enhances, develops, and sustains thought and language. The
textual information is supported by the pictorial perception.
The drawing helps to bring out one of the metaphorical meanings of
the second component of the PU tree (which is a polysemous word),
namely, ‘a gallows’ (Webster’s New Universal Unabridged
Dictionary [1983] 1989: 1945). Another dictionary formulates this
meaning as follows: ‘a device used to hang a person, has one upright
 Visual Representation of Phraseological Metaphor in Discourse 75

post and a projecting crosspiece’ (New Webster’s Dictionary 1988:

1642). By punning on the two meanings of the component tree Twain
extends the image of the base metaphor. The semantic role of visual
representations lies in sustaining and developing figurative thought.
The illustration speaks a visual language of its own, accentuated by
the caption our family tree, which acquires the effect of a coda. Thus,
the understanding of some metaphors requires an extended and
attentive focus processing (Steen 1994: 245). For full understanding of
metaphor in use both the verbal and visual comprehension are
important together with conceptual knowledge.
The PU a family tree is further extended in the sketch, creating a
metaphorical chain, which calls for a sustained mental vision in one’s
mind’s eye:
I will remark here, in passing, that certain ancestors of mine are so thoroughly
well-known in history by their aliases, that I have not felt it to be worth while
to dwell upon them, or even mention them in the order of their birth. Among
these may be mentioned Richard Brinsley Twain, alias Guy Fawkes; John
Wentworth Twain, alias Sixteen-string Jack; William Hogarth Twain, alias
Jack Sheppard; Ananias Twain, alias Baron Münchausen; John George
Twain, alias Captain Kydd; and then there are George Francis Twain, Tom
Pepper, Nebuchadnezzar, and Baalam’s Ass – t h ey a l l b el o n g t o o u r
fa m i l y , b u t t o a b r an ch o f i t so m ew h at d i s t i n ct l y re m o v ed
fro m t h e h o n o r ab l e d i re c t l i n e – i n f a ct a co l l a t e r a l b r an ch ,
whose members chiefly differ from the ancient stock in that, in order to
acquire the notoriety we have always yearned and hungered for, they have got
into a low way of going to jail instead of getting hanged.
Twain, A Burlesque Biography, p. 182.

With the sub-image of ‘a collateral branch’ that is ‘distinctly removed

from the honorable direct line’, Twain establishes a semantic and
stylistic tie with the base metaphor of the PU. Semantic and stylistic
cohesion and coherence are made possible because PUs are stable
cohesive word combinations with a figurative meaning. The extended
phraseological metaphor is sustained across five pages. The sub-image
conveys a new instantial euphemistic meaning. However, only at the
very end of the paragraph does the non-euphemistic meaning ‘hanged’
appear as a sudden revelation of the plain and bitter truth, disclosing
the meaning of the instantial metaphor – ‘a gallows’, which remains in
the centre of events described in the sketch. The final paragraph
contains a reiteration of the non-euphemistic ‘hanged’:
76 Anita Naciscione

My own history would really seem so tame contrasted with that of my

ancestors, that it is simply wisdom to leave it unwritten until I am hanged.
Twain, A Burlesque Biography, p. 182.
The sketch reveals how the base metaphor of the PU a family tree
undergoes instantial semantic and stylistic changes in discourse: it is
extended across the whole sketch to sustain figurative thought. The
extended metaphor is also linked with other stylistic features – pun
and euphemism. In cognitive processes ‘figures of thought do not
exist in isolation from one another’ (Gibbs [1994] 1999: 449), and
hence in language tropes are combined, they interact with each other.
The individual tropes do not work independently; they are
functionally related to each other to provide not only figurative
coherence to the text that cannot be explained merely in logical or
causal terms (Gibbs [1994] 1999: 454), but also semantic and stylistic
cohesion. In discourse the language is alive, new meanings are created
and sustained. It is essential to develop an understanding of the
discoursal dimensions of phraseological metaphor, including visual
discourse. This example brings out the role of visual representation in
the extension of the image of a metaphorical PU in discourse.
Illustrations open up a possibility for creating a visual impact. The
extended phraseological metaphor is enhanced and developed by a
pictorial illustration of the instantial image. This example shows that
extended phraseological metaphor reflects extended figurative
thought.
Another way to assist mental visualisation of figurative thought is the
instantial use of PUs in stage remarks in plays. Instantial use reveals
information about the attitude, which the character has to convey more
accurately. Here it has a paralinguistic function: it gives precise
instructions for the actor or actress how to enact the scene. For
instance, George Bernard Shaw is known for his meticulous stage
remarks in which he frequently resorts to stylistic use:
to give someone the cold shoulder
He sits down next to the Newly Born who pouts and t u rn s a v ery
cold right shoulder to h i m , a demonstration utterly lost on him.
George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah.
The interaction of tropes is not only a phenomenon to be observed in
discourse but also in the base form of PUs, which brings out the
complexity of phraseological meaning.8 This PU has both
 Visual Representation of Phraseological Metaphor in Discourse 77

metaphorical and metonymic features in the semantic structure of its

base form. A new meaning is additionally created in text. This way
instantial use offers a new vision, which is different from core use.
The non-verbal enactment is another mode of the presentation of
message and the visualisation of thought.
A merger of verbal and non-verbal communication is a feature of the
discoursal use of PUs. ‘How elements in visual and verbal modes
interact on the page is a central issue in multi-modal texts’ (Goodman
1996: 69), that is, in texts which use features from more than one
semiotic mode of communication simultaneously. It is revealing to
follow the ways in which visual and verbal representation can interact
within a text, reinforcing the message or creating additional meanings
(see Goodman 1996: 38). As a rule, a pictorial illustration follows the
stretch of text or appears in the middle of it. Yet it may also precede
the text, as is the case in ‘The Thurber Carnival’, bringing the literal
meaning to the fore:

an old bird
Question. After a severe storm we
found this old male raven in the study of my
father, the Hon. George Morton Bodwell, for
many years head of the Latin Department at
Tufts, sitting on a bust of Livy which was a
gift to him from the class of ‘92. All t h e o l d
b i rd will say is “Grawk!”
Answer. I am handicapped by an
uncertainty as to w h o say s “G r a w k ” ,
t h e r av en o r y o u r fa t h er . I t j u s t
h ap p en s t h at “A r rk ” i s w h a t rav en s
s ay . I h av e n ev e r k n o w n a r av en
t h a t s a i d an y t h i n g b u t “A rrk .”
James Thurber, The Pet Department.
An old bird is a metaphorical PU used to denote someone who is too
experienced and shrewd to be taken in. The picture of a bird and the
question addressed to the Pet Department are non-figurative; they both
feature an old raven sitting on a bust in the direct sense of the word.
However, the answer involves parallel perception, and the reader is
simultaneously aware of figurative thought and the literal meaning.
Phraseological pun is a way to stretch imagination and reflect
experience beyond the possibilities offered by a PU in core use.
Moreover, the pun has turned visual: the pictorial representation
78 Anita Naciscione

becomes part of the process of change and development of thought in

discourse.
Change and development of phraseological meaning is not merely a
feature of literary discourse, but also a mode of figuration that is
common in various types of newspaper texts which easily combine
verbal and visual representation. Let me examine the PU to put one’s
best foot forward, which appears in the headline of a news item The
Queen puts her best (bar e) foot forward in The [London] Times (22
April 1999, p. 1). The headline is instantial use due to the insertion of
the epithet bare which is put in brackets. This is very unusual as the
base form never contains any brackets. The brackets become a
semantic technique. Moreover, the instantial component bare brings
out the literal meaning of the component foot, which results in
phraseological pun as part of the process
of semantic change in the instantiation of
the phraseological metaphor. The pun is
enhanced by a big photograph of Queen
Elizabeth with one of her shoes off (with
one bare foot).
To put one’s best foot forward is a
polysemous PU. One of the meanings is
‘to make the best possible showing’.9
When the Queen celebrated her 73rd
birthday in Korea she had to remove her
white court shoes, entering a traditional
house in her stockinged feet to observe
the local customs. The literal meaning of
shoes is spread throughout the news item:
the Queen is kicking them off and
PICTURE 3 wriggling her feet back into them again.
The phraseological pun permeates the text, creating a visual narrative
and contributing to its coherence and cohesion.
The last paragraph mentions ‘the Queen’s momentary scowl at being
wrong-footed’, that is, at being put in an unexpected or difficult
situation (Collins Cobuild English Dictionary for Advanced Learners
[1987] 2001: 1816). One aspect (having no shoes on) stands for the
Queen’s general feeling at being put at a disadvantage. This is a
metonymic link effected by associations of contiguity. The successive
 Visual Representation of Phraseological Metaphor in Discourse 79

change from one figurative mode to another – metaphor–pun–visual

pun–metonymy – reveals the complex interaction of different tropes
(see Gibbs [1994] 1999: 434-54).
The pun is further visualised in a cartoon placed at the end of the news
item.
The caption ‘I think we should get her a pair
of shoes’ is non-metaphorical;10 however, in
this context the cartoon reinforces the visual
pun. This sequence constitutes a kind of
narrative strategy, which reflects the
development of figurative thought and a
continual return to literal meanings in the
realisation of a PU-based pun. The PU is
sustained verbally and visually throughout
the news item.
PICTURE 4 Phraseological metaphors may be sustained
and visualised not only in news items and articles of a general type but
also in serious specialist articles, as, for instance, a financial article
‘Send Your Money Home’ in Time (29 September 1997, p. 44)
dealing with interest rates, stocks, and mortgages. The semantic focus
of the article is the conceptual metaphor home. The idea of home as a
desired place to live in is manifest in the use of three phraseological
units, which have one common component home, occurring within the
limits of a short article. The first lines read as follows:
Your home has always been your castle, and is used to double as a piggy
bank, until a classic late-’80s bust crushed the notion of housing as an
investment.
Time, 29 September 1997, p. 44.
The article actually deals with the nonfigurative meaning of home,
discussing the existing homes and home prices, and the idea of a
house as an investment. The article ends with another PU with the
component home, creating a frame construction and acting as a coda:
A house as an investment is a pitch that hasn’t opened many doors lately. But
today, home i sn ’ t just where the heart is; i t ’ s w h er e t h e s m a r t
m o n ey i s t o o .
Time, 29 September 1997, p. 44.
The base form of the PU home is where the heart is has a positive
meaning: your true home is in the place you love most.11 In the text
 80 Anita Naciscione

the PU is used in the opposite meaning. The PU is extended by a

parallel construction, which conveys the message of the article: a
house is a good investment now.
The visual focus of the article is a graphic: the drawing of a house
placed in the middle of the article, containing information on home
prices in various states in the USA. As the article is financial, the
house is drawn in austere lines, not like a dream house in home
adverts. The graphic gives the necessary financial information to
persuade the reader of the sound investment, yet it reveals creative
thinking.
The graphic is of stylistic and
cognitive interest. Usually
phraseological puns have one or
several components, which are used
in their literal meaning(s). In this case
the pun is created through an
associative link between a home and a
house. The graphic has an unusual
headline, ‘Home $weet Home’,
which is a case of instantial use of a
popular PU. The sweetness of home
(the dream of a house of your own) is
enhanced by a visual representation of
PICTURE 5 $, which is always seen as a symbol of wealth and
the dollar sign
money. The symbolic meaning is incorporated in the semantic
structure of the PU: it becomes part of the meaning of the PU in the
given instantiation.
For the identification of the instantial graphic implications it is also
important to know the cultural background: the use and the symbolic
meaning of the currency sign. Graphic properties are generally used to
represent the extra-linguistic world in an accurate manner (see
Goodman 1996: 184). The visual effect works together with the verbal
in the creation of a visual pun.
The use of a symbol is one of the visualisation techniques. The
graphic representation is inextricably linked with the content of the
article. The symbol $ has a semantic function. The visual creation
stretches the usual system of typography and affects the relation
 Visual Representation of Phraseological Metaphor in Discourse 81

between the visual and the verbal. The use of the dollar symbol has a
special visual effect that adds a new visual and semantic dimension to
the text, a dimension which is not available in standard writing.
Cognitive linguistics has shown that one conceptual metaphor may be
expressed in many variations of linguistic organisation (see Dirven
1985; Steen 1994: 7). This magazine article has made use of three
metaphorical PUs containing the component home and a visual
representation to reflect the semantic development of the conceptual
metaphor home. Visual comprehension is facilitated by the
metaphorical context.
In conclusion, this paper deals with the creative aspect of textual and
visual representation of figurative thought. Extended phraseological
metaphor is one of the figurative modes whereby people conceptualise
their experience. It provides for the development and sustainability of
metaphorical thought and language in discourse. Visual representation
helps to disambiguate instantial stylistic use. The cognitive approach
promotes the comprehension and interpretation of phraseological
metaphor in verbal and visual discourse. Mental visualisation of
instantial stylistic use is part of cognitive performance, enhanced by a
visual representation of the extended image. The visual reinforces
mental representations, and sustains and develops the message
expressed by the PU, lending a visual dimension to the text. Extended
metaphor calls for greater stylistic awareness, which involves a
conscious perception and understanding of significant changes in form
and meaning, associative links and their networks, stylistic cohesive
ties, and the creation of a new meaning in discourse. As thought
develops, phraseological metaphor develops, too. Extended
phraseological metaphor reflects extended figurative thought.

Endnotes
1
The phraseological unit is a stable, cohesive combination of words with a fully or
partially figurative meaning. For my understanding of the basic terms in phraseology
see Naciscione 2001.
2
The base form of a PU is the form to which other forms can be related and with
which they can be compared. It is the dictionary form and meaning, recorded as the
head form. The base form is stored in the long-term memory of the language user as a
language unit, which is accessed when a discourse situation calls for it.
82 Anita Naciscione

3
Core use is the use of the PU in its most common form and meaning. In core use the
PU does not acquire any additional stylistic features in discourse and does not exceed
the boundaries of one sentence.
4
I have indicated the forms of PUs for emphasis: base forms are marked bold and
underlined; instantial elements are sp a ced an d u n d e r l i n ed ; replaced elements
are u n d er l i n ed d o u b l e an d sp a c ed ; cues are marked with a dotted line.
5
Instantial stylistic use is a particular instance of a unique stylistic application of a PU
in discourse resulting in significant changes in its form and meaning determined by
the context.
6
The base metaphor is the metaphor that is part of the image of the PU in its base
form.
7
A family (fruit) tree – a fruit tree bearing different varieties of the same fruit grafted
on to it (Kirkpatrick [1983] 1987: 455).
8
The semantic structure of phraseological meaning frequently includes a number of
tropes. For the formation of phraseological meaning and types of phraseological
abstraction see Melerovich 1982; Dobrovolsky 1998; Naciscione 2001.
9
See Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary [1983] 1989: 713.
10
It is significant to explore the aspects of human cognition which are grounded in
everyday bodily and perceptual experiences that form the nonmetaphorical part of
thought and language (Gibbs [1994] 1999: 79).
11
See Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms 1998: 195.

References
Burke, Michael. 2003. ‘Literature as Parable’ in Gavins, Joanna, and Gerard Steen
(eds) Cognitive Poetics in Practice. London: Routledge: 115-28.
Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms. 1998. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Collins Cobuild English Dictionary for Advanced Learners. [1987] 2001. Glasgow:
Harper Collins Publishers.
Dirven, René. 1985. ‘Metaphor as a Basic Means for Extending Lexicon’ in Paprotté
& Dirven (1985): vii-xix.
Dobrovolsky, Dmitrij O. 1998. ‘Vnutrennyaya forma idiom i problema tolkovaniya’ in
Izvestiya AN. Seriya literaturi i yazika 57(1): 36-44.
Emmott, Catherine. [1997] 1999. Narrative Comprehension: A Discourse Perspective.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Freeman, Margaret H. 2000. ‘Poetry and the Scope of Metaphor: Toward a Cognitive
Theory of Literature’ in Barcelona, Antonio (ed.) Metaphor and Metonymy at the
Crossroads: A Cognitive Perspective. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter: 253-81.
Gibbs, Raymond W. Jr. 1990. ‘The Process of Understanding Literary Metaphor’ in
Journal of Literary Semantics 19: 65-79.
__. [1994] 1999. The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language and
Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
 Visual Representation of Phraseological Metaphor in Discourse 83

Goodman, Sharon. 1996. ‘Visual English’ in Goodman, Sharon, and David Graddol
(eds) Redesigning English: New Texts, New Identities. London: Routledge: 38-72.
Kirkpatrick, E. M. (ed.). [1983] 1987. Chambers 20th Century Dictionary. Edinburgh:
Chambers.
Kövecses, Zoltán. 2002. Metaphor. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lakoff, George. 1986. ‘A Figure of Thought’ in Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 1:
215-25.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Turner. 1989. More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to
Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Melerovich, Alina M. 1982. ‘Semanticheskaya struktura frazeologicheskih yedinits v
sovremennom russkom yazike kak lingvisticheskaya problema’. Doctoral
habilitation dissertation. Leningrad: Leningrad University.
Naciscione, Anita. 2001. Phraseological Units in Discourse: Towards Applied
Stylistics. Riga: Latvian Academy of Culture.
New Webster’s Dictionary. 1988. New Delhi: Allied Publishers.
Paprotté, Wolf, and René Dirven (eds). 1985. The Ubiquity of Metaphor: Metaphor in
Language and Thought. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Steen, Gerard. 1992. ‘Literary and Nonliterary Aspect of Metaphor’ in Poetics Today
13: 687-704.
__. 1994. Understanding Metaphor in Literature. London: Longman.
__. 2002. ‘Identifying Metaphor in Language: A Cognitive Approach’ in Style 36(3):
386-407.
Twain, Mark. 1961. The Complete Humorous Sketches and Tales of Mark Twain. New
York: Hanover House.
Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary. [1983] 1989. New York: Dorset &
Baber.
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 A Structural Analysis of Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’

Ken Nakagawa

Abstract
Roman Jakobson’s analytical approach can help us realise what we might otherwise
ignore or fail to notice with regard to the meaning of a poem. A Jakobsonian approach
to Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ reveals that the poem has the following structure: (1) The
centre of the poem is literally in the centre; (2) from a descriptive viewpoint, we can
observe parallelism in ll. 1-8 and ll. 17-24, whereas no parallel expressions are found
between ll. 9 and 16; (3) as for the object of the poet’s description, the poet depicts
external and natural elements in ll. 1-14; in contrast, he describes internal and spiritual
objects in ll. 15-24; and (4) turning to the poet’s attitude to Nature, we find an
observation stage in ll. 1-12, a gazing stage in ll. 13-18, and finally a stage of
contemplation and union with Nature in ll. 19-24. This structural analysis, however,
results in a static observation. In order to make up for this deficiency and investigate
the dynamic movement of the poem, I employ a philological reading and examine the
poem stanza by stanza.
Keywords: Jakobsonian structural analysis; componential analysis; juxtaposition;
mirror-image relation; poet’s craft.

1. Introduction
The purpose of this paper is a structural analysis of William
Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’. In the first part (§2), I will adopt a
Jakobsonian approach to the poem. The models I refer to are Jakobson
(1962, 1970a, 1970b). Using the so-called ‘binary opposition’ I will
analyse ‘Daffodils’ from four perspectives: (1) anterior [stanzas]
against posterior [stanzas]; (2) outer against inner; (3) odd against
even; and (4) centre against margins.
It is said that structural analysis is fated to be static. In the second part
(§§3-7), in order to compensate for this defect, I will employ a
traditional, philological reading. I will look at the poem stanza by
stanza, paying special attention to the result of the observation from
the fourth perspective. In so doing we will be able to see a far more
dynamic movement of ‘Daffodils’ emerge. The following topics will
86 Ken Nakagawa

be discussed: (5) variation of subject and object; (6) the craft of

Wordsworth’s syntax; (7) organic and cohesive function of ‘golden’;
(8) mirror-image relation of sounds; and (9) distribution of ‘dance’.
2. Jakobsonian reading
2.1. Anterior against posterior
Ϩ For the text of the poem and its rhyme scheme, refer to
A Figure 1 on p. 88. The linguistic aspects that connect the
ϩ
first stanza with the second and organise them into a group
ࠈϪ are the following:
B
ϫ First, each anterior stanza contains an as-phrase and the
object of the preposition as is modified by a relative pronoun that,
respectively.
Second, we can observe a parallel structure between ll. 3 to 6 in the
first stanza and ll. 11 to 12 in the second stanza. The former is an
SVOC pattern: ‘I saw a crowd, / A host, of golden daffodils ... /
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze’ and the latter is an OVSC
pattern: ‘Ten thousand saw I ... / Tossing their heads in sprightly
dance’, which derives from an underlying SVOC structure.
In the posterior stanzas, on the other hand, we can see an echo rhyme,
which is lacking in the anterior. In the third stanza, the rhyme word
‘gay’ in l. 15 echoes in ‘gazed – and gazed –’ in l. 17 (/gei/ /geizd/
/geizd/). This echo rhyme helps to create the picture of a poet who is
watching intently at the daffodils with great delight. The feeling of
delight, that is, ‘gay’ (/gei/), which means ‘cheerful and excited’, is
literally included in the act of ‘gazing’ (/geizi/).
Similarly, in the fourth stanza we observe an echo rhyme in l. 19, ‘On
my couch I lie’ (/ai/ /ai/ /ai/), which constitute an internal rhyme, and
‘lie’ (/lai/) then rhymes with its rhyme-pair ‘eye’ (/ai/) in l. 21.
2.2. Outer against inner
Ϩ
Let us turn to those elements which characterise a binary
opposition between outer and inner stanzas. We can take
ϩ
A B note of five elements.
ࠈϪ
First, the word ‘daffodils’ appears in the outer stanzas: in ll.
ϫ 4 and 24. It does not appear in the inner stanzas.
Second, words which express solitariness appear in the outer stanzas:
‘lonely’ in the first line and ‘solitude’ in l. 22, whereas no such words
 A Structural Analysis of Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ 87

appear in the inner stanzas. Words suggesting melancholy appear in

the outer stanzas as well: ‘lonely’ (just mentioned) and ‘In vacant or in
pensive mood’ in l. 20. In contrast, what appears in the inner stanzas is
nothing else but the ‘dancing daffodils in sprightly dance’ and ‘the
sparkling waves’ and ‘a poet who can not but be gay’ and ‘a jocund
company’.
Third, the conjunction ‘when’ appears only in the outer stanzas: that is
to say, in l. 3 of the first stanza and in l. 19 of the last stanza.
Fourth, negative lexical items appear only in the inner stanzas: ‘never-
ending’ in l. 9 and ‘could not but’ in l. 15, and ‘little’ in l. 17. There
are no negatives in the outer stanzas.
Lastly, in the outer stanzas, the rhyme-pair b: ‘hills’, ‘daffodils’ in ll. 2
and 4 circularly evokes l: ‘fills’, ‘daffodils’ in the fourth stanza.
Similarly, in the inner stanzas, the rhyme-pair e: the ‘ei’ sound in
‘way’ and ‘bay’ gives rise to g: ‘they’ and ‘gay’ in the third stanza.
2.3. Odd against even
Ϩ Features characterising this third type of grouping are
Aϩ
scarce. First, the odd stanzas begin with grammatical
subjects, whereas the even stanzas do not. However, in each
ࠈϪ B
even stanza ‘They’ begins the third line.
ϫ
Second, possessive cases of pronouns do not appear in the
odd stanzas, but only in the even stanzas. To be exact, ‘their heads’ in
l. 12, ‘my couch’ in l. 19, and ‘my heart’ in l. 23.
Third and last, in the odd stanzas, imperfect masculine rhymes appear:
cc, in ll. 5 and 6 of the first stanza, and hh, in ll. 14 and 16 of the third
stanza. The remaining are all perfect masculine rhymes.
2.4. Centre against margins
Ϩ
This poem unifies itself every two lines from the standpoint
B of meaning and punctuation. When we observe each pair of
ϩ
A lines in the poem’s centre minutely, we find no parallelism
ࠈϪ (ll. 9, 10; 11, 12; 13, 14; and 15, 16). On the contrary,
B
ϫ parallel juxtaposed expressions are realised in the margins
(highlighted in Figure 1): ‘vales’ and ‘hills’ and ‘on high’
and ‘o’er vales and hills’ (ll. 1, 2); ‘a crowd’, ‘A host’ (3, 4); ‘Beside
the lake’, ‘beneath the trees’ and ‘Fluttering’ and ‘dancing’ (5, 6);
‘shine’ and ‘twinkle’ (7, 8); ‘gazed –’ and ‘gazed –’ (ll. 17, 18); ‘In
88 Ken Nakagawa

vacant’ or ‘in pensive’ (19, 20); ‘that inward eye’, ‘the bliss of
solitude’ (21, 22); and ‘with pleasure fills’, and ‘dances with the
daffodils’ (23, 24). All these expressions reveal strong parallelism.
Contrary to this, there is no parallelism at all between ll. 9 and 16.

Figure 1 Centre against margins

<Key:sjuxtaposition>
‘Convergence’ of foregrounded linguistic
n. techniques realised in ‘the centre’
1 I wandered lonely as a cloud a n.
2 That floats on high o’er vales and hills,ࠈ b n.
Ϩ 3 When all at once I saw a crowd, a n.
4 A host, of golden daffodils; b n.
5 Beside the lake, beneath the trees, cࠈ V S
n.
6 Flúttèrìng and dancing in the breeze. c 11 Tén thóusand saw I at a glance,

7 Continuous as the stars that shine d vi.

8 And twinkle on the milky way, e n. 12 Tóssìng their heads in sprightly dance.
ϩ9 They stretched in never-ending line d n. S
10 Along the margin of a bay: e n. 13 The waves beside them danced; but they
11 Tén thóusand saw I at a glance, f n. V
12 Tóssìng their heads in sprightly dance. fࠈ n.
14 Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
13 The waves beside them danced; but they g=e pron.
14 Out-did the sparkling waves in glee: hࠈ n. /gli/
Ϫ 15 A poet could not but be gay, g=e adj.
16 In such a jocund company: hࠈ n. /kmpni/
17 I gazed – and gazed – but little thought iࠈ vt.
18 What wealth the show to me had brought: iࠈ vt.

19 For oft, when on my couch I lie jࠈ vi.

20 In vacant or in pensive mood, k n.
ϫ 21 They flash upon that inward eye j n.
22 Which is the bliss of solitude; k n.
23 And then my heart with pleasure fills,ࠈ l=b vi.
24 And dances with the daffodils. l=b n.

It follows that what I call ‘the centre’ (ll. 9-16) shows a remarkable
contrast to its surroundings in that the centre shows no juxtaposition
opposed to that found in the margins.

Let us examine the punctuation, especially the use of colons and

semicolons, which help to split the stanzas into quatrain-like units.
There is a semicolon at the end of the fourth line of Stanza I; in Stanza
II there is a colon at the end of the fourth line. In Stanza III there is a
colon at the end of the second, the fourth, and the sixth lines; and then
in Stanza IV there is a semicolon in the fourth line. This would seem
to constitute a strong coherence in the first four lines of each stanza as
units. If we seek the most cohesive four lines between ll. 9 and 16, we
must focus on ll. 11-14 despite the existence of a break between the
second and third stanzas. As for elements that connect l. 11 to l. 14,
 A Structural Analysis of Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ 89

we can point out that, phonologically, the /gl/ sound of rhyme word
‘glance’ in l. 11 forms a strong framework with that of ‘glee’ in l. 14;
and the /sp/ consonant cluster and /l/ duplication found in ‘sprightly’
in l. 12 and ‘s p a r k ling’ in l. 14 show sound equivalence.
Grammatically, the possessive pronoun ‘their’ in l. 12 continues to the
objective case ‘them’ in l. 13; and rhetorically, the last word of the
second stanza, ‘dance’, is followed by ‘danced’ in l. 13 by means of
anadiplosis and polyptoton. We may call these four lines the ‘centre of
the poem’ with good reason.
First, the only instance of SV inversion in this poem is observed in l.
11 (‘saw I’).
Second, it is in ll. 6, 11 and 12 that the basic rhythm of this poem, i.e.
iambic tetrameter, is altered. ‘Flúttèrìng’ is a dactyl, ‘Tén thóusànd’ is
a spondee, ‘Tóssìng’, a trochee, and two of these alterations are found
in consecutive lines of the centre.
Third, apart from the change of rhythm, a bold enjambment of ‘they /
Out-did’ occurs from l. 13 to l. 14.
Fourth, ‘they’ is a unique word in that it is the only pronoun among
the rhyme words.
Fifth, ‘Out-did’ is morphologically conspicuous because it has a
hyphen, whereas the other 22 verbs in this poem do not.
Last, strictly speaking, as mentioned above, ‘glee’ in l. 14 does not
constitute a complete masculine rhyme with its rhyme pair ‘company’
in l. 16. This rhyme is imperfect because /gli/ has a long vowel and
/kmpni/ has a short one.
It is enough to point out the linguistic facts which make the ‘centre’
conspicuous against the margins.
To summarise this fourth perspective, these four lines constitute a
‘convergence’ (Riffaterre 1959: 172 [cited in Fowler 1966: 21]) of
phonological, structural, grammatical, and rhetorical markedness in
this poem. These four lines in which such ‘foregrounded’ linguistic
properties converge play a role in what in music is called
‘modulation’. They cause the poem to modulate from ‘external’
description into ‘internal’ description.
90 Ken Nakagawa

3. Philological reading
In the first part, we have examined formal and static aspects realised
in the poem. Now, in the second part, based particularly on the result
obtained in the fourth grouping, ‘Centre against margins’, I will look
at the movement in the poem stanza by stanza basically from a fifth
perspective, variation of subject and object, and illustrate some of the
linguistic techniques of Wordsworth.
As is well known, this poem begins with the first person pronoun ‘I’.
The poet is identified with a cloud floating high above in the sky,
which foreshadows his complete union and identification with Nature
accomplished at the last stage of the poem. A lonely poet meets with a
group of daffodils. The epithet ‘golden’ in l. 4 is considerably
important, and we cannot ignore the significance of the emendation
from ‘dancing’ in the 1807 edition to ‘golden’ in the 1815 edition. I
will refer to this point later.
4. The craft of Wordsworth’s syntax
The SVOC structure in ll. 3 to 6, which I mentioned in the first part, is
noteworthy. At the end of l. 3, Wordsworth uses ‘a crowd’, and then at
the beginning of the fourth line, he changes it to ‘A host’
appositionally. Let us have a closer look at the appositional change,
and appreciate the craft of Wordsworth’s syntax.
Figure 2 The craft of Wordsworth’s syntax
S V order, harmony O C 䚭
㻐 a crowd fluttering 䊲shine
I saw of golden daffodils
+
a host dancing 䊲twinkle

According to the brilliant observation by Durrant (1969: 21-23; 1970:

129-31), the shift of the poet’s description is that from ‘a fluttering
crowd’ to ‘a dancing host’ which suggests ‘order and harmony’. In
other words, parallel phrases – ‘crowd’, ‘host’; ‘Fluttering’, ‘dancing’
– form strong semantic links respectively.
Componential analysis for each pair of synonyms will make the point
clearer:
 A Structural Analysis of Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ 91

crowd = <a large number>, <–order>, <–harmony>;

host = <a large number>, <+order>, <+harmony>
flutter = <move>, <–order>, <–harmony>;
dance = <move>, <+order>, <+harmony>

With the help of these distinctive features of <sorder, sharmony>,

we can easily recognise the marked difference between the two noun
phrases. Here Durrant catches the overt and succinct semantic change
from ‘a fluttering crowd’ which has neither <order> nor <harmony>
to ‘a dancing host’ which has both <order> and <harmony>. In my
opinion, the same is true of ‘shine’ and ‘twinkle’ in ll. 7 and 8 because
the former implies <-order, -harmony>; and the latter suggests
<+order, +harmony>.
Now let us move on to the second stanza. The ‘golden daffodils’
which have been described as an object of the verb ‘saw’ now appear
as a subject of the verb ‘stretched’ in l. 9 – though in the form of the
pronoun ‘They’. ‘They’ are identified with the stars in the Milky Way,
just as, in the first stanza, ‘I’, the poet, was identified with a cloud in
the sky. The description of daffodils in the second stanza and that of
the first stanza have equivalence in respect of the multitude of number.
The description in the second stanza is expanded dramatically by
using a simile of tens of thousands of stars in the galaxy – a
magnificent cosmic image. What makes this giant leap of association
possible is the above-mentioned epithet ‘golden’ in ‘golden daffodils’
in l. 4 of the first stanza. It signifies <brightness of the colour> of the
flowers, which is identical with that of ‘stars’. Therefore the dramatic
expansion of the image works smoothly.
At the beginning of l. 11, ‘a crowd, / A host, of golden daffodils’ in ll.
3 and 4 is now transformed to ‘Ten thousand’. The headword
‘daffodils’ is hidden in the multitude. When we come across the
expression ‘in never-ending line’ in l. 9, together with the whole
cosmic image of endless numbers of stars, we feel the magnitude of
the number itself is strengthened and enhanced into what might be
called <spatial boundlessness>.
Incidentally, up to l. 12, either ‘I’ or ‘daffodils’ has been the subject of
the lines, but at the beginning of the third stanza, ‘The waves’ takes up
the position of subject as if to change the stream of description. The
‘waves’ are only presupposed by proximity or adjacency relation with
92 Ken Nakagawa

‘Beside the lake’ in l. 5 and ‘Along the margin of a bay’ in l. 10. It has
not been expressed explicitly. The ‘waves’ here cause the poet to do
‘comparative thinking’. So the poet asks himself a question: ‘Which is
superior, the dancing waves or the dancing daffodils?’ (The dancing
movements of both, of course, are caused by the ‘breeze’ at the end of
l. 6.)
It is noteworthy that comparative thinking occurs in what I call ‘the
centre of the poem’ in the word ‘Out-did’ (cited in OED under ‘outdo’
and defined as ‘To be superior to’). The dancing of the ‘daffodils’ is
definitely superior to that of the ‘waves’. Why? Because, as the
epithet ‘sparkling’ implies, the dancing of the waves is fleeting and
transitory. On the other hand, the dancing of the daffodils is
sufficiently permanent to be compared to the stars in the galaxy which
have appeared without fail in the night sky since the creation of the
universe. The dance by the daffodils is by far the superior because it
has <order> and <harmony> and <eternity>.
In l. 15 an objective subject ‘poet’, not a subjective ‘I’, appears as the
subject, which, till then, has been expressed by the first person
pronoun ‘I’. And in l. 17, the verb ‘saw’ changes to the double ‘gazed
– and gazed –’ which has the semantic features <see> +
<concentration>. Can we say that now the poet comes to the stage of
gazing, which follows the stage of observation? No. The gazing stage
has already begun at the latter part of the centre (ll. 13 and 14),
because the above-mentioned ‘Out-did’ has already appeared there. To
be more precise, ‘Out-did’ means ‘to be superior to’ and so is
suggestive of comparative thinking. Thinking comparatively pre-
supposes gazing. And gazing makes it possible to recognise the
difference between two objects as a result of the comparative thinking.
At the end of l. 17 the verb ‘to think’ appears for the first time as
‘thought’, following the verbs of motion and perception used in the
former part of the poem. But it is totally negated through the use of
‘little’. Given Wordsworth’s state of ecstasy, this use of ‘little’ is quite
understandable and quite natural. Is it possible for someone to think
when experiencing sheer joy?
5. Organic and cohesive function of ‘golden’
Here we need to mention ‘wealth’ in the last line of this stanza. It is
closely related to the other connotation of the epithet ‘golden’ stated
before. Let us review the two meanings of ‘golden’ represented in
 A Structural Analysis of Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ 93

Figure 3. One semantic feature, <bright colour>, is related to ‘stars’,

‘shine’, ‘twinkle’, ‘sparkling’ and then ‘flash’ in the last stanza. The
other semantic feature, <high value>, is closely related to ‘wealth’
here in l. 18. The adjective, ‘golden’, in fact, constitutes a starting
point for this organic verbal network. The ‘dancing’ in the original
version would not have performed such a cohesive function as
‘golden’ does. It should also be noted that the second stanza was
added at the same time when original ‘dancing’ was replaced by
‘golden’ in 1815.
Figure 3 Organic function of ‘golden’
= <bright colour> = <high value>

1 I wandered lonely as a cloud

2 That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
I
3 When all at once I saw a crowd,
4 A host, of golden daffodils;
5 Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
6 Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

7 Continuous as the stars that shine

8 And twinkle on the milky way,
II 9 They stretched in never-ending line
10 Along the margin of a bay:
11 Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
12 Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

13 The waves beside them danced; but they

14 Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
III
15 A poet could not but be gay,
16 In such a jocund company:
17 I gazed – and gazed – but little thought
18 What wealth the show to me had brought:

19 For oft, when on my couch I lie

20 In vacant or in pensive mood,
IV 21 They flash upon that inward eye
22 Which is the bliss of solitude;
23 And then my heart with pleasure fills,
24 And dances with the daffodils.

6. Mirror-image relation of sounds

Now let us examine the sound structure between the last word of the
third stanza and the first two words of the fourth stanza:
‘… brought: / For oft …’
94 Ken Nakagawa

First of all, we need to remember, ‘the conjunction “for” introduces

new information, but suggests that the reason is given as an
afterthought’ (Swan 1995: 72). With that observation in mind, let us
look at Figure 4-1.
Figure 4-1 Mirror-image of ‘brought: / For oft’ (i)

Stanza III Stanza IV

(1) / b r t f  f t /
(2) / b r t f  f t /
(3) / b r t f  f t /

The vertical line in Figure 4-1 divides stanzas III and IV. Firstly, the
long vowel // is common to the three words, as is illustrated by (1).
Secondly, let us suppose a mirror is placed between ‘For’ and ‘oft’.
Then, as the opposing arrows in the Figure indicate, the initial
consonant of the word ‘For’, /f/, reflects part of the third word ‘oft’,
that is /f/, showing a mirror-image relation (/f//f/), which is
depicted by (2). Thirdly, further scrutiny reveals that the final sound of
the first word, /t/, plus the sound of the second word, /f/, vs. the
sound of the third word, /ft/, are also in a mirror-image relationship
(/tf//ft/), as is shown by (3) (cf. Austin’s idea of ‘concentricity’
[1984: 84]).
Figure 4-2 Mirror-image of ‘brought: / For oft’ (ii)

S t a n za I
S t a n za II
S t a n za II I
…brought :

For oft…
S t a n za IV

Therefore, seen from the viewpoints of phonology and semantics as

indicated in Figure 4-2, this mirror-image sound structure helps the
fourth stanza reflect the third stanza, just as a mirror reflects its object.
Here we can see the poet’s craft: form matches meaning.
 A Structural Analysis of Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ 95

Now back to the main argument. At the beginning of Stanza IV, the
poet’s inner feeling is clearly described: ‘In vacant or in pensive
mood’. In such a mood, what has been captured as an object of ‘I
saw’, ‘saw I’, and ‘I gazed – and gazed –’ emerges as a subject, that is
to say, ‘They’ in l. 21. And ‘they’ actively work on ‘that inward eye /
Which is the bliss of solitude’, namely ‘imagination’. But the subject
itself is still a pronoun and is not manifested. We have to wait until the
very end of the poem for the pronoun to change to ‘daffodils’ again.
Furthermore ‘I’ and ‘A poet’, which so far appear as the subject of
each action, suddenly disappear in l. 23, and this time, near the end of
the poem, the emotional ‘heart’ (not the intellectual mind), which has
been a main agent appreciating the pleasant dancing of the daffodils,
becomes the subject. The poet hides himself in a possessive pronoun,
‘my’ in l. 23. His ‘heart fills with pleasure’ and ‘dances with the
daffodils’.
7. Distribution of ‘dance’
Before concluding, I would like to highlight the word ‘dance’, which
is a keyword of this poem realising <order> and <harmony>. The
word ‘dance’ is distributed equally once in each stanza with its form
slightly changed morphophonologically. The distribution is as follows:
‘dancing’ in l. 6, ‘dance’ in l. 12, ‘danced’ in l. 13, and ‘dances’ in the
last line. Moreover, two of them appear in the centre. When the
daffodils in the outer world dance, then correspondingly the heart
dances. There is a dance all through the undercurrent of the poem’s
meaning.
8. Conclusion
In the first part, we applied a Jakobsonian approach and, then, in the
second part, a philological reading, to the structure of ‘Daffodils’. As
a result we posited the following structure illustrated in Figure 5.
Figure 5 Structure of ‘Daffodils’

Stanza I II III IV
Line 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

(1) M AR G I N CENTRE M AR G I N

(2) + juxtaposition – juxtaposition + juxtaposition

(3) external, natural internal, spiritual
(4) observation gazing contemplation, union
96 Ken Nakagawa

Summarising, I would like to reiterate the following four structural

points which underpin this paper:
• Point (1): The centre of the poem is literally in the
centre;
• Point (2): From a descriptive viewpoint, we can
observe juxtaposition in ll. 1-8 and ll. 17-24, whereas
no juxtaposed expressions are found between ll. 9-16;
• Point (3): As for the object of the poet’s description,
the poet depicts external and natural objects in ll. 1-14;
in contrast, he describes internal and spiritual entities
in ll. 15-24; and
• Point (4): Turning to the poet’s attitude towards
Nature, we find an observation stage in ll. 1-12, a
gazing stage between ll. 13-18, and finally a stage of
contemplation and union with Nature from l. 19 to the
last.

References
All quotations are from Wordsworth, William. 1969. The Poetical Works of William
Wordsworth, Vol. 2 (ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. H. Darbishire). Oxford: Clarendon
Press. All italics and underlines are mine.

Austin, Timothy R. 1984. Language Crafted. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Durrant, Geoffrey. 1969. William Wordsworth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
__. 1970. Wordsworth and the Great System. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fowler, Roger (ed.). 1966. Essays on Style and Language. London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul.
Jakobson, Roman. 1960. ‘Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics’ in Sebeok,
Thomas A. (ed.) Style in Language. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
__ . 1962. (with Claude Lévi-Strauss) ‘“Les Chats” de Charles Baudelaire’ in
L’Homme 2: 5-21. English tr. by Katie Furness-Lane in Lane (1970): 202-26.
__. 1970a. ‘On the Verbal Art of William Blake and Other Poet-Painters’ in Linguistic
Inquiry 1: 3-23.
__. 1970b. (with Lawrence Jones) Shakespeare’s Verbal Art in ‘Th’Expence of Spirit’.
The Hague: Mouton.
Lane, Michael (ed.). 1970. Structuralism: A Reader. London: Jonathan Cape.
Riffaterre, Michael. 1959. ‘Criteria for Style Analysis’ in Word 15: 154-74.
Swan, Michael. 1995. Practical English Usage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 Seeing the Sea:
Deixis and the Perceptions of Melville’s Reader

Robert Cockcroft

Abstract
This essay uses the concepts of deixis and schema theory to investigate how in Moby-
Dick, Melville deliberately disorients the perceptions and cognition of his readers.
Writing at a time of tension between the older epic and religious values echoed in
Ahab’s quest, and the rise of American industrialism and materialism, Melville
reflects this in the tension between Ahab’s warped religiosity and his repressed
humanity – a quality shared with people as diverse as Ishmael and Queequeg, which
in Melville’s view stands to gain from the shift towards a more this-worldly
perspective. But this opposition is never simple: humanity’s pillaging of nature in the
cause of material progress can seem as demonic as Ahab’s more metaphysical
obsession. Detailed study of a particular chapter shows how the writing constantly
superimposes one deictic frame of reference, or one schematic script or scene upon
another, changing the direction and determinants of the reader’s engagement with the
story, in line with that of its narrator. Ishmael’s perception of the industrial process of
‘trying out’ whale blubber to whale oil is opposed to his perspective and
responsibilities as helmsman, until in a moment of drowsiness he cannot, literally, tell
whether he is coming or going.

Key words: affordance; cognition; deixis; scene.

1. Melville’s world
In the marine world of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, the author
systematically familiarises his reader with two orders of things: with
whales and whaling, and within that larger scheme, with the particular
history of Ahab, his ship the Pequod, and the White Whale. However
we conceive the genre of this work – fiction, epic, tragedy, or all three
– it is shaped throughout by the technical, economic and political
affordances of 19th-century America. Its original readers, of course,
inhabited that world themselves, or, as with Melville’s earliest English
readers, saw in it the unrestrained development of tendencies apparent
in their own society.
98 Robert Cockcroft

It is fitting that Moby-Dick was published in 1851, the year of the

Great Exhibition, with its celebration of British technological
development – so soon to be surpassed both in inventiveness and
application by the United States.
But the technical world of Moby-Dick is a peculiar one. Whaling as
expounded and explored by Melville combines the ancient skills of
seamanship, boat-handling, and hunting, with a complex high-pressure
industrial process carried out at sea to meet the demands of a mass
market in whale oil, itself a vital element in the territorial expansion of
America. Ship-board processing made it possible to secure a maximal
return on capital by hunting whales where they were concentrated at
particular times of year, ensuring a high-quality product, and
employing the full capacity of the whaling-ships’ holds. Advances in
the techniques of navigation, in geographical knowledge, in the
suppression of piracy, and in the understanding of whales’ migratory
behaviour now made it possible for ships to range throughout the
Pacific.
Poising Ahab, Starbuck, Queequeg, and Ishmael between the
expanding world of power, money, and material production, and the
epic past where survival had depended on physical strength, on
manual skills and courage, and on the psychological and spiritual
resource of religion, as it still does so problematically on board the
Pequod, subject to the warped religious impulses of Ahab, Melville is
able to expose his characters and his readers to a bewildering but
purposive process of disorientation. He constantly subverts any
assumed sense, on the reader’s part, of a discontinuity between
physical and mental space. What I will attempt to demonstrate might
be done with reference to many other chapters of Moby-Dick; but I
will restrict myself chiefly to Chapter 96, ‘The Try-Works’ (Melville
1957: 417-21). Like any other epic writer, Melville tends to epitomise
major themes in small-scale objects, and I will linger for a while in the
‘left hand try-pot’ between the main mast and foremast of the whaling
ship Pequod (i. e. one of the two cauldrons in which whale oil was
produced: the one situated on the starboard side of the ship – i. e. the
right side looking forward). I want to propose a follow-up to Captain
Ahab’s observation, addressed to the departing and despondent ears of
the First Mate, Starbuck, but heard – or imagined – by the narrator
Ishmael and recounted in Chapter 132 (Melville 1957: 531-35): ‘By
 Seeing the Sea 99

heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder
windlass, and Fate is the handspike’. But if we as readers are to
entertain Ahab’s view, by conforming our imagination to the
experience of Melville’s sailors, what levers cause our rotation – and
the force consequently exerted through us? And what features of the
text point us towards the mindset of Melville’s readers and of Melville
himself as he engages with them, adapting his persuasive technique to
the technology of his time and the changing orders – physical,
economic, and intellectual – with which it interacts? Might our
perceptions, themselves, constitute those ‘levers’, if they work with
cumulative effect in one dominant direction? Is it possible by close
examination of Melville’s language to demonstrate how it works on
our cognitive processes, through our sense of immediate physical
space (within a ship or a whale boat, a spot in the sea), and through
our more personal sense of who, or what, is above, below, beside,
beyond or within us – in short, through everything that locates us,
deictically, within the text? Since deictic language derives its meaning
from the immediate space and time common to speaker and listener,
and from the apprehended position of each individual within that
space, the fact that Ahab, thinking that Starbuck is still standing next
to him, compares them both to ‘yonder windlass’ puts a special
poignancy into the word – to get their bearings, readers must place
themselves momentarily, and imaginatively, at the deictic centre that
Starbuck has vacated.
2. Deixis: the try-pot’s perspective
The ‘standard account’ of deixis typified by Stephen Levinson
(Levinson 1983: 54-96) centred such language on the ego of each
successive speaker, as its only meaningful point of reference. But the
one-legged Ahab himself, tortured by the neural sensation of his lost
limb, has already in effect refuted this in conversation with the
Carpenter: ‘Look, put thy live leg here where mine was [my italics];
so, now, here is only one distinct leg to the eye, yet two to the soul’
(Melville 1957: 466). More recent thinking has at once queried the
‘egocentric’ view, and linked deixis to broader ideas of cognition. In
his contribution to New Essays in Deixis (Green 1995: 27-48), Peter
Jones shows that the paramount authority cited for this view, Karl
Bühler, himself points beyond it. As quoted by Jones, he observes
that:
100 Robert Cockcroft

If one person wants to point out something to another, then both together, the
guide and the person guided, must possess a sufficient measure of harmonious
orientation within an order in which what is to be pointed out has its place.
Before considering how schema theory might help us distinguish a
whole range of such ‘orders’ (harmonious or otherwise) within Moby-
Dick, let us consider ‘orientation’ within ‘The Try-Works’ chapter.
How does the reader ‘see the sea’ on that night of wind, waves, and
fire – and which sea – ‘monomaniac’ Ahab’s, Ishmael’s, or a
hallucination rising from the fire itself? And how can we clearly see
anything whilst subject to such constant disorientation? We have just
emerged from one of the most ‘wicked’ chapters of all Melville’s
‘wicked book’, as he called it in the famous letter to Hawthorne
included in Tanner’s edition of the novel (Melville 1988: 601), i. e.
Chapter 95, ‘The Cassock’. That is the one about the skin of the sperm
whale’s penis, used as protective clothing by the mincer cutting up the
blubber; and it ends in a staggering series of puns mincingly flaunting
its own ambiguity, flickering between cetological, industrial,
ecclesiastical, and sexual schemes of things. Moving on from there,
we fall back at first into a vein of calm exposition and logic,
explaining what makes ‘an American whaler’ outwardly different
from any other ship. But even here we have a ‘curious anomaly’.
Something like ‘a brick-kiln’ – normally associated with a scene
giving greater scope to human action than the open sea, ‘the open
field’ – is ‘transported to her planks’. For the greater part of the next
paragraph we attend to a methodical general description of this
particular piece of manufacturing equipment, addressed to us like a
lecture in human geography.
The try-works, its ponderous inorganic substance ‘planted’ so
incongruously on the deck, is contemplated as though in an isometric
drawing or a fitting-out basin. Readers are made aware of its core
materials, bricks and mortar, before being told how it would actually
appear to them on board the completed ship, when not in use – ‘cased
with wood’ and covered by a ‘battened hatchway’. Then – as though a
rabbit were being produced from a hat – the vital part not mentioned
before the woodwork was (mentally) put in place, is revealed, as ‘we
expose the great try-pots’. In its immediate context, it isn’t clear
whether the pronominal subject ‘we’ represents Ishmael as the lecturer
with his attentive audience looking at any ‘American whaler’, or
Ishmael and his shipmates setting to work on board the Pequod. But in
 Seeing the Sea 101

any case, this exposure relates to the structure itself, not to its
immediate use; and we as human agents are kept at a distance in the
next two sentences, with their passive verbs telling us how the pots are
‘kept remarkably clean . . . [and] polished’, centring our minds on
them as extraordinary objects, without respect to their purpose –
though that is reflected in their cleanliness. It requires the comparison
of this shipboard scene with one of extravagant luxury ashore, the pots
‘shin[ing] within like silver punch-bowls’, to remind us – through the
opposed associations of work and leisure – that this is a working
environment. Then, as if to subvert any simple opposition of sea,
work, and hardship to land, leisure, and luxury, we see the image of
‘cynical old sailors’ shirking work, who ‘[d]uring the night watches
… will crawl into them and coil themselves away there for a nap’.
They are ‘coiled’ reflexively ‘away’ as the passive objects of their
own rogue activity, like ropes, dogs, or foetuses, in the try-pots – like
the Cynic Diogenes in his fabled barrel, the sailors disdaining the
proprieties of watch-keeping at sea as the philosopher renounced the
luxuries and scorned the civic values of terrestrial Athens.
In recollecting his own active or passive role within this ‘order’,
Ishmael recalls his experience as polisher of ‘the left hand try-pot’, as
viewed from the standpoint of the furnace doors, facing aft – in other
words (and within another, larger ‘order’) on the starboard side of the
ship as viewed from his alternative position at the ‘midnight helm’:
It was ... with the soapstone diligently circling around me, that I was first
indirectly struck by the remarkable fact, that in geometry all bodies gliding
along the cycloid, my soapstone for example, will descend from any point in
precisely the same time.
The ‘diligence’ of ‘my soapstone’ (‘my’ bespeaking the order of the
task, not of personal possessions) has gone beyond the realm of
hypallage or transferred quality, detaching itself from Ishmael the
operative to such an extent that lapses in his outward attention lead to
him being struck repeatedly around his bent knees, buttocks, or ankles
by its rapid descent from a slackening grasp, as he ‘drowses at the
helm’ in this small, shining world. This will be easily verified by the
reader, granted such apparatus as a hemispherical salad bowl and a
couple of grapes, one poised at the rim and the other half-way down,
released simultaneously. Both collide precisely at the bottom in the
same instant. As this fact, placed in his way by the technology on
which – ostensibly – his livelihood depends, ‘strikes’ Ishmael, we are
102 Robert Cockcroft

at once in the cauldron with him, choosing ‘any’ point on its punch-
bowl surface (any having vivid immediacy in that imagined
enclosure), and outside it, appreciating an abstract geometrical truth as
though sitting in a lecture room. The deixis of place, ‘up there’ or
‘down here’, makes no difference to the deixis of time, the interval
between the stone’s release and its painful impact, though it may to
the force of the impact. Here, too, Ishmael seems to be located within
two ‘orders’ at once.
3. Schema theory and the plant in use
Before we consider the far more radical and disturbing disorientation
which is to follow, let us extend our theoretical base a little further.
The title of our chapter, ‘The Try-Works’, reflects that broad order of
things, that scene which the whole novel progressively elaborates for
the reader, namely the American sperm-whale fishery, as carried on at
this epoch by every ship involved in it, at every stage – though this
chapter relates initially to one specific stage, the preparation and use
of a ship’s whale-oil processing plant. A definite article ‘The’,
attached to a compound noun half exotic and half familiar, ‘Try-
Works’, announces another stage in our familiarisation with the
mystery of whaling, assuming our interest and attention to something
pointed to by that definite article, as part of the work of the ship.
Nobody could suppose that the titles of other chapters like ‘The
Symphony’ and ‘The Chase – First Day’, or in this chapter ‘The pit’ of
Hell to whose fiery reek the burning blubber is compared, referred to
things of a similar order – though whaling provides a context for both
of them. Schema theory, as developed by Roger Schank in his
Dynamic Memory (Schank 1982) and as summarised by Elena Semino
in her Language and World Creation (Semino 1997: 119-59), may
show us how Melville’s world is both created and convulsed – as he
works on the reader’s existing memory, implants fresh imaginative
experience to be drawn on, as memory, in succeeding chapters, and
plays his climax against both of them. Schema theory of course, views
our perception and cognition as largely shaped by pre-existing
schemata in our minds, based on prior experience and cultural
conditioning – which are in their turn modified by fresh experience
and perception and which may be consciously activated – by our
reason, our persuasive intent, or our imagination (or by all three as in
the case of Melville).
 Seeing the Sea 103

Schank’s account would represent every stage of the Pequod’s voyage

as a ‘scene’, from the mustering of the crew to the sighting of Moby
Dick. Most readers know that ships have to be manned, linking this to
the broader capitalistic scenario of contractual agreement; and by the
end of Ishmael’s extended discourse on this area of human geography
and oceanography, they have become acquainted with every stage of
the process including watching for whales, lowering the boats, and
perilously pursuing the prey – as necessity still demands prior to the
invention of steam-driven whale-catchers and explosive harpoons –
and they are cognitively prepared for the climactic encounter.
Particular ‘scripts’ play on our expectations as defined by these
scenes. As early as Chapter 16 we learn what makes whaling ships
different, and what makes the Pequod extraordinary even in its
mustering of a crew, presided over by one of its two Quaker owners,
Captain Peleg, from a black whale-bone wigwam on the deck. And by
the end we know that there are special conditions (and one bizarre
participant, Ahab himself, hoisted aloft in a basket) attached to the
Pequod’s watch for whales.
Schank would view each separate stage of the voyage as put together
from progressive, and repeated, scripts and scenes – movement
through the tropics, shipboard routines – made coherent to us by
means of what he calls Memory Organisation Packets (MOPs for
short). Our pre-existent ideas regarding deep-sea fishing voyages will
help us to assimilate more and more information into a larger pattern
of MOPs – departure, travel to the grounds, work on the grounds,
difficulties encountered, ultimate success or disaster, return or non-
return. This overarching or containing schema constitutes what
Schank calls a meta-MOP; and Melville both plays with it – as storms
are encountered, whales caught and processed, oil barrels stowed and
re-stowed, and the prospect of a happy return to Nantucket raised as
late as Chapter 132 – and against it. How he does this is our real
concern; and four final categories of schemata, namely goals, plans,
themes, and TOPs (Thematic Organisation Points) might help us find
out how. Goals as characterised by Schank and his earlier collaborator
Abelson in 1977 include Achievement Goals and Instrumental Goals,
and themes serve to explain goals in terms of social position (or role),
interpersonal relationships, and aspirations in life. Thematic
organisation points embody our capacity to compare things, to see
similarities of goal, situation (and, presumably, differences), etc.
104 Robert Cockcroft

So, how do the goals, relationships, and aspirations of Ahab’s

company relate to his own? Returning to the ‘Try-Works’ chapter and
following the narrative from the position of Ishmael, sharing his five
senses and his imaginative vision as he stands at the Pequod’s tiller,
hearing Stubb’s distant deictic address to the unnamed and
unspecified members of the trying-out gang, ‘“All ready there?”’,
smelling the whale that has been chased, killed, brought alongside,
peeled like a gigantic orange into strips of blubber which are then
‘minced’ into slices as thin and flammable as ‘bible leaves’ – as (in
the discursive geographical present tense) ‘he supplies his own fuel
and burns by his own body’, we also look forward down the length of
the deck to the pitching of boiling oil, the flaming flues and furnace
doors, the fiend-like harpooneer-stokers, and the equally fiendish
watch ‘lounging’ on the ‘sea-sofa’ of the windlass, swapping stories,
whose physical sensations Ishmael anticipates as ‘their eyes . . .
[scorch] in their heads’. Once reduced to ‘fritters’ and transferred to
the furnace, what’s left of the ‘bible leaves’ of blubber smells
remarkably human (Melville 1957: 418):
… his smoke is horrible to inhale, and inhale it you must, and not only that,
but you must live in it for the time. It has an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor
about it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal pyres. It smells like the
left wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument for the pit.
Using another affordance linking Melville with his implied reader as
inheritors of a long tradition of faith, the deictic bearings of the Bible
and Christian art are imposed on those of the ship; in other words
mental space is mapped onto the physical frames of reference – the
processing plant and the vessel under sail – so that what is seen and
smelt along the centre line of the hull is simultaneously referred
forwards and downwards towards ‘the pit’, for smell, and (for sight)
forwards, upwards and outboard to a position somewhere over the port
side, towards the divine reprobating judge. In paintings of the Last
Judgement like that on the east wall of the Sistine Chapel, the damned
are on our right as we face the scene – while for the reader familiar
with Matthew 25, and the Judge’s empathetic oneness with everybody
helped by the good, and neglected by the bad (vv. 35-45), they are
down there on ‘the left wing’, alternately reflecting the reader’s own
bad conscience, and his or her memories of rejection, as these are
channelled through the ultimate spiritual insight of Christ as Judge.
And the composite physical and social scene surrounding the try-
 Seeing the Sea 105

works, so reminiscent of the hellish scene below the earth (as in

Dante) or below the universe (as in Milton), seems at first to reflect a
hardness of heart comparable to that of the damned. But whose,
predominantly – the harpooneers’ and the raconteurs’, or Ishmael’s
own? His account reflects both the lounging watch’s callous and
shameless inhumanity, and Ishmael’s willful demonising, both of
them and of the trying-out team itself (Melville 1957: 419):
As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror
told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of
them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the
harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as
the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and
yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the
sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and
viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with
savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that
blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac
commander’s soul.
Here we see the ‘full operation’ of the try-works of Ishmael’s
imagination as, point by comparative point, it forges a flaming hell out
of two working shifts – one, the blubber-boilers, hyperactive; and the
other, the seamen on watch, standing (or sitting) easy. Ishmael’s own
life-theme, his values and his horror at the universal denial of kindness
envisioned here, whether by Ahab towards his fellow-men, or by those
men towards their fellow-creatures, turns the comic scripts and scenes
recounted by the watch into his own ‘tales of terror’. Thus, however
temporarily, he is alienated from those whose hands, as recently as
Chapter 94 (Melville 1957: 412-15), he recalled squeezing so
affectionately, intermingled with the globules of precious spermaceti
from the whale’s head, as they worked together to homogenise it, and
as he glimpsed a concordant vision of this-worldly happiness, to be
based on human fellowship and material progress: ‘the wife, the heart,
the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country’ (Melville
1957: 413). As the order of factory work effaces that of the hunt, his
friend and former bed-fellow the harpooneer Queequeg, is
transformed into a devil flourishing a pitchfork. Meanwhile the ship
herself (reflecting the sound and movement of a sea neither seen nor
smelt), enacts the recurrent ‘scene’ of the seaway, her diving and
plunging repeated, stressed, and made metaphorical as she extends
Ishmael’s mood, his inward ‘blackness of darkness’, into ‘scornful’
and ‘vicious’ belittlement of the sea itself – her rising to the waves
106 Robert Cockcroft

only inferred from our default knowledge of this scene. As though

referring back to the point when the flames first reached their full
height, Ishmael steers them deictically with the ship, ‘further and
further’ into the dark.
4. Conclusion: coming or going?
Deprived as he has been, repeatedly, of any fixed mental, emotional,
or spiritual bearing, it is more understandable that Ishmael, who as the
helmsman is immediately responsible for the safety of the ship, should
doze off like a tired motorway driver, pivot on one heel, wake up
facing aft – and for a moment construe headlong retreat as heroic
advance. He has the sensation of ‘rushing from all havens astern’ but
is still, cognitively, suspended in the scene of his duty as the
steersman, grasping the helm and gazing ahead (Melville 1957: 420):
Nothing seemed before me but a jet gloom, now and then made ghastly by
flashes of redness. Uppermost was the impression, that whatever swift,
rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead as
rushing from all havens astern. A stark, bewildered feeling, as of death, came
over me. Convulsively my hands grasped the tiller, but with the crazy conceit
that the tiller was, somehow, in some enchanted way, inverted. My God! what
is the matter with me? thought I. Lo! in my brief sleep I had turned myself
about, and was fronting the ship’s stern, with my back to her prow and the
compass. In an instant I faced back, just in time to prevent the vessel from
flying up into the wind, and very probably capsizing her.
The tiller seems ‘inverted’, pivoted forwards towards the bows rather
than backwards towards the stern. Then, seemingly, Ishmael realises
that he is, in reversal of normal deictic associations ‘fronting the
ship’s stern’ – i. e. within mental, more than physical space,
confronting what grows more remote rather than what looms ahead,
perceiving Ahab’s abandonment of every haven, every goal of
preservation. Through his disorientation he achieves a truer sense of
the inexorable ‘rushing’ movement noted earlier by Ahab himself, in
Chapter 37 (‘Sunset’) after gazing over the ship’s wake. There the
‘demoniac’ compared his unswerving ‘path’ towards a ‘fixed purpose’
with the railroad’s advance across continental America (Melville
1957: 166):
Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under
torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to
the iron way!
He acknowledges in the same chapter that in enflaming others with his
own purpose, ‘the match itself must needs be wasting’; but then he
 Seeing the Sea 107

reassumes mass and momentum, availing himself of the supreme

image of wilfully abandoned choice afforded by the technical and
economic power of mass-produced steel, coal, and steam.
The contrary attraction of those ‘havens astern’ is to be finally
represented in Chapter 132, ‘The Symphony’ (Melville 1957: 531-35),
by imagery of another order, again involving many shifts in direction
and alternating strains on that ‘windlass’ towards which Ahab finally
seeks to turn Starbuck’s attention (after he has ‘stolen away’). In that
same last-chance chapter Ahab ‘drop[s] a tear into the sea’, leaving
‘that one wee drop’ in the Pacific – indicated deictically as though in a
precise location, just as its atoms disperse – as an index of his
humanity. He looks ‘“into [Starbuck’s] human eye”’ only to avert his
gaze from his own wife and child, which it reflects. He is drawn from
the ‘“green land”’ back to the inverted orders of sea and sky where the
sun as ‘royal czar and king’ yields up ‘the pensive air … transparently
pure and soft, with a woman’s look’ to the powers of ‘sword-fish and
sharks’ which ‘rush’ below, personifying the ‘murderous thinkings of
the masculine sea’ (and of Ahab). When in due course he looks over
the side, the eyes of his evil genius, Fedallah, are reflected in the water
– from which in the following chapter Moby Dick’s inverted jaw will
rise like an open marble tomb. All of this could well be investigated
with a fuller use of deixis and schema theory; but, in the meantime,
Ishmael’s superimposition of forward and backward movement,
figuring as it does the pain of loss fuelling Ahab’s driving rage,
already represents the narrative’s overall direction.

References
Green, Keith (ed.). 1995. New Essays in Deixis. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Jones, Peter. 1995. ‘Philosophical and Theoretical Problems in the Study of Deixis: A
Critique of the Standard Account’ in Green (1995): 27-48.
Levinson, Stephen. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Melville, Herman. 1957. Moby Dick: or The Whale (ed. Newton Arvin). New York:
Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
__. 1988. Moby-Dick (ed. Tony Tanner). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schank, Roger. C. 1982. Dynamic Memory: A Theory of Reminding and Learning in
Computers and People. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Semino, Elena. 1997. Language and World Creation in Poems and Other Texts.
London: Longman.
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 Narratives of Transgression: Challenging the
Boundaries of Competent Discourses

Anna Elizabeth Balocco

Abstract
In this paper narratives published in the Brazilian magazine Época are analysed: the
narratives are part of a cover story entitled ‘Brazilian homosexual women occupy
public space and affirm their sexual orientation with dignity’. The main theoretical
assumption of this paper is that social identities, across different dimensions, are
discursively constructed (Hall 1997; Sarup 1996). The analysis is concerned with the
interdiscursive (Chouliaraki & Fairclough 1999) dimension of the narratives, with a
view to identifying the discourses (or discursive formations) that constitute the
storytellers’ voices. It is argued that although storytellers challenge the boundaries of
‘competent discourses’ (Chauí 2000), constituted to erase cultural, linguistic, ethnic,
gender or sexual differences, their narratives are contained within a dominant code,
which defines a particular type of representation for homoerotic women.

Key words: identity; interdiscourse; homoeroticism.

1. Introduction
The discussion of female homoeroticism, which was once undertaken
exclusively within the limits of specialised discourses (medical,
psychiatric, literary discourses, among others), has lately been
emerging in different genres of the media. Well-known examples in
the Brazilian media are: a soap opera produced by a powerful
television channel, in which a lesbian couple played an important role;
a TV programme for wide audiences, whose theme was dating among
lesbians; an online feature story about teenage girls ‘who kiss each
other on the mouth’, available at the site iGirl (Behaviour Section:
Meninas que beijam meninas).1 The questions that immediately
emerge from this picture are the following: what are the conditions
which might allow for discussion of an issue which was once
circumscribed in specialised publications? What role do popular
media genres perform in contemporary society, from the point of view
110 Anna Elizabeth Balocco

of constructions of the real? To what extent can these genres be seen

as territories for the circulation of non-hegemonic meanings?
In this paper, narratives published in issue 22 of the Brazilian
magazine Época are analysed: the narratives are part of a cover story
entitled ‘Brazilian homosexual women occupy public space and affirm
their sexual orientation with dignity’.2 Narratives of this kind are often
called coming-out stories, and represent a ‘narrative of transgression’
(Caldas-Coulthard 1996: 256), associated with the public affirmation
of a sexual identity which is still seen by many people as ‘deviant’ (cf.
Giddens 1992: 23).
The argument in this paper runs in two directions. First, these
narratives function as a representational resource (Kress 1996: 18)
through which a public identity is constructed for homoerotic women.
However, as will be argued below, the narratives are contained within
a dominant discourse, which defines a demarcated space for
homoerotic women, and constructs a specific type of representation
for them.
2. Theoretical Framework
The main principle informing this paper is the notion that social
identities, along different parameters (ethnic, gender, or sexual
identities, among other possibilities), are discursively constructed.
They are seen, in this paper, as the result of linguistic and discursive
processes: it is through dialogue with different discourses circulating
around us that we constitute our identities (Hall 1997: 55).
Narratives represent a very powerful discursive practice in our culture,
through which we attach meaning to our social experiences and
construct our identities (Mischler 2001; Sarup 1996; Brockmeier &
Harré 1997: 263). Like other practices of meaning production,
narratives are culturally and historically grounded (Woodward 2000:
10): the meanings or representations expressed in narratives vary over
time, and within different social groups.
With a view to investigating the cultural, historical, and ideological
variables that affect the production of the coming-out stories
published in Época, the decision was taken to focus on the
interdiscursive dimension of the narratives (Chouliaraki & Fairclough
1999: 45). The study of interdiscourse in the coming-out stories will,
it is hoped, enable us to explore the ways in which the subjectivity of
 Narratives of Transgression 111

homoerotic subjects is constituted, the voices that resonate in this

process, and the perspective or point of view from which
representations of these subjects are constructed.
In this paper, interdiscourse is understood as the complex articulation
of discursive formations (Foucault 1987) in the narratives studied.
This important, constitutive dimension of discourse enables us to
analyse coming-out stories from the point of view of the broad
cultural context in which they are situated, associating them with
certain orders of discourse (for example, medical discourse about
sexuality), as well as with particular discursive formations (patriarchal
discourse, for example, or homophobic discourse).
The analysis also deals with the social relations established between
the storytellers and the assistant editor of the feature article: attention
will be paid to the factors that position the female subjects’ voices in a
relationship of subordination to a macro-narrative (the article within
which the narratives appear) whose point of view is male (Caldas-
Coulthard 1996: 256). In tackling this issue, we are concerned with
how the meanings in the article are implicated in relations of power,
specifically between the assistant editor who is writing about the topic
and the women who are being written about.
3. Narratives of transgression: the genre of ‘coming-out stories’
Magazines play an important role in the construction of social
representations, thus constituting an invaluable source of reference for
the study of identity, in its dimensions of gender, race, sex, and
profession.
The reports published in Época satisfy the four criteria for narratives
proposed by Bruner (1997: 46): 1) they are temporally organised; 2)
they establish relationships between the exceptional and the common,
or canonical (criterion of exceptionality); 3) they meet the criterion of
dramatic quality; and 4) they feature two discursive dimensions: that
of the story proper, whose protagonists are the female storyteller and
her parents or friends; and the dimension of the context of utterance,
in which the storyteller addresses the reporter who collected the
narratives.
If, on the one hand, criteria 3 and 4, exceptionality and dramatic
quality, make these narratives ‘reportable’ (cf. Labov & Waletsky
1967), on the other hand they constitute the elements which
112 Anna Elizabeth Balocco

characterise them as narratives of transgression. These are narratives

that are not socially sanctioned: to some, it still seems ‘natural’ to
classify people as either ‘homosexual’ or ‘heterosexual’, to treat these
two categories as stable (Lacqueur 2001: 18) and ‘[to view
homosexuality] as a perversion (…), that is, as specifically non-
natural and morally condemned’ (Giddens 1992: 23).3
The narratives may be characterised as a sub-genre of narratives of
personal experience (cf. Labov & Waletsky 1967), henceforth
narratives of identity, given that they throw up questions of identity
through discussion of issues related to the sexuality of the storytellers
(cf. Caldas-Coulthard 1996: 256). These narratives report the
circumstances in which the subjects ‘disclosed’ their sexual identity to
their family or friends.
4. Coming out of the closet
In the language of magazines, titles often function as the Abstract and
Orientation of a narrative (cf. Labov & Waletsky 1967), telling
readers what the story is about, and who the people are who are
involved in it. Brought together below are: the titles on the cover of
Época 22; the titles that feature in the table of contents; and the
heading that initiates the article:

COVER Lesbians.4
They reveal [their sexual orientation].
Brazilian homosexuals occupy public space and
affirm their sexual orientation with dignity.
TABLE OF Behaviour.
CONTENTS
Lesbians, like psychologist Angela Prado, from
São Paulo, are more and more at ease and do not
hide a sexual option which is gradually ceasing to
be a taboo.
A conquered space.
FEATURE Lesbians come out of the closet, want to have
ARTICLE children, and even admit to having a relationship
with men.
 Narratives of Transgression 113

The Orientation in the cover provides us with the theme of the feature
article (female homoeroticism), the people involved (‘Brazilian
homosexuals’) and the situation which justifies the article insertion in
the section on Behaviour (‘they occupy public space’). Point of view
is anonymous in the cover and in the table of contents, but represents
that of the assistant editor, who signed the feature article in the
magazine.
The beginning of the feature article provides us with more
Orientation: ‘there is something new in the streets…’; ‘lesbians are
more at ease…’; ‘they walk around holding hands’; ‘they dare to
caress each other…’. The initial segment appears to have a double
function: it re-establishes the Orientation, and functions as an attempt
on the part of the editor to justify the article.
By describing what is ‘out there in the streets’, the editor presents the
article as though it reflected changes in society (‘this is a fashionable
theme’, he writes), thereby fulfilling his social role of mirroring
society, bringing forward themes pertaining to Behaviour. However,
as will be argued below, the feature article in Época does not merely
reflect changes in society; rather, it constructs a specific type of
representation for homoerotic women.
Kress, Leite-Garcia & van Leeuwen (1997: 270) argue that we ought
to analyse the way language interacts with visual elements in a text, in
ideologically marked ways. Although there is not enough room in this
paper to introduce an exhaustive analysis of the ‘semiotics of the
visual space’ of the text, the function of the photographs featured in
the cover, in the table of contents, and inside the magazine proper
should not be neglected. These photographs perform a double
function: they indicate that the narratives published were produced by
real people (and not fictionalised people, as is often the case in
magazines), but they also act as the main anchorage for the
characterisation of these women as representatives of ‘new
lesbianism’: the photos show young, well dressed, and well groomed
women, who wear tight clothes, high-heeled shoes and their hair long.
The point of view which incorporates these women into our collective
memories is male: on account of their attributes (their ‘femininity’, in
the editor’s words), they remain within the scope of the male gaze,
being easily eroticised.
114 Anna Elizabeth Balocco

The narratives themselves are detached from the matrix-text,

appearing as they do in boxes containing the storytellers’ names, ages
and professions. These narratives have been edited, with deletions and
minor changes, as becomes clear from an inspection of the online
version of the magazine, which features the published narratives and
the full versions, as well as two narratives produced by parents of the
storytellers.
4.1. Identity and interdiscourse
The narratives which were analysed articulate various orders of
discourse (religious discourse; medical discourse; moral discourse),
and are shaped by competing discursive formations (among others,
patriarchal discourse; a more liberal discourse on sexuality;
homophobic discourse). In the fragment below, for example, sexuality
is constructed within moral discourse, as signalled by the terms
‘values’ and ‘education’:
Fragment 1: Revealing my desire for other women was no easy task.
Education in northeastern parts of Brazil is organised around traditional
family values. (Ita Catrina)
The evaluation contained in ‘[it] was no easy task’ signals a point of
tension in the constitution of the storyteller’s subjectivity. If in the
fragment discussed the tension is discussed in moral terms, in the
fragment below it is framed in religious discourse:
Fragment 2: I have been dating women for three years. Before that, I had a
relationship with a boy, hence my mother’s disappointment when I told her
the news. It was quite a shock for them. Well, I do not feel guilty from a
Christian point of view. (Rafaela)
The notion of Christian guilt in this narrative represents a residual
element of a discourse of the 19th century, which treats homoeroticism
as a ‘sin against the soul’ (Freire Costa 2002: 43).
The same discursive configuration can be seen in the following
fragment:
Fragment 3: I was never afraid I would lose my job on account of my
decision, but I lost friends when I disclosed my sexual identity. I knew my
parents would accept me, but I was afraid of hurting them because they are
from a different generation. When I told them, the weeping scene was
inevitable, but the tears did not burst from my eyes, but from theirs.
(Carolina)
The expressions lose one’s job, lose one’s friends, and hurt one’s
parents support the discursive construction, in the previous fragments,
 Narratives of Transgression 115

of homoeroticism as conduct within the domain of the prohibited, and

under disciplinary constraints (Foucault 1987: 18).
From the point of view of the discursive formations articulated in the
narratives, most of them introduce both a conservative conception of
sexuality, and a more liberal one:
Fragment 4: I have been dating both boys and girls since I was 16. I had a few
boyfriends, as I wanted to experiment with men and make sure this is what I
really wanted. I had a lot of problems in the family. I am an only child, I had a
very strict education, and was brought up by my grandparents. (Ana Paula)
In this fragment, the storyteller’s sexual identity is discursively
constructed as a process of experimentation (‘I wanted to experiment
with men’), within the boundaries of a discursive formation in which
the plurality of one’s sexual practices may be enunciated. But the
storyteller’s conduct is condemned by her family (‘I had a lot of
problems in the family’). From an interdiscursive point of view, the
fragment articulates competing discursive formations: the discourse of
‘pure relationships’ (see Giddens 1992: 48), which construes the
notion of emotional AND sexual equality between men and women,
and a conservative discourse, voiced through ‘the family’, which
condemns such practices.
Many narratives feature the discourse of ‘plastic sexuality’, in which,
according to Giddens (1992: 10), a distinction is drawn between sex
and reproduction:
Fragment 5: … the fact that two women are together does not mean that they
do not think of having children. I would like to have children. Insemination is
very expensive and I’d prefer to have children naturally. (Ana Paula)
In this fragment, the storyteller establishes, through negation, a
relationship between ‘being together’ (a euphemism for having a
sexual attachment to someone) and ‘having children’. From an
interdiscursive perspective, the negation only makes sense within a
discursive formation in which sex is subordinated to reproduction.
It is the discourse of plastic sexuality, which dissociates sex from
reproduction, that allows for the emergence of the discourse of ‘pure
relationships’ (Giddens 1992:10):
Fragment 6: The idea of separating love from sex, which men have always
felt comfortable with, is a recent discovery for women like me. … [W]omen
have learnt that it is possible to separate love from sex. (Raíssa)
116 Anna Elizabeth Balocco

The narrative constructs men and women as living in different

temporal and cognitive universes: if for men the conception of sex as
separate from love is a given (‘they have always felt comfortable with
it’), for women it is ‘a recent discovery’, one which ‘women have
learnt’. The temporal markers (always, recent) and the dynamic
durative verb learn (Greenbaum & Quirk 1990: 55), which denotes a
change of state taking place over a period of time, all play an
important role in discursively constructing a temporal and conceptual
divide between men and women. From an interdiscursive perspective,
this construction of two separate worlds for men and women only
makes sense within patriarchal discourse, that is, a discursive
formation that positions men and women differently with respect to
sexual rights and obligations (the so-called ‘model of the two sexes’).
Patriarchal discourse features in many narratives, in different guises.
In the next fragment, it takes the form of a dominant discourse which
encourages emotional restraint for men and sensitivity, warmth, and
camaraderie for women (Nixon 1997: 296):
Fragment 7: A relationship with a woman is more satisfying. She is more of a
companion, more of a friend, more of a lover. She laughs with you, cries with
you. (Raíssa)

The fragment actualises a discursive formation (from 18th-century

rationalist Enlightenment discourse, but which dates back to the
ancient Stoics5) which attaches positive value to cognition and reason,
and negative value to affection, or the expression of emotions. This is
but a small step to associating the former (cognition) with the public
sphere, and the latter (emotion) with the domestic, or private domain,
and to the coding of established notions of masculinity and femininity.
From this perspective, patriarchal discourse limits not only women’s
social experience, restricting it to the domestic sphere, but men’s as
well, locating it in the public sphere and ruling out emotions and
feelings from this social space.
Turning to the possible conducts and practices adopted by homoerotic
subjects in dealing with social exclusion, the following discourses are
articulated in the narratives:
Fragment 8: I spent my whole life thinking that a dyke was the kind of woman
that kicks out other women in bars and that a gay man is the kind of guy who
sees cockroaches and runs away. (Rafaela)
 Narratives of Transgression 117

Fragment 9: My parents know [about it], my friends know, my colleagues at

work know, my friends at school know. I never felt any kind of prejudice
against me, nor did anybody give me any queer looks and I believe I have
benefited from the changes [that have taken place]. The end of the stereotype
of the masculine lesbian has helped a lot, it is as if this were less aggressive
[for people]. People realise that a woman can be a lesbian without losing her
femininity. (Daniele)
Fragment 10: It was only when I turned 26 that I attended a GLS party. I
realised that this was not much of a problem. I found out there were girls
[there] just like me, and not only masculine women. (Ita Catrina)
The discourse of ‘camp subculture’ (see Sontag [(1961)] 2001: 275-
76) is articulated in these fragments, which introduce a representation
of lesbians based on parodic models of heterosexual men. In these
models, lesbians are depicted as behaving in exaggerated ways and as
adopting male ways of dressing and speaking. The discourse of
‘clandestine ghetto culture’ (Freire Costa 2002: 94) is also adopted by
this storyteller, in the last fragment (‘It was only when I turned 26 that
I attended a GLS party’), and is present in other narratives:
Fragment 11: As for me, I do not go to gay places. I do not believe it is
necessary to get together with other people to fight for this. I believe that a
political attitude begins at home, with my family members. (Rafaela)
To Freire Costa, the ‘ghetto subculture’ is made up of a restricted
number of exclusive meeting places, and carries social values that
reinforce the prejudice against homoerotic subjects and their feelings
of anomie. In the same narrative, the discourse of ‘gay activism’, very
common after the Stonewall riots in June 1969 (Berutti 1999) is
introduced only to be rejected: ‘I do not believe it is necessary to get
together with other people to fight for this’.
The last mode of conduct adopted by homoerotic subjects, that of
‘sexual acting out’ (Freire Costa 2002: 94) was also identified in these
narratives:
Fragment 12: But there are still other girls, mainly here in Recife, who have a
boyfriend just as a façade. (Ita Catrina)
The discourse of sexual acting-out refers to a double standard of
behaviour whose aim is to ‘disguise’ the subject’s sexuality, and thus
subscribes to a conservative conception of sexuality which determines
a social position for the homoerotic subject. In the following fragment,
for example, the storyteller reports an incident when she did not
‘respect’ the subject position prescribed for homoerotic subjects
118 Anna Elizabeth Balocco

(which encourages ‘disguising’ their sexual orientation) and ended up

having to deal with homophobic discourse and attitudes:
Fragment 13: …we were once attacked by a man. We went to the police
station and reported what had happened. He attacked us both physically and
morally. I believe this accounts for lesbians not [wanting] to expose
themselves so much. We are physically weaker in a fight. (Ana Paula)
Apart from articulating homophobic discourse in her speech, through
the voice of the man who attacked her, the storyteller establishes a
relationship between this discourse and one of the strongest signs of
lesbianism, that of invisibility (Berutti 2001: 90): ‘I believe this
accounts for lesbians not [wanting] to expose themselves so much’,
says the storyteller.
4.2. Discursive heterogeneity
Analysis of the narratives suggests that they are characterised by their
discursive heterogeneity. This heterogeneity produces an ‘identity in
the making’ or a ‘shifting identity’, which challenges the static,
essentialist conception of the homoerotic subject. Evidence of this is
in the storytellers’ concern to make clear that their sexual orientation
is not fixed, and may change at any time in the future. In general
terms, this kind of remark, on the part of the subjects, occurs in the
final segment of the narrative (in its Coda), which features a ‘final
evaluation’ of the contingencies of disclosing one’s sexual identity:
Fragment 14: I can’t say that I will never date a man again, especially because
I never saw myself as a homosexual. The prejudice is there, there is no
denying it, but the tendency is [for prejudice] to weaken. Society needs
somebody to crucify (or blame). (Carolina)
Fragment 15: By and large, I don’t want anybody to judge me. I am a
missionary of my own ideas and if along the way [= in the future] I find out
that this doesn’t work any more, I [would] change my route. (Raíssa)
The storytellers’ concern with stating the ‘malleability’ of their sexual
orientation signals the open nature of identity in late modern society,
in which dominant sexual stereotypes are challenged (Giddens 1992:
41). This concern is also evident in the development of the narratives,
in Evaluative segments, in which storytellers address the reporter:
Fragment 16: I never presented myself as a bisexual, but I can’t say that my
decision is definitive, because I do not loathe men.6 (Rafaela)
Fragment 17: Since then, I never dated men any more. I don’t feel like doing
so, but this does not mean that I might not do so again in the future. (Rosane)
 Narratives of Transgression 119

In these fragments, the storytellers construct personal narratives

projected towards the future: they function as ‘a reflexive self-project
– a more or less continuous interrogation of the past, the present, and
the future’, which characterises social life in late modernity (Giddens
1992: 71).
As to the ordering relations among the discourses, they seem to be
paired in dichotomous sets: every time a progressive discourse on
sexuality, for example, is articulated, a conservative one is placed
alongside it. This distinct patterning constructs a subject position for
homoerotic women which is the discoursal position of the Other of
hegemonic discourses, or ‘competent discourses’ (Chauí 2000: 7). For
the Brazilian philosopher Marilena Chauí, ‘competent discourses’ are
those discourses constituted by a single voice and which function
towards erasing difference, whether cultural, linguistic, and racial or
gender difference, or difference in terms of sexual orientation.
These mechanisms for ‘fixing up subjects in positions prescribed by a
structural system’ reveal, to Freire Costa (2002: 35), the work of
ideology. Lesbians are doubly inscribed as the Other of hegemonic
discourses on sex and on gender: in opposition to hegemonic male
heterosexual discourse, as well as to patriarchal discourse, embedded
in the ideological struggle over gender and power. Thus, the
constitution of a lesbian identity of a particular kind (‘chic
lesbianism’, according to the assistant editor of the feature article) can
be accounted for only within the context of a discussion on gender and
power. Adapting Lacqueur’s claim (2001: 23) about sexuality,
‘everything that one wants to say about [lesbianism] already contains
in itself a claim about gender’.
5. The genre of coming-out stories and the construction of a
discourse of resistance
The genre of coming-out stories is a representational resource that
constructs a new form of social representation for the lesbian. The
homoerotic subjects of these narratives have traditionally been the
object of other people’s discourse, in texts that discuss homoeroticism
from different perspectives: clinical, psychiatric, religious, and moral,
among other perspectives. There is no denying that in their coming-
out stories these women constitute themselves as subjects of their own
discourse.
120 Anna Elizabeth Balocco

However, these narratives are subordinated to a text which is the locus

of ideological struggle: although the feature article presents itself as
though it were aligned with progressive discourses on sexuality
(which reject the absolute separation between ‘homosexualism’ and
‘heterosexualism’), the text is laden with values associated with
discourses that bound women within the scope of male gaze and
desire, as its emphasis on chic lesbianism suggests. In this respect, it is
never enough to argue that femininity is socially constructed, not a
‘natural’ condition for women, and that the meaning attached to the
term ‘femininity’ carries the discursive memory of a historical and
cultural context which institutionalised male sexual domination and
the submission of women (Guedes 2001: 100).
The narratives themselves are permeated by contradictory discourses.
In Kress’s words (1989: 7), ‘discourses do not exist in isolation, but
within a broader system of opposing, contradictory, competing, or
simply different discourses’. Indeed, these narratives seem to be
aligned with progressive discourses on sexuality, which treat sex as
‘autonomous in relation to other forms of relationship’, as one of the
storytellers says: ‘women have learnt that it is possible to separate
love from sex’. However, the same narratives construct stereotypical
representations of men: ‘men should not be trusted’; ‘they separate sex
from love’; ‘boys only want a one-night stand’.
If on the one hand these women disclose their sexual orientation and
do so ‘with dignity’, as the assistant editor argues, on the other hand
they are still locked into a linguistic and conceptual universe which
represents them as the object of male desire: ‘men make a fetish of
[seeing] two women together’, says one of the storytellers. These
narratives are thus contained within a patriarchal visual discourse of
seeing/being seen, which represents a male fantasy of mastery and
control over female sexuality.
Apart from residues of conservative discursive formations in the
narratives themselves, the coming-out stories are performed in a
small, demarcated space, contained within a dominant code (the
matrix text which introduces the narratives). However, in spite of
these limitations, the coming-out stories challenge competent
discourses in operation at this point in time, in our culture: it is
through these stories that homoerotic women’s collective memory is
structured and social meaning is attached to their private experiences.
 Narratives of Transgression 121

Endnotes
1
Revista iGirl, available at http://igirl.ig.com.br/website/sexo/comportamento.
2
I retain the terms ‘homosexual’ or ‘heterosexual’ when these are used in the works
referred to. Otherwise, the terms ‘homoerotic’ and ‘heteroerotic subjects’ are adopted
(see Freire Costa 2002 for justifications for this discoursal practice).
3
My translation into English from a Portuguese version (cf. ‘References’ below).
4
The translation into English is a relatively free version aimed at capturing aspects of
content only, rather than exact form of expression.
5
Cf. Rajagopalan (in press): ‘William James (1884) famously argued that emotions
have no mental content but are merely bodily states. James’ position thus echoes a
long tradition – dating back to ancient Stoics – of regarding emotions as generally
deleterious and in need of being reined in by robust reason: the hysterical woman who
must be brought under control by man’s cool and sober reasoning power. Incidentally,
this tradition is still kept alive in contemporary practices of cognitive therapy for
emotional disorders’.
6
Literally, ‘take no aversion to men’.

References
Berutti, Eliane Borges. 1999. ‘Gays e Lésbicas: Vozes da Literatura Norte-
Americana Contemporânea’ in Matraga 12: 1-7.
__. 2001. ‘Gays, Lésbicas e AIDS: uma Perspectiva Queer’ in Oliveira Lima &
Monteiro (2001): 98-109.
Brockmeier, Jens, and Rom Harré. 1997. ‘Narrative: Problems and Promises of an
Alternative Paradigm’ in Research in Language and Social Interaction
30(4): 263-83.
Bruner, Jerome. 1997. Atos de Significação. Porto Alegre: Artes Médicas.
Caldas-Coulthard, Carmen Rosa. 1996. ‘Women Who Pay for Sex and Enjoy It:
Transgression versus Morality in Women’s Magazines’ in Caldas-Coulthard
& Coulthard (1996): 250-70.
Caldas-Coulthard, Carmen Rosa, and Malcolm Coulthard (eds). 1996. Texts and
Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Routledge.
Chauí, Marilena. 2000. Cultura e Democracia: o Discurso Competente e Outra s
Falas. Campinas: Cortez.
Chouliaraki, Lilie, and Norman Fairclough. 1999. Discourse in Late Modernity:
Rethinking Critical Discourse Analysis. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1987. A Arqueologia do Saber. Rio de Janeiro: Forense-
Universitária [original French ed. 1969].
Freire Costa, Jurandir. 2002. A Inocência e o Vício. Estudos sobre o
Homoerotismo (4 th ed.). Rio de Janeiro: Relume Dumará.
Giddens, Anthony. 1992. A Transformação da Intimidade. Sexualidade, Amor e
Erotismo nas Sociedades Modernas. São Paulo: Editora da Unesp.
122 Anna Elizabeth Balocco

Greenbaum, Sidney, and Randolph Quirk. 1990. A Student´s Grammar of the

English Language. London: Longman.
Guedes, Peônia Viana. 2001. ‘Desafiando Mitos de Feminilidade: o Grotesco e o
Erótico em Nights at the circus e em The passion’ in Oliveira Lima &
Monteiro (2001): 100-15.
Hall, Stuart (ed.). 1997. Representation: Cultural Representations and
Signifying Practices. London: Sage.
Kress, Gunther. 1989. Linguistic Processes in Sociocultural Practices. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
__. 1996. ‘Representational Resources and the Production of Subjectivity:
Questions for the Theoretical Development of Critical Discourse Analysis in
a Multicultural Society’ in Caldas-Coulthard & Coulthard (1996): 15-31.
Kress, Gunther, Regina Leite-Garcia, and Theo van Leeuwen. 1997. ‘Discourse
Semiotics’ in van Dijk, Teun A. (ed.) Discourse as Social Interaction.
London: Sage: 257-91.
Labov, William, and Joshua Waletsky. 1967. ‘Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions
of Personal Experience’ in Helm, June (ed.) Essays on the Verbal and Visual
Arts. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press: 12-44.
Lacqueur, Thomas. 2001. Inventando o Sexo. Corpo e Gênero dos Gregos a
Freud. Rio de Janeiro: Relume Dumará [original English ed. 1992].
Mischler, Elliott G. 2001. ‘Narrative and Identity: The Double Arrow of Time’.
Paper presented at Discourse and Identity Conference (Rio de Janeiro: PUC).
Nixon, Sean. 1997. ‘Exhibiting Masculinity ’ in Hall (1997): 291-336.
Oliveira Lima, Tereza Marques, and Conceição Monteiro (eds). 2001.
Representações Culturais do Outro nas Literaturas de Língua Inglesa. Rio
de Janeiro: Vício de Leitura.
Rajagopalan, Kanavilil (in press). ‘Emotion and Language Politics: The Brazilian
Case’. To appear in Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development.
Sarup, Madan. 1996. Identity, Culture and the Postmodern W orld. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Sontag, Susan. [1961] 2001. ‘Notes on Camp’ in Against Interpretation and
Other Essays. New York: Picador: 275-92.
Woodward, Kathryn. 2000. ‘Identidade e Diferença: Uma Introdução Teórica E
Conceitual ’ in Silva, Tomás Tadeu (ed.) Identidade e Diferença: a
Perspectiva dos Estudos Culturais. Petrópolis: Vozes: 7-72.
 The Translator’s Craft as a Cross-Cultural Discourse

Mirjana Bonačić

Abstract
Dialogue between cultures which avoids cultural assimilation into a global form of
communication still depends on the translator’s ability to negotiate the space between
cultures. Therefore, along with the writer in the context of globalisation, it seems
relevant to redefine the translator as well. The traditional view of translation is
expressed from the theorist’s vantage point involving two potentially opposing
concepts: translation equivalence with respect to the source text vs. translation
acceptability within the target culture. The paper argues that important questions are
closed off by an emphasis on the translated text that acquires its identity by virtue of
either being equivalent to the source or acceptable within the target literary system.
Postmodern logic can redefine the translator’s craft in terms of access to the
potentially manifold modes of mutual refraction of the source and target. Such
refraction occurs in the space between them which is opened up by the concept of
translatability as the mode of a cross-cultural discourse. Different translations of a
poem are analysed from a linguistic and critical perspective to try to account for the
individually established, multiple routes of reference where translatability means the
chance to embrace more than was possible before.

Key words: poetic translation; equivalence; translatability; cross-cultural discourse;

cognitive linguistics.

1. Introduction
Rather than being culture-specific, present-day high technology has
become the active constituent of the driving force behind current
processes of globalisation. Thus, one of the main purposes of the
Internet is to facilitate international communication and access to
information. The question is: Does the Internet function effectively
through the use of a dominant world language or as a means of
specific cultural representation through a Babel of languages? I think
that in the domain of creative writing, dialogue between cultures
which avoids cultural assimilation into a reductive global form of
communication will continue for a long time to depend on our ability
to comprehend other cultures through learning their languages or on
124 Mirjana Bonačić

the translator’s ability to negotiate the space between cultures without

subsuming it into preconceived generalities. Thus, along with the
writer in the context of globalisation, it seems relevant to redefine the
translator as well, since translation still plays a significant role in
cross-cultural relations.
In this paper, I will first briefly discuss some crucial theoretical
questions relating to the redefinition of the translator’s craft in the
light of postmodern logic. Then I will use translations of a poetic text
from English into two different Slavic languages to examine
translation as a dialogic, two-way process which can be described in
terms of translatability as the mode of a cross-cultural discourse.
2. Theoretical issues
The theoretical account of translatability as a key concept in the
encounter between cultures, recently put forward by Iser (1995),
although not concerned with translation proper, can be seen as highly
relevant for a process-oriented approach to interlinguistic translation. I
see such an approach as being diametrically opposed to traditional
translation theories. The majority of translation theorists and
commentators on translation define or describe the nature of the
relationship between source text and target text in terms of two
opposite poles of the continuum relating to the norms used in the
translation process: translation equivalence as the source-text-oriented
pole vs. translation acceptability as the target-text-oriented pole.
The source-text-oriented models of translation define equivalence in
terms of particular dimensions in the source text: formal, functional,
communicative, textual, cognitive (e. g. Catford 1965; Nida & Taber
1974; Ivir 1981; Neubert & Shreve 1992; Tabakowska 1997). They
prescribe aspects of translation in advance, primarily on the basis of
the source text and its environment. On the other hand, the target-text-
oriented models of translation rely on the notion of acceptability
which they define in terms of adherence to the norms, linguistic and
textual (literary, stylistic, etc.), of the target system. Thus, their aim is
to provide a framework for describing existing translations against the
background of the target language and culture (Toury 1995).
However, the fact that there is little agreement over the proper
application of the term adequacy is symptomatic of a major problem
underlying the idea of a continuum with two opposite poles. Namely,
 The Translator's Craft as a Cross-Cultural Discourse 125

the term adequacy is used sometimes synonymously with, sometimes

instead of, and sometimes in contrast to the related term equivalence
(Shuttleworth & Cowie 1997: 9). Translation is described as adequate
if the translator seeks throughout to follow source rather than target
linguistic and literary norms. In this case, adequacy is used
synonymously with translation equivalence. On the other hand,
adequacy is generally defined as the quality of being good enough to
be acceptable. So in this sense, adequacy is used synonymously with
acceptability. This terminological confusion is related to basic
problems of the two-pole continuum which is perceived and assessed
from the theorist’s vantage point. It is only from the theorist’s vantage
point that the two potentially opposing concepts of translation
equivalence vs. translation acceptability seem to be clearly
distinguished. In reality, the determination of translation equivalence
depends on the extent to which the theorist and the translator extract
converging patterns of signification from the text’s language.
Likewise, when translation phenomena are explained in relation to a
hypothetical construct of acceptable translation, the parameters of
conformity to the target-culture norms of adequacy may be variously
defined by the theorist and the translator respectively.
The problem of the traditional two-pole (source vs. target) continuum
of translation adequacy is related to the aporia between freedom and
faithfulness. Does translation have to be faithful to the original, or
does it have to be free for the sake of the idiomatic and cultural
relevance of the target language? The question haunts the problem of
translation assessment. However, from the translator’s internal
perspective, a translation is both faithful and free. It is faithful to his
or her interpretation of the original. At the same time, it is free
because it displaces the original into yet another context and, like
interpretation, can never be complete or definitive.
I think that important questions are closed off by an emphasis on the
translated text that acquires its identity by virtue of being either
equivalent to the source text or acceptable to the target end.
Postmodern logic can redefine the translator’s craft in terms of access
to the potentially manifold modes of mutual refraction of the source
and target. Such refraction occurs in the space between them which is
opened up by the concept of translatability as the mode of a cross-
cultural discourse.
126 Mirjana Bonačić

Translatability, as defined by Iser (1995), is a counter-concept to

cultural assimilation in the encounter between cultures. It aims for
comprehension and therefore makes us focus on the space between
cultures that allows them to mirror one another, opening up the
experience of otherness. Translatability requires a discourse that
allows the transposition of a foreign culture into one’s own by
negotiating the space between foreignness and familiarity. This is an
open-ended interpretative process in which the mutual translation of
cultures brings about comprehension. In this, translatability represents
the ever-present chance to embrace more than was possible before.
Theories of translation that rely on the concept of the continuum with
two poles relating to source-vs.-target norms tend to isolate translation
from interpretative processes of sign production. They totalise the text
into an all-inclusive meaning or interpretation that can be transmitted
as a given message or predetermined conceptual content and rendered
into a target text according to the two alternative sets of given norms.
In my view, translation is best understood as a process of semiosis in
which a sign of another language is an interpretative response
translating and at the same time fragmenting and displacing the
meaning of the first sign. The variability of the sign-function becomes
an essential precondition for translation, which, like understanding, is
never complete. It is always relative to the shifting modes of reference
and the purpose in view. Textual indeterminacy does not prevent
translation but rather sets reading, writing, and translating in motion
(Bonačić 1998: 42).1
3. Critical analysis
3.1. The poem and two translations
In her article ‘Translating a poem, from a linguistic perspective’,
Elżbieta Tabakowska states that her aim is to demonstrate ‘how
intuitive interpretations and assessments are corroborated by a strictly
linguistic analysis, which is carried out in the cognitivist vein’
(Tabakowska 1997: 25). The example she uses is Robert Frost’s poem
Nothing Gold Can Stay and its Polish translation by one of the most
prominent contemporary Polish poets and translators, Stanisław
Barańczak. Her article is presented in chronological order which is in
itself a telling clue to the type of translation assessment based on the
traditional source-vs.-target continuum of translation adequacy. First,
 The Translator's Craft as a Cross-Cultural Discourse 127

she describes the meaning of the original poem on the basis of ready-
made interpretations by literary critics. Then she provides linguistic
evidence that this meaning resides in the poem’s formal structure. In
this, she relies on some central concepts of cognitive linguistics which
she explains and then applies to those linguistic aspects of the poem
that structure its previously established content. Finally, she analyses
the Polish translation according to the conflicting principles of the
traditional source-vs.-target continuum. Namely, she focuses on
determining translation equivalents vs. translation losses – some of the
latter unavoidable because of systematic discrepancies between
linguistic conventions, others apparently non-obligatory but
nonetheless justified as a compromise imposed by the target-end
literary conventions.
In her approach to translation, Tabakowska seems to follow theories
of translation which claim that interpretation is the first, preparatory,
stage of the translation process, while the rendering process is the
second (e. g. Nida & Taber 1974: 33; Steiner 1992: 49; Neubert &
Shreve 1992: 7). To my mind, translation is a continuous, two-way
and two-fold dialogical process in which the rendering process
involves further acts of interpretation beyond any interpretative
process regarded as a separate phase. Interpretation is both a
prerequisite and an effect of the rendering. In the first phase of
interpretation, we may become aware of the flexibility of meanings,
and ask ourselves not only which features of context are relevant in
the determination of meanings but also which textual patterns have the
status of meaningful expressions. We may believe we have arrived at
a valid interpretation, but then the actual rendering process forces us
to engage in the further process of adjusting the possibilities of
interpretation. Each version of the translated text looks back and
reflects on the original, often producing a new reading of it. So one
continues the process, begun by one’s previous reading, of
diversifying the original.
Thus, the meaning of the expression ‘translating a poem’ (from the
title of Tabakowska’s article) cannot be fully understood unless you
examine translation as a concrete interpretative experience by trying
to retranslate the poem yourself. Then translation becomes a
discourse, the analysis of which can reveal important aspects that
remain concealed in a contrastive linguistic analysis of the source and
128 Mirjana Bonačić

the target text as cut-and-dried products derived from somebody else’s

or even one’s own previous interpretation. That is why my translation
of Frost’s poem into Croatian is added to the Polish translation. As a
Slavic language, Croatian is closer to Polish than to English. Yet the
two translations are very different. It is through their interpretative
effect on each other that their relevance to the original is to be
measured.
The poem:
Nothing Gold Can Stay
1 Nature’s first green is gold,
2 Her hardest hue to hold.
3 Her early leaf’s a flower;
4 But only so an hour.
5 Then leaf subsides to leaf.
6 So Eden sank to grief,
7 So dawn goes down to day.
8 Nothing gold can stay.
—Robert Frost

A Polish translation:
Wszystko, co złote, krótko trwa
[Everything which gold briefly lasts]
1 Złotem przyrody – pierwsza zieleń
[Gold (N) of-nature first green (N)]
2 Po niej – już nic prócz spłowień, zbieleń.
[After it already nothing except fadings whitenings]
3 Rozkwitu szczyt – to pierwszy listek,
[Of-efflorescence peak this first leaf (Diminutive)]
4 Lecz przez godzinę ledwie; wszystek
[But for hour only all]
5 Zwykleje w liść natychmiast potem.
[Commons into leaf (Acc.) immediately afterwards]
6 Tak Eden zszarzał nam w zgryzotę
[So Eden grayed us (Dat.) into worry (Acc.)]
7 Tak świt nam blaknie w śiatło dnia.
[So dawn us (Dat.) fades into light (Acc.) of-day]
8 Wszystko, co złote, krótko trwa.
[Everything which gold briefly lasts]
—Translated by Stanisław Barańczak (1992)
 The Translator's Craft as a Cross-Cultural Discourse 129

A Croatian translation:
Ništa zlatno ne ostane
[Nothing gold (not) stays]
1 Prva je zelen zlato,
[First is green (N) gold (N)]
(The first greenness/verdure is gold)
2 Prirodu krasi kratko.
[Nature (Acc.) adorns briefly]
(It adorns nature briefly)
3 Njen rani list je cvijet;
[Her early leaf is flower]
4 Al začas već je blijed.
[But in-moment already is pale]
5 List struni list u pad.
[Leaf shakes-loose leaf into fall (Acc.)]
6 Raj potonu u jad,
[Paradise sank into grief (Acc.)]
7 Zora u dan se utrne.
[Dawn into day itself extinguishes]
8 Ništa zlatno ne ostane.
[Nothing gold (Adj.) (not) stays]
—Translated by Mirjana Bonačić (2001)

Let me comment briefly on some important points in Tabakowska’s

analysis. According to critics quoted by Tabakowska (1997: 26-28),2
Frost chooses the pastoral technique, which means using similes in a
pattern of natural analogies. The cycle of nature becomes a symbol of
human life. The first five lines are purely descriptive of the transience
of natural beauty. Then follows a sequence of similes suggesting ever-
widening circles of correspondences in the human sphere. The three
images in succession present a change from better to worse: the
transience of man’s happiness in Eden and the transition from purity
to decay as part of a larger scene in the cosmic image of the daily
cycle. The last line is a final shift into statement – the adage, simple
and explicit: all things change. Tabakowska concludes that ‘the
permanent recurrence of cycles leading from beauty and innocence to
decay... is the subject of the poem’ (Tabakowska 1997: 28). Then she
supports this impressionistic interpretation with linguistic arguments
(Tabakowska 1997: 29-36). She analyses three aspects of the poem’s
language: structural iconicity, metaphors, and grammatical categories.
With regard to metaphor, she relies on Lakoff & Johnson (1980). Her
130 Mirjana Bonačić

analysis of structural iconicity and grammatical categories is based on

Langacker’s model of grammar as image (Langacker 1990). Lastly,
she examines how these three linguistic aspects of the original text are
realised in Barańczak’s translation (Tabakowska 1997: 36-39).
My aim is to examine how the Polish and Croatian texts relate to each
other with respect to these and some other aspects and how this
interrelationship reflects on the interpretation of Frost’s poem. At the
same time, I will consider how useful or relevant it is to apply the
concepts of equivalence and acceptability to translation as discourse.
3.2. Grammatical imagery
According to Langacker (1990: 12-13), grammar is ‘imagic’ in
character, and grammatical constructions have ‘the effect of imposing
a particular profile on their composite semantic value’. Thus,
Tabakowska points out that due to the word order in l. 1, ‘Nature’s
first green becomes the most prominent element of the image, or what
is called the figure, with gold providing the background, to which the
green is related’ (Tabakowska 1997: 30). The effect of the
grammatical image is similar to a painter’s visual image. She rightly
points out that in the Polish translation the reversed order of green and
gold in l. 1, and leaf and flower in l. 3, changes the figure/ground
composition of the two images. In l. 1, we first see the ‘gold of nature’
and then map it against the domain ‘green’. Likewise, in l. 3, it is ‘of
the peak of efflorescence’ that the ‘first little leaf’ becomes merely an
exemplar. However, her conclusion about all such (as she terms them)
translation losses, is that they are ‘doubtlessly dictated by the
necessity of using an equivalent poetical convention’ (Tabakowska
1997: 38).
Do the norms of an ‘equivalent’ poetic convention really constrain the
translator’s choices to such an extent? It is metre and rhyme that
Tabakowska primarily has in mind when she justifies the reversed
word order due to the necessity of ‘preserving’ the convention. Is the
convention really ‘preserved’ or ‘equivalence’ realised? The Polish
translation is in iambic tetrameter (with extrametricality at the end of
the lines) while the original is in iambic trimeter. Longer lines are
sometimes considered to be necessary in translating English verse into
Slavic languages because of a larger number of polysyllabic words in
Slavic languages. While in some instances, as in l. 1 of the Polish
translation, the tetrameter may accommodate all necessary words, in
 The Translator's Craft as a Cross-Cultural Discourse 131

others it may encumber the translation with additional words. This

happens in all other lines of the Polish text. So we get spłowień
‘fadings’ and zbieleń ‘whitenings’ (2), listek, a diminutive leaf (3),
and especially the pronoun nam ‘us’ in dative, ‘to us’ (6, 7), which
reduces the perspective of the images to the personal sphere, as
Tabakowska herself notices.

In contrast, the Croatian translation is written in iambic trimeters with

rhymes and assonant half-rhymes (frequent in Croatian modern
poetry). Some lines (3, 4) have a regular rhythmic pattern (x / x / x
/), some have trochaic inversion at the beginning (1, 2, 7) or a stressed
monosyllabic word (5, 6), and some have extrametrical effects at the
end (1, 2, 7, 8), while the last line (8) with its more irregular rhythm (/
x / x x / x x) stands out from the rest and concludes the poem (in a
manner similar to the effect of the last line in the original poem). In
the Croatian text, there are frequent instances of alliteration,
assonance, and mirror-image sound patterning (e. g. l. 5: List struni
list u pad). So it seems that the prosodic and phonological structure of
the Croatian text, although quite different from the structure of the
Polish text, can also be described as governed by an ‘equivalent’
poetic convention. In fact, the more economical craft of the Croatian
trimeters shows that the target norms are flexible enough to permit a
very different translational interpretation of the images. The Croatian
translation interprets the mode of iconic meaning of the original in
such a way that the first green and the early leaf are projected as
figures on the background of gold and flower. Also, the Croatian text
avoids circumlocutions. Thus, for instance, while the Polish
translation ends with a complex affirmative statement, the last line
(and the title) of the Croatian text is a succinct negative statement
beginning with emphatic ništa ‘nothing’. To conclude, it seems
unwarranted to justify the translator’s choices and strategies on the
grounds of ‘preserving’ the poetic convention. The convention alone
is an empty rule. It comes to life when it is adapted to ever-changing,
concrete substance.
3.3. Metaphors
The same controversial question of equivalence to the source text or
conformity to the target literary convention applies to the
interpretation of metaphors. Tabakowska refers to Lakoff & Johnson
(1980) to explain that the second aspect of the linguistically symbolic
132 Mirjana Bonačić

structure of Frost’s poem is the consistent use, in ll. 5, 6, and 7, of

what cognitive linguistics defines as an orientational-axiological
metaphor, namely UP IS GOOD and DOWN IS BAD. The three verbs in ll.
5, 6, and 7, subsides, sank, and goes down, have the concept of
movement with the orientation DOWN built into their semantics. The
conceptual metaphor CHANGE IS MOVEMENT combines with the
axiology of the orientational metaphor to produce the meaning
MOVEMENT DOWNWARDS IS BAD. Thus, all three verbs symbolise
decay (Tabakowska 1997: 31-32).

The Polish version contains numerous words from the domain of

colour. Inference generation proceeds in a much less direct way: LOSS
OF COLOUR IS LOSS OF BEAUTY, LOSS OF BEAUTY IS LOSS OF VALUE,
and LOSS OF VALUE IS DECAY. Tabakowska concludes that in this way
the translator ‘compensates’ for the missing orientational-axiological
metaphor (Tabakowska 1997: 37).
I think that the Polish version cannot be read simply by evoking the
concept of compensation. The translation is a specific interpretation of
the original. My version also interprets the original, but in a very
different way by making it possible to infer the orientational metaphor
of downward movement from the verbs struni ‘shakes loose’ (as if
making petals of a flower fall down, l. 5) and potonu ‘sank’ (6), as
well as from the more explicit prepositional phrase u pad ‘into fall’
(5). These verbs and the reflexive verb se utrne ‘extinguishes itself’
(7), used to describe the vanishing of dawn into daylight, evoke the
central meaning of decay and loss in a much more direct way than the
repetitive allusions to fading colours in the Polish text. The Croatian
version reflects on the original by drawing attention to its powerful
and economical craft of figuration. Thus, the two versions differently
refract inference generation which sets into motion the patterning of
language and metaphorical mapping during translation.
3.4. Grammatical categories
The third aspect of the poem’s language involves the interplay of two
grammatical oppositions, namely between countable and mass nouns
and between perfective and imperfective verb forms. Tabakowska
explains at length Langacker’s concept of boundedness. Boundary is a
conceptual contour that delimits the extension of an entity or process.
Thus, countable nouns and perfective verbs are bounded, while mass
 The Translator's Craft as a Cross-Cultural Discourse 133

nouns and imperfective verbs are unbounded. Langacker emphasises

that ‘bounding is a function of how we construe the conceived entity,
and is not invariably motivated by objective considerations’
(Langacker 1990: 66). Language allows for more complex construals.
In English, the conceptualisation of count-in-mass is expressed by
using a countable noun without an article. An entity, although
bounded, is not grounded in any particular pragmatic context. It loses
its individuality and is conceptualised as a mass of individual entities.
Slavic languages have no articles, so the difference in
conceptualisation can only be inferred from the linguistic or
situational context. Within the category of verbs, the linguistic and/or
situational context is decisive for some ‘special’ interpretation, e. g.
when a perfective verb occurs in present-tense form and is construed
as ‘habitual’, hence imperfective (Langacker 1990: 90).
In Tabakowska’s opinion, Frost’s poem conveys ‘the concept of
permanence composed of impermanences’ through ‘a conspiracy of
imperfective habitual verbs (subsides, goes down) and ungrounded
countable nouns (leaf, dawn, day, green, gold)’ and that this concept
‘confronts the translator with a true case of untranslatability’
(Tabakowska 1997: 38). As Polish does not lexicalise the notion of
(in)definiteness, there can be no equivalent to the ‘conspiracy’
between nouns and verbs. So she praises the noteworthy compensation
strategy used by the Polish translator. In the Polish version, the two
gerunds in l. 2, spłowień ‘fadings’ and zbieleń ‘whitenings’, are
‘derived from perfective verbs, and used in the plural, thus becoming
conceptually equivalent to Langacker’s “imperfective habitual”’
(Tabakowska 1997: 38).
Tabakowska’s analysis is an excellent example of how an
overemphasis on one aspect of the poem’s meaning can blur another.
Her analysis shows how any analysis, even if it carried out in the vein
of a sophisticated present-day model of cognitive linguistics, leaves
behind something in the language of the poem which is just as
important or even more important for the poem’s interpretation. To
my mind, it is precisely those expressions in the Polish version which
Tabakowska regards as conceptually equivalent to ‘imperfective
habitual’ that actually become an obstacle to a different cognitive
process of inference generation. The Polish version contains a large
number of different noun phrases, such as spłowień ‘fadings’ and
134 Mirjana Bonačić

zbieleń ‘whitenings’ (2), rozkwitu szczyt ‘peak of blossoming’ (3),

diminutive listek preceded by deictic to ‘this’ in the expression to
pierwszy listek ‘this first little leaf’ (3), and liść ‘leaf’ (5), as well as
pronouns nic ‘nothing’ (2) and wszystek ‘all’ (4). I must emphasise
that all these different words apparently refer to the entity LEAF and,
according to Tabakowska, contribute to the overall image of
‘permanent recurrence’. An overemphasis on the grammatical
category of count-in-mass, whereby it is claimed that an entity such as
a leaf loses its individuality, makes one ask the important question:
What happens to the individual leaf? The use of so many different and
additional words (partly due to the choice of tetrameter instead of
trimeter) prevents the reader from inferring the crucial meaning of
change occurring in the same individual thing. The Polish version
makes one try to translate the poem again in a very different way.
3.5. Different refraction
In the Croatian version, the same word list ‘leaf’ is repeated three
times: Njen rani list je cvijet ‘Her early leaf is flower’ (3), List struni
list u pad ‘Leaf shakes-loose leaf into fall’ (5). The translation draws
attention to the repetition of the word leaf in Frost’s poem: ‘Her early
leaf’s a flower’ (3), ‘Then leaf subsides to leaf’ (5). The repetition of
the same word evokes the concept of difference in the sameness, as in
the well-known verse by Gertrude Stein: ‘A rose is a rose is a rose is a
rose’. The repetition makes one suspect that each time the same word
returns, it means something slightly different, so the expression gives
the impression of saying something that is semantically rich and
therefore ambiguous (Eco 1976: 270). In the Polish version, the
enjambment between ll. 4 and 5 and the use of the indefinite pronoun
wszystek ‘all’ (4), instead of the same word for ‘leaf’, make such
instantaneous and rich meaning construction impossible. In Frost’s
line (5), and in its Croatian version likewise, the implied meaning of
internal change in the thing itself combined with downward
movement is just as important as the concept of permanent recurrence
or even more so.
Perhaps the ‘conspiracy’ of habitual verbs and ungrounded countable
nouns of the original poem does not confront the translator with such a
‘true case of untranslatability’. This is a true case of untranslatability
from a narrow linguistic perspective, since it is a linguistic fact that in
English the notion of count-in-mass can be expressed by using a
 The Translator's Craft as a Cross-Cultural Discourse 135

countable noun without an article, and that Croatian has no articles

and does not lexicalise (in)definiteness. However, from the
perspective of translatability as discourse, the concept of count-in-
mass is evoked by the anaphoric reference of list ‘leaf’ in l. 3 to zelen
‘verdure’, the topic of the opening lines, and by the repetition of the
same word list ‘leaf’, used without any deixis, in l. 5. The first two
lines already create a context of the general and habitual. Thus, we
interpret list ‘leaf’ as referring to a mass of leaves that make up
nature’s greenery as well as being an individual leaf which changes
into a different leaf. As for the verbs, the concept of imperfective
habitual relationship is expressed by the Croatian perfective verbs
struni ‘shakes loose’ (5) and utrne ‘extinguishes’ (7), which are in
present-tense form. Unlike English perfectives, Croatian perfective
verbs are morphologically marked. But like English perfectives
(Langacker 1990: 85, 90), when they occur in the present-tense form,
they receive a ‘special’ interpretation (e. g. habitual, historical
present). In the Croatian version, the perfective verbs in the present
tense refer to any conceivable time in which the designated events
recur permanently.
4. Final reflections
The absence of initial connectives in ll. 6 and 7 of the Croatian version
needs to be commented on. The first part of the poem concludes with
l. 5, List struni list u pad, which is not purely descriptive but
emphatically evokes a new meaning of inner change. The relationship
between l. 5 and the rest of the poem is open to multiple
interpretations. Lines 6 and 7 are not only similes in the mode of
pastoral convention. A semantically rich discourse is created by the
relationships of cause and consequence, reason and conclusion. It is
the imminence of inner change that brings about the events described
in the lines. The possibility of multiple interpretations brings to life a
poetic world which is much more complex than the overall image of
permanent recurrence.
In conclusion, this analysis seeks to demonstrate the plurality of
translational discourses derived from a single original text by
exploring how different frames of reference are reflected in, or created
by, the use of language during translation. Rather than simply assess
the translation from the perspective of the original, we must also
understand the original from the perspective of the translation.
136 Mirjana Bonačić

Translated texts provide evidence of how different meaning

representations are constructed. The analysis shows how translation
procedures become interpretative decisions and how translating open-
endedness into graspability involves the individually established,
multiple routes of reference where translatability is the chance to
grasp more than before.

Endnotes
1
A theory of translation that takes this factor into account is fully expounded in
Bonačić 1999.
2
Tabakowska quotes from Gerber 1982; Greenberg & Hepburn 1961; Lynen 1960;
and Squires 1969.

References
Bonačić, Mirjana. 1998. ‘Context, Knowledge, and Teaching Translation’ in de
Beaugrande, Robert, Meta Grosman and Barbara Seidlhofer (eds) Language
Policy and Language Education in Emerging Nations: Focus on Slovenia and
Croatia and with Contributions from Britain, Austria, Spain, and Italy. Stamford,
CT: Ablex: 37-48.
__. 1999. Tekst Diskurs Prijevod: o Poetici Prevođenja (Text Discourse Translation:
On the Poetics of Translating). Split: Književni krug.
Catford, John C. 1965. A Linguistic Theory of Translation. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Eco, Umberto. 1976. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Gerber, Philip L. 1982. Robert Frost (rev. ed.). Boston: Twayne.
Greenberg, Robert A., and James G. Hepburn (eds). 1961. Robert Frost: An
Introduction. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Iser, Wolfgang. 1995. ‘On Translatability: Variables of Interpretation’ in The
European English Messenger 4(1): 30-38.
Ivir, Vladimir. 1981. ‘Formal Correspondence vs. Translation Equivalence Revisited’
in Poetics Today 2(4): 51-59.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Langacker, Ronald W. 1990. Concept, Image, and Symbol: The Cognitive Basis of
Grammar. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Lynen, John F. 1960. The Pastoral Art of Robert Frost. New Haven: Yale University
Press.
Neubert, Albrecht, and Gregory M. Shreve. 1992. Translation as Text. Kent, OH:
Kent State University Press.
 The Translator's Craft as a Cross-Cultural Discourse 137

Nida, Eugene A., and Charles R. Taber. 1974. The Theory and Practice of
Translation. Leiden: E. J. Brill.
Shuttleworth, Mark, and Moira Cowie. 1997. Dictionary of Translation Studies.
Manchester: St. Jerome.
Squires, Radcliffe. 1969. The Major Themes of Robert Frost. Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press.
Steiner, George. 1992. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (2nd ed.).
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tabakowska, Elżbieta. 1997. ‘Translating a Poem, From a Linguistic Perspective’ in
Target 9(1): 25-41.
Toury, Gideon. 1995. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
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 Illustrated Literature:
Future Style, Fertile Spirit, or Futile Waste?

Marika Schwaiger

Abstract
This paper concerns the comparison of standard text-book format and illustrated
comic-book format of a literary text, using the parable Before the Law as told in Franz
Kafka’s novel The Trial. This text was chosen because Kafka is known as an author
who often causes anxiety and difficulties in reading and understanding among
students – even among those who have had a certain amount of experience with so-
called high literature. Two classes of a German grammar school, one of them aged 15,
the other aged 17, on average, participated in a reception study investigating readers’
different reactions to a literary text offered in two different text formats, one merely
textual and the other presenting both textual and visual information. The results of the
study concern the relations drawn by the students between the parable and their own
reality and identities.

Key words: comic book; format; illustrated literature; image; text.

1. Yesterday’s literature – tomorrow’s readers

One of the most obvious consequences of recent developments in
information technology is the radical change of means of
communication. Soon after a world-wide electronic networking
concept was born, both presentation and exchange of information and
knowledge changed their format, to say nothing of their speed. It was
only a question of time until those developments had effects on all
kinds of text, even literary texts: new forms of literary practice arose
from new opportunities to deal with verbal and non-verbal
information; reading habits were adapted to changing and new literary
formats and vice versa. Interesting questions worth closer
investigation arise when we examine current trends in textual
presentation and revisit former reading traditions, expectations, and
habits as well as instructional ways of dealing with literature for
educational purposes [‘teaching literature?’].
140 Marika Schwaiger

Does yesterday’s literature presented in its original textual format still

attract today’s readers’, especially today’s young readers’, attention
and interest? Does literature, read and treated in class as it was
traditionally done, still satisfy students’ expectations as well as
motivate them to continue reading literary classics outside the
classroom for their own interest? Does the textual format of literary
classics still manage to imbue meanings and/or messages into modern
classrooms and young people’s minds or do literary classics fail to
show themselves to be worth reading, because of their old-fashioned
textuality? These are some of the questions I believe present-day
stylistics and poetics should address and help resolve.
One might imagine situations which require special means and
methods in order to help young or inexperienced readers to recognise
and understand meanings evoked by literary texts. This might be
especially the case for texts which seem at first sight to have nothing
to do with readers’ current realities, because of the temporal or spatial
distance between the author’s and the reader’s circumstances or of
linguistic differences between the author’s mode of expression and the
reader’s interpretative abilities.
If doubt arises whether yesterday’s literature is able to keep its
relevance for present and future readers, what does literature have to
look like in order to attract and excite today’s young readers? Do
teachers (or any other persons who feel responsible for promoting
anyone’s literary interest and abilities) have to develop special means,
methods and strategies to confront students with so-called high
literature? Do they perhaps have to think of transitional steps or a kind
of compromise between yesterday’s literature and today’s students’
reading habits or their perceptive faculties, which are undoubtedly
highly influenced by new media?
Due to recent technological developments our eyes as well as our
brains have to get (and are getting) more and more used to a kind of
holistic and multisensory reading, i. e. perceiving, distinguishing and
processing many different kinds of information at the same time. We
have to deal with verbal and nonverbal, visual and audible information
simultaneously, especially when we receive and read data from
electronic network systems like the internet, which requires well
developed and/or well trained skills of integrated reading and
 Illustrated Literature: Future Style, Fertile Spirit, or Futile Waste? 141

thinking. Those developments fit current constructivist claims for

holistic processing of knowledge and integrated learning.
Without foreseeing the actual extent to which visual media should
influence today’s reading and communication habits, the publisher
Albert L. Kanter decades ago sought to meet young readers’ needs by
suggesting the comic-book format as a new way to introduce children
to the great classics of literature and to motivate them to read classic
literature for their own pleasure. Started in 1941 under the title Classic
Comics, the series changed to Classics Illustrated, which soon became
one of the most popular series of comics ever produced anywhere in
the world. The main aim of the series was to encourage readers to read
the original book after having overcome their reservations about
literary classics and after having given up the idea that one might not
have the necessary intellectual and emotional resources to deal with
them. The comics were amazingly popular all over the world, with
many foreign language editions being produced. They were
continually reprinted in hundreds of different editions until 1967 when
the title was sold to Twin Circle, who published for a further four
years until they ceased due to poor distribution. The American
editions ran to 169 titles with many specials. The British editions ran
to 162 titles with 13 titles that never appeared in America, plus other
variations in cover design. There were also numerous special
hardcover deluxe editions, which are very hard to find nowadays and
are true collectors’ items.
More recently, Acclaim Books have published new editions, re-
coloured and including essays by accomplished scholars and specialist
teachers about each book, as a study aid. The series Classics
Illustrated forms a nostalgic part of many a childhood, and there are
readers who may not be interested in other comics but still collect
individual copies of Classics Illustrated. Although there is no
equivalent series of illustrated German literary classics, at least not to
that extent, a small number of single issues can be found. I once came
upon Kafka – kurz und knapp, an illustrated synopsis about Franz
Kafka’s life and works written by David Zane Mairowitz and
illustrated by Robert Crumb, who ranks as one of the pioneers of
American underground comics (e. g. Fritz the Cat, Mr. Natural, and
other popular cartoons), and upon Give it up!, a collection of Kafka
stories illustrated by Peter Kuper, a famous American political
142 Marika Schwaiger

cartoonist, who has been publishing his illustrations in well-known

American newspapers and magazines (e. g. The New Yorker, Time,
The Washington Post, and The New York Times). As I found myself
developing a special liking for these appealing and critical high-
quality illustrations, I wondered whether students would like them
more than the ordinary textbook Kafka, whether students would
experience fewer difficulties in understanding and interpreting them,
and whether the additional visual elements would exert an influence
on connections drawn by students and their own realities and
identities.
The study described below aimed to concentrate on textual and visual
information only, excluding any other (e. g. audible) multimedia
components. Looking for previous research concerning the role of text
and illustrations for learning purposes, one can fall back upon a
number of widely acknowledged studies that show the significance
and the indisputable effects of pictures on memory and learning. The
question whether, where, and how multimedia environments can be
used as promising learning environments has played an important part
in current debates on instructional methods and educational designs.
Those approaches, which predominantly concentrate on learning
situations and processes requiring tasks of recognition and recall (e. g.
in first- and second-language acquisition), are based on neuro-
physiological findings that promise best learning outcomes when the
left and right brain hemispheres are simultaneously involved.
Neurophysiological tests show that left and right hemispheres of the
brain process information in two different ways (often complementing
each other) and suggest a bipolar division into a logical vs. an
intuitive, or a rational vs. a non-rational processing mode, both
possessing specific attributes and functions. In accordance with the
assumption that the left-brain hemisphere has a verbal component
(using words to name, describe, define etc.), and the right-brain
hemisphere has a non-verbal one (awareness of things, but minimal
connection with words), it seems reasonable to conclude that pictures
and words are processed differently by the human brain: most
individuals read text with the left-brain hemisphere, whereas the right-
brain hemisphere is responsible for processing visual stimuli, i. e.
recognizing pictures (Benson 1981: 82).
 Illustrated Literature: Future Style, Fertile Spirit, or Futile Waste? 143

Based on these and further deliberations, the following study was

designed. It reflects on the place of the writer’s craft in a world of
technological change, where everyday culture is characterised by
multimedia exposure and processing.

2. Processing Kafka through text and image

The present study investigates readers’ responses to a text, both in a
standard text-book format and an illustrated comic-book format.
These two formats reflect the traditional way in which literature has
been mediated over the past centuries (i. e. as ‘text’) on the one hand,
and the present-day mode, in which cultural artifacts and symbols are
encountered through several channels simultaneously (i. e. as ‘text
AND image’). As a text, the parable Before the Law as told in Franz
Kafka’s novel The Trial was used. This text was intentionally chosen,
as Kafka is known as an author who often causes difficulties, or even
anxiety or aversion among students, even among those who have had
a certain amount of experience with so-called high literature. Because
a parable contains many symbolic components, which, in the case of
Kafka’s text, date from ages ago, it is not as easy to handle and
understand as other literary text types which show more transparency
in both language and content. Since I have often met students as well
as teachers who showed quite a prejudiced attitude towards Kafka and
his texts, I developed this study in order to find out whether the media
format of a text influences readers’ reactions and attitudes to such
author and/or text.
A further aim of the study was to find out whether illustrating a
literary text had any positive effect on young people’s reading
motivations. It is a widely held opinion among teachers that students
are more motivated when they provide them with visual and/or
multimedia material. Cartoons are used to boost understanding,
collages for brainstorming activities, comic strips for keeping students
in a good mood. According to constructivist learning theories these
multi-sensory strategies are highly functional. But there might be
cases where presenting visual stimuli in addition to textual ones does
not necessarily lead to the hoped-for success.
With respect to the illustrated Kafka text, it is important to observe the
following: illustrated literature differs from ordinary comic books in
so far as it shows temporal discontinuities between the time of the
144 Marika Schwaiger

text’s original edition and the illustrated version, whereas ordinary

comic books can, as a rule, be dated in the same period of time, in so
far as author and illustrator are often one and the same person. The
time difference involved in illustrated literature results from the
artist’s attempt to give an adequate interpretation of the original
literary text. Thus, the reader of Before the Law in comic-book format
must be aware of the fact that Crumb presents an individual
interpretation of Kafka’s words by using his drawing pencil. Whereas
pure text offers the chance to build up more than just one single image
in one’s mind, illustrated text can have a restraining effect on the
reader’s interpretative freedom.

Furthermore, studies like the present one have to deal with individual
differences and preferences: age, for instance, is an important factor
concerning the processing of texts and pictures. Whereas children tend
to prefer pictures in order to imagine, understand, and recall certain
situations, facts and coherences, adults often prefer dealing with pure
texts as they gain experience with reading words, as their reading
becomes faster, and as the processing of words (unlike the processing
of pictures) becomes automatic through practice (Noldy, Stelmack &
Campbell 1990: 418).

3. Design of the study

The sample of the present study consisted of 40 students, two classes
of a Bavarian grammar school, one of them aged 15, the other aged
17, on average. I chose these two different age groups to make sure to
work with a mixed group of students, the one almost without any
knowledge of Franz Kafka and the other with basic knowledge and
first experiences with some Kafka texts. With the help of the students’
German teachers, I split the classes into two groups of the same size,
taking into consideration that each group should consist of a mix of
students usually having good results and those usually coming off
worse in working on literature tasks, in order to make sure that the two
groups were homogeneous concerning their literary and interpretative
skills, at least to a large degree. One group was the ‘text-group’, the
other one the ‘comic-group’. Text-group members read the German
text, which means Kafka’s parable Before the Law, in the common
textbook format. Comic-group members read the same text in
illustrated comic-book format. Both texts contain almost the same
 Illustrated Literature: Future Style, Fertile Spirit, or Futile Waste? 145

textual information. After reading the text, both groups had to fill in
the same questionnaire. I used closed questions to be answered on
interval scales as well as open questions to be answered in their own
words. Each student had to work completely on his or her own.

3.1. Hypotheses
The hypotheses can be divided into five different categories: (1)
reading motivation and aesthetic judgement; (2) estimation of degree
of textual difficulty; (3) understanding and interpretation of the text;
(4) connections drawn by readers between the central meaning of the
parable and their own reality; and (5) the readers’ emotional reactions
to protagonists.

Before I carried out the research I discussed my research project with

some teachers, not least to get an idea of their spontaneous
assumptions concerning the results of the survey. They expressed
considerable enthusiasm for the comics I had shown them: they all
suggested that they would integrate them into their lessons as soon as
they had to read Kafka in class. Most of them affirmed that their
students would prefer reading Kafka comics to reading Kafka texts
and they assumed that the comic-readers would achieve better results
in understanding the text than the text-readers.

When I was to put forward my own hypotheses for the research, I

remembered my own experiences, first as a student who had to read
what the teacher proposed and later as a teacher who proposes
readings to students and who unceasingly tries to motivate students to
read. Both experiences led me to hypothesise the following causal
chain: the more illustrated, the more interesting; the more interest, the
more motivation; the more motivated, the more concentrated; the
more concentration, the better the understanding; the better
understood, the easier applied... and so on.

Shortly I too was as good as convinced that an illustrated comic-book

format would achieve successes in at least the first three of the five
categories above. And I hoped that, concerning the fourth category,
with the help of illustrations, not only the protagonists but also the
central idea of the text would get more concrete and that the students
would therefore manage to transmit abstract elements of the text into
their own reality. Let us now look at the results of the study.
146 Marika Schwaiger

3.2. Observational and empirical results

When the students were working on their questionnaires I made
several interesting observations. While I was distributing the materials
in class, some students were complaining about the grouping, which
had been made in advance. Some students who had been assigned to
read the text, when they noted that other students were given comics,
were moaning and protesting that they would like to swap groups.
With members of the comic-group it was the other way around: they
were happy and content with their lot as comic-readers. After the
lesson the students were free to keep the texts or comics for their own
use or to return them. 95% of the texts came back but only 29% of the
comics. When the students handed in their questionnaires, some of the
text-group members even asked for a copy of the comic for their own
use. Thus, the illustrated text was more likely to be reread at home
than the plain text or, at least, students found it worth keeping.
Furthermore, I noticed a difference between the two age groups: the
younger students were much more excited about and keen on the
comic than the older ones. These different reactions may underline the
theory that children are more familiar with processing images whereas
adults – in the present case young adults – get more and more used to
processing text.
There was also a noticeable difference between text- and comic-
groups concerning their working methods: Many of the text-group
members showed concentrated and disciplined working, as if they
were working on an exam. Some of them even seemed to be quite
nervous and anxious about not making any mistakes. Most of the
comic-group members, however, seemed to be more relaxed and less
anxious about the exam-like situation. I had the impression that they
did not take the situation as seriously as their text-reading classmates
did, that they tackled the tasks with less discipline and concentration,
but with more self-confidence. Another remarkable difference was
that comic-group members simply had more fun: they seemed to enjoy
their activity more than the text-group readers did. These were only
my observations and impressions. Students were not asked to confirm
them explicitly.
The evaluation of the questionnaires was conducted using the statistics
computer program SPSS for Windows. On the one hand I carried out
tests of the difference in means between the two groups, on the other
 Illustrated Literature: Future Style, Fertile Spirit, or Futile Waste? 147

hand I calculated correlations between students’ emotional reactions

and the behaviour they would show if they took on the role of one of
the protagonists, the man from the country. Much to my surprise,
especially with the previously mentioned observations in mind, there
were no significant differences between the text- and the comic-group
concerning students’ motivational and aesthetic attitudes towards the
story. Both groups tended to choose the middle value of the scales,
indicating that they partly liked the parable. I also wanted to know
how much they liked filling in the questionnaire and doing the tasks
on the story, and whether they could imagine reading something
similar again. No noticeable differences between the interest of text-
group and comic-group members were observed.
The question of how difficult they found the parable did not show
significant differences between text- and comic-groups either. The
average student chose a value between 2 and 3, which means that the
average statement concerning the students’ estimation of the degree of
difficulty of the parable is somewhere between ‘medium’ and
‘difficult’.
Another series of questions aimed to investigate students’ general
understanding of the text. Among other things they were asked to
characterise the protagonists of the parable, the doorkeeper and the
man from the country, as I wanted to see whether the students were in
a position to sift out character traits from textual or textual-plus-visual
information. Again, the evaluation of these questions did not reveal
any noticeable differences between text-group and comic-group
members.
Questions concerning the interpretation of the text did not show
significant differences between text- and comic-groups either, though
the comic-group members’ formulations of the central message of the
parable showed a slight tendency to be more convincing than those of
the text-group members. Concerning one particular task, for instance,
where students had to write their own story including the central idea
of the parable, I noted that comic-group members wrote stories
containing more concrete, imaginable, and realistic elements, elements
from their own lives and experiences, whereas text-group members
wrote stories which showed quite symbolic and abstract traits, similar
to the parable itself.
148 Marika Schwaiger

Further questions investigated students’ attitude towards the behaviour

of the protagonists as well as their own behaviour in case they were in
a situation like that described in the parable. Again I could observe a
highly similar distribution of students’ answers, no matter which
group they belonged to.
Investigating the students’ emotional reactions to the protagonists, I
discovered some significant differences between text-group and
comic-group concerning their reactions to the doorkeeper. There were
differences in both the students’ anger toward, and their pity for, the
doorkeeper. Comic-group members show perceptibly more anger and
less pity for the doorkeeper. This observation means that the
visualisation of the doorkeeper, which is the artist’s personal
interpretation of the character, resulted in the intensification and
lessening respectively of the emotions ‘anger’ and ‘pity’ among
comic-readers, whereas text-readers tended to experience less strong
emotions.
3.3. Analysis and interpretation
All present results (except my personal observations in class) indicate
that the choice of the text format does not really influence students’
motivation, interest, understanding, and interpretation. This was much
to my own (and most teachers’) surprise.
As it will never do any harm to disprove some widespread
assumptions from time to time, I tried to find reasons for these results:
I spoke again with teachers and pedagogues and tried to put myself in
the position of the students. The more I did the latter, the closer I came
to some plausible explanations. One of the conclusions I came to was
that today’s students, who are confronted (and often even flooded)
with visual (and multimedia) stimuli day by day and nearly right
round the clock, may sometimes be glad and grateful to deal with
textual material in its pure and original form. Taking into
consideration that pure text is likely to be the opposite of students’
everyday reading experiences, I can understand that they quite
welcome and appreciate this kind of plainness from time to time.
Finally, I wanted to have a closer look at the students’ emotional
reactions, as that was the complex of questions with the most
interesting and most noticeable results. I wonder whether the
visualisation of the parable had an influence on connections and
 Illustrated Literature: Future Style, Fertile Spirit, or Futile Waste? 149

correlations between the students’ different emotional reactions and

their own behaviour. In fact, the comic-group members showed more
significant correlations than the text-group members. Let me highlight
one example.
In the comic-group, there was a clear connection between students’
estimation of the fictional situation, which means the fictional
universe of the protagonists, their comments on the behaviour of the
protagonists, their emotional reactions to the protagonists, and their
own behaviour if they were in a similar situation. Text-group
members showed hardly any such connection. One possible
interpretation of this result could be that those who read only the text
answered each question separately, whereas those who had text and
pictures showed more homogeneity between their answers and even
more connections between their estimation of the protagonists’
fictitious and their own reality. That could mean that they were, with
the help of visual elements, in a better position to translate the content
and meaning of the parable into their own life. The theory of the two
different brain hemispheres mentioned above could give a suitable
explanation for that result: working with words and pictures means
stimulating and integrating both the left (words) and the right
(pictures) hemispheres of the brain. As the right-brain hemisphere is
also responsible for seeing relationships between things, for
understanding metaphoric relationships and for relating to things as
they are at the present moment, the clearer and more homogeneous
transmission into the students’ own reality could derive from the more
intensive stimulation of the right-brain hemisphere during the reading
process.
4. Conclusion
Although the question of how to deal with yesterday’s literature in
today’s classrooms cannot easily be answered, the results of the
present study reveal that there are certain factors which should be
taken into account and perhaps also further scrutinised. The study
showed that the more difficulties the readers have in tackling the text,
the more they are interested in and grateful for additional visual aids,
and, conversely, the more familiar the readers are with the degree of
difficulty of a text, the less they need visual elements in order to cope
with the text. Thus, age plays an important role when the question
arises whether to add visual material. Furthermore, one can say that
150 Marika Schwaiger

even experienced readers who do not need visual aids to grasp the
meaning of a text may profit from illustrations when they are asked to
relate traits of fictitious characters and parts of fictional worlds to their
own identity and reality. This might be connected to the study’s
finding that students experienced stronger emotions concerning both
the fictitious scenery as well as their own situation when they had
additional visual stimuli.
The results of my study lead me to question the widespread classroom
theory of ‘the more illustrated the better’. Rather, these results argue
for a well-directed use of illustrations in specific classroom situations.
For example, illustrations might be helpful for young and
inexperienced readers; they might also help students to draw parallels
between literary fiction and their own reality. I consider these results
an encouragement to further explore the relationship between the
writer’s craft and new cultural technologies, especially to have a
closer look at the differences between processing text and processing
multimedia information.

References
Benson, D. F. 1981. ‘Alexia and the Neuroanatomical Basis of Reading’ in Pirozzolo,
Francis J., and Merlin C. Wittrock (eds) Neuropsychological and Cognitive
Processes in Reading. New York: Academic Press: 69-92.
Kafka, Franz. 1925 [posthum.]. Der Prozess. Berlin: Verlag Die Schmiede.
Kuper, Peter. 1997. Gibs auf! und andere Erzählungen von Franz Kafka. Hamburg:
Carlsen Verlag.
Mairowitz, David Zane, and Robert Crumb. 1995. Kafka – kurz und knapp. Frankfurt:
Zweitausendeins.
Noldy, N. E., R. M. Stelmack and K. B. Campbell. 1990. ‘Event-Related Potentials
and Recognition Memory for Pictures and Words: The Effects of Intentional and
Incidental Learning’ in Psychophysiology 27(4): 417-28.
 PART III

CHANGING CULTURES OF REPORT

Who said that? Who wrote that? Reporting,

Representation, and the Linguistics of Writing

Geoff Hall

Abstract
Quotations appearing in newspaper stories tend to be at best rather inaccurate, at times
completely imaginary or probabilistic, though important parameters impacting on the
faithfulness of the representation are suggested by Short (1989), Short, Semino &
Wynne (2002) and van Dijk (1988). Tannen (1989), Mayes (1990), Sternberg (1982)
and others have proposed altogether abandoning the notion of ‘reported speech’ in
favour of more ‘presentational’ pragmatic views of what is seen as primarily a
rhetorical device. The investigation reported here is informed by this debate,
including the comparative rarity of accurate reproduction as opposed to loose
representation even in cases when technology would seem to have made more precise
reporting easily possible. Testing the proposed ‘faithfulness parameters’ reveals that
while Short et al. have undoubtedly given us a better nuanced picture than was once
the case, their schema may still be premised upon too limited a model of
communication. I conclude with wider reflections on the need for stylistics to develop
and apply a better elaborated linguistics of writing.

Key words: news reporting; verbatim quotation; faithfulness; linguistics of writing;

authorship.

1. Discourse representation vs. ‘reported speech’

A critical linguistic interest in media representations led me, like
many others, initially to notice the improbability, if not downright
inaccuracy of many quotations attributed to speakers in newspaper
reports of events purportedly of public significance, where
conventions of a ‘universal pragmatics’ (Habermas 1979) would lead
a reader to expect greater faithfulness to factuality. The insight is
152 Geoff Hall

hardly startlingly original in itself, as a brief review of the literature

reveals in what follows. My larger claim, however, is that the issue
and its handling in stylistics to date, throws into relief a characteristic
aporia of mainstream stylistics, given the extent to which writing is
central to the field, in regard to the central issue of a linguistics of
writing, particularly of writing under conditions of new technologies
and ‘new work orders’. The notion will be elaborated in my
conclusion by reference to the previous discussion and analysis, but in
essence a linguistics of writing argues that writing is a distinct
linguistic representational form, not secondary to speech as in some
Bloomfieldian scheme of things, whether in fiction or newspaper
reporting or in any other written medium. I contend that too much
work in stylistics, whatever intellectual arguments might be accepted,
operationally speaking, does not sufficiently recognise this alternative
rather than secondary nature of written communication (cf. Linell
1982). Finally, I accept that the linguistics of presentational writing I
sketch here inevitably problematises the fundamental fact-fiction
distinction in a way which many will find uncomfortable, but which
may more accurately reflect the ways in which language in the
postmodern world works.
An early, pre-theoretical, even pre-analytical pedagogical label for the
kind of phenomenon to be investigated here was ‘reported speech’.
Indeed Toolan’s undergraduate stylistics textbook (Toolan 1998) has a
chapter entitled ‘Recorded Speech’, as if a novel were some kind of
spectrograph, though a few pages later this label modulates without
explicit commentary to ‘represented speech’ (Toolan 1998: Ch. 5), a
more critical orientation, and also the preferred verb in the more
monograph-level study of Narrative (Toolan 2001: Ch. 5:
‘representing character discourse’). The ‘ownership’ of the
subordinate clause in ‘reported’ structures exercises Toolan (1998),
presumably including the ownership of the last two sets of single
inverted commas (‘scare quotes’?), as it will exercise us all in what
follows. The most refined linguistic taxonomy of speech
representation was initially offered by Leech & Short (1981),
distinguishing DS and IS (Direct Speech and Indirect Speech), FDS
(Free Direct Speech), NRSA (Narrative Report of a Speech Act), and
FIS (Free Indirect Speech). The seemingly infinitely open, quasi-
Borgesian attempt to map this complex territory continues to the
present with ongoing additions and refinements to the scheme and its
 Who said that? Who wrote that? 153

categories (adding Thought, Writing, Embeddedness etc.), nowadays

importantly assisted by corpus research (see Semino, Short &
Culpeper 1997), and insistence on the importance of context. At the
same time a literary tradition, nurtured on Voloπinov ([1929] 1986:
double voicing), Pascal (1977), Banfield (1982), Fludernik (1993) and
McHale (1978), among others, emphasised the slippery
indeterminacy, and the social rather than individual nature of
represented voices (Bakhtin 1981) in fiction, just as Toolan (1998)
emphasises the slippages that seem to occur in his own attempted
textbook examples. So, too, new literacies research and media studies
emphasise the problematics of traditional notions of writing, including
questions of authorship and attribution (Gee 1990). Voloπinov ([1929]
1986), indeed, seems to suggest that in so far as literary writing has
any differentia specifica from other kinds of discourse, its essence
might be apprehended in the consideration of FID (Free Indirect
Discourse). Later literary successors, however, seem to suggest that
the literary/non-literary divide could be more problematic than this,
with indeterminacy reaching far into the more ordinary and everyday
uses of language.
However, Short, Semino & Wynne (2002 [hereafter SSW]), in the
best-argued paper on the subject to appear to date, acknowledging the
validity of many criticisms that have been made, nevertheless wish to
resist what is seen as the fashionable impingement of such literary and
discoursal perspectives onto ‘non-literary’ areas like newspaper
reporting. The very uneasiness with the perceived vagueness of the
term ‘discourse’ can be taken as symptomatic of the effort to fix
boundaries (SSW: 333). The efforts of those such as Banfield (1982),
Fludernik (1993), Tannen (1989, 1995) or Sternberg (1982), who
wanted to go further than Short and his colleagues in querying the
value of understanding speech or thought representation by reference
to any supposed anterior or ‘real world’ utterance at all, are resisted,
often fruitfully critiqued. Verbatim, precise ‘word-for-word’
reproduction, it is accepted, can only rarely occur. A more
‘functional’, almost Gricean notion of ‘faithfulness’ of representation
is proposed. At the least it is felt, quite understandably, that the
newspaper report is of a different order, or stands in a different
relation to the world, or should do, than the fictional representation.
There are times and instances, it is argued, when what was said does
matter, and in life, as opposed to fiction, people do actually speak, and
154 Geoff Hall

what they say can make a difference. The article sets out parameters
for such times and instances. It is this debate which forms the setting
for my own examples and the conclusions I draw, which ultimately
suggest that the hard boundaries the Lancaster Speech and Thought
Representation group (SSW; Semino, Short & Culpeper 1997) wish to
draw are not fully tenable, however instructive the attempt has
undoubtedly been. I conclude that the idea of faithfulness certainly
haunts many of our communicative practices, but is however
necessarily finally imprecise and negotiable.
SSW concede that Sternberg (1982) or Fludernik (1993), to begin, are
held to make some valid points regarding the impossibility of tracing
origins for speech reported as ‘his face spoke volumes’ or ‘my
students say they can’t find the books in the library’, or ‘the Pope
said’ (where English translation is used) and the like. In this vein
Mayes (1990) or Tannen (1989, 1995) question on empirical grounds
the coherence of the notion of ‘reported speech’ if it is taken to imply
the invariable existence of an actual previous speaker whose precise
words are being faithfully reported. There is ‘no such thing, literally,
as reported speech’ (Tannen 1995: 148). Mayes (1990) calls DS a
‘misnomer’ (after Tannen 1989: 133), and notes rather the functions
of ‘direct speech’ utterances in building affect, dramatising, and
bidding for credibility in the conversations she studies. Nevertheless,
the defence (SSW) is that these examples come from literature,
conversation, or are ‘hypotheticals’, all of which are specific kinds
which need to be treated specifically, and in any case, the Lancaster
corpus indicates, are not particularly characteristic types of reported
speech. SSW acknowledge the importance of drawing attention to
‘presentational’ rather than ‘representational’ issues in speech
representation, but insist that such work draws on investigations of
reported speech in conversations, and as such is not easily generalised
to the very different genre of newspaper reporting. The injunction to
beware of carrying over generalisations from one field to another,
related but not identical, is well taken.
Perhaps a more serious challenge comes from investigators such as
Slembrouck (1992) or Caldas-Coulthard (1994), who note the habitual
inaccuracy, or at best challengeability, of apparent reproductions of
speech in, respectively, Hansard (the transcriptions of proceedings in
the British parliament) or in journalism. These are documents where
 Who said that? Who wrote that? 155

faithfulness should matter surely. Similarly, Waugh (1995), on the

basis of her investigations of the French newspaper Le Monde,
proposed a dichotomy between fiction and conversation, on the one
hand, and concern with issues of referentiality, truth, reliability, and
accountability in serious newspaper reporting. Where, it is proposed, a
prototypically literary form of ‘reported speech’ is the finally
undecidable voice-mingling of Free Indirect Discourse (compare
Voloπinov, Banfield, McHale), Le Monde writings carefully maintain
DS and IS, where DS will not necessarily be precise verbatim
reproduction, but is expected to be ‘functionally equivalent’ (cf.
‘faithful’), and IS allows for more journalistic – rather than original
text – determination. Sanders & Redeker (1993: 74), indeed, in one of
the few studies I have found in the area to actually study real readers,
report that perspectival embedding of IS, far from being a problem, is
something that readers expect from journalism. Waugh’s idea of
‘functional equivalence’, and the suggestion of parameters
determining when readers should be given the actual words at issue to
judge for themselves, echoed by investigators like van Dijk (1988), is
a more fruitful avenue for Short et al. and certainly introduces more
precision into the debates.
Certainly, what quickly became evident from the more precise
investigations of Leech & Short (1981) and then Short and other
collaborators in what became the Speech and Thought Representation
project at Lancaster University, was that a label like ‘reported speech’
or even ‘reported speech and thought’ attempted to include too many
disparate forms under one umbrella. Increasingly subtle taxonomies,
likely to be familiar to readers of this paper, were – and continue to be
– proposed in an effort to tame the beast(s), and important efforts have
been made to distinguish contextual parameters which will impact on
the accuracy of speech reports in newspapers. The weakness or
incompletion of Slembrouck or Caldas-Coulthard’s work from this
perspective would be its neglect of these parameters.
The most elaborated and very valuable listing of factors determining
the degree to which faithfulness is a salient issue for readers occurs in
SSW, which readers interested by this paper clearly need to consider
carefully for themselves if they are not already aware of the work.
Nevertheless, I list them again for convenience now, though it is
important to note that these proposals, however intuitively and
156 Geoff Hall

retrospectively valid they may seem, have yet to be empirically tested,

so far as I am aware, in (say) protocol studies of readers reading
newspaper reports. My own ‘report’ of these parameters, many
instances of which are found in the examples I offer, would include:
• Anterior discourse accessibility (without access there could
logically be no report). Accuracy of written report is more
easily checked. Analyses of examples below suggest this may
be a more critical factor than SSW recognise.
• The importance of what is being reported – obviously
relative, but for most, war with Iraq will be more of an issue
than the state of the weather.
• Status, social role, and personality of the original
speaker/writer (President Bush vs. Church of England vicar
or ‘a Bedouin’).
• Attitude, social role, and personality of the reporter –
sympathy or antipathy to the source could promote either
greater or less accuracy, but are likely to be relevant factors.
• Text type and speech context: popular magazine vs. respected
broadsheet; court of law vs. conversation in bar.
• Part of the text in which the reporting occurs: e. g. Short
(1989) on headlines as less accurate than main story
quotations.
• The memorability of the original – form, context, etc. –
though what we know about memory and language suggests
that even ‘peace in our time’, or ‘the lights going out across
Europe’, etc. will have been crafted in transmission over time
(after SSW: 351-52).
A particularly suggestive earlier publication was Short (1989), who
writes of ‘Speech presentation, the novel and the press’. The first key
point to emerge from the research described there is the importance of
‘speech summary’, including apparent (IS) Indirect Speech, to
newspaper reporting, as contrasted, for example, with fictional novel
writing. Giving the ‘gist’ is clearly felt to be more important than
precise reproduction of words uttered for the first genre. Second, and
related, anticipating SSW, various parameters are proposed to impact
on what Short denominates the ‘faithfulness principle’ (Short 1989:
74). Overall, however, the perceptive proposal of this earlier
 Who said that? Who wrote that? 157

publication is that newspaper reporting be viewed as primarily a

storytelling activity, using attention-gaining devices such as
(purported) direct speech (enclosed in quotation marks or italicised),
however cautious Short might be about such a formulation today. A
headline, as already observed, is likely to be a ‘macro-proposition’ (in
Kintsch & van Dijk’s 1978 terms) representing what might well have
been said (but in fact never was in those words), rather than – as
perhaps only the academic trained in citation practices and the like
expects – making strict claims to reproduce faithfully what was said,
regardless of circumstances, simply because it is punctuated by
quotation marks of some kind. My own analyses have tended to
validate the general bearing of these proposals, though I feel they fall
short of a completely satisfactory account of the data. For the moment,
I note with Bray (2002), Short (1989), and Fairclough (in Short 1989)
that: ‘the reporting of speech is never mere reproduction, but a
representation, even in the case of DS or FDS [Free Direct Speech],
because the writer can choose “what parts of the speech reported to
include, in what order, and within what discoursal matrix”’ (Short
1989 in Bray 2002: 66; now in Hall 2001). This is Bakhtin’s point that
every individual utterance is always totally ‘novel’ (we need to return
to this characterisation) and unique (because of its new context,
regardless of its form, which will necessarily also vary anyway). But
at the same time, (Bakhtin points out), all language is pervasively
intertextual, all utterances are constructed from a tissue of quotations,
so that choosing to punctuate a given utterance as a quotation is seen
as a pragmatic or rhetorical rather than a factual decision in this
perspective (compare Fairclough 1992: Ch. 4). We may also be
reminded of the Derridean notion of ‘iterability’ of language:
language always exceeds and pre-exists the speaker’s intention
(Derrida 1977). In any case, we can all agree, surely, that words can
never speak for themselves, nor be evaluated or responded to
(dialogically) in a context-free Chomskyan vacuum.
Here too some historical perspectives are in order, since it could be
argued that modern journalistic practices have come full circle – or
perhaps they never turned at all – to return to earlier written
communicative norms. Parkes (1992) describes with fascinating
examples the early appearance of what would become our various
differentiated ‘quotation marks’ used by scribes from the sixth
century, when ‘diples’ (< >) began to appear in manuscripts to
158 Geoff Hall

highlight the importance of Biblical quotations relative to any

surrounding text. Here a reader should ‘pause’ for contemplation.
(‘Pause and Effect’ is Parkes’s title). Printers from the 16th century
experimented with an increasing range of fonts and technological
possibilities becoming available to (for example) highlight the words
of international or prestigious authors, increasingly in vernaculars
other than the classical languages (Latin especially), with italics or
‘textura’. Diples occur increasingly in the margin to indicate Biblical
or Church Fathers’ quotations, later moving from margins into the
body of the text from the end of the 16th century (Parkes 1992: 58ff.).
We should also note that ‘sententiae’, wisdom whose provenance was
often unknown or irrelevant, their aura sometimes preserved in Latin
or another foreign language, lost in history, were normally equally
punctuated as direct speech. By the 18th century, with authors like
Fielding, Swift, and Sterne, something like modern conventions of
quotation punctuation were in operation, though Parkes emphasises
that, as ‘the novel’ emerged and differentiated itself into fiction and
newspaper (cf. Davis 1983), punctuation was used increasingly for
presentation, and with much creativity, exploiting what Parkes terms
‘the pragmatics of the written medium’ (72), writing increasingly
coming into its own as a separate, alternative linguistic system, with
its own unique affordances, as intended by my own phrase, ‘the
linguistics of writing’. While, as Bray (2002) usefully outlines,
literary history now takes a more nuanced view of Davis’ proposal for
the blurring of fact and fiction at the moment of the emergence of the
novel and the newspaper and modern historiographical writings in the
early 18th century, Davis’ point that the three modes of writing have
not always been as distinct as we would like to imagine, and as
rapidly evolving printing practices came to suggest (the punctuation of
speech representation), is to the point in this discussion too.
2. Three new examples
In my own efforts to explore some of these ideas even as they were
being developed and published I began with a text like that of the
‘shoplifting vicar’ (Express on Saturday, 15 March 1997), whose
headline ‘A Moral Duty to Shoplift’ (with single inverted commas)
under the banner ‘Astonishing outburst by Church of England priest’
seems to suggest that the priest concerned spoke those words. In fact,
as Short (1989) suggests, a closer reading of the article (if the reader is
inclined to read more closely rather than have his prejudices
 Who said that? Who wrote that? 159

confirmed) suggests that these words were never uttered by the priest,
nor was there actually any ‘outburst’, but rather some over-reported
comments made in the context of a larger sermon, now all but
obliterated (a committed reader would have to follow the story on to a
slight column on an inner page even to know this). Under the main
headline are three further quotations, it seems from their bullet-point
presentation, though now there are no inverted commas. Further
reading confirms that two are more or less faithful quotations, while
the first has lost its hedging and specificity from the original sermon.
(Newspaper: Big stores are evil because they destroy local community
life; sermon, as reported later, with double inverted commas: “These
big stores are thoroughly evil because they are really destroying local
community life.”). The report goes on to suggest in its leading
paragraph that the priest said it was “quite right” to steal from giant
supermarket chains, when further reading suggests (if only by its
absence) that the Rev. Mr. Papworth used no such expression, and that
in fact he was even careful to speak against the idea of stealing, even
though he regarded supermarkets as being themselves immoral. (This
newspaper, ironically or not, was given to me free by a local
supermarket!) In the period of a run-up to a general election, we
should also note, the Express emphasises that the priest had been a
Labour parliamentary candidate earlier in his life. Here, in sum, is a
popular newspaper, (mis)reporting a minor personality on a tangential
issue to confirm reader prejudices. The accuracy of reporting seems to
increase as the story progresses over the page on to a minor column
which will not usually be read in case any legal proceedings should
arise, though there seems a low risk of this. A good example of Short
(1989) and Fairclough on ‘slants’ and embedding in reporting,
‘reporting’ as evaluation, but perhaps also raising questions about the
form of the presentation, where the single, double, and zero inverted
commas seem to relate almost inversely to whether or not the words
thus marked were actually spoken as attributed or not. A lot of
inferential work needs to be done to see past the presentation by a
sceptical reader. At the least we can say that this is not how we were
taught to punctuate at school!
A second and more problematic text to consider could be the report of
a serious event in a serious newspaper, ‘Gaza Strip explosion kills
four Palestinians’ (Guardian Unlimited, 4 Feb. 2002, credited to ‘Staff
and agencies’). Here an Internet news text highlights usefully the way
160 Geoff Hall

modern journalistic practices of writing and (co-)authorship throw

some doubt on ideas of a world in which single writers can be held to
account for faithful reporting of individual voices, an instance where I
find the Short et al. parameters and model suggestive but not fully
adequate to capture what seems to be going on. This is reporting as
bricolage with collective voices and multiple embeddings much in
evidence as a complex actual and fast developing real-world situation
is reported. I identify at least ten individual or collective voices here,
with confusions of DS and DW (Direct Writing) and interesting
modalisation through double quotation marks: thus, “terrorist groups”,
for example. Does this indicate the controversial nature of such
designations? a distancing of the newspaper from an official Israeli
pronouncement? presentational rather than reporting? Since sources
mentioned include press releases as well as spokespeople (anonymous
as well as named) it cannot be clear at what stage those double
inverted commas were introduced or by whom. (We remember SSW’s
point about the accessibility of the original utterance.) One
anonymous participant is a ‘Bedouin’ who is ventriloquised here in
English. Collective speakers include the Israeli military, the UN, and
the Red Cross; embeddings include the report of a report of an
interview with Arafat (where Sharon is available in a less mediated
voice, suggesting the ‘importance’ of the speaker [SSW] as
ideological bias). Who said that? Who wrote that? The questions
admittedly arise, but the answers are not clear. Short et al. might want
to argue that this is because of the online, up-to-the-minute nature of
this reporting (though it must be said that events became no clearer in
subsequent days before the event was removed forever from our
horizons). But surely also, however, the report is a highly confused
and confusing one (when read with these questions of attribution in
mind) because of the conditions of communication and composition,
specifically of journalism here, in the modern world. I would also
suggest, though certainly intuitively and without benefit of
quantitative or corpus-based evidence, that such a style of reporting is
increasingly the norm.
In support of such a contention, however, it is fitting to turn for a
moment to Allan Bell’s (1991: 41) strictures on ‘authorship’ in
journalism, as part of his book-length argument that applied linguists
have tended to misinterpret journalistic writings because of profound
ignorance about the conditions of production of news reports:
 Who said that? Who wrote that? 161

Much of what a reporter writes is [therefore] paraphrased or quoted from what

someone else said to him.... [J]ournalists can draw on written as well as spoken
sources. Very few stories consist entirely of wording newly generated by the
journalist from his own observation or verbal interview. Much news comprises
updates and rewrites of previous stories....
[M]any stories contain material selected and reworked from documents generated
by newsmakers or other media – reports, agendas, proceedings, transcripts, speech
notes, news agency copy, newspaper clippings, press releases. Some stories are
entirely cut-and-paste jobs from such sources ….
[A] basic feature of media communication: embedding....
The journalist is therefore as much a compiler as a creator of language, and a lot
of the news consists of previously composed text reworked into new texts.

This kind of process of composition, then, is increasingly the typical

case in contemporary journalism of all kinds, just as poststructuralist
and postmodernist accounts of authorship and intertextuality have
problematised traditional approaches to written communication in
literary studies.
The final text to be offered here was deliberately selected to test the
‘faithfulness parameters’ validity most directly when SSW came to
my attention. SSW’s own offering (SSW: 344) is the most senior BBC
political reporter’s recorded and broadcast question to Prime Minister
Thatcher just before her resignation as reported in a senior colleague’s
diary. Only a few minor variations are reported by SSW, thus
apparently validating their proposals, though it is stressed that the
parameters could probably be supplemented and better understood.
My own example is the ‘axis of evil’ speech (as it very rapidly came
to be known) of President George W. Bush, a very public and very
significant event, released by the President’s own press secretary onto
the Internet (as written sources) almost immediately, and then
immediately reported in prestigious newspapers world-wide (Bush
2002). The Website also offered the opportunity to view a video of the
State of the Union address and the option of listening as well as
reading. Here if anywhere, the condition of retrievability of the
original instance of utterance applies. We could thus confidently
expect The Washington Post (WP) to report from the horse’s mouth,
and indeed, with other quality newspapers, as SSW found, that is
mostly what occurred (Goldstein & Allen 2002), and DS seemed, as
predicted, to be mainly used for variety and ‘colour’: ‘tens of
thousands’; ‘I will not stand by’ (credibility); and of course ‘axis of
evil’. And yet I find the example again prompts questions about
162 Geoff Hall

modern technologies of story composition, and the inescapability of

media frames.
The important variable here is of course the length of the speech (10
pages, half an hour to deliver including applause and razzamatazz).
The WP report will clearly highlight what are felt to be key phrases,
and these our model would predict to be very accurate. In fact, of 18
purported DS quotations, 10 were completely accurate, just over 50
percent, not an unusual figure in my own research, but far from
‘highly accurate’ in anyone’s statistics. The differences in most cases
are small and clearly due to inattention (‘typos’ like ‘our economic is
in recession’); or house style (systematic replacement of semicolons
by commas, removal of hyphens); or naturalisations (expansions such
as ‘we have’ from ‘we’ve’, ‘we will’ from ‘we’ll’); minor lexical
substitutions. ‘Faithful’, then, broadly. Nevertheless, different is not
the same, and even small changes make a difference to our
understanding, perhaps cumulatively. Consider ‘So long as Congress
acts in a fiscally responsible manner’ (speech text) which becomes ‘in
a financially responsible way’ (newspaper text is arguably vaguer), or
‘our war on terror’, reproduced as ‘our war on terrorism’ (more
specific?). At the least, however, these changes are evidence that the
text of the speech has not simply been downloaded into the article at
appropriate points, as it could have been if faithfulness and accuracy
was the object (as the journalism training manuals suggest it should
be). Rather the story has been thoroughly written, word by word,
using the official release as a source, otherwise all these minor
changes are difficult to explain. Frames recur to guide our
interpretation throughout (‘Sounding mindful of the divides in politics
that often typify election years...’, etc.). Moreover, arguably, not all
the changes are minor. I was particularly struck, even from looking at
this single example, by the report in this newspaper and in all other
media reports I heard, watched, and read of the charge that Iraq, Iran,
North Korea, and others were ‘developing weapons of mass
destruction’. Where did this verb come from? The President actually
said: ‘seeking weapons of mass destruction’. (e. g. Washington Post:
‘[H]e [Bush] said that ... North Korea, Iraq and Iran, represent “an
axis of evil” that is attempting to develop nuclear, biological and
chemical weapons’).
 Who said that? Who wrote that? 163

So what’s all the fuss about? The gap between my own investigations
and those of the Lancaster group is clearly not unbridgeable. I do want
to suggest, however, that Short et al. taxonomies do not go far enough
to recognise the realities of the linguistics of writing, particularly
under modern technological conditions. In the light of evidence such
as the texts discussed here, it is difficult not to conclude that there is
still a certain clutching on to straws of presence (Derrida), modes of
representation and communication which do not fully recognise the
realities of modern media communication production and reception,
where the relevance of the referent, recoverable or not, is attenuated,
of less import than the representation in its own right as a
representation. The Bush speech could simply have been reproduced,
but the journalists had a story to write. And we should note, too, that
the two named journalists, who would have been edited and sub-
edited in any case, were demonstrably subject to house style, and drew
on the Internet release, also were assisted in unspecified ways
(‘contributions’) by three named ‘staff writers’, as a credit at the end
of the article reveals. Of course the story comes from somewhere
(someones), but the processes of transmission and reproduction, in my
view, raise very real questions about models predicated on (at least
some) recoverable and faithfully reproduced words.
3. Concluding Remarks
In my abstract I suggested that the wider field of stylistics may be
more generally at fault here, and it is encouraging to note one or two
examples of ‘linguistics of writing’ appearing in the field (see Hall
2001). The kind of discussion found in Austin’s (1994) careful
reading of apparent quotations in Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ is
exemplary in this respect and should be consulted by those who would
like to understand better the wider point I wish to raise, but which lies
beyond the limits of this single conference paper. (‘I met a traveller...
who said... written...’, etc.: multiple levels of indirection). It is not at
all the case that ‘faithfulness’ is an irrelevant idea. It is a condition we
aspire to much of the time. My point is rather that this undoubtedly
central principle of communicative practice is at the same time often
highly problematic or instable on closer investigation as I have tried to
show from my own admittedly very limited set of examples.
164 Geoff Hall

References
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Tradition. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin:
University of Texas Press.
Banfield, Ann. 1982. Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the
Language of Narrative. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Bell, Allan. 1991. The Language of News Media. Oxford: Blackwell.
Bray, Joe. 2002. ‘Embedded Quotations in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Journalism
and the Early Novel’ in Journal of Literary Semantics 31: 61-75.
Bush, George W. 2002. ‘State of the Union Address’. 29 Jan. 2002. Online at:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/01/20020129-11.html (consulted
02.04. 2002).
Caldas-Coulthard, Carmen Rosa. 1994. ‘On Reporting Reporting: The Representation
of Speech in Factual and Factional Narratives’ in Coulthard, Malcolm (ed.)
Advances in Written Text Analysis. London: Routledge: 295-308.
Davis, Lennard. 1983. Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1977. ‘Signature Event Context’ in Glyph 1: 172-97.
Fairclough, Norman. 1992. Discourse and Social Change. Oxford: Blackwell.
Fludernik, Monika. 1993. The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction.
London: Routledge.
Gee, James Paul. 1990. Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses.
London: Falmer Press.
Goldstein, Amy, and Mike Allen. 2002. ‘Bush Vows to Defeat Terror, Recession’ in
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dyn?pagename=articel&node=&contentId=A58475-20 (consulted 03.04.2002).
Habermas, Jürgen. 1979. Communication and the Evolution of Society. London:
Heinemann Educational.
Hall, Geoff. 2001. ‘The Year’s Work in Stylistics: 2000’ in Language and Literature
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Kintsch, Walter, and Teun A. van Dijk. 1978. ‘Toward a Model of Discourse
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Leech, Geoffrey, and M. H. Short. 1981. Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to
English Fictional Prose. Harlow: Longman.
Linell, Per. 1982. The Written Language Bias in Linguistics. Linköping: University of
Linköping Press.
Mayes, Patricia. 1990. ‘Quotation in Spoken English’ in Studies in Language 14(2):
325-63.
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PTL: A Journal for Poetics and Theory of Literature 3: 249-87.
Parkes, Malcolm B. 1992. Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of
Punctuation in the West. Aldershot: Scolar.
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Pascal, Roy. 1977. The Dual Voice: Free Indirect Speech and its Functioning in the
Nineteenth Century Novel. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Sanders, José, and Gisela Redeker. 1993. ‘Linguistic Perspective in Short News
Stories’ in Poetics 22: 69-87.
Semino, Elena, Mick Short and Jonathan Culpeper. 1997. ‘Using a Corpus to Test a
Model of Speech and Thought Presentation’ in Poetics 25: 17-43. Online at:
http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/users/eiamjw/stop/papers/poetics.html
(consulted 02.04.2002).
Short, Mick. 1989. ‘Speech Presentation, the Novel and the Press’ in van Peer, Willie
(ed.) The Taming of the Text: Explorations in Language, Literature and Culture.
London: Routledge: 61-81.
Short, Mick, Elena Semino and Martin Wynne. 2002. ‘Revisiting the Notion of
Faithfulness in Discourse Presentation Using a Corpus Approach’ in Language
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Construction of Spoken Discourse’ in Language and Literature 1(2): 101-19.
Sternberg, Meir. 1982. ‘Point of View and the Indirections of Direct Speech’ in
Language and Style 15(2): 67-117.
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Conversational Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
__. 1995. ‘Waiting for the Mouse: Constructed Dialogue in Conversation’ in Tedlock,
Dennis, and Bruce Mannheim (eds) The Dialogic Emergence of Culture. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press: 198-217.
Toolan, Michael. 1998. Language in Literature. London: Hodder.
__. 2001. Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction (2nd edition). London:
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van Dijk, Teun A. 1988. News as Discourse. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates.
van Dijk, Teun A., and Walter Kintsch. 1983. Strategies of Discourse
Comprehension. New York: Academic Press.
Voloπinov, Valentin N. [1929] 1986. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. (tr.
Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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 ‘Print Culture’ and the Language
of the 18th-Century Novel

Joe Bray

Abstract
Recent technological developments, including the Internet, have led some textual
scholars to identify a ‘destabilizing crisis in the world of production and meaning’.
This essay shows that such a crisis also occurred in the early 18th century. A rapidly
expanding ‘print culture’ created many of the conditions that have preoccupied the
late 20th and early 21st centuries, including ‘mobility, instability, the permeability of
text to text, and of authorial property to readerly reinterpretation and alteration’.
These features are particularly well demonstrated by the first novel of the successful
London printer Samuel Richardson. Not only did Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded
(1740) generate an explosion of print in the form of satires, continuations, and
imitations, it also embodies the slipperiness of text and meaning in the period. The
fluidity and instability of Pamela’s own written text is a key theme in the novel, as too
is the way that her journal is open to the ‘readerly reinterpretations’ of Mr B.

Key words: textuality; print culture; the Pamela media event; embodied discourse;
misreading.

It has long been fashionable in modern textual criticism to observe

that recent technological developments pose a challenge to traditional
understandings of textuality. As Kathryn Sutherland notes (1997: 1),
both enthusiasts and critics of electronic technology
take it for granted that the shift is monumental, involving a reconsideration of
such large and difficult issues as the nature and extent of authorial property,
the stability/fluidity of text and its relation to material forms, the globalisation
or dis-/relocation of knowledge and the threat to or likely changes in reading
practices.
For Sutherland, the ‘dominant procedures of the electronic medium’
are ‘mobility, instability, the permeability of text to text, and of
authorial property to readerly reinterpretation and alteration’ (14). Her
claim that ‘we are in the late twentieth century living through [a]
168 Joe Bray

destabilizing crisis in the world of production and meaning’ (3) has

been echoed in the first few years of the 21st. Describing the ‘move
into a more insistently, intensely multimodal world’, made possible by
technological developments such as the internet, Gunther Kress and
Theo van Leeuwen announce a ‘deep change in the representational
world’ (2001: 127). As Jerome J. McGann somewhat wearily observes
in Sutherland’s 1997 volume, ‘lofty reflections on the cultural
significance of information technology are commonplace now’ (1997:
19).
In this essay I will argue that this ‘destabilizing crisis’ is also nothing
new. Similarly anxious debates about the nature of text have been
occasioned at other moments of rapid technological change. Here I
will focus on one such moment in particular: the early 18th century.1
This period witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of printing
technologies and printed material, which helped to promulgate,
amongst other genres, the early novel. The result was a sometimes
confusing ‘print culture’ in which texts circulated in an often
bewildering variety of forms. The ‘mobility’ and ‘instability’ of text
were everywhere evident, as too was ‘the permeability of text to text,
and of authorial property to readerly reinterpretation and alteration’.
These factors created crises of meaning and interpretation of the kind
which have preoccupied critics of postmodern culture. However, this
essay does more than argue that technology has caused textual
instability at an earlier historical period. It also grounds some of the
lofty reflections about the interaction between technology and literary
culture. I show that many of the concerns about textuality and
meaning which have recently come to prominence are actually
embodied in one particular early 18th-century text. This was produced
by a man who, as the most successful printer in London at the time,
was at the centre of the expanding ‘print culture’.
Following its publication in November 1740, Samuel Richardson’s
Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded generated what Thomas Keymer and
Peter Sabor call an ‘explosion of print’ (2001: xvi). The first pirated
edition appeared in Dublin in January 1741, less than three months
later. Henry Fielding’s witty satire Shamela arrived in April, the same
month as Pamela Censured, an anonymous criticism of the novel’s
morality. An unauthorised continuation by John Kelly, Pamela’s
Conduct in High Life, was published in May, and Eliza Haywood’s
 ‘Print Culture’ and the Language of the 18th-Century Novel 169

response, Anti-Pamela: or, Feign’d Innocence Detected, was brought

out in June. Further pirated editions, sycophantic imitations, critical
attacks, and spurious continuations followed later in the year, as well
as a French translation (in October), a stage play by Henry Giffard (in
November) and even an opera (in May of the following year). As
Keymer and Sabor put it, ‘Pamela’s success inspired a swarm of
unauthorized appropriations, a Grub Street grabfest in which a hungry
army of entrepreneurial opportunists and freeloading hacks [...] moved
in for the action’ (2001: xiii).
Almost as numerous as these grubby appropriations by others were
Richardson’s own rewritings of the novel. He became increasingly
desperate to control and limit readings of the novel of which he did
not approve, particularly those which were hostile to its heroine. His
response to criticism of Pamela, as with all of his novels, was to keep
obsessively rewriting and revising the text in order to try and prevent
the possibility of it being misread. As Eaves and Kimpel bluntly put it,
‘Richardson, who read little else, read his own works constantly and
seldom read them without changing something’ (1971: 91). The
second edition of Pamela appeared just three months after the first, in
February 1741, with a new, self-promoting introduction based on six
commendatory letters from Aaron Hill. A third edition followed in
March, a fourth in May, and a fifth in September, before, irked by
those that were already circulating, Richardson published his own
continuation of Pamela’s married life in December. A sixth edition
came out in May 1742 in luxury octavo format, together with what
was called the ‘third’ edition of the continuation. Three further revised
editions of the original novel appeared in Richardson’s lifetime, in
1746, 1754, and 1761.2
Yet despite Richardson’s best attempts, the ‘permeability’ of Pamela
into other texts meant readings that were far from his original
intentions continued to circulate, and he could not control the ensuing
debates about the novel. This ‘readerly reinterpretation and alteration’,
to use Sutherland’s terms, is highlighted by William B. Warner in his
discussion of ‘the Pamela media event’. For Warner, ‘the elevation of
novels’ was ‘a creative early modern response by media workers and
entertainers to the onset of market-driven media culture’ (1998: xiii).
Praising Richardson’s understanding of the workings of this media
culture, Warner argues that ‘the extraordinary popularity of Pamela
170 Joe Bray

involves more than a transient shift in taste, a mere “vogue”; it is a

media event that helps to inaugurate a shift in reading practices’
(178).3 Thus ‘the Pamela media event evidences a mutation in the
print-media culture in Britain’ (224), reinscribing the novel ‘within a
contentious public sphere, where what a text means will be the
negotiated outcome of sustained critical scrutiny by sophisticated
adult readers’ (208).
These sophisticated critical scrutineers were generally divided into
two camps: on the one hand those who defended Pamela’s morals and
recommended them as models to be followed, and on the other those
who found her unbelievable and were inclined to suggest that she had
been a schemer all along. The argument between the ‘Pamelists’ and
the ‘Antipamelists’, as these two groups were known, reveals wider
cultural debates within the period, as Keymer & Sabor (2001: xix)
point out:
below the surface of arguments about character and motive, also in play were
the larger conflicts and questions of an age in which the traditional ideologies
were increasingly open to question or challenge: the relationships between
virtue and class, or between virtue and gender; the rival claims on the
Christian soul of faith and good works; the vague and troubled borderline
between moral and immoral discourse. Pamela was not only a novel but also a
site of ideological contestation, and in the focus given by writers of the
controversy to these and other areas of dispute we can read a whole culture
and its discontents.
For Warner, it is an important point that this ‘ideological contestation’
soon spins out of the original author’s control. He characterises the
print market in which Pamela appeared as ‘a system of production and
consumption in which no one can control or guarantee the meanings
that sweep through its texts’ (1998: 181), and claims that ‘there is
something in the very structure of both the system of early modern
entertainment wherein the letter-novel Pamela is composed and
circulates and the space that opens around Pamela’s performance of
her virtue that produces meanings that disrupt claims to an interior
univocal meaning’ (197-98). In his view ‘it is precisely because it is
set in motion by someone who strives so hard to get his message to its
proper destination that the Pamela media event is an especially rich
matrix for reading the perversely plural effects of communication’
(199).
 ‘Print Culture’ and the Language of the 18th-Century Novel 171

The rapidly proliferating network of texts that followed the

publication of Pamela was thus characterised by the ‘permeability of
text to text, and of authorial property to readerly reinterpretation and
alteration’. Richardson’s original novel soon became transformed into
other versions, and, try as he could, he was unable to control the vast
spectrum of ‘readerly reinterpretations’ which the text generated. As a
result unresolvable debates over Pamela’s destabilised ‘meaning’
arose. In the rest of this essay I will argue further that uncertainties of
interpretation and possibilities of misreading were actually inherent in
the text from the beginning, in its first edition.4 The ‘perversely plural
effects of communication’ are not just evident in the controversy that
surrounded the publication of Pamela, but are also embodied within
the text itself. In fact the metaphor of embodiment is central to
accounts of the ‘print culture’ in which Pamela appeared.
Referring to the ‘proliferation of print commodities’ in the early 18th
century, which saw ‘printing-processes in overdrive’, Deidre S. Lynch
(1998: 24) identifies a ‘typographical culture’, in which
‘communication was a matter of marking, imprinting, and embodying’
(28). Her study of the period’s understanding of ‘character’ points to
the earliest meanings of the word associated with marking and
engraving,5 and notes ‘an interest in the material grounds of meaning
and a fascination with the puns that could link the person “in” a text to
the printed letters (alphabetic symbols, or “characters” in another
sense) that elaborated that text’s surface’ (6). ‘Understanding how
character mattered in eighteenth-century Britain entails, first of all’,
she claims, ‘understanding the curiously embodied terms in which
literate people conceptualised their reading matter’ (30). The ‘Pamela
media event’ offers several examples: aside from the play and opera
mentioned earlier, other material forms into which Richardson’s text
was transmuted include paintings and engravings, a fan, and even a
waxwork.6 Referring to ‘a semantic complex in which the ethical, the
physiognomic, the typographic, and even the numismatic merge’ (30),
Lynch (1998: 30) claims that:
The eighteenth century inherited from the seventeenth the conviction that it
was best to image the linguistic grounds of human knowledge and an
eagerness to apprehend the constituents of knowledge through analogies with
the human body. According to the understanding of linguistic behaviour that
prevailed at the opening of the century, discourse was embodied – at ease with
its immersion in a print culture in which language necessarily assumes visible,
corporeal form. At the same time, the body was discursive, a telltale transcript
172 Joe Bray

of the identity it housed. Ideas of the Book of Nature invited people to think
of human bodies and the cultural texts humans produced in tandem and
invited them to think of both humans and their texts as linked to the animal,
vegetable, and mineral works of Creation – to natural forms, which
themselves were said to possess ‘signatures’ indexing their affinities.
The idea that human bodies, like humanly produced texts, can be read,
was of course not new. Alberto Manguel traces the long history of the
notion that ‘human beings, made in the image of God, are also books
to be read’ back to St. Augustine, showing that it was important for
Shakespeare and Whitman, amongst others (1997: 163-73). According
to E. R. Curtius, ‘the idea that the world and nature are books derives
from the rhetoric of the Catholic Church, taken over by the mystical
philosophers of the early Middle Ages’ (Manguel 1997: 168). The
metaphor was strengthened at the end of the 17th century by John
Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding, which explicitly forges a
connection between the materiality of text, particularly its typography,
and the body. In his Essay Locke rejects the ‘received Doctrine, That
Men have native Ideas, and original Characters stamped upon their
Minds, in their very first Being’ (1975: 104), arguing that ‘if there
were certain Characters, imprinted by Nature on the Understanding, as
the Principles of Knowledge, we could not but perceive them
constantly operate in us’ (67). Instead, Locke asserts, ‘let us suppose
the Mind to be, as we say, white Paper, void of all Characters, without
any Ideas’ (104). This ‘Experience’ is composed of ‘Sensation’ and
‘Reflection’. No one has ‘any Idea in his Mind’, Locke insists, ‘but
what one of these two have imprinted’ (106). The human mind is thus,
for Locke, a text on which ideas have been imprinted, or, as Lynch
puts it, ‘at the centre, then, of the Essay’s account of the operations of
human understanding is an analogy that links the getting of ideas, the
techniques of typography, and the process of individuation’ (1998:
34). She refers to the early 18th century’s ‘Lockean conception of the
person’, according to which, ‘people figure as bodies of writing’ (42).
This textual ‘conception of the person’ is certainly apparent in
Pamela. As will shortly be demonstrated, the heroine is often
represented by and equated with a body of writing. Similarly, many
observers equated the text with its heroine, including its author
himself. In a letter of 1753 to Lady Bradshaigh, Richardson predicted
that ‘I will give Pamela my last Correction, if my Life be spared; that,
as a Piece of Writing only, she may not appear for her Situation,
 ‘Print Culture’ and the Language of the 18th-Century Novel 173

unworthy of her Younger Sisters’ (Forster Collection, XI, 30).7 Others

viewed Richardson’s texts as sisters. An example is the German
scientist Albrecht von Haller, whose review of Clarissa appeared,
translated, in the Gentleman’s Magazine of June 1749. For von Haller,
‘Clarissa may be said to be the younger sister and imitater [sic] of
Pamela’, though he claims that the author, a Mr S. Robinson, ‘appears
to have drawn great advantages from the criticisms which have been
made on the prior work’, and praises the younger sister for ‘a variety
that is wanting in Pamela’ (The Gentleman’s Magazine 1749: 245).
This conflation of text and heroine is also apparent in the two letters
with which Richardson prefaced his text in the first edition of 1740.
The first was from a French translator then earning his living in
London, Jean Baptiste de Freval, the other was unsigned, but probably
the work of the Reverend William Webster, who had recently become
vicar of Thundridge and Ware. Webster’s commendation had already
appeared, a month earlier in the religious periodical which he edited,
the Weekly Miscellany. Richardson had printed the journal for four
years following its inception in 1732, and had recently forgiven
Webster a debt of £90 owing from this period. He had also just printed
de Freval’s English translation of the Abbé Pluche’s The History of
the Heavens on favourable terms.8 De Freval’s letter opens by
announcing that ‘I have had inexpressible Pleasure in the Perusal of
your PAMELA’ (2001: 5). The merging of text and heroine is
apparent again in its final paragraph: ‘Little Book, charming
PAMELA! face the World, and never doubt of finding Friends and
Admirers, not only in thine own Country, but far from Home’ (6).
Similarly, arguing that the text should be seen ‘in its own native
Simplicity, which will affect and please the Reader beyond all the
Strokes of Oratory in the World’, Webster condemns ‘superfluous and
needless Decorations’:
No, let us have Pamela as Pamela wrote it; in her own Words, without
Amputation or Addition. Produce her to us in her neat Country Apparel, such
as she appear’d in, on her intended Departure to her Parents; for such best
becomes her Innocence and beautiful Simplicity. Such a Dress will best edify
and entertain. The flowing Robes of Oratory may indeed amuse and amaze,
but will never strike the Mind with solid Attention. (9)
Throughout the novel the heroine is closely associated with the text
which she writes, as her body and her writing are intimately
connected. This is indeed physically the case, since, as she reveals to
174 Joe Bray

her parents, she stitches her ‘Writings [...] in my Under-coat, next my

Linen’ (131), in order to hide them from Mr B and Mrs Jewkes. Later
she reports that her journal is ‘sew’d in my Under-coat, about my
Hips’ (227). Desperate to see her ‘sawcy Journal’, Mr B realises he
will have to strip her:
Now, said he, it is my Opinion they are about you; and I never undrest a Girl
in my Life; but I will now begin to strip my pretty Pamela; and hope I shall
not go far, before I find them.
I fell a crying, and said, I will not be used in this manner. Pray, Sir, said I (for
he began to unpin my Handkerchief) consider! Pray, Sir, do! - And pray, said
he, do you consider. For I will see those Papers. But may-be, said he, they are
ty’d about your Knees with your Garters, and stooped. Was ever any thing so
vile and so wicked! (235)
To get to Pamela’s journal then, Mr B must interfere with her
physically. Reading her text becomes an act of sexual assault, akin to
taking her virginity. When Pamela is finally forced to hand over her
papers, she says she ‘will take it for a great Favour, and a good Omen’
if he will ‘please to return them, without breaking the Seal’ (239). Yet
for Mr B such restraint is impossible: ‘He broke the Seal instantly, and
open’d them’ (239).
Indeed Mr B is driven to distraction and infatuation by Pamela’s text,
as much as by her physical charms. He is particularly struck by her
writing style, praising her ‘easy and happy Manner of Narration’
(300), and admitting that he is ‘quite overcome with your charming
manner of Writing, so free, so easy, and so much above your Sex; and
put this all together, makes me, as I tell you, love you to
Extravagance’ (84). He defends his increasingly violent attempts to
get possession of her writing by asking ‘And if I had not loved you, do
you think I would have troubled myself about your Letters?’ (229),
and acknowledges that they have been instrumental in strengthening
his feelings for her: ‘Your Papers shall be faithfully return’d you, and
I have paid so dear for my Curiosity in the Affection they have
rivetted upon me for you, that you would look upon yourself amply
reveng’d, if you knew what they have cost me’ (247).
Several times in the novel, Mr B in fact conflates Pamela’s text and
her body, or her self. She is afraid of his reaction when he has read the
bulk of her journal:
 ‘Print Culture’ and the Language of the 18th-Century Novel 175

About nine o’Clock he sent for me down in the Parlour. I went a little
fearfully; and he held the Papers in his Hand, and said, Now, Pamela, you
come upon your Trial. (230)

It is not clear whether this ‘Pamela’ refers to the heroine herself or to

her text, or to a conflation of the two. Later he merges the two again
when urging her ‘to continue your Relation, as you have Opportunity;
and tho’ your Father be here, write to your Mother, that this wondrous
Story be perfect, and we, your Friends, may read and admire you more
and more’ (301). In her letters to her parents, Pamela exhibits a
similar confusion between herself and her text. Sending them ‘a most
tedious Parcel of Stuff, of my Oppressions, my Distresses, my Fears’
via Mr Williams, Pamela rejoices that ‘I am glad I can conclude, after
all my Sufferings, with my Hopes, to be soon with you’ (149). Seeing
her writing will, she often insists, be the same as seeing her, and she
often finds herself apologising for both: ‘But blame not your poor
Daughter too much: Nay, if ever you see this miserable Scribble, all
bathed and blotted with my Tears, let your Pity get the better of your
Blame! But I know it will’ (175). The connection between Pamela’s
text and her self is reinforced when Pamela has finally fallen in love
with Mr B and agreed to marry him. Her transfer from her father’s
protection to that of her future husband is marked symbolically by the
transfer of her writing, as she asks for her letters and journal back
from her father and solemnly hands them over to Mr B: ‘He pulled
them from his Pocket; and I stood up, and with my best Duty, gave
them into my Master’s Hands’ (296).
However, although Pamela’s text has a very physical, embodied
presence in the novel, at times seeming to represent the heroine
herself, this materiality is no defence against ‘readerly
reinterpretation’. In a letter to Pamela’s father Mr B reveals that he
has contrived, by his servant John, to read ‘the strange
Correspondence carry’d on between you and your Daughter, so
injurious to my Honour and Reputation’ (92):
Something, possibly, there might be in what she has wrote from time to time;
but, believe me, with all her pretended Simplicity and Innocence, I never
knew so much romantick Invention as she is Mistress of. In short, the Girl’s
Head’s turn’d by Romances, and such idle Stuff, which she has given herself
up to, ever since her kind Lady’s Death. (93)
This claim that Pamela’s head has been turned by the unchecked
reading of romances is not simply invented by Mr B in order to justify
176 Joe Bray

his behaviour to her father. Elsewhere he seems genuinely to believe

that her writing style is that of a romantic heroine, and indeed belongs
in a romance. He explains his curiosity to read all she has written:
‘there is such a pretty Air of Romance, as you relate them, in your
Plots, and my Plots’ (232). Pamela responds indignantly that ‘this is a
very provoking way of jeering at the Misfortunes you have brought
upon me’ (232). He also reads her correspondence with Mr Williams
as an episode from a romance:
In the first Place, Here are several Love-letters between you and Williams.
Love-letters! Sir, said I. – Well, call them what you will, said he, I don’t
intirely like them, I’ll assure you, with all the Allowances you desired me to
make for you. Do you find, Sir, said I, that I encouraged his Proposal, or do
you not? Why, said he, you discourage his Address in Appearance; but no
otherwise than all your cunning Sex do to ours, to make us more eager in
pursuing you.
Well, Sir, said I, that is your Comment; but it does not appear so in the Text.
(230)
The physicality of Pamela’s writing in the novel does not then prevent
Mr B from reading it in his own way, and discovering meanings far
from those she intended. In response to his reinterpretations she
resorts here to the authority of ‘the Text’, yet it is clear that this is a
less transparent and stable entity than she had foreseen when
reluctantly agreeing to let him read ‘all my private Thoughts of him,
and all my Secrets, as I may say’ (226). Though strongly connected
with the body in this novel, her text remains slippery and unstable,
and its meanings are hard to pin down. Indeed, none of the elements
of the ‘semantic complex’ which Lynch sees as central to the early
18th century’s ‘typographical culture’ are perhaps as easy to read as
she suggests. It is possible to challenge particularly strongly her claim
that in this period ‘the body was discursive, a telltale transcript of the
identity it housed’.
The 18th-century novel is in fact littered with physiognomical
misreaders. In Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling, ‘physiognomy
was one of Harley’s foibles, for which he had often rebuked by his
aunt in the country’ (1967: 44), and ‘his skill in physiognomy is
doubted’, not least in Chapter 27, in which he is advised that ‘“as for
faces - you may look into them to know, whether a man’s nose be a
long or a short one”’ (53). As Graeme Tytler has shown,
physiognomical readings are also often problematic in Fielding’s
novels, which abound with misreadings of faces and bodies (examples
 ‘Print Culture’ and the Language of the 18th-Century Novel 177

are those by Parson Adams in Joseph Andrews and The Man of the
Hill in Tom Jones; see Tytler 1982: 144-151). In his ‘Essay on the
Knowledge of the Characters of Men’ Fielding notes that ‘the truth is,
we almost universally mistake the symptoms which Nature kindly
holds forth to us’ (1882: 332). The fault is thus with the
physiognomist, rather than the science itself: ‘I conceive the passions
of men do commonly imprint sufficient marks on the countenance;
and it is owing chiefly to want of skill in the observer that
physiognomy is of so little use and credit in the world’ (332).
The common practice of misreading, or rather not reading, the Book
of Human Nature is also a theme of an article in The Lady’s Magazine
in July 1789. The writer asks: ‘Is it not strange, gentle courteous
reader, is it not strange, that nobody should read what is in every
body’s hands? That there should be a book, full of information,
entertainment, and instruction, as easily come at, as is to lay one’s
hand on one’s heart, and yet so few give themselves the trouble to
look into it?’ (339). Though this book was ‘printed, published and
dispersed through the universe long before [...] the invention of
printing was heard of’ (339), the article makes an analogy with the
products of 18th-century ‘print culture’:
it does happen in the case of curious and old books – such as the one I am
speaking of – that we rarely can complete a copy, and render it perfectly
agreeable to the ORIGINAL – without collating and comparing many
editions, one with the other, expunging what appears to have been
interpolated – and adding what may have been omitted [....] (340)

This reference to interpolated and incomplete texts, and the need to

collate and compare many editions in order to ‘complete a copy, and
render it perfectly agreeable to the ORIGINAL’ gives a sense of the
chaotic circulations of ‘print culture’ in the 18th century, and the
unstable and fragmented nature of text. As the ‘riot of print’ (Keymer
& Sabor 2001: xiv) which followed the publication of Pamela
demonstrates, original meanings could soon be overtaken by the
‘permeability of text to text’, and the often startling transformations
and alterations which texts underwent. The desperate anxiety to keep
the text fixed and stable is a sign of how fleeting such fixedness and
stability was in practice. Pamela promises that she will give Mr B her
‘Papers [...] without the least Alteration, or adding or diminishing’
(235). Yet he remains nervous:
178 Joe Bray

If you have either added or diminish’d, and have not strictly kept your
Promise, woe be to you! Indeed, Sir, said I, I have neither added nor
diminish’d. (238-39)

‘The Pamela media event’ thus offers rich evidence for the way that
technology can cause a ‘destabilizing crisis in the world of production
and meaning’. Richardson’s first novel rode the tide of the rapidly
expanding ‘print culture’ and soon became drowned in the deluge of
publications which ensued. The controversy and ideological debate
which it generated illustrate that the early 21st century is not alone in
witnessing ‘the permeability of text to text, and of authorial property
to readerly reinterpretation and alteration’. Furthermore, the
‘instability’ and ‘fluidity’ of text is an internal theme of the novel, as,
in Warner’s words, ‘misreadings are programmed into Pamela from
its inception’ (1998: 203). The physical, embodied nature of Pamela’s
discourse does not protect it from reinterpretation. Rather, given the
repeatedly stressed hazards of reading bodies and faces in the period,
it emphasises the slipperiness of her text, and the impossibility of
reducing it to a fixed meaning. The novel is indeed driven by Mr B’s
misreading of her journal as a romance, and the heroine’s attempt to
correct him and reassert her original meanings. Pamela’s struggles
anticipated Richardson’s own efforts to control the readings of his
text. Both could tell the 21st-century theorist much, from bitter
experience, about the ‘perversely plural effects of communication’.

Endnotes
1There are, of course, other such moments of ‘destabilizing crisis’ brought about by
technological development. Sutherland cites ‘that moment around 1800 which saw the
invention of the iron-frame hand-press with its mechanical power to increase the rate
of print production’ (1997: 3).
2In the last years of his life, before his death in 1761, Richardson was working on
another revision of his first novel; this was eventually published, possibly with some
alterations by his daughters, in 1801 as the 14th edition.
3Terry Eagleton makes a similar point, arguing that Pamela is not so much a novel as
‘a whole cultural event [...] the occasion or organizing principle of a multimedia
affair, stretching all the way from domestic commodities to public speeches, instantly
recodable from one cultural mode to the next’ (1982: 5).
4I am greatly indebted to Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely’s recent (Richardson
2001) edition of the novel, which takes the first edition as its copy-text. All quotations
from Pamela in this essay are from this text.
 ‘Print Culture’ and the Language of the 18th-Century Novel 179

5The first three ‘literal senses’ of ‘character’ in the OED are ‘A distinctive mark
impressed, engraved, or otherwise formed; a brand stamp’; ‘A distinctive significant
mark of any kind; a graphic sign or symbol’; and ‘A graphic symbol standing for a
sound, syllable, or notion, used in writing or in printing; one of the simple elements of
a written language; e. g. a letter of the alphabet’.
6The most famous paintings of episodes from Pamela are those of Joseph Highmore,
which were exhibited at his house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in February 1744. In the
following year Antoine Benoist and Louis Truchy produced engravings of
Highmore’s paintings. In April 1741 The Daily Advertiser reported that ‘PAMELA, a
new Fan, representing the principal Adventures of her Life, in Servitude, Love and
Marriage’ is now on sale ‘at all the Fan-Shops and China-Shops in and about
London’, while the same paper announced the exhibition of ‘PAMELA; or, VIRTUE
REWARDED. Being a curious Piece of Wax-Work’ near Richardson’s Salisbury
Court premises in April 1745. It seems the waxwork was on display for several
months and may even have been expanded to include scenes from the continuation.
7In the absence of a complete edition of Richardson’s letters, I have consulted the
Forster Collection in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, which contains many
of the original manuscripts of the letters.
8As Keymer puts it, ‘though no doubt sincere in their admiration, both de Freval and
Webster were clearly in receipt or expectation of SR’s patronage, which must have
helped to lubricate their praise’ (2001: xlv).

References
Eagleton, Terry. 1982. The Rape of Clarissa. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Eaves, T. C. Duncan, and Ben D. Kimpel. 1971. Samuel Richardson: A Biography.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Fielding, Henry. 1882. ‘An Essay on the Knowledge and Characters of Men’ in The
Works of Henry Fielding, Vol. VI (ed. Leslie Stephen). London: Smith, Elder &
Co.: 327-353.
The Gentleman’s Magazine. 1749. London.
Keymer, Thomas, and Peter Sabor (eds). 2001. The Pamela Controversy: Criticisms
and Adaptations of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, 1740-1750. Vol. I:
Richardson’s Apparatus and Fielding’s Shamela. London: Pickering & Chatto.
Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. 2001. Multimodal Discourse: The Modes
and Media of Contemporary Communication. London: Arnold.
The Lady’s Magazine. 1789. London.
Locke, John. 1975. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (ed. P. H. Nidditch).
Oxford: Clarendon Press [based on 4th ed., 1700].
Lynch, Deirdre S. 1998. The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the
Business of Inner Meaning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mackenzie, Henry. 1967. The Man of Feeling (ed. Brian Vickers). Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Manguel, Alberto. 1997. A History of Reading. London: Flamingo.
180 Joe Bray

McGann, Jerome J. 1997. ‘The Rationale of Hypertext’ in Sutherland (1997): 19-46.

Richardson, Samuel. 2001. Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (ed. Thomas Keymer and
Alice Wakely). Oxford: Oxford University Press [based on 1st ed., 1740].
Sutherland, Kathryn (ed.). 1997. Electronic Text: Investigations in Method and
Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Tytler, Graeme. 1982. Physiognomy in the European Novel: Faces and Fortunes.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Warner, William B. 1998. Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading
in Britain, 1684-1750. Berkeley: University of California Press.
 Truth and Lies: The Construction of Factuality in a
Television Documentary1

Susan Hunston

Abstract
This paper describes a television documentary in which two contradictory versions of
a story are presented. The paper explores how these two versions are given without
the narratorial voice in the film appearing inconsistent. It is argued that this is
achieved mainly because in the first half of the film the epistemic status of much of
the material is kept indeterminate and that it is therefore open to reinterpretation in the
second half of the film. The indeterminacy is maintained by features of language and
of image.

Key words: film; factuality; status; averral; attribution.

1. The story
In the mid 1990s a newly published book, Fragments, had an impact
on the reading public. It was the autobiography of a man called
Binjamin Wilkomirski who, as a Latvian Jewish child during World
War II, had been interned in the concentration camps at Majdanek and
at Auschwitz. It was a harrowing book, describing in detail the
suffering of young children in those camps. Its publication was
welcomed by other child survivors, who felt that their unique
suffering had at last been given a voice. A BBC film team from the
‘Inside Story’ series filmed Wilkomirski telling his story, with the aim
of making a documentary about his life and his book.
Before the film was finished, however, an Israeli-born journalist
named Daniel Ganzfried cast doubt on the book’s authenticity as
autobiography. He suggested that although events like those described
in Fragments may indeed have happened, they had not happened to,
or been observed by, the writer of the book. The BBC team
interviewed Ganzfried and undertook further investigations.
Wilkomirski had lived for most of his life in Switzerland, under the
182 Susan Hunston

name Bruno Grosjean. Following Ganzfried’s leads, the film

researchers found a number of people who asserted that Grosjean had
been born in Switzerland, rather than arriving there as a child after the
war, that he had never been in a concentration camp until he visited
Majdanek as an adult tourist, and that his parents were Swiss, not
Latvian, and not Jewish.

The film Truth and Lies that was eventually shown on BBC
television, in 2000, is divided into two parts. The first part is entitled
‘Binjamin’s Story’, and consists mainly of interviews with
Wilkomirski, along with readings from his book. Here the audience is
given Wilkomirski’s version of the events of his childhood. The
second part of the film is entitled ‘Bruno’s Story’, and it presents the
alternative life of Bruno Grosjean – his birth to a single mother, his
adoption, schooldays, and young adulthood, all taking place in
Switzerland. This is the evidence against Wilkomirski’s version of
events. By the end of the film it is clear that viewers are positioned to
believe Ganzfried and to disbelieve Wilkomirski. The book
Fragments is not a record of the writer’s life, but a work of fiction.

2. The film
Like most documentaries, the film Truth and Lies is a multitextual
entity and incorporates a number of different voices. Its raw material
is a number of individual texts, including filmed interviews, news
footage from the 1940s, and reconstructions of the events in
Fragments. Parts of these texts are extracted and recombined to make
the film. The constituent texts may be described in terms of their
epistemic status, using the categories ‘record’ and ‘reconstruction’,
and the concurrent categories ‘averred’ and ‘attributed’.2 For example,
a sequence of news footage is ‘record’ (because it is a film of actual,
not acted, events) and ‘attributed’ (because the film-makers have not
filmed it themselves). A reconstruction of the events described in
Fragments is ‘reconstruction’ and is ‘averred’ (because the film-
makers have filmed it). An interview with Wilkomirski is ‘record’
(because the interview is an actual event) and ‘averred’. In addition,
the statements spoken by the various participants in the film can also
be ascribed status, based on whether they are averred by the narrator,
or attributed to Wilkomirski, to other speakers, or to the book
Fragments (extracts from which are read by an actor). Table 1 gives
 Truth and Lies 183

three examples of the combination of statuses of film and of

statements.

Table 1
Content of extract Status of film Status of statements
News footage of Nazi troops in attributed record narrator averral
Riga.
Voice-over (narrator): In 1940
the Red Army came in. Then in
1941 the Nazis. Jews in Riga
were rounded up, herded into
synagogues, and burned alive.
Wilkomirski in close-up. averred record attribution to Wilkomirski
Narrator: And how old would
you have been then?
Wilkomirski: I guess, I guess,
three.
Black-and-white shots of steam averred reconstruction narrator averral;
train, close-ups of wheels, attribution to Fragments
chimney. Unidentifiable person
climbing onto train.
Narrator: A woman in a grey
uniform put him on another
train.
Book: ‘Where to?’ I asked the
grey uniform, clutching on the
edge of her skirt. ‘Majdanek’
she said.

The question raised by the film is: how are these different texts
combined so that two incompatible versions of events are presented
without apparent internal inconsistency? Clearly it is not the case that
the two possible stories are shown impartially, leaving the audience
free to choose between them. If this were the case the narrator would
aver two mutually inconsistent narratives. More plausible is the
possibility that the story in the first half of the film is attributed to
others while the second half is averred by the narrator. As shall be
seen below, some instances of attribution-averral do occur. Mostly,
however, the relationship between the two halves of the film is more
subtle. I shall argue below that the second half of the film in fact
reinterprets the status of the first half. This is made possible because
the status of the first half is indeterminate and is therefore open to
resolution in the second half.
184 Susan Hunston

3. The process of reinterpretation

The process by which the second part of this film reinterprets the
information in the first part, and in particular reinterprets its status,
can be illustrated by comparing two extracts from one of the
constituent texts of the film: an interview with Anne Karpf, who is
described as the daughter of a holocaust survivor. In ‘Binjamin’s
Story’ Karpf is shown giving her reaction upon first reading the book:
I found it devastating. I’ve read an enormous amount of holocaust literature, a
surfeit I’d say, but this I did think belonged up with Primo Levi and the other
greats. It was very very powerful, very evocative, very moving. I read it in
one sitting and I sobbed.
In the second part of the film she is shown giving her reaction upon
hearing that the book might not be a true account:
I had a complete sense of disbelief in the beginning and that was followed
quite quickly by a sense of rage, betrayal, feeling traduced, and it almost felt
blasphemous, you know, as if to take on– as if– as if being a holocaust
survivor was some kind of costume that you could just don and impersonate
someone. I felt absolutely appalled.
The relation of these statements to each other is important. They do
not form a sequence of ‘statement plus contradiction’ (which would
be discoursally inconsistent), but the common English discourse
sequence of either ‘apparently true plus actually true’, or ‘concession
plus counter-assertion’.3 The presence of the second extract from the
interview re-evaluates the status of the first extract in such a way that
it is discoursally consistent. These possible interpretations are shown
in Table 2.
Table 2
Discourse pattern First statement Second statement
Statement + contradiction Anne was moved by the Anne was angered by the
Discoursally inconsistent book. book.
Apparent + real Anne thought she was Actually she was angered
Discoursally consistent moved by the book. by it.
Concession + counter-assertion It is true that Anne was But later she was angered
Discoursally consistent moved by the book. by it.

The Anne Karpf sequence is a micro-sequence that mirrors the

structure of the film itself. Binjamin’s story comes first, and Bruno’s
story, coming second, reinterprets it. More specifically, the first half
of the film contains many statements which appear to have the status
of ‘fact’, averred by the narrator, but which are later reinterpreted as
 Truth and Lies 185

fictions, lies, or inventions, attributed to Wilkomirski and then

contradicted. For example, in ‘Binjamin’s Story’ the narrator says:
Long ago in Poland his brother had played with toy planes in a sunny field.
In ‘Bruno’s Story’ the boy playing is described as an image, not as an
actual event:
One of the images in the book is that of Wilkomirski’s elder brother flying
model planes in the fields.
Similarly, in ‘Binjamin’s Story’ the narrator describes an event from
Wilkomirski’s childhood in Switzerland:
Once he went on a school trip to a fair in Zürich. Suddenly he ran away from
the other boys, squatted on the ground and begged for money from strangers.
It was as if he was back in his orphanage in Poland.
In ‘Bruno’s Story’ this becomes a claim:
Wilkomirski claims that on a school trip to a fair he broke away and begged
for money from strangers. Somehow he thought he was back in his Polish
orphanage.
This claim is then discredited in an interview with Bruno’s class
teacher:
Teacher: Could never have happened because I never went to a fair with the
whole class.
Interviewer: You would have heard if something like that had happened.
Teacher: Yes of course. The other children would surely have told me.
As a final example, in ‘Binjamin’s Story’, the assertion that
Wilkomirski was born in Latvia is presented as a belief, that is,
something which the speaker holds to be true:
He began life, he believed, in a more humble home, in Riga, in Latvia, on the
edge of the Baltic Sea.
In ‘Bruno’s Story’ a former girlfriend disparages this view, and the
narrator classifies it as a lie, that is, something which the speaker
(Wilkomirski) holds to be untrue:
Girlfriend: When he was seventeen or eighteen he told me that he came from
the Baltic states. And I didn’t believe it because I knew it couldn’t be true.
Narrator: They were small, harmless lies.
This strategy of reinterpretation may be contrasted with a less-used
device, mentioned above, in which statements in the first part of the
film are attributed and hedged, and then contradicted by averral in the
second part of the film. For example, ‘Binjamin’s Story’ describes the
relationship between Wilkomirski and a woman named Laura
Grobowski. The assertion that Laura was a fellow internee at
186 Susan Hunston

Auschwitz is not averred by the narrator, but is attributed to

Wilkomirski:
The victims of the experiments, he believes, include Laura Grobowski… like
him a child of Auschwitz…. In their first phone conversation Wilkomirski
told her he thought he remembered her…
Where the narrator does aver, it is with a hedged statement:
[Laura] seemed to have a rare blood disease caused by the experiments…
In ‘Bruno’s Story’, the narrator’s averrals contradict these claims:
Laura is not who she seems…. She isn’t Jewish and never was in a
concentration camp…. It certainly was a strange day when she and Binjamin
Wilkomirski came together. Neither had ever seen each other before in their
lives.
This example, however, is an exception. In most cases the status of the
first part of the film is reinterpreted in the second, as in the previous
examples. The reinterpretation is possible because the status of the
utterances in the first part of the film is in fact indeterminate, the
indeterminacy being a product of both word and image and resolved
by the words and images in the second half of the film. The next
section will illustrate this process.
4. The narrator’s words and the resolution of indeterminacy
Indeterminacy of status can be illustrated by two extracts from the text
that is the narrator’s commentary. The first is from the first part of the
film:
In Poland he was separated from his mother and brothers. A woman in a grey
uniform put him on another train. He was told that at Majdanek he would find
his brothers waiting. Majdanek was amongst the worst of Nazi death camps.
Men, women and children rounded up all over Europe were brought to a
siding near the camp. Then they were marched along the black road made of
broken tombstones from Jewish cemeteries.
This extract includes both ‘historical fact’ (Men, women and children
rounded up all over Europe were brought to a siding…) and
statements about Wilkomirski’s life (In Poland he was separated from
his mother and brothers…). These are undifferentiated in terms of
their status, in that neither is explicitly attributed, or assessed for its
truth value. The second extract is from later in the film, at the point
where Wilkomirski’s story begins to be challenged. In this extract,
signals of attribution and hedging, and status identifiers, are shown in
bold.4
 Truth and Lies 187

The truth is long ago and far away. In Riga, which he says he left when he
was two or three, could he really have remembered his house? … Bernstein
and Verena returned with him to Riga, which he seemed to know like the
back of his hand. … But a Jewish historian says his account of escaping with
his mother and brothers across the river is highly unlikely. The fact is that
almost everything about the Nazi occupation of Riga, and the murder of the
Latvian Jews, is well known.… Wilkomirski admits he studied the holocaust
from college onward. Before this trip to Majdanek in 1993 his passports
disclose several previous trips to Poland. On any one he could have visited
Majdanek. He could have stitched his story together from what he’d read.
The official historian at Majdanek says Wilkomirski could only have
survived if the SS hadn’t known he was a Jew. Since he says he’s
circumcised, that seems unlikely.… He claims he was … transferred to
Auschwitz. 38 women and children were transported from Majdanek to
Auschwitz in April 1944 but as far as is known they were killed.… The
answers in the end are in the archives of a small town in Switzerland.
Wilkomirski claims that when he arrived from Poland, Swiss officials gave
him a false identity.… But Ganzfried discovered that a real Bruno Grosjean
did exist.
In this extract, a dialogic argument is enacted, with points being made
for and against Wilkomirski. For example, Wilkomirski’s memories
of living in Riga, with the evidence that he seemed to know the city,
are set against the words of a Jewish historian. His claim to have been
transferred from Majdanek to Auschwitz is countered by the assertion,
attributed in a hedged way to unnamed persons (as far as is known),
that there were no survivors of such a transfer. The notion of
Wilkomirski obtaining his knowledge through research rather than
through experience is raised as a possibility (could have). Three
statements are asserted categorically: that facts about the Nazi
occupation of Riga are common knowledge (The fact is that); that the
debate can be resolved by consulting Swiss archives (The answers in
the end are); and that someone with the name Bruno Grosjean existed
as a Swiss citizen from birth (Ganzfried discovered).5
There is much more that could be said about the various statements in
this extract, but what is important here is that the statuses of the
various statements are precisely differentiated; there is averral and
attribution, fact and supposition. This contrasts sharply with the
undifferentiated stance of the first extract. Because of the
differentiation in the second extract, the narrator’s voice as an averrer
is stronger. This in turn encourages reinterpretation of the first extract,
where the narrator’s apparent averral is weaker precisely because it is
not in contrast with anything else.
188 Susan Hunston

A crucial additional element, however, is that neither of these two

extracts stands as they have been presented here. In each case the
narrator’s account is interspersed with quotes, from interviews and
from Wilkomirski’s book. Below is an expansion of part of the first
extract, showing the different voices used:
Narrator: In Poland he was separated from his mother and brothers. A woman
in a grey uniform put him on another train.
Book: ‘Where to?’ I asked the grey uniform, clutching on the edge of her
skirt. ‘Majdanek’, she said.
Narrator: He was told that at Majdanek he would find his brothers waiting.
Book: ‘I pictured how it was going to be in Majdanek. We’d play in a big
sunny field. But when we arrived there I didn’t find my brothers’.
I suggest there is uncertainty here as to whether the narrator’s
statements are averral or attribution, and what their relationship is
with Wilkomirski’s utterances as recorded in his book. The utterance
He was told that at Majdanek he would find his brothers waiting
could be an averral: a statement which the film-makers believe, and
for which evidence is provided by the quotation from Wilkomirski’s
book. Alternatively, it could be an implicit attribution: a report of
what Wilkomirski claims, followed by more attribution in the form of
quotation. Because the attribution is implicit the audience may
interpret the utterance as narrator averral. However, because the
attribution is possible the audience may subsequently reinterpret the
utterance. In other words, indeterminacy allows for subsequent
resolution.

5. The interaction of word and image

It has been argued that in the first part of this film the epistemic status
of many of the utterances is ambiguous. Supporting this ambiguity is
the juxtaposition of words and images of different statuses. The film is
remarkable for very rapid cutting between the constituent texts of the
film, each of which, as has been discussed, has a different status. For
example, in one sequence, the narrator gives the following account of
events in the 1940s:
Narrator: In 1940 the Red Army came in. Then in 1941 the Nazis. Jews in
Riga were rounded up, herded into synagogues and burned alive. Latvian
fascists, on the orders of the Nazis, murdered thousands more. Foreign Jews
were brought into concentration camps. Several thousand of the old and the
weak were shot at a station and buried in pits under the track.
 Truth and Lies 189

This is accompanied by the following series of film extracts:

Colour shot: house and road.
News footage: army vehicles, cannon firing, Jews escorted along street, Nazi
troops, burning building.
Colour, image blurring: Riga across river, red sunset.
News footage: men being hurried along road.
Colour: train moving quickly, still shot of station.
Colour, image blurring: railway tracks.
News footage: man in pit being shot.
No fewer than seven separate texts make up this sequence,
interspersing contemporary news footage with illustrative
reconstruction filmed in the present day.
Even more remarkable is a sequence which recounts the child
Wilkomirski’s experiences. The voice-over intersperses narrator
averral with attribution to Wilkomirski as author of the book
Fragments:
Book: In a shadowy corner the outline of a man, his sweet face smiling at me.
Maybe my father.
Narrator: Wilkomirski says his home in the Jewish ghetto was raided by
Latvian fascists.
Book: A cry of terror echoing down the staircase – ‘Watch it! Latvian
militia!’
Narrator: A man is dragged to the ground next to the front gate. In
Wilkomirski’s memory, a Nazi transport heads straight for him.
Book: A big stream of something black shoots from his neck as the transport
squashes him. From now on I have to manage without you. I am alone.
The following series of images accompanies this:
Muted colour: shadow of man moving along roadway.
Black-and-white: camera moves along cobbled street, along corridor towards
sunlight.
Colour: pen points to street map.
News footage: man dragged along street by soldiers.
Black-and-white: still shot of door handle, moving shot of staircase.
Colour: Wilkomirski looking upwards.
News footage: soldiers and large vehicles.
Black-and-white: camera moves along passageway to gates.
Muted colour: small boy moves out of shadow, arms shielding body, looks at
camera.
News footage: dead body in street, woman covers face with arm, bodies in
street, woman among ruins.
190 Susan Hunston

Here news footage is interspersed with apparent reconstruction of the

events recorded in Fragments and with present-day film of
Wilkomirski pointing to a map and ‘remembering’ the events. Image
and voice are combined in a variety of ways. For example, a quotation
from the book, ‘A cry of terror echoing down the staircase’ is
accompanied by a shot of a staircase, and the words ‘I am alone’ are
accompanied by a shot of a small boy in a doorway staring at the
camera. The narrator’s words ‘Wilkomirski says his home in the
Jewish ghetto was raided by Latvian fascists’ overlay the image of a
pen pointing at a map, clearly filmed in the present, followed by news
footage of a man being dragged along a street and a black-and-white
still shot of a door handle. The words ‘In Wilkomirski’s memory a
Nazi transport heads straight for him’ are accompanied by a present-
day shot of Wilkomirski followed by news footage of Nazi soldiers
and vehicles.

It is possible to interpret this sequence simply as a dramatic

reconstruction of the events in Wilkomirski’s book, but this
interpretation is uncertain. Firstly, a distinction is made in the images
between ‘real’ and ‘unreal’.6 Reality is present in the solid-colour
shots of Wilkomirski and his map, and also in the grainy, black-and-
white news footage. Unreality is represented by the muted colour or
the black-and-white of the reconstructions, and by the over-sharp
distinctions between light and shadow. It is not clear, however,
whether this unreality is a simple indication that we are watching
reconstruction as opposed to news footage, or whether it implies that
we are watching the product of imagination. The confusion is
compounded by the rapid movement between footage and
reconstruction and back, which is matched by the alternation between
narrator averral and quotations from the book. Such rapid changes of
status in word and image keep the audience off balance in terms of
whether they are watching fact or fiction. Finally, the sequence has a
background of emotional music which also allows for two
interpretations: horrific reality or dramatic fiction. All these things
taken together create a sequence whose status is in the end uncertain,
in which the distinction between fact and fiction is blurred. This
ambiguity allows for the reinterpretation essential to the film.
 Truth and Lies 191

6. Reinterpretation: the ‘Wilkomirski in tears’ text

As a final point about reinterpretation, attention may be drawn to a
number of images which recur throughout the film, each time in a
different context and with a different interpretation indicated by the
voice-over. One example is a home-made video text which shows
Wilkomirski visiting the site of the concentration camp of Majdanek
as an adult. As he walks around the site, now so peaceful, then the
scene of so much human suffering, he breaks down in tears. Similar
footage of Wilkomirski with a handkerchief to his face is shown
several times throughout the film, and each time it is interpreted
differently by the voice-over, as shown below.
First telling:
Narrator: At the age of three or four he entered a concentration camp.
Second telling:
Wilkomirski’s partner: And I think one of the deepest impression was for
me when he said you know it was so crowded and now it’s so empty and
the grass it was very high and and it was very very moving the– the–
whole situation.
Narrator: Next to the gate children were held.
Third telling:
Narrator: Wilkomirski admits he studied the holocaust from college
onwards. Before this trip to Majdanek in 1993 his passports disclose
several previous trips to Poland. On any one he could have visited
Majdanek.
… At Majdanek his emotion seemed real enough.
Fourth telling (interspersed with news footage of elderly Jews being mistreated):
Ganzfried: ... so this guy desperately tried to make a character out of
himself. So you know what better character can you have but the victim?
Karpf: If you are victimised, miserable, turbulent person because you’ve
been adopted, because you’ve been badly treated, you aren’t necessarily
going to get the kind of sympathy that you’re going to get if you are a
holocaust survivor.
Fifth telling:
Karpf: If he set out to delude people obviously that feels like a terribly
calculated and very sick unpleasant thing to do. If he somehow had such a
profound sense of identification that his own identity somehow merged
into that of a holocaust survivor I suppose one would be more charitable.
But I think it is a key question.

At the first two showings of this footage, the audience is likely to

accept the reality of the emotion conveyed. The third showing casts
192 Susan Hunston

doubt on this, and the fourth and fifth showings assume that
Wilkomirski is lying and ask what his motives might be. Each time
the sequence is shown, then, the emotion presented is re-evaluated: as
genuine grief and then as hypocritical pretence. Because the same
image is repeated it is apparent that both interpretations cannot be
true, and our acceptance of the hypocrisy forces us to reject the grief.
7. Conclusion
Truth and Lies is a remarkable film that has at its heart a debate about
the epistemic status of a literary work: is Fragments fact or fiction? I
have suggested in this paper that this debate is mirrored by the
interspersal of words and images of varying statuses in the film itself.
Specifically, the second half of the film reinterprets the first,
something that is possible without inconsistency because in the first
half of the film there is considerable ambiguity or indeterminacy in
the narrator’s voice.
This film is, however, interesting not only for its treatment of the story
concerned, but also for the attention it draws to the very nature of
documentary. The first half of the film – ‘Binjamin’s Story’ – is
credible in its own terms as an account of Wilkomirski’s early life.7 It
uses many of the resources common in historical documentaries, such
as interviews, contemporary film, and dramatic reconstruction. I
suggest that audiences tend to accept such films as accurate accounts
of the historical events. In particular, they tend to accept that
reconstructions of past events are true in essence if not in detail. In
Truth and Lies, however, this acceptance is subsequently undercut by
the evidence presented in the second half of the film. But that part of
the film, also, is documentary and so is also open to debate. What is
drawn into question by the film is not just one person’s credibility, but
the process of documentary itself.

Endnotes
1I would like to thank Malcolm Daniel, film editor of Truth and Lies, for assistance in
preparing this paper. Responsibility for omissions and inaccuracies is of course mine.
Malcolm Daniel was awarded the 2000 BAFTA award for non-fiction film editing for
his work on this film.
2The notion of ‘status’ is taken from Hunston (1994, 2000) and adapted for use here.
An integral part of the theory of status is the distinction between averral and
 Truth and Lies 193

attribution, made by Sinclair (1986) and developed in Tadros (1993) and Hunston
(2000).
3Although these are two distinct sequences, it is not possible to say which one the
audience will perceive here. As Hoey (1983: 18-19), following Winter (1982), notes,
relations between clauses are determined by readers, not writers (or hearers, not
speakers), and there is always scope for different readers to perceive different
relations (see also Hoey 1991: 12). The relation ‘apparent + real’ is identified by
Winter (1982: 196-98) as ‘hypothetical + real’.
4Signals of attribution include ‘say’ and ‘admit’; signals of hedging include ‘seem’
and ‘could’. Status identifiers include ‘the fact is’ and ‘highly unlikely’.
5The first two of these are narrator averral. The phrase ‘Ganzfried discovered’
indicates, of course, that the following statement is attributed to Ganzfried, but
responsibility for the statement remains with the narrator, as it does when a statement
is averred, because of the verb ‘discover’ (Hunston 2000).
6For a discussion of colour and its relationship to perceived reality in images, see
Kress & van Leeuwen (1996: 165-68).
7This is not strictly true, as the film begins with a summary of the whole argument, so
that at the beginning of the section entitled ‘Binjamin’s Story’ the audience is already
aware that this story will be contradicted. In spite of this, ‘Binjamin’s Story’ is a
convincing and internally coherent account.

References
Hoey, Michael. 1983. On the Surface of Discourse. London: Allen & Unwin.
__. 1991. Patterns of Lexis in Text. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hunston, Susan. 1994. ‘Evaluation and Organisation in a Sample of Written
Academic Discourse’ in Coulthard, Malcolm (ed.). Advances in Written Text
Analysis. London: Routledge: 191-218.
__. 2000. ‘Evaluation and the Planes of Discourse: Status and Value in Persuasive
Texts’ in Hunston & Thompson (2000): 177-206.
Hunston, Susan, and Geoff Thompson (eds). 2000. Evaluation in Text: Authorial
Stance and the Construction of Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. 1996. Reading Images: The Grammar of
Visual Design. London: Routledge.
Sinclair, John. 1986. ‘Fictional Worlds’ in Coulthard, Malcolm (ed.) Talking about
Text. Birmingham: ELR Monographs 13: 43-60.
Tadros, Angela. 1993. ‘The Pragmatics of Text Averral and Attribution in Academic
Texts’ in Hoey, Michael (ed.) Data, Description, Discourse. London:
HarperCollins: 98-114.
Winter, Eugene. 1982. Towards a Contextual Grammar of English. London: Allen &
Unwin.
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 PART IV

CORPUS-ENABLED STYLISTICS

Technology and Stylistics: The Web Connection

Donald E. Hardy

Abstract
There are at least four potential problems in high-tech stylistics pedagogy and
research: 1) high costs of purchasing individual programs or site licences; 2) front-end
overloading of the technological learning curve; 3) inflexibility in the analytic tool; 4)
a focus on technology for the sake of technology. The motivation, structure, and use
of the author’s text-analysis program – TEXTANT – will serve as illustrations of
solutions to these potential problems. The ‘front-end’ of TEXTANT is designed with
the beginning student in mind, and the ‘back-end’ may be relatively easily modified
by the designer in response to particular needs of users. TEXTANT is written in Perl
and runs on a password-protected website.1

Key words: computational stylistics; Perl; software; text-analysis; corpora.

1. Introduction
One obvious strategy for promoting stylistics in the curriculum and
research agenda of literary and linguistic studies is the motivation of
stylistic methods and analyses within computer-based pedagogy and
research. There are several sets of dangers in the use of computers for
text analysis: for the instructor, for the student, and for the researcher.
However, most of these dangers are at least relatively manageable
with the use of Web-based text processing and analysis. This chapter
specifies some of the more prominent of these dangers and
demonstrates how it is that a text analysis and statistical program,
entitled TEXTANT (TEXT ANalysis Tools), serves as a solution in
advanced development to several problems involved in teaching
196 Donald E. Hardy

selected computational methods of linguistic analysis, in making

available to a consortium of text researchers both corpora and text-
processing software, and in using the program specifically for stylistic
analysis. TEXTANT, which I wrote using Perl (Practical Extraction
and Report Language), demonstrates many of the advantages of
creating and managing software and corpora on the Web for both
pedagogical and research purposes. In an age of increasing
technological need, drastically reduced educational funding, and the
consequent shortage of technological expertise, Web programming is
an attractive alternative for stylistics students and researchers needing
customisable text-processing software and access to corpora.
2. Pedagogy and technological need
In an introduction to stylistics at the graduate level in the English
department at Northern Illinois University (NIU), a mid-sized
university quite typical in America in having no linguistics department
but having a diffuse collection of linguists and linguistics students
across campus (in English, psychology, foreign languages,
anthropology, speech pathology), the following are the skills and
materials that are taught in a typical 16-week semester: 1) the use of at
least one text-search software program; 2) basic statistics and the use
of at least one statistical software package; 3) basic research design; 4)
the literary work of an author or authors, typically one or more authors
whose texts have been scanned into ASCII form (e. g., Jane Austen,
Flannery O’Connor, Henry James); 5) syntactic and morphological
analysis concentrating on structures of interest to stylisticians; and 6)
the answer to the most frequently asked question, ‘Why would you
want to go to all this trouble?’ That last question is perhaps the most
difficult one of the semester and is answerable only by extended
demonstration, that is, the demonstration of the use of computer-aided
stylistic methodology and interpretation, ideally, to contribute
potentially to both linguistics and literary analysis in a way that is not
feasible without the technology. About the only similarities between
the stylistics course and any other literary course in our department
are the literary texts themselves. The students do buy and read print
editions of the literary texts, but an author is chosen at least in part on
the basis of whether a significant number of the author’s works are
already available on the Web, as in the cases of Austen and James, or
whether the professor has enough interest in the author to scan the
works himself, as in the case of my interest in O’Connor. There are
 Technology and Stylistics 197

other computational methodologies, such as text markup and even

basic programming skills, with which students ideally would be
provided some practice. However, given the current pedagogical load
of the course as outlined above, markup and programming are
probably best left for another as yet uncreated and unapproved course.
In a description of a B.A. honours module in stylistics at the
University of Luton, Jon Mills and Balasubramanyam Chandramohan
(1996) describe the acquisition of an almost duplicate set of skills as
the goal of their course. Their module for honours undergraduates
analysed one relatively short text – Heart of Darkness – and restricted
statistical analysis to the level of percentages and ranked z-scores for
collocations. One of the required courses in the stylistics master’s
degree at NIU is one on linguistic research methods; however,
students in the introduction to stylistics may not have taken the
research methods course yet, and most students in the stylistics course
are not in the stylistics programme but are instead literature students
looking either to complete their single Ph.D. linguistics requirement or
to explore ‘something different’. There is no element of the stylistics
course that does not at least implicitly rely on computer technology
although most of the students in the course have no background at all
in statistics, research design, linguistics, or computer programming.
Thus, the typical student begins our stylistics course with no
background at all in the specific skills to be learned. About the only
way to guarantee failure in the course would be the use of intrusive,
distracting, and non-functional technology.
3. Research and technological need
There are at NIU several professors who perform or are interested in
beginning to perform computer-based text research. On the strength of
our combined research and pedagogical interests, the English
department has invested in a membership in the Linguistic Data
Consortium as well as purchased the ICAME (International Computer
Archive of Modern English) corpus collection. Thus, among the
corpora that we have are the Brown, LOB, London-Lund, Helsinki,
Santa Barbara Corpus of American English, Switchboard, and Wall
Street Journal corpora, plus several individually constructed datasets,
including all of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction and all of Wallace
Stevens’ poetry. As a group, we thus have several million words of
text for analysing; as a group we also have need of an easy-to-use text
198 Donald E. Hardy

analysis program and a central easily accessible repository for all of

the corpora.
4. The burden of technology
For both groups – students and researchers – there are at least four
internally complex problems in the use of technology in stylistic and
linguistic analysis: 1) costs of purchasing individual text-analysis
programs or site licences for those programs; 2) front-end overloading
of the technological learning curve; 3) inflexibility in the analytic tool;
4) focus on technology for the sake of technology. Each of these
problems involves hidden complexities. Thus, the frequently very
time-consuming tasks of installing programs and maintaining the
computers on which the programs run must be figured into the
technological learning curve and cost. Any hypothetical solution to the
second and third problems might seem mutually exclusive in that the
easier programs are to use the more inflexible and pre-determined
their structures. And focus on technology for the sake of technology is
a result not only of the joy of mastering the electronic tools but also of
a failure to realise how or why to use those tools in the production of
significant research.
The work that Mills and Chandramohan’s students performed was
possible at least in part because they used the text/statistical package
TACT (Text Analysis Computing Tools). Another easily obtained and
widely used program is Wordsmith Tools. Harald Klein has created a
useful list containing these and many other similar programs and a
basic description of each (http://www.textanalysis.info/). Eric
Rochester (2001) has written an insightful comparison of TACT and
Wordsmith; as he points out, TACT is still in many ways the standard
for prepackaged text-analysis programs. However, in reality even with
a prepackaged program there are problems with individual installation
and use. For example, there are serious shortcomings in the TACT
program, including the limited size of text that can be processed, and
the fact that the program does not run in the Windows NT or 2000
environments, the latter issue ruling out its use in our English
department computer laboratory with 20 computers running Windows
2000. This laboratory is where our stylistics and research-methods
courses are taught. In the version of TACT that Mills and
Chandramohan used, the program must be installed on individual
computers. There is a Web version of TACT under development:
 Technology and Stylistics 199

http://tactweb.humanities.mcmaster.ca/tactweb/doc/tact.htm. However,
it is very much still in its experimental stage.
One potential way to avoid the more obvious monetary costs and
operating-system limitations of prepackaged text-analysis programs is
individual programming, which provides maximum flexibility in the
ability to respond not only to operating-system advances but also to
individual student and researcher needs. Maximum flexibility may
indeed be gained only by programming by the individual student or
researcher, but custom programming can lead to unrealistic demands
on those with the programming expertise to create text-processing
programs of enormous complexity and specificity. The dangers for the
programmer and for the field of humanities computing are 1) that the
programmer is called on to produce relatively isolated pieces of
programs for exceedingly specific tasks; and 2) that individual
programmers reinvent the wheel multiple times. The first danger is
illustrated in Eric Johnson’s (1996) description of the 15-odd
programs that he wrote individually either for his own students or for
colleagues who became interested in text processing but who could
not write their own programs. It is quite common, however, for
authors such as Johnson to make their programs widely available to
others, as have John Sinclair et al. (1998) with their collocation tests.
The costly reinvention of the programming wheel is perhaps
unavoidable in these early stages of the mass adoption of computer-
based research and pedagogy. One relatively obvious and easily
avoidable error in duplication of effort is the multiple installation of a
program that needs only one installation on one server. So, for
example, even though the next section of this paper presents
TEXTANT as an exemplar of how to avoid some of the more obvious
dangers of technology, in the interests of experimentation I recently
arranged for the installation of TEXTANT on a server at another
location where researchers are interested in Web text processing and
are experimenting with various text-analysis programs. In retrospect I
realise that I should simply have loaded the research group’s files to
my own server for analysis and evaluation. Primarily due to internal
networking complications, it took two full working days, four
different computer technicians, two hours of my time in a telephone
conference, and the installation of two different server software
packages – IIS4 and Personal Web Server – to get Perl working with
200 Donald E. Hardy

the server software at the remote location. Once Perl and Personal
Web Server were installed and communicating with one another, the
installation of TEXTANT was simply a matter of copying files from a
floppy disk. In spite of the touted portability of Perl programs, no one
except a relatively highly computer-literate user is going to have the
patience or knowledge to install Perl and a Web server and then
configure that Web server for the use of TEXTANT. In summarising
the experience of the publishing house Chadwyck-Healey in creating,
first, a CD-ROM of British and American literature, Steven Hall
(1998: 290) writes that in a survey of universities that had purchased
their English Poetry collection it was discovered that many of those
universities had not made the resource available except by use on a
single CD-ROM drive. Hall points out that among the many reasons
why Chadwyck-Healey decided to put their collection on the Web was
the aim of increasing its availability for research and teaching as well
as the ease of updating their ‘databases, making good omissions and
correcting errors’ (1998: 286). Thus, the availability of programs and
data on the Web both increases availability and decreases the need for
duplication of effort, or reinvention of the wheel.
Two final technological dangers to consider are that student and
researcher end up 1) simply surfing through the programs with no real
understanding of how or why to use the programs; and/or 2) focussing
on technology for the sake of technology. Rosanne Potter (1996: 183)
registers a warning about the first danger in relation to the use of
hypertext in the literary classroom. She writes that ‘the literature
student who is clicking merrily down the lane is not re-creating that
work, but sliding irresponsibly over its surface’. Potter points out that
‘a research tool requires a research plan and the hard work of trial-
and-error data manipulation before one is anywhere near doing
research or, for that matter, even learning with it’.
All students in the NIU stylistics programme have had some
experience in literary analysis. Some have had quite a bit. However,
students typically have initial difficulty connecting their literary
expertise with the technology available to them. A program that
produces impressive frequency counts, collocational figures, and key-
words-in-context displays would be worse than useless if the student
had to concentrate too much on how to install and operate the program
that produces the impressive computer displays. The goal for the
 Technology and Stylistics 201

instructor of computational stylistics is to turn the student’s attention

to a discovery that an empirical study of, say, O’Connor’s use of
body-part terms will get at some of the literary issues of interest in the
term grotesque. Potter (1996: 182) has aptly written that ‘technology
does not speed up the process of doing valuable work’. In fact, as she
points out, the time that it takes to learn the technology can mean the
coverage of fewer literary works. Technology will not allow us to
perform more quickly, subtly, or thoroughly the literary analysis that
students are probably familiar with, especially if the technology itself
becomes the focus of instruction; instead, computer technology should
almost recede to the background as it allows students to perform a
different kind of analysis, a type of analysis that begins with
hypotheses about how a particular form patterns stylistically,
progresses to a gathering of empirical data on that form, and then ends
with a refinement of the hypotheses that the students started with. Of
course, the successful execution of this type of analysis depends on
successful education in the goals and methods of computer-based
linguistics and stylistics.
In his summary paper on Chadwyck-Healey’s experience in creating
its corpus of literary texts, Hall (1998: 289) makes a trenchant point:
We have told our customers how to use the database, through our manuals,
help files and on-site training; we have perhaps failed, however, to tell them
why to use it, to spell out the ways in which it might contribute to their
teaching or research. (We intend, incidentally, to address this issue for
Literature Online).
Although I do not think that it is necessarily the long-term job of
Chadwyck-Healey to explain to instructors or students why such a tool
is valuable, if their tool is to be used, rather than simply purchased by
a library, such information is necessary until the time, if it ever
arrives, when large numbers of students and researchers already know
what large searchable literary texts are for.
5. Web-based technological solutions
In the stylistics and linguistics community at NIU, the dangers
outlined in the section above have been at least tempered through the
use of TEXTANT.2 The free program runs on one server and is
available through the Web to registered users so that the labour costs
of programming and maintenance are absorbed by only one member
of the research consortium. The program interface is constructed with
202 Donald E. Hardy

simple drop-down menus, radio-buttons, and text boxes. The program

itself may be modified in order to accommodate any particular need,
within reason, of individual users. And given that TEXTANT runs
almost trouble-free on the Web, users are better able to concentrate on
using the program to produce their own research. This section details
text markup and preparation; the architecture of the latest version of
TEXTANT; planned additions; and use of the program by both
students and researchers.
TEXTANT runs on a password-protected website (http://textant.
colostate.edu). One of the most important features of administering
TEXTANT on a password-protected site is that one may use
copyright-protected materials with the protection of the ‘fair-use’
copyright agreement. That is, one may use copyrighted material for
one’s teaching and research but need not give ASCII copies of the
texts to one’s students. There is no feature in the program that allows
students or researchers to print out or download entire texts from the
corpora that are contained within it. TEXTANT currently has loaded
within it many copyrighted-protected texts such as the complete
stories and novels of Flannery O’Connor and the complete poems of
Wallace Stevens as well as the Brown corpus and the Switchboard
corpus. Thus, without having to go to a central computer laboratory,
students and researchers are able to access (potentially from their own
homes) copyright-protected material as well as the computer program
used to search those texts and produce basic statistics. And no extra
software is required on the users’ computers other than a Web
browser.
TEXTANT produces the standard frequency counts, word lists, and
statistics that one finds in most text-analysis programs. It provides
total word counts for each corpus. It can produce both alphabetically
sorted and frequency-sorted type/token counts; these windows also
provide ratios. In either of the type/token count windows, users may
create, save, retrieve, and modify lexical groups for the purposes of
efficient group searching in the search window. A separate
collocations window provides both fixed-phrase and variable-phrase
collocations along with frequency counts, t-scores, and mutual-
information scores. The fixed-phrase collocations may vary in length
between two and eight words. The distance for the variable-phrase
collocations may vary from one to four words on either side of the
 Technology and Stylistics 203

optional target word. If a target word is specified, only those

collocations with the target word are listed by the program.
TEXTANT also provides the opportunity to choose alpha probability
thresholds for t-scores. There are separate stoplist files for auxiliary
verbs, modal verbs, determiners, coordinating conjunctions,
subordinating conjunctions, and prepositions, which may be selected
in any combination or alone. The stoplists may be applied to both
collocation windows as well as the total word token count. The
optionality of using the stoplists allows users to choose, for example,
whether to include prepositions and determiners in the lists of
collocations since collocations of the sort ‘of the’ are common but of
no interest to most researchers.
Besides the statistics that are generated in the type/token pages and the
collocation pages, TEXTANT also produces tables in which users
may enter data for statistical processing. The descriptive statistics that
may be produced are minimum, maximum, sum, count, mean, median,
mode, variance, and standard deviation. Slated for addition are basic
statistical tests for which probability tests may be run: chi-square,
anova, and correlation.
The most commonly used features of TEXTANT in stylistic work are
the search mechanisms. Some relatively simple search choices are
presented in user-friendly interfaces in TEXTANT either because the
choices are so simple that restraining user input on those searches
does not limit at all the user’s creativity or because the input of the
user would need to be so complex that any minor loss of creativity is
more than compensated for by relative ease of use and may easily be
overcome by repeated searches. First, a user may choose zero or any
number of words to include before or after the target word or phrase in
the output of the program. Thus, the immediate context in the sense of
number of words on each side of the target word is left to the user’s
choice. If one were searching for words whose relevant context might
be the simple phrase, one might choose to display few words on either
side of the target. However, if one were interested in cohesive ties in a
text and were searching for pronouns, one might want to include a
great number of words before the target. Depending on whether and
how the corpus that the user is searching is tagged, the user may
choose to search for words or phrases within dialogue or narrative or
both; search for words or phrases within a selected chapter/story or
204 Donald E. Hardy

all; and search for words or phrases in the dialogue of a particular

character. Of course, the tags are at the level of detail to please those
who inserted them and plan to use them. So, for example, most but not
all literary texts in TEXTANT are tagged for dialogue vs. narration,
usually but not always operationally defined as dialogue when the text
occurs within quotation marks and is attributed as thought or speech to
a character or characters. I have written a Perl subprogram that inserts
the dialogue and narration tags although the tagging must be hand
checked if, for example, scare-quoted words and phrases are not to be
tagged as dialogue. Text divisions such as chapters or short stories are
implicitly defined by formatting of the texts rather than with tags.
Unlike with the predetermined contextual search parameters, users
must know something of regular expressions in order to find what
they want in entering anything but the simplest words or phrases for
search material in the ‘Word or Phrase to Search for’ box. If users
don’t use regular expressions carefully, they are likely to find
something both unexpected and unwanted or not find the very thing
they are looking for. Thus, the program has an extended help page for
the use of regular expressions. That help page is reachable from the
search page for each text. For example, advanced users of the program
can use regular expressions to search for two or more words within a
specified window of words. And, of course, all of the regular
expression ‘wildcards’, such as \S for non-whitespace character or \d
for digit, may be used.
At NIU, TEXTANT is currently used by two psychology professors,
two English professors, and their graduate student research assistants
in both psychology and English, as well as one Ph.D. candidate who is
using the program for his dissertation research on pseudo-clefts in
English. TEXTANT is also used by the American research institution
North Central Regional Education Laboratory (NCREL) for the
purpose of analysing text files composed of the search strings that are
gathered from the search engine of their website. NCREL’s specific
use of the program provides a good example of the flexibility of the
programming that is possible in Perl. It also illustrates the
convenience of Web-based text processing, in which both program
and texts may be used from any location with Web access. Thus,
NCREL e-mails me the data, I load it for them into the proper
directory, and they analyse the data from their own offices over the
 Technology and Stylistics 205

Web. The ultimate purpose of NCREL’s research using TEXTANT is

to structure their website so that information that users tend to look for
frequently is easily found. Researchers at NCREL indicated that they
had grown weary of the labour-intensive text preprocessing that was
necessary to analyse their texts in other affordable commercial or
freeware programs. In TEXTANT, the text data is automatically
preprocessed and loaded into the program. The program itself formats
the data and deletes irrelevant information. For example, the raw data
in (1) are transformed to (2):
1) [Sun Jan 14 6:09:24 ‘The Thinking Curriculum’
[Sun Jan 14 8:12:32 ‘(no search)’
[Sun Jan 14 8:20:51 ‘education technology’
2) The Thinking Curriculum
education technology
Empty searches, dates, times, and quotation marks are deleted.
Student interest in TEXTANT currently takes two forms: 1) students
using the program to write papers for me on texts that I have
preloaded for them; and 2) students preparing their own texts for
analysis in other classes. The second category of students is
interesting for the reason that they must do some text preparation
themselves and thus learn some issues regarding corpus preparation,
such as the use of a sophisticated text processor like Textpad and the
use of regular expressions in such a program. Thus, some of the more
advanced areas of text processing and analysis are picked up by the
students as they perform their own research on their own data.
I wrote TEXTANT in the first place to allow me to analyse Flannery
O’Connor’s fiction for a series of articles and a book on her style.
Over a period of three or four years, I had become extraordinarily
frustrated with the performance and reliability of existing text-analysis
programs. The primary use of TEXTANT in my O’Connor studies has
been to search for and count tokens of morphological and syntactic
patterns such as not negation, see + clausal or phrasal complements,
and body-part terms. Using TEXTANT, I am able to process all of
O’Connor’s fiction in one text file, whose size makes economical
processing impossible in programs such as TACT, for example. As
Biber, Conrad & Reppen (1998: 255-56) point out, there are many
advantages to writing one’s own program for text analysis. For
example, by processing O’Connor’s fiction in one file, I am able to
206 Donald E. Hardy

perform many tasks at once that otherwise would necessitate several

repetitive, and potentially error-inducing, processing runs. In
particular, in the initial preparation of the O’Connor texts, I was able
to create one ‘suspect-words’ list in the final check of the accuracy of
the electronic scanning of the texts into ASCII files. Greater accuracy
in text searches is made possible by the ease with which the results of
searches can be double-checked against multiple versions of the
corpus, ensuring the identification and correction of any errors
introduced by coding the corpora for contextual variables such as
dialogue and narration.
By means of a reliable text-analysis program, students can be led back
to the text and away from an overemphasis on abstract notions of
theme, characterisation, and even narrative structure. One specific way
to do this is to ask them questions that can only be easily answered by
means of a text-analysis program like TEXTANT. The following is an
excerpt from O’Connor’s ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’, in which
narration, dialogue, and speaker identity are tagged.
“If you would pray,”<G=D> <G#N>the old lady said,<G=N> “Jesus would
help you.”<G=D> <SP@Grand>“That’s right,”<G=D> <G#N>The Misfit
said.<G=N> <SP@Misfit>“Well then, why don’t you pray?”<G=D>
<G#N>she asked trembling with delight suddenly.<G=N> <SP@Grand>“I
don’t want no hep,”<G=D> <G#N>he said.<G=N> “I’m doing all right by
myself.”<G=D>
The information that is encoded here and throughout the tagged
version of the story is normally constructed or accessed by any reader
with no conscious effort. What the computer technology makes
possible is simply the rearrangement and acquisition of this
information very quickly and efficiently. For example, it is possible in
TEXTANT to find and quantify almost instantaneously all dialogue,
all narration, or all dialogue by any one character. My favourite
introductory exercise with students is to ask them which of the
characters in ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’ talks the most. The
invariable answer is the grandmother; she is perceived as being
garrulous to a fault, full of rambling detail in her stories and nosy. A
raw count in TEXTANT of the number of words spoken by her and
The Misfit shows that she produces 602 words while he produces 978
words. The difference between what readers expect and what results
from an objective count is even more striking when it is realised that
The Misfit does not even enter the story until it is half-way finished.
 Technology and Stylistics 207

Thus, the disjunction between perception and reality can be discussed

as perception is influenced by expectations of gendered differences in
ways and quantity of talk and by narrative focus. One can also search
the texts without specifying the context of dialogue, narration, or
character, so one can in fact abstract out the tags in searches showing
students the informational gain from having these tags. The limits of
the existing tags may also be demonstrated by showing for example
how it is that one might study clausal complements to cognitive verbs
by first creating a group of cognition verbs, then searching for those
verbs, and finally sorting through by hand the complements that are
clausal rather than phrasal.
6. Conclusions
I am not naïve about the permanence of websites and the programs
and information available within them. Byron Anderson (1998)
laments the lack of scholarly emphasis on ‘value, relevance, quality,
and nature of the content’ of the World Wide Web. Indeed, three of
the trustworthy review sites that Anderson points us to in 1998, or
1997 since the publication date of his article is in 1998, are now in
October 2002 (my writing time) no longer available as review sites:
Point (http://www.pointcom.com), Magellan Internet Guide
(http://www.mckinley.com/), and Infofilter (http://www.usc.edu/users
/help/flick/Infofilter). However, unlike a great deal of raw information
on the Web that can be found more reliably and predictably in a good
library, a Web-resident program such as TEXTANT is a promising
model for stylisticians and text-analysts in search of economical and
reliable text-processing software.
Endnotes
1
Although this paper was written when I was at Northern Illinois University, most of
the generalisations and particulars about computer usage and need apply to my current
teaching and research environment at Colorado State University as well.
2
Readers who wish to have accounts in TEXTANT in order to evaluate the program
may email the author at [email protected] to request those accounts.

References
Anderson, Byron. 1998. ‘The World Wide Web and the Humanities: Superhighway to
What? Research, Quality, and “Literature”’ in Humanities Collections 1(1): 25-
40.
208 Donald E. Hardy

Biber, Douglas, Susan Conrad and Randi Reppen. 1998. Corpus Linguistics:
Investigating Language Structure and Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Hall, Steven. 1998. ‘Literature Online – Building a Home for English and American
Literature on the World Wide Web’ in Computers and the Humanities 32(4): 285-
301.
Johnson, Eric. 1996. ‘Professor-Created Computer Programs for Student Research’ in
Computers and the Humanities 30(2): 171-79.
Klein, Harald. ‘Text Analysis Info Page’. Online at http://www.textanalysis.info/
(consulted 15.10.2002).
Lancashire, Ian, et al. 1996. Using TACT with Electronic Texts. New York: Modern
Language Association.
‘Literature Online’. Online at http://lion.chadwyck.com (consulted 15.10.2002).
Mills, Jon, and Balasubramanyam Chandramohan. 1996. ‘Literary Studies: A
Computer Assisted Teaching Methodology’ in Computers and the Humanities
30(2): 165-70.
Potter, Rosanne G. 1996. ‘What Computers Are Good for in the Literature Classroom’
in Computers and the Humanities 30(2): 181-90.
Rochester, Eric. 2001. ‘New Tools for Analysing Texts’ in Language and Literature
10(2): 187-91.
Sinclair, John, et al. 1998. ‘Language Independent Statistical Software for Corpus
Exploration’ in Computers and the Humanities 31(3): 229-55.
‘TACTWeb 1.0 Home Page’. Online at http://tactweb.humanities.mcmaster.ca
/tactweb/doc/tact.htm (consulted 15.10.2002).
‘TEXTANT’. Online at http://textant.colostate.edu (consulted 29.03.2004).
 How Playwrights Construct Their Dramatic Worlds:
A Corpus-based Study of Vocatives
in Early Modern English Comedies*

Michi Shiina

Abstract
Vocatives are generally neglected in linguistic research. Carefully investigated,
however, vocatives reveal themselves to be a rich source of socio-historical
information about the characters found in period dramas. This paper focuses on
the use of vocatives in a selection of Early Modern English comedies, and
illustrates how a variety of vocatives are exploited by playwrights in staging the
relationships and interactions of characters within their dramatic worlds. This is
made possible through a combination of historical pragmatics, stylistics,
sociolinguistics, and corpus linguistics. Theoretically, this study draws on Brown
& Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory and Brown & Gilman’s (1960) study of
address terms. A quantitative analysis teases out general patterns of vocative use,
and a qualitative analysis examines deviant cases in terms of pragmatics and
stylistics. The paper illustrates how computer-assisted linguistic research can help
us explore the literary craftsmanship and creativity of playwrights of the past.
Keywords: vocatives; address terms; historical pragmatics; corpus-based
approach; discourse markers.

1. Introduction
How do playwrights construct the characters in their dramatic worlds?
Syntactically marginal as it is, a vocative is an effective linguistic
device to describe the relationship between characters in a dramatic
world which consists mainly of language. In this paper, I take a
corpus-based approach with a historical pragmatic perspective to
analyse the use of vocatives. Consequently, my research depends on
several linguistic fields.

*This research was supported by MEXT. KAKENHI 15520320.

210 Michi Shiina

2. Vocatives as discourse markers

2.1. Politeness scale of vocatives
The theoretical framework I apply to analyse pragmatic functions of
vocatives is Brown & Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory. The most
significant notion in their theory is face, which is people’s emotionally
invested self-image. Face consists of positive face and negative face.
Positive face refers to appreciation by others, whilst negative face
refers to personal freedom of action. The weightiness of a face-
threatening act involves three factors: the relative power of and social
distance between the interlocutors, and the ranking of impositions.
Relative power and social distance are closely related to the vocative
form, whereas the ranking of impositions is related to the pragmatic
force of the utterance. Vocatives, as discourse markers, mitigate or
strengthen the illocutionary force of the utterance.
I use a continuum on a sliding scale of values devised by Raumolin-
Brunberg (1996) to align vocative forms and analyse them in terms of
politeness. Vocative forms are classified into two types: the
deferential and the familiar.
Figure 1 Politeness scale of vocatives
Deferential type Familiar type
negative face positive face

Honorific T+SN SN FN Familiarisers Kin Endearment

Abbreviations: T+SN = Title-plus-surname; SN = Surname; FN = First name.

As Figure 1 shows, the deferential type oriented to negative face

includes honorifics (e. g. Sir) and title-surname combinations (e. g.
Mr. Strictland; title-surname combinations include title and first name
combinations such as Sir Paul), whilst the familiar type oriented to
positive face includes surnames (e. g. Wat), first names in full form
(e.g. Thomas), shortened first names (e. g. Tom), familiarisers (e. g.
Friend), kinship terms (e. g. Mother), and endearments (e. g. Dear).
Although it is not on this scale, I have also included abusives (e. g.
Villain) in my classification.
2.2. Three-dimensional model of vocatives
Address terms have been discussed comprehensively since Brown &
Gilman (1960). To summarise these past discussions, I refer to Wales
 How Playwrights Construct Their Dramatic Worlds 211

(1983), who presents a list of dichotomies of the use of thou and you
during the medieval period (116). Her model provides insight into the
basic concepts underlying choices of vocative form, if I assume that
thou forms correspond to familiar vocatives, and you forms to
deferential vocatives.
Figure 2 Dichotomies in use of vocatives (adapted from Wales 1983)
Deferential type of vocatives Familiar type of vocatives
to social superiors to social inferiors
to social equals (upper class) to social equals (lower class)
in public in private
formal or neutral familiar or intimate
respect, admiration contempt, scorn

Combining the politeness scale of vocatives presented in Figure 1

with the dichotomies in Figure 2, I have constructed a three-
dimensional model for vocative forms. I have transposed vocatives on
the politeness scale onto three axes: power, solidarity, and contextual
condition. The vertical axis of power deals with vocatives used
between equals and non-equals in status and social roles. The
horizontal axis of solidarity situates vocatives used between those in
close or distant relationships. The contextual axis is twofold in that it
refers, on the one hand, to the situational condition, such as
formal/private context, and on the other hand, to the emotional state of
the interlocutors, such as admiration/contempt. This is represented in
Figure 3.
Figure 3 Three-dimensional model of politeness scale of vocatives
Power (+)
Contextual condition

Solidarity (0) Solidarity (+)

Power (-)
212 Michi Shiina

This model helps explain the factors influencing a dramatist’s choice

of vocative form between characters. The interlocutors are to be
located on this politeness scale. If the addressee is more powerful than
the speaker, s/he goes up the hierarchical power axis, and the
politeness scale moves towards negative politeness. But if the
addressee is lower down the social ladder, the politeness scale turns to
positive. Thus if the addressee is higher in social status than the
speaker, deferential types of vocatives are expected. Conversely, if the
addressee is lower in status, familiar vocatives are generally used.
Likewise, along the horizontal solidarity axis, when the relationship
becomes closer, the degree of positive politeness increases, whilst it
turns negative when the relationship becomes distant. In this case, the
deferential type is used when the social relationship is distant, whilst
the familiar type is used when it is closer. The third axis depends on
the context. In a formal situation, the politeness scale moves towards
negative politeness, whereas in an informal situation it moves towards
positive politeness. Thus in formal situations the deferential type is
expected (Watts 1992), whereas the familiar type is expected in
informal situations. The emotional situation, on the other hand, is
more complicated and it depends on context. This will be discussed
further in §5.2 below.

3. Data and methodology

3.1. Data
My data come from my own ‘Vocative-Focussed Socio-Pragmatic
Corpus’ (120,000 words), which consists of twelve play extracts
between 1640 and 1760. This corpus comes from the million-word
‘Corpus of English Dialogues 1560-1760’ compiled by Merja Kytö
and Jonathan Culpeper (Culpeper & Kytö 1997).

3.2. Methodology
There are two tagging systems in my annotation. One is the socio-
pragmatic tagging system (Archer & Culpeper 2003), which describes
the interlocutors by sex, role, status, age, etc., as follows:
Socio-pragmatic tagging system
1. Number of interlocutors
2. ID numbers of the interlocutors
3. Sex of the interlocutors
4. Roles of the interlocutors
 How Playwrights Construct Their Dramatic Worlds 213

5. Status of the interlocutors

6. Age of the interlocutors
The second is the vocative tagging system (Shiina 2002), which
distinguishes 10 kinds of linguistic property for each vocative:
Vocative tagging system
1. Presence/absence of a vocative in the utterance
2. Pronoun used in the vocative
3. Premodifier used in the vocative
4. Vocative form
5. Vocative position in the clause
6. Number of words preceding the vocative in the clause
7. Number of words following the vocative in the clause
8. Pronominal address term used in the utterance
9. Number of words in the vocative
10. Lexical item number of the vocative

4. Quantitative analysis: General patterns in the use of vocatives

4.1. Vocatives used between spouses
Are there any general patterns to be discerned in the use of vocatives?
Here let us see how the vocative form is used according to the three
axes. First, let us give solidarity a positive value, and change the
values on the power axis. The vocative use between spouses is an
example of this kind. Table 1 shows how husband and wife use
vocatives in the nobility, the gentry and the middling groups:
Table 1 Vocative use between husbands and wives
Familiar type Deferential
Interlocutors Status type
endear kin familiar short full T+SN Honor
FN FN
husband→wife 1
nobility
wife→husband 1 21
husband→wife 8 2 1 4
gentry
wife→husband 17 2 10 15
husband→wife middling 2 5 10 3 4
wife→husband groups 5 8 5 1

Note: The numbers in the cells are raw numbers of tokens.

214 Michi Shiina

In the nobility, the wife uses the deferential type, mainly honorifics, to
address her husband. In the gentry, the spouses use both the
deferential and familiar types, but their preference is for the
deferential type. Unlike the nobility, the gentry use the title-plus-
surname as well as honorifics. In the middling groups, their vocative
use leans towards the familiar type. To summarise, between husband
and wife, there is a status difference in the use of vocatives in that
characters of higher status prefer the deferential type and those of
lower status the familiar type. This supports the observation made by
Brown & Gilman (1960), i. e. the power semantic.
As Figure 4 shows, the wife is in a contradictory space in that the
power semantic suggests she use the deferential type whereas the
solidarity semantic indicates the opposite. How does she solve this
conflict? One solution is to add a premodifier of endearment, such as
dear as in ‘Dear Mr. Strictland’, to make vocatives more intimate. The
husband also uses vocatives of endearment such as Love and Dear,
premodifiers of endearment such as dear and poor, as well as an in-
group marker my, to mitigate their hierarchical relationship, as in ‘my
Dear’, ‘poor Madam’, and ‘my Love’. These additional items of
endearment on both sides seem to emphasise their solidarity
relationship, though their hierarchical power relationship is
simultaneously indicated.
Figure 4 Husband and wife on the two axes

Power (+)
negative politeness
husband

negative politeness positive politeness

Solidarity (0) Solidarity (+)

wife

positive politeness
Power (–)
 How Playwrights Construct Their Dramatic Worlds 215

4.2. Vocatives used between customer and tradesperson

Secondly, let us give solidarity a negative rather than positive value,
and change the values on the power axis. Table 2 shows vocative use
between customers and tradespersons. They mainly use deferential
type of vocatives, because shopping is ostensibly an activity done in a
public situation in which there are other shoppers and apprentices
present. Between them, there is a division in social roles in that the
tradesperson must serve the customer. Concerning status, the
customer could be higher, the same as, or lower than the tradesperson.
In my data, when the customer is lower in status than the
tradesperson, the social roles seem to override status difference. Thus
the hierarchical axis seems to influence the choice of vocative form.
Table 2 Vocative use between customers and tradespersons
Relationship Familiar type Deferential type
familiariser T+SN honorific
customer → tradesperson 3 20 2
tradesperson → customer 1 0 41
Note: The numbers in the cells are raw numbers of tokens.

Not unlike the wife described in 4.1, the customer is also in a

contradictory position, as Figure 5 shows.
Figure 5 Customer and tradesperson on the two axes
Power (+)

customer

Solidarity (0) Solidarity (+)

tradesperson

Power (–)

In the hierarchical relationship, the customer is in a higher position in

terms of social roles, and thus entitled to use the familiar type. But the
solidarity axis indicates the opposite: the deferential type oriented to
216 Michi Shiina

negative face when they are not close friends. To resolve this conflict,
both interlocutors use the deferential type to avoid embarrassment, but
the degree of negative politeness differs. The tradesperson uses a more
deferential vocative than the customer to show their social roles. Title-
plus-surname vocatives are used from customer to tradesperson,
whereas honorifics are used from tradesperson to customer. The
familiar type is also used from customer to tradesperson, which may
be an indication of the hierarchical order based upon social roles, but
the number is too low for generalisation. This pattern changes when
they have a close personal relationship. In such a case, the
tradesperson is in a conflicting position similar to the wife discussed
above.

4.3. Vocatives used between strangers, acquaintances, and friends

The third case is when the value along the power axis is fixed and
those on the solidarity axis change, as in Figure 6:
Figure 6 Strangers, acquaintances, and friends on two axes
Power (+)

strangers – acquaintances – friends

Solidarity (0) Solidarity (+)

Power (–)

Table 3 shows how characters change their choice of vocatives when

they come to know each other. Regardless of status, strangers mainly
use honorifics such as madam, lady, and sir. This may be because they
do not know the addressee’s name, but it is also because strangers
prefer to keep distance so as to avoid embarrassment. As long as the
interlocutors use honorific vocatives, they cannot be regarded as
impolite, and thus it is safer to use honorifics.
 How Playwrights Construct Their Dramatic Worlds 217

As characters come to know each other better, they start using familiar
vocatives. When characters of lower status use vocatives to address
friends of higher status they use honorifics, whereas familiar vocatives
are used downwards. The two most frequently used vocative forms are
first name and surname. Surname vocatives are mainly used by male
friends amongst the gentry to show comradeship. These distribution
patterns are also predicted by Brown & Gilman’s (1960) configuration,
i. e. the solidarity semantic.
Table 3 Vocatives used between strangers, acquaintances, and friends
Relationship Direction Status Familiar type Deferential type
2→1 3
upwards 3→2 2
5→1 1
strangers level 1→1 2
1→2 1
downwards 2→3 1
1→5 1
2→1 1
upwards 3→2 2
3→1 20
acquaintances level 1→1 19 108
1→2 1
downwards 2→3 3
1→3 16
upwards 1→0 11
2→1 6
friends level 1→1 213 130
5→5 4
downwards 0→1 11 13
1→2 6 1
Status: 0 = nobility; 1 = gentry; 2 = professions; 3 = middling groups;
4 = ordinary commoners; 5 = lowest groups.

5. Qualitative analysis: A case study

5.1. Social network and vocative
This qualitative analysis takes an example from Brome’s A Mad
Couple Well Match’d (1653). Figure 7 illustrates the social networks
(Milroy 1987) of some characters in Brome’s text. I focus on the
network surrounding Alicia Saleware, the wife of Thomas Saleware
218 Michi Shiina

who owns a drapery shop. Table 4 summarises the vocatives used by

Lady Thrivewell and Alicia Saleware.
The default forms are static sociolinguistic phenomena, and the shifts
dynamic pragmatic phenomena. The shift of vocatives from the
default form to other forms is pragmatically interesting, because these
are the moments when the relationship between the characters can be
reconfigured either to the positive or negative side of the politeness
scale. These are also the moments when the third axis comes into play
– that of formality or emotion.
Figure 7 Social network of Brome’s characters
married
Sir customer
Oliver Lady
Thrivewell Thrivewell
(adultery) customer

tradesperson

Thomasmarried married Alicia

Saleware Saleware

Table 4 Norms and deviations in the use of vocatives in Brome’s text

speaker → addressee Vocatives
default form shift to
Alicia → Lady T. Honorific: Madam + modifier of positive value:
most courteous
Lady T. → Alicia T + SN: Mistris Saleware + modifier of endearment:
sweet

5.2. Vocatives in context: A dialogue between a tradesperson and

her customer
In this section, I will discuss vocatives in a dialogue between a
tradesperson and her customer. The following example is a dialogue
between Alicia Saleware and her customer, Lady Thrivewell. Lady
Thrivewell discovers that her husband has had an affair with Alicia
(see Figure 7), and has paid her £100. Lady Thrivewell goes to
Alicia’s shop, buys an enormous amount of expensive lace, and pays
 How Playwrights Construct Their Dramatic Worlds 219

£100 less than the full price, saying Alicia has already received the
difference from her husband. Lady Thrivewell has just exacted her
revenge.
Example
1 [Alicia] Madam your Beere.
2 [Lady] I’le pledge you Mistris Saleware.
3 [Alicia] I shall presume then Madam – [Drinks.]
…
4 [Alicia] And I hope you will finde your money so well bestowd
5 Madam, that you will vouchsafe always to know the Shop.
6 [Lady] Ever upon the like occasion, Mistris Saleware, so most
7 kindly farwell sweet Mistris Saleware.
8 [Alicia] The humblest of your servants Madam.
…
9 [Lady] … but beware of old Knights that have young Ladies of their
10 owne. Once more adieu sweet Mistris Saleware.
11 [Alicia] Most courteous Madam. (Brome, C3V-C4R, my emphasis)

After shopping, Lady Thrivewell asks for a glass of beer. In the first
three lines, the two women seem to converse as customer and
tradesperson normally would. Here the default forms are used (cf.
Table 4). But in fact, Lady Thrivewell is triumphant because she has
just put Alicia down by her well-planned revenge. Alicia, on the other
hand, is furious with good reason. From l. 4 to l. 5, Alicia throws Lady
Thrivewell a bluff with a default vocative in mid-sentence. Alicia
pretends to be calm as she makes an ironic utterance, but the vocative
in the middle of her statement reveals her resentment towards Lady
Thrivewell. Alicia inserts a vocative in her utterance to confirm that
Lady Thrivewell is getting her message. In other words, this vocative
is used as a discourse marker to reinforce the illocutionary force of the
utterance. The vocative here seems to express the speaker’s emotion
and attitude towards the addressee. Lady Thrivewell responds to
Alicia’s challenge as if nothing untoward has occurred. When Lady
Thrivewell bids Alicia farewell in ll. 6-7, she cannot help expressing
joy at her victory over Alicia. Lady Thrivewell does so by using very
polite language. Here, the strain in the relationship becomes more
apparent. Lady Thrivewell adds the premodifier of endearment, sweet,
to the default form, Mistris Saleware, which is supported by the
phrase, most kindly farewell, thus the politeness vector moves even
220 Michi Shiina

further towards positive politeness. Here then, Lady Thrivewell’s

utterance is rather complicated, because it is oriented both to negative
and positive politeness. Mistris Saleware is oriented to negative
politeness and sweet is oriented to positive politeness. Lady
Thrivewell’s use of the deferential vocative is a default form for a
customer to address a tradesperson, and most kindly and sweet would
in other circumstances be supposed to add a sense of endearment to
her greeting. However, this should be interpreted as a sarcastic re-
emphasis of hierarchical order between these two women, rather than
any sense of solidarity. Lady Thrivewell’s higher position here
depends not on social roles or status but on the power struggle
between two hostile women. Here Lady Thrivewell, the winner, is
basking in her victory over Alicia.
In ll. 9-10, Lady Thrivewell advises Alicia to ‘beware of old Knights
that have young Ladies of their owne’. The plural forms of old knights
and young Ladies of their owne make the advice sound as if it were
generally applicable. However, old knights here specifically refers to
Lady Thrivewell’s husband and young Ladies to Lady Thrivewell
herself. Thus this is actually an injunction and a threat: never meet or
seduce my husband again. Lady Thrivewell repeats an overpolite
farewell, this time with adieu, reinforcing her ironic stance. Her
farewell is a resolute word of parting: I shall not see you again. Lady
Thrivewell’s utterances are artificial and too polite to be perceived as
polite. They sound, in fact, impolite and scathing.
Alicia, on the other hand, responds to these artificially polite
utterances with extremely polite answers: ‘The humblest of your
servants Madam’ in l. 8, and ‘Most courteous Madam’ in l. 11. In the
former, Alicia uses the superlative form, the humblest to put herself in
an inferior position by humiliating herself. In the latter, she uses the
superlative form, most courteous, to modify the honorific vocative in
order to elevate Lady Thrivewell by paying her respect. By doing so,
Alicia is trying to keep her distance from her. Alicia is also ‘polite’ to
the point of impoliteness. The third axis of contextual condition is
useful in explaining their use of vocatives, as Figure 8 illustrates.
The relationship between Lady Thrivewell and Alicia is different
from the usual customer-tradesperson situation observed in Figure 5.
On the solidarity axis, their relationship is pushed further towards the
negative side, whilst their emotional condition is on the negative
 How Playwrights Construct Their Dramatic Worlds 221

side, because they hate each other. The hierarchical axis of social
roles and status is also valid. Thus their relationship is complicated
and dramatised in terms of politeness.
Figure 8 Lady and Alicia on the three axes

Power (+) Emotion (+)

Lady Thrivewell

Solidarity (0) Solidarity (+)

Emotion (–)

Alicia
Power (–)

From a stylistic point of view, these overpolite vocatives are

foregrounded. What are they doing here with these reciprocal
greetings of super politeness with opposite vectors? What is the
implication of this extremely polite use of vocatives? These two
women’s exchanges are superficially very polite, but their implication
is extremely bitter and ironic due to the background of adultery and
financial trickery. What is implicitly conveyed is contempt and hatred.
In plain words, Lady Thrivewell does not hide the fact that she
despises Alicia and that she never wants Alicia to come near her
husband again. Alicia also shows that she hates Lady Thrivewell. The
implication of the dialogue is just the opposite of what it literally
means. On the third axis, which represents emotion and attitude, Lady
Thrivewell uses a positive politeness strategy paradoxically to display
her hatred and contempt towards Alicia, and Alicia uses a negative
politeness strategy ironically to show her disrespect for and hatred of
Lady Thrivewell. Although the vectors of their strategies are opposite,
they serve to fulfil the same purpose: they are off-record strategies to
send impolite messages (Brown & Levinson 1987). Overpolite
vocatives and over-humble greetings are both beyond the
conventional range of politeness to be perceived as politic behaviour
222 Michi Shiina

(Watts 1992). This excessively polite verbal exchange, in fact,

destroys the relationship between the interlocutors.
6. Conclusion
Now that the default vocative form in the English-speaking world is
the first name (Leech 1999), it is difficult to detect hierarchical and
horizontal relationships between people in their use of vocatives. As
the conventional vocative forms are limited, it is hard to see how
vocatives exert manipulative power in the interpersonal relationship.
However, it has not always been so. In the Early Modern English
period, class, status, and social roles can be more clearly recognised
in vocative use. The playwrights of the 17th and 18th centuries are
aware of this, and exploit a variety of vocatives as a linguistic and
literary device to construct the character relationships in their
dramatic worlds, and also manipulate them as the plot unfolds.
Especially in comedies, vocatives fluctuate around comic characters
and help to enhance comic effects. As tiny a linguistic item as it may
seem, a vocative is a useful tool to analyse drama texts in terms of
pragmatics and stylistics. I hope to have demonstrated that computer-
assisted linguistic research can further reveal the craftsmanship and
creativity of playwrights of the past.

Source text
Brome, Richard. 1653. ‘A Mad Couple Well Match’d’ in Kytö, Merja, and Jonathan
Culpeper (eds). Unpublished. Corpus of English Dialogues 1560-1760.

References
Archer, Dawn, and Jonathan Culpeper. 2003. ‘Sociopragmatic Annotation: New
Directions and Possibilities in Historical Corpus Linguistics’ in Wilson, Andrew,
Paul Rayson and Tony M. McEnery (eds) Corpus Linguistics by the Lune: A
Festschrift for Geoffrey Leech. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 37-58.
Brinton, Laurel J. 1996. Pragmatic Markers in English: Grammaticalization and
Discourse Functions. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in
Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brown, Roger, and Albert Gilman. 1960. ‘The Pronouns of Power and Solidarity’ in
Sebeok, Thomas A. (ed.) Style in Language. New York: Technology Press of The
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and John Wiley: 253-76.
Culpeper, Jonathan, and Merja Kytö. 1997. ‘Towards a Corpus of Dialogues, 1550-
1750’, in Ramisch, Heinrich, and Kenneth Wynne (eds) Language in Time and
Space: Studies in Honour of Wolfgang Viereck on the Occasion of his 60th
Birthday. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner: 60-73.
 How Playwrights Construct Their Dramatic Worlds 223

Leech, Geoffrey. 1999. ‘The Distribution and Function of Vocatives in American and
British English Conversation’, in Hasselgård, Hilde, and Signe Oksefjell (eds.)
Out of Corpora: Studies in Honour of Stig Johansson. Amsterdam: Rodopi: 107-
18.
Milroy, Lesley. 1987. Language and Social Networks. Oxford: Blackwell.
Raumolin-Brunberg, Helena. 1996. ‘Forms of Address in Early English
Correspondence’ in Nevalainen, Terttu, and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg (eds)
Sociolinguistics and Language History: Studies Based on the Corpus of Early
English Correspondence. Amsterdam: Rodopi: 168-81.
Shiina, Michi. 2002. ‘How Spouses Used to Address Each Other: A Historical
Pragmatic Approach to the Use of Vocatives in Early Modern English Comedies’
in Bulletin of the Faculty of Letters 48: 51-73. Tokyo: Hosei University.
Wales, Kathleen. 1983. ‘Thou and You in Early Modern English: Brown and Gilman
Re-Appraised’ in Studia Lingustica, 37: 107-25.
Watts, Richard J. 1992. ‘Linguistic Politeness and Politic Verbal Behaviour:
Reconsidering Claims for Universality’ in Watts, Richard J., Sachiko Ide and
Konrad Ehlich (eds) Politeness in Language: Studies in its History, Theory and
Practice. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter: 43-70.
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Collocational Style in the Two Narratives of Bleak House:
A Corpus-based Analysis

Masahiro Hori

Abstract
In the light of research on collocation in Charles Dickens (1812-70) I would like to
make clear various collocational characteristics of the third-person narrative and
Esther’s narrative in Dickens’ Bleak House (1852-53), both quantitatively and
qualitatively. Certain characteristics of collocation in this text are analysed from two
viewpoints: usual and creative collocations. Regarding usual collocations there is an
obvious difference between the two narratives in the collocations of frequent words.
Unique and creative collocations in both narratives are discussed under three types:
metaphorical, transferred, and oxymoronic collocations. As a result of this research,
there is apparently a structural difference in collocation between the two narratives. In
order to carry out a thorough investigation into this subject and provide further
consideration of Dickens’ language within the context of the development of the
language of fiction and the history of English, I have made use of the CD-ROMs of
the OED 2, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction as well as
electronic texts and concordances of Dickens’ works.*

Key words: Dickens; Bleak House; usual collocation; creative collocation;

corpus-based analysis.

1. Introduction
The major peculiarity of Dickens’ Bleak House is that the story is
narrated by two distinct voices, the third-person narrator who is
‘anonymous, objective, and presumably masculine and stands outside
the action’ (Page 1990: 54) and the first-person narrator, Esther
Summerson, who is ‘subjective, feminine, and a major character in the
story’ (ibid.). Dickens hoped to achieve by means of such a technique
‘the possibility of our seeing the story from radically different angles

*This is a modified version of chapter 5 of my book, Investigating Dickens’ Style: A

Collocational Analysis, (Basingstoke: Palgrave 2004), and is reproduced here with the
permission of the publisher.
226 Masahiro Hori

of objectivity and subjectivity’ (Smith 1974: 8). Accordingly, the

differences of style between the third-person narrative (34 chapters)
and Esther’s narrative (33 chapters) can be discerned easily from the
viewpoints of vocabulary and sentence structure as well as of person
and tense. The aim of this paper is to show that there is, additionally, a
difference of lexical collocation between the two narratives in terms of
usual collocations and that there are many linguistically experimental
unusual collocations in Esther’s narrative (EN) as well as the
third-person narrative (TN). As a result of this research, I would like
to emphasise the necessity and importance of collocational studies of
literary language; there have been few such satisfactory investigations
to date, although Firth (1957: 195) and Greenbaum (1970: 81)
encouraged the study of common, unique, or peculiar collocations in
literary works.
2.1. Usual collocations in Esther’s and third-person narratives
In this section I will examine usual collocations in narratives written
by the third-person narrator and Esther, the first-person narrator. The
following is a table of word-totals, as well as the total number of
different words1 in the Dialogue and Non-dialogue of the two
narratives:
Table 1 Total number of words and different words in dialogue and
non-dialogue of the two narratives
Bleak House: 356,931 words, 15,412 different words
(Dialogue 140,591; Narrative 216,340 words)
Third-person Narrative (TN) Esther’s Narrative (EN)
(164,455 words) (192,476 words)
(11,985 different words) (10,036 different words)
Dialogue Non-dialogue Dialogue Non-dialogue
63,320 words 101,135 words 77,271 words 115,205 words
5,579 10,982 6,543 8,183
different words different words different words different words

As Table 1 illustrates, TN has fewer words in total than EN, but a

greater number of different words. The ratio of different words per
10,000 words in TN is 1.4 times as many as those of EN (723 different
words in TN and 521 different words in EN). The ratio between
Dialogue and Non-dialogue in both narratives is almost the same
(1:1.6 in TN and 1:1.5 in EN). Regarding different words per 10,000
 Collocational Style in the Two Narratives of Bleak House 227

words in the dialogue, there are 881 words in TN and 847 words in
EN. There is little difference in the dialogues of the two narratives.
However, an obvious difference can be recognised in different words
contained in the non-dialogues of the two narratives; the different
words per 10,000 words in the non-dialogue indicate 1,086 words in
third-person non-dialogue and 710 words in Esther’s non-dialogue.
Therefore, it can be said that Esther’s phraseology is more dependent
upon repetition than that of the third-person narrator.

Among a list of the 100 most frequent words in EN and TN, from
which function words and proper names have been removed, 79 words
are common between both narratives. John Jarndyce, one of the main
characters, is referred to as a guardian (Rank 14) 395 times in EN but
only once in TN. In contrast the word trooper usually referring to
George Rouncewell appears 145 times in TN but only nine times in
EN. Some words such as seemed (185 times in EN, but only 10 times
in TN) and poor (173 times in EN, but only 57 times in TN) may
reflect Esther’s personal style. In this way the differences between
both narratives can be discerned easily on the level of vocabulary, as
well as of person and tense.

On the other hand, there is also the difference between the two
narratives in the collocations of frequent words, although collocational
differences are not recognised as easily as are vocabulary, person, and
tense. For example, let us consider the collocations of little and so,
which are frequently used in both narratives.

Little shows a very high frequency in both narratives (Rank 5 in EN

and Rank 9 in TN). What is interesting in the collocates of little is the
combination with poor. This collocation poor little (such as the poor
little things for Mrs. Jellyby’s children and the poor little creature for
Miss Flite) appears 14 times in EN and all these instances of the
collocations of poor little except one example in Mr. Snagsby’s
dialogue are used in Esther’s non-dialogue. This reveals Esther’s pity
or sympathy for Mrs. Jellyby’s children and Miss Flite in EN. On the
other hand, among the four instances of poor little in TN, three
instances are in the characters’ dialogues but not in the third-person
non-dialogue. This difference of collocations of little, as observed in
poor little in EN and little woman in TN, shows each narrator’s
attitude toward the characters and at the same time implies the
228 Masahiro Hori

difference in the meaning of little, that is, Esther’s little, as: ‘an
implication of endearment or of tender feeling on the part of the
speaker’;2 the third-person narrator’s little, as: ‘a small body’.
The frequency of so is also very high in both narratives (Rank 3 in EN
and Rank 4 in TN). The word so frequently co-occurs with many
words; therefore the difference in the use of so between both
narratives is not easily discerned. However, the collocation so very is
distinctive in both narratives. Among the 32 instances of so very in EN,
24 instances are used by Esther (22 times in her narration and two
times in her dialogue), while in TN there is a total of 12 instances
(seven times in the narration and five times in the dialogues). The use
of so very by male characters occurs only in Prince Turveydrop’s
dialogue in EN, and in Smallweed’s and Guppy’s dialogues in TN.
The fact that the collocation of similar intensive words of so very are
never used by other male characters (such as Jarndyce, Woodcourt,
and Bucket) may imply that Dickens dealt with so very as a style of
diction women are inclined to use. The following is a list of collocates
of so very in EN and TN (non-dialogues):
so very (22) in EN:
good, cold, clear, military, embarrassing, ridiculous, anxious, pretty, gallant,
often, watchful, much, chatty and happy, likely, earnest, sorry (twice),
solicitous, ill, long, far, indignant.
so very (7) in TN:
bad, remarkable (twice), large, trying, disagreeable, nomadically.

The collocates of so very in the above list are more emotional in EN,
as observed in adjectives such as ‘embarrassing, anxious, sorry,
solicitous, and indignant’ than in TN.
The collocations that have been treated in this section are usual and
familiar but we are able to realise differences in the use of usual
collocations between Esther’s narrative and the third-person narrative.
2.2. Usual collocations in Esther’s and third-person non-dialogues
The distinctive formal style of collocation in the third-person
non-dialogue (which does not occur in Esther’s non-dialogue) is the
collocation of ‘the + adjective + proper name’, while the collocational
type in Esther’s non-dialogue is the collocation ‘adjective + proper
name’ without a definite article (which does not occur in the
third-person non-dialogue). This type of collocation ‘the + adjective +
 Collocational Style in the Two Narratives of Bleak House 229

proper name’ is classified into three heads according to the semantic

meaning of adjectives in context: a relatively long-term, stable aspect
of character or situation, a temporal emotion or situation, and ‘others’.
Within this collocational type referring to the characters’ personality
or situation, I find the following collocations:
the hapless Jo / the eloquent Chadband / the sagacious Smallweed (twice) / the
active Smallweed / the susceptible Smallweed / the trusty3 Smallweed / the
venerable4 Mr. Smallweed / the eminent Smallweed / the Elfin Smallweed /
the unoffending Mrs. Smallweed / the snappish Judy / the blooming Judy / the
perennial Judy / the fair Judy / the grim Judy / the imperturbable Judy / the
sportive Judy / the virtuous Judy / the Honourable5 William Guppy / the
audacious Boythorn / the innocent Mr. Snagsby / the devoted Mr. Snagsby /
the unfortunate George / the sanguine George / the fair Dedlock / the great old
Dedlock family / the handsome Lady Dedlock / etc.

The following collocations express the temporal emotions or

situations of characters:
the injured Guppy / the afflicted Mr. Guppy / the disconsolate Mr. Guppy / the
admiring Mrs. Snagsby / the watchful Mrs. Snagsby / the sprightly Dedlock /
the irascible Mr. Smallweed / the scornful Judy / the gentle Judy / the
triumphant Judy / the interesting Judy / the placid Vholes / the equable Vholes
/ the astounded Tony / the careful Phil

The following are collocations which lack judgemental or emotional

adjectives:
the late Mr. Krook’s / the late Mr. Tulkinghorn / the present Lady Dedlock /
the present Sir Leicester Dedlock / the superannuated Mr. and Mrs.
Smallweed

All of the collocations of the type ‘the + adjective + personal name’

quoted above occur in the third-person non-dialogue.
With respect to this type of collocation in Esther’s non-dialogue,
however, there are only two examples of the third type of collocation:
the elder Mr. Turveydrop and the identical Peepy.6 On the other hand,
regarding the type of collocation ‘adjective + personal name’ (which
lacks the definite article), there are many instances in Esther’s
non-dialogue:
poor Peepy / poor little Peepy / poor Miss Jellyby (twice) / poor Caddy (four
times) / little Miss Flite (three times) / poor Miss Flite / poor little Miss Flite /
poor Mr. Jellyby (four times) / poor Charley / poor little Charley / waking
Charley / poor dear Richard (twice) / poor Gridley / poor Jo / poor crazed
Miss Flite
230 Masahiro Hori

The adjectives poor, little, and dear in these collocations do not

describe the characters’ personalities, situations, or temporal emotions
but rather reveal Esther’s spontaneous emotions towards them.
One of the functions of the definite article is as a specific reference,
which ‘can be identified uniquely in the contextual or general
knowledge shared by speaker and hearer’ (Quirk et al. 1985: 265), but
a proper name itself functions as a specific reference. In fact, the use
of the definite article the is not absolutely necessary in order to add an
adjective to the proper name. According to Quirk et al. (1985: 290):
nonrestrictive premodifiers are limited to adjectives with emotive colouring,
such as:
old Mrs. Fletcher dear little Eric poor Charles
beautiful Spain historic York sunny July.
In a more formal and rather stereotyped style, the adjective is placed between
the and a personal name:
the beautiful Princess Diana [‘Princess Diana, who is beautiful’]
the inimitable Henry Higgins [‘Henry Higgins, who is inimitable’].

Therefore, the collocational pattern ‘the + adjective + personal name’

in the third-person non-dialogue, which tends to convey a relatively
long-term, stable aspect of character or situation, rather than a
temporal emotion, reveals a more formal style as well as the
omnipotent attitude of the narrator toward characterisation.
3. Unusual collocations of EN and TN
Most readers of Bleak House have the impression that the third-person
narrative is apparently more unusual or deviant than Esther’s narrative
in its use of language. For example, Page (1990: 55-56) points out
language differences between the two narratives as follows:
Her [Esther’s] language is for the most part simple and at times even banal,
and her tone informal and confidential; the other narrative by contrast is
rhetorical, linguistically experimental, and dramatic. . . Language and style
apart, there are further differences between the two narratives. Esther’s, for
instance, is more consistently serious; most of the comedy in this novel (and
there is a good deal) is found in the more imaginative and highly colored
third-person narrative.
W. J. Harvey (1969: 226) also mentions Esther’s simple and invariable
narrative by using negative expressions ‘even at the risk of insipidity
and dullness’ and ‘plain, matter-of-fact, conscientiously plodding’. Is
this difference reflected in the collocations as well? What is it about
 Collocational Style in the Two Narratives of Bleak House 231

Esther’s narrative that leaves us unable to describe her language and

style as linguistically experimental, dramatic, lively, etc.? Keeping
these issues in mind, I would like to consider some language
differences between the third-person narrative and the first-person
narrative, in terms of unusual collocations. The unusual collocations
to be dealt with in this section are only those collected from Esther’s
non-dialogue and the third-person non-dialogue, not appearing in any
other dialogues.
In Bleak House I find many unusual collocations which are not found
in other 18th- or 19th-century fiction.7 Over 700 examples were
collected for this research. Among these examples there are
(minimally) over 300 unusual collocations in EN. In this section these
unusual collocations in the non-dialogues of each narrator will be
compared and discussed according to three types of collocations (that
is, metaphorical collocations, transferred collocations, and
oxymoronic collocations) with consideration for syntactic patterns,
though some of the unusual collocations may also belong to other
types.
3.1. Metaphorical collocations
The first type of unusual collocation I will examine is metaphorical.
One typical metaphorical collocation is personification.8 As observed
in the scene of fog at the beginning of Bleak House, natural
phenomena, such as sunshine and moon, are often given animate
attributes and anthropomorphic characteristics with the collocational
pattern of ‘noun + verb’. Such personifications are found in both
narratives:
Esther’s non-dialogue
The purblind day was feebly struggling with the fog, . . . (Ch. 4)
the night was very slowly stirring (Ch. 59)
the houses frowned at us, the dust rose at us, the smoke swooped at us, nothing
made any compromise about itself, or wore a softened aspect. (Ch. 51)
the morning faintly struggled in (Ch. 59)
Third-person non-dialogue
the clear cold sunshine glances into the brittle woods, and approvingly
beholds the sharp wind scattering the leaves and drying the moss. (Ch. 12)
The moon has eyed Tom with a dull cold stare, . . . (Ch. 46)
the long vacation saunters on towards term-time, like an idle river very
leisurely strolling down a flat country to the sea. (Ch. 20)
232 Masahiro Hori

There are also personifications having the collocational pattern

‘adjective + noun’. The following are a list of personified collocations
in Esther’s non-dialogue:
cheerful lodging / cheerful town / healthy shore / hospitable jingle / hungry
garret / inexpressive-looking books / miserable corner / smiling country /
over-ripe berry / pleasant footpath / ripening weather / ungrown despair
In the above list of metaphorical collocations there are many
adjectives expressive of sensory perception, such as cheerful, healthy,
and hungry.
Personified collocations ‘adjective + noun’ in the third-person
non-dialogue show only a slight difference from those of Esther’s:
argumentative back-fall9 / benighted10 England / deathlike hue / discontented
goose / idle river / inconsolable carriages / invigorating pail / penitential
sofa-pillows / pertinacious oil lamps / ravenous little pens / upstart gas /
welcome light / perplexed and troublous valley of shadow of the law
In comparison to the personified collocations in Esther’s non-dialogue,
animistic metaphorical collocations, ‘which attributes animate
characteristics to the inanimate’ (Leech 1969: 158) are dominant in
the third-person narrative. Esther also tends to use favourable or
neutral words such as cheerful and ripening in the personified
collocations cheerful town and ripening weather, while the
third-person narrator uses not only favourable words but unfavourable
or negative and judgemental words as well: benighted, discontented,
idle, penitential, ravenous, perplexed, troublous.
The following are visualised collocations which attribute an image to
an abstraction or add a sharp image to concreteness or physical
existence. The following occur in Esther’s non-dialogue:
chivalrously polite / colossal staircases / colourless days / fish-like manner /
flaming necklace / full-blown girl / musty rotting silence
In the third-person non-dialogue I find additional visualised
collocations:
buttoned-up half-audible voice / clouds of cousins / crooked knife of his mind
/ dazed mind / elephantine lizard / feline mouth / foggy glory / icy stare / iron
bow / leaden lunches / reservoir of confidences / nomadically drunk /
shadowy belief / skeleton throats / sparkling stranger / swarm of misery /
swelling pride / as hollow as a coffin / unwholesome hand (i. e. the suit,
Jarndyce and Jarndyce)
The third-person non-dialogue not only has more visualised
collocations but also a greater variety of visual images than Esther’s.
 Collocational Style in the Two Narratives of Bleak House 233

Additional metaphorical collocations are:

Esther’s non-dialogue
Examples of metonymy: my guardian’s delicacy had soon perceived this / as
if his natural generosity felt a pang of reproach / her quickness anticipated
what I might have said presently
Other interesting metaphorical collocations: calendars of distress /
crisp-looking gentleman / dead glove / divine sunshine / gleam of welcome /
ruin of youth / summer joke / my vanity should deceive me
Third-person non-dialogue
Examples of metonymy: her head concedes / Mrs. Rouncewell’s hands
unquiet
Other interesting metaphorical collocations: deadened world / deadly meaning
/ forensic lunacy / imperial luxury / infernal stables / official cat / unsavoury
shelter / imperturbable as Death / imperturbable as the hearthstone

3.2. Transferred collocations

There are collocations which are not contradictory in literal meaning
or connotative meaning but are considered as transferred or dislocated
collocations, in which an adjective or adverb grammatically qualifies a
noun, adjective, or verb but literally or semantically applies to a
different word. Among transferred collocations, in both the
non-dialogues, collocations of ‘an adjective + a body part’ are the
ones most frequently found. These unusual collocations of body parts
are divided into two types: (1) a transferred collocation referring to a
temporary emotion of the possessor of a body part; and (2) a
transferred collocation referring to a relatively permanent character of
the possessor of a body part. The following are transferred
collocations of ‘an adjective + a body part’ in both the non-dialogues:
Esther’s non-dialogue (20 examples)
(1) a transferred collocation referring to a temporary emotion of the possessor
of a body part: care-worn head / darkened face / disdainful face / pleasant
eyebrows / quiet hands / sudden eye / surprised eyes / too-eager eyes /
troubled hands / warning feet (10 examples)
(2) a transferred collocation referring to a relatively long-term, stable aspect of
character of a body part: gracious hand (Jesus Christ’s hand) / quick face
(Jarndyce’s careful attention to people) / resolute face (Esther’s strong-willed
aunt) / trusting face (Ada) / mad lips (Miss Flite) / rustic faces / sprightly eyes
(Skimpole) / sprightly forehead (one of Skimpole’s daughters) / sulky
forehead (Prince Turveydrop’s girl student) / well-remembered finger
(Inspector Bucket) (10 examples)
234 Masahiro Hori

Third-person non-dialogue (20 examples)

(1) a transferred collocation referring to a temporary emotion of the possessor
of a body part: admonitory finger / angry hands / anxious hand / busy face /
cruel finger / disdainful hand / unconscious head / wary hand (8 examples)
(2) a transferred collocation referring to a relatively long-term, stable aspect of
character of the possessor of a body part: admonitory hand (Chadband) / calm
hands (Mrs. Rouncewell) / decent hand (Lady Dedlock) / dreadful feet /
gracious head (Lady Dedlock) / knowing eyes (Inspector Bucket) / maternal
foot / murderous hand / relentless head / so-genteel fingers (Lady Dedlock) /
stately breast (Sir Leicester) / venerable eye (young Smallweed) (12
examples)

These transferred collocations of body parts are of nearly equal

number and nearly equally used for both temporary emotions (e. g.
angry hands) and relatively long-term, stable aspects of character (e. g.
decent hand) in both the non-dialogues. What is different between
them is that the persons to whom these transferred collocations of
body parts are applied in Esther’s non-dialogue are different from
those of the third-person non-dialogues (though exceptionally,
Inspector Bucket’s finger is described in both non-dialogues).
The transferred collocations of ‘an adjective + a human behaviour’ are
also interesting:
Esther’s non-dialogue
attentive smile / dejected bow / dull thoughtfulness / hopeless gesture /
observant smile / sulky jerk / sunburnt smiles / triumphant rub
Third-person non-dialogue
angry nods / apologetic cough / comprehensive wave / deferential cough /
emaciated glare / explanatory cough / fat smile / gloomy yawn / majestically
interpose / majestic sleep / persuasive action / sarcastic nods / shrewd
attention / stately approval / undisguisable yawns
The third-person non-dialogue shows a greater variety of adjectives
and behaviours in this type of transferred collocation than Esther’s
non-dialogue.
Other transferred collocations are as follows:
Esther’s non-dialogue
affable dignity / agreeable candour / agreeable jocularity / amiable importance
/ bashful simplicity / captivating gaiety / delightful confidence / delightful
gaiety / delightful weather / deplorable home / dreary passage / engaging
candour / fearful wet / gentle seriousness / guileless candour / overweening
assumptions / painful belief / playful astonishment / pleasant footpath /
pleasant weeks / serene composure / surly stop / timid days / thoughtful
amazement / timid tenderness / vivacious candour
 Collocational Style in the Two Narratives of Bleak House 235

Third-person non-dialogue
angry reasons / boastful misery / disappointing knobs / grinning silence /
inconsolable carriages / melancholy trees / restless pillow / stately gloom /
stately liking / uncomfortable tightness / worn-out heavens
Concerning other types of transferred collocations, I find more
examples in Esther’s non-dialogue. In addition, Esther tends to use
transferred epithets with favourable adjectives such as captivating and
pleasant, while the third-person narrator shows a tendency to use
adjectives more unfavourable in meaning, such as boastful and
uncomfortable.
3.3. Oxymoronic collocations
Oxymoronic collocations are often used by both Esther and the
third-person narrator. In terms of semantic construction there are three
types of oxymoronic collocations: (1) ‘a word of favourable meaning
+ a word of unfavourable meaning’; (2) ‘a word of unfavourable
meaning + a word of favourable meaning’; and (3) ‘others’:
Esther’s non-dialogue (26 examples)
(1) ‘a word of favourable meaning + a word of unfavourable meaning’:
benignant shadow / captivating looseness / cheerful gravity / curious
indifference / delightfully irregular / friendly indignation / good-humoured
vexation / good-natured vexation / loving anxiety / modest consciousness /
pleasant absurdity / pleasantly cheated / pleasantly irregular / professions of
childishness / resolutely unconscious / respectful wretchedness / serene
contempt / smiling condescension (18 examples)
(2) ‘a word of unfavourable meaning + a word of favourable meaning’:
absent endeavours / disagreeable gallantry / haughty self-restraint11 /
mournful glory / old-faced mite / plaintive smile / rapacious benevolence (7
examples)
(3) Others: thoughtful baby (1 example)
Third-person non-dialogue (24 examples)
(1) ‘a word of favourable meaning + a word of unfavourable meaning’:
affectionate distress / affectionate lunacy / exalted dullness / harmonious
impeachment / magnificent displeasure (5 examples)
(2) ‘a word of unfavourable meaning + a word of favourable meaning’:
awful politeness / cold sunshine / dismal grandeur / dull repose / exhausted
composure / foggy glory / frosty fire / frowning smile / gloomy enjoyment /
gloomy relief / mechanically faithful / stolid satisfaction / stunned admiration
/ wicked relief / worn-out placidity (15 examples)
(3) Others: boastful misery / official den / interminable brief / waking doze (4
examples)

Of interest in the above list of oxymoronic collocations is that Esther’s

236 Masahiro Hori

non-dialogue surpasses the third-person non-dialogue quantitatively

(though a few more examples might be discovered in the third-person
non-dialogue). Even more striking is that with respect to the semantic
construction of oxymoronic collocations there is a distinctive contrast
between Esther’s and the third-person non-dialogue. That is to say, ‘a
word of favourable meaning + a word of unfavourable meaning’ is
dominant in Esther’s non-dialogue while ‘a word of unfavourable
meaning + a word of favourable meaning’ shows an overwhelming
majority in the third-person non-dialogue. Such a difference of a
semantic word order of oxymoronic collocations seem to be attributed
to each narrator’s difference of attitude towards the events and
characters. To put it another way, Esther’s oxymoronic collocations
are used in a more generous, less judgemental manner than those of
the third-person narrator.

4. Conclusion
As seen in the foregoing sections, collocational characteristics in
Esther’s narrative and the third-person narrative have been analysed
both quantitatively and qualitatively from two viewpoints: usual and
creative collocations. With respect to usual collocations, there are
various patterns of collocational difference in common words between
the two narratives. These differences of collocational pattern are
closely connected with the narrators’ attitudes and emotional tone. As
far as creative or unusual collocations are concerned, this text has a
flood of new collocations not to be found in other 18th- and
19th-century fiction. Esther’s language or style in her narrative is
generally said to be simple, plain, and matter-of-fact; however, there
are many unusual collocations in Esther’s narrative, including
numerous types of unusual collocations (metaphorical, personified,
transferred, and oxymoronic collocations). Therefore, it could be said
that collocations in Esther’s narrative are linguistically experimental
and satisfactorily creative. As well, examining differences between
Esther’s narrative and the third-person narrative, qualitative
differences relating to ‘unusuality’ or types of unusual collocations
seem more apparent than differences relating to the quantity of
particular collocations. Such differences between unusual collocations
leads us to an awareness that the third-person narrator is more deeply
involved in and in more direct control of his narration than Esther,
who intends to narrate in an unobtrusive manner, as observed in her
 Collocational Style in the Two Narratives of Bleak House 237

remark, ‘I mean all the time to write about other people, and I try to
think about myself as little as possible’ (Ch. 9).

Endnotes
1‘Different words’ indicates morphologically distinct words (e. g., say, says, saying,
and said are each counted as different words).
2OED s. v. ‘little’, adj. 3.
3The adjective trusty is used ironically.
4The adjective venerable is used ironically.
5The adjective Honourable has the narrator’s ironical tone.
6Mr. Guppy, Mr. and Mrs. Snagsby, Smallweed, Chadband, George, etc. also appear
in Esther’s narrative but the collocational pattern ‘the + adjective + personal name’ is
not used.
7Cf. Eighteenth Century Fiction and Nineteenth Century Fiction on CD-ROM.
8Regarding personification, Leech (1969: 158) points out the following three
categories: [a] The Concretive Metaphor, which attributes concreteness or physical
existence to an abstraction: ‘the pain of separation’, ‘the light of learning’, ‘a vicious
circle’, ‘room for negotiation’. [b] The Animistic Metaphor, which attributes animate
characteristics to the inanimate: ‘an angry sky’, ‘graves yawned’, ‘killing
half-an-hour’, ‘the shoulder of the hill’. [c] The Humanising Metaphor, which
attributes characteristics of humanity to what is not human: ‘This friendly river’,
‘laughing valleys’. As Leech admits, these three categories overlap and especially, the
distinction between animistic metaphor and humanising metaphor is not clear.
9As an example of backfall to mean ‘A fall or throw on the back in wrestling. Often
fig.’, the OED quotes from Bleak House (OED s. v. ‘backfall’, 2).
10Here benighted is used to mean ‘fig. Involved in intellectual or moral darkness’
(OED s. v. ‘benighted’, 2).
11Haughty self-restraint referring to Lady Dedlock is used in the phrase ‘the absence
of her haughty self-restraint’ (Ch. 36).

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 Index
A
address terms.........................................209 transferred.................. ...231, 233-5
analysis, componential...........................85 usual .................225, 226, 228, 236
analysis, structural ..................................85 comic books..................................139, 143
anaphora................................................135 coming-out stories... ...110, 111, 119, 120
anchors communication, computer-
hypertext ......................... xiii, 2, 14 mediated..............28, 29, 41, 57, 58, 69
image ...........................................10 community
text ...............................................10 discourse ...............................58, 69
argument, dialogic................................187 virtual ....................................58, 60
attribution .....xx, 151, 153, 159, 160, core use.................................72, 73, 77, 82
181-9, 193, 204, 236 corpora, text...viii, xv, xxi, xxii, 29, 57,
authorship....................151, 153, 160, 161 61, 69, 153, 154, 195-7, 201-12
Augustine, Saint...................................172 Ctheory Multimedia .............................. 15
Austen, Jane..........................................196 cybergenre............................................... 58
averral ... .................................. xxi, 181-93 cybernetics .............................................. 47
averral, narratorial ..................................xx cyberspace...37, 42, 47, 48, 51, 53-55,
awareness, stylistic ...........................71, 81 59, 60
B cyborgs.................................................47-9

Baldessari, John........................................2 D
Benjamin, Walter...................................19
Bloomfield, Leonard............................152 Daniel, Malcolm...................................192
Borges, Jorge Luis............................7, 121 deconstruction .....................18, 48, 49, 51
brain hemispheres........................ 142, 149 deixis.....xvii, 109, 111, 114-119, 134,
British Library.......................................3, 4 135
Buchloh, Benjamin...................................1 Deleuze, Gilles........................................49
Bühler, Karl.............................................99 DeLillo, Don...........................................49
dematerialisation ..............................10, 60
C dialogical................................. xiv, 44, 127
camp subculture....................................117 Dickens, Charles.............................225-38
categories, grammatical .......................129 Diogenes...............................................101
chains, image-text..............................xiii, 1 discourse analysis..... v, viii, ix, 23, 27, 72
cognition ...vi, vii, viii, xv, 29, 41, 48, 49, discourse
60, 71-82, 109-33, 207 critical ........................................... x
coherence cross-cultural ........................ 123-5
figurative .....................................76 embodied ..................................167
cohesion................................78, 86, 92, 93 free indirect...............................153
stylistic ................................ 75, 76 hegemonic........................ xvii, 119
collocation ...xxi, xxii, 197, 199, 200, homophobic ............111, 114, 118
202, 203, 225-37 moral .........................................114
creative ............................. 225, 236 orders of ............................111, 114
metaphorical ......................... 231-3 patriarchal........111, 114, 116, 119
oxymoronic... ..225, 231, 235, 236 religious ....................................114
personified ................................232 discursive configuration...................... 114
258 Index

discursive construction...xvii, 109, 110, I

114, 115
ICAME (International Computer
discursive heterogeneity ......................118
Archive of Modern English)....... 197
E iconicity, structural............................... 129
identity construction .............................. 32
engagement, sites of.................xiv, 37, 44 identity, narratives of ........................... 112
equivalence, functional........................155 identity, virtual........................................ 23
experiences, self-object..........................35 ideological contestation....................... 170
eye rhyme...............................................xvi illocutionary force........................210, 219
images
F phraseological............................. 73
imagetext..................................... xxiii, 1, 2
face, negative ............................... 210, 216 indeterminacy......................181, 183, 186
face, positive .........................................210 epistemic..................................... xx
factuality....................................... 151, 181 intention, authorial ................................. xx
faithfulness.... ..................xix, 125, 151-63 interdiscourse..........................109-11, 114
features, semantic ...................................92 interdiscursivity...xiv, 44, 109, 110, 115,
film................................xx, 17, 26, 181-93 116
foregrounding ....................69, 34, 89, 221 intertextuality............. xiv, 44, 57, 59, 157
format........xviii, 139-41, 143-5, 148, 169 J
formations, discursive....109, 111, 114,
115, 120 James, Henry........................................196
de Freval, Jean Baptiste.......................173 journalism.... .... xix, 154, 157, 160-2, 181
Frost, Robert....................................128-35 Joyce, James............................................49
juxtaposition ....... ....2, 85, 88, 95, 96, 188
G
K
Ganzfried, Daniel................181, 191, 193 Kanter, Albert L. .................................141
genre...vi, xiv, xv, 23, 27, 57-70, 109, Karpf, Anne..................................184, 191
111, 119, 154, 156 Kelly, John............................................168
genres, electronic....................................57 Kidman, Nicole......................................17
Giffard, Henry......................................169 Klein, Harald.........................................198
globalisation.......xviii, 48, 52-4, 123, 167
Grice, H. Paul........................................153 L
Grosjean, Bruno...................................182 linguistics
cognitive.........vi, viii, 71, 72, 123,
H 127, 132, 133
linguistics, corpus...viii, xxi, xxii, 160,
von Haller, Albrecht.............................173 209, 225
Hansard........................................ 154, 165 link rhetoric............................................. 57
Haywood, Eliza....................................168 links....xiii, xv, xix, 1, 10, 13, 14, 27, 44,
Heaney, Seamus................................. .xvii 48, 57, 59-69, 78, 80, 81, 90, 171,
honorifics.....................210, 214, 216, 217 172
hypallage ...............................................113
commercial ................................. 62
hyperdiscourse..................................xv, 57
hypertextual ............. 62, 64, 65, 70
hypertext...vii, xiii, xv, xxiii, 1, 2, 9, 11, informational ........................62, 63
13, 14, 19, 47-51, 55-70, 200 situational........................62, 63, 67
 Index 259

literacy netizen ...........................xv, 47, 48, 51, 54

hypertext .....................................64 netocracy........................xv, 47, 48, 51, 52
topic.............................................64 network
Web ...................................... 62, 64 metaphorical ............................... 73
literature, illustrated..................... 139, 143
literature, teaching of............................139 O
M O’Connor, Flannery.............................196
opposition, binary.............................85, 86
macro-propositions...............................157 orientation, coding ................................. 39
markers, discourse....................... 209, 210
McGregor, Ewan....................................17 P
meaning
instantial ......................................74 Pamela media event, the.....xx, 167, 169-
meaning, phraseological.....72, 76, 78, 82 71, 178
mediated action.......................................29 parables..........................139, 143-5, 147-9
Memory Organisation Packets.... .......115 personification..............................231, 237
metaphor...vi, vii, xiv, xv, 1, 16, 19, 48, photomontage.....................................2, 10
51, 71-82, 117, 129, 131, 132, 171, Plato.........................................................54
172, 225, 231-237 Police, The..............................................17
base........................... 73, 75, 76, 82 politeness........................xxii, 209-21, 235
extended ......................... 73, 74, 76 posthumanism ............................ 47-50, 52
orientational ..............................132 postmodernism...xv, xviii, 31, 48-50, 53,
phraseological....71-73, 75, 76, 78, 124, 152, 161, 168
81 poststructuralism...................... 48-52, 161
relationships..............................149 Pound, Ezra.............................................18
metonymy ................................77, 78, 233 power semantic ........................... xxii, 214
mimesis....................................... xv, 38, 50 Prado, Angela.......................................112
misreading.............xx, 167, 171, 177, 178 pragmatics, historical......................ix, 209
multimodality...xiv, xv, xviii, 1, 19, 23-8, pragmatics, universal ........................... 151
30, 38, 44, 71, 168 print culture.........167, 168, 171, 177, 178
prosthetics ......................vii, xv, 47, 48, 52
N psycholinguistics.................................... 72
puns............34, 76-80, 112, 157, 158, 171
narration....xv, xvii, 12, 18, 27, 28, 30, Pynchon, Thomas...................................49
47, 50, 52, 109, 110, 182-93, 204,
206, 225-37 Q
narrative...vi, x, xv, xvii, xix-xxii, 11-3,
18, 23, 26, 30, 31, 38, 44, 47, 52, 58, quotation, verbatim.............................. 151
71, 72, 78, 79, 109, 110-20, 181-93,
203, 206, 207, 225-32, 235-7 R
autobiographical .........................11
heterodiegetic........................... xxii reader response...................................... xvi
narrativisation ............... xiv, 23, 27 reading, philological ................ xvi, 85, 95
oral...............................................24 reception........................................139, 163
NCREL (North Central Regional reconstruction...xx, 30, 69, 182, 183, 189,
Education Laboratory)...................204 190, 192
Negroponte, Nicholas...............................2 recontextualisation...xiv, 23, 27, 28, 30,
Nelson, Ted.............................................55 31, 36-8
260 Index

record .............................. xix, xx, 182, 183 TEXTANT (TEXT ANalysis

register ............................................ 28, 200 Tools) ...... xxi, 195, 199, 201-8
reinterpretation...xx, 167-9, 171, 175, solidarity semantics..............................xxii
176, 178, 181, 184-7, 190, 191 source text .................................123-5, 131
relation, adjacency..................................91 speech act, narrative report of............. 152
relation, mirror-image............... 85, 86, 94 speech, direct...152, 154, 155, 157, 158,
report, fidelity of....................................xix 160-2
reporting, news .....................................151 speech, free direct.........................152, 157
representation, stereotypical................120 speech, free indirect ............................. 152
representation, visual...71, 72, 74-6, 78, speech, indirect........... 132, 152, 155, 156
80, 81 speech, reported......xix, 151, 152, 154,
representations, social ..........................111 155
rhyme, echo..................................... xvi, 86 Spencer, Diana........................................10
rhyme, masculine .............................87, 89 status...xv, xx, 50, 63, 67, 127, 181-4,
roles, social.......................211, 215, 220-2 186, 188, 190, 192, 211, 212, 214-7,
Rushdie, Salman..................................xvii 220-2
S Sting.........................................................17
strategies, discursive ................ xiv, 23, 26
scenes...11, 76, 109, 112-8, 129, 179, Sung, Kim-il............................................18
191, 231 Sterne, Laurence...................................157
schemata...xvii, 109, 112, 114, 115, 119, Stevens, Wallace...................................xxi
151 structuralist............................................. xvi
scripts............................. 24, 109, 115, 117 style, formal ..................................228, 230
semantics........................... vii, 72, 94, 132 stylistic use, instantial ................71, 73, 81
semiotics...vi, 5, 9, 14, 19, 24-7, 29, 34, stylistics, computational ......viii, 195, 201
37, 39, 58, 59, 68, 77, 113 Swift, Jonathan.....................................157
sexuality, heteroerotic ..........................121
sexuality, homoerotic...xvii, 12, 109-11, T
113-21
sexuality, plastic....................................115 target text..............................124, 126, 128
Shakespeare, William..........................172 text analysis.................. xxi, 195, 198, 205
Shelley, Mary..........................................54 text processing............ 195, 199, 204, 205
Simone, Nina..........................................18 textmontage... .........xiii, 1-3, 9, 12, 15, 16
social construction..................................47 dynamic........................xiii, 1-3, 19
software programs textual instability .................................. 168
Flash, Macromedia .....................15 textuality...............xviii, 60, 140, 167, 168
ICQ............................................30 Thematic Organisation Points............115
Perl (Practical Extraction and Thurber, James........................................77
Report Language) ..... .viii, 195, transgression......................................110-2
196, 199, 204 translatability ...........123-6, 133, 134, 136
Personal Web Server................200 translation, poetic................................. 123
Photoshop......................................2
Shockwave ........................... 15, 19 U
SPSS for Windows..................146
TACT (Text Analysis Computing units, phraseological... ........71, 72, 79, 81
Tools).. ........xxi, 198, 205, 208 USENET....................................................7
 Index 261

V
variation, genre .................................57, 69
vizpo (Poems That Move).....................18
vocatives................................. xxii, 209-22
W
Webster, the Rev. William..................173
Whitman, Walt.....................................172
Wilkomirski, Binjamin..................181-92
World Wide Web........xxiii, 2, 24, 26, 28,
57, 61, 207, 208
writing, direct........................................160
writing, linguistics of...........xix, 151, 152,
158, 163
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Theory into Poetry:
New Approaches to the Lyric.

Edited by Eva Müller-Zettelmann and Margarete Rubik.

Amsterdam/New York, NY 2005. 375 pp.

(Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und
Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 89)

ISBN: 90-420-1906-9 € 75,-/ US $ 94.-

At the beginning of the 21st century, there is still no generally accepted comprehen-
sive definition of the lyric or differentiated modern toolkit for its analysis. The
reception of poetry is largely characterised either by an empathetic identification of
critics with the lyric persona or by exclusive interest in formal patterning.
The present volume seeks to remedy this deficit. All the contributors ‘theorise’ the
lyric to overcome the impasse of an impressionistic and narrowly formalistic critical
debate on the genre. Their papers focus on a variety of different questions: the
problem of establishing a framework for definition and classification; the search for
dynamic and potent critical approaches; investigations of poetry's cultural
performance and its fundamental relevance for the construction of group cohesion.
The essays collected in this volume offer a consciously polyphonic range of
theories and interpretations, suggesting to the reader a variety of theoretical
frameworks and practical illustrations of how a discussion of poetry may be firmly
grounded in modern literary theory.

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Contemporary Pragmatism

Edited by John Shook,

Oklahoma State University, USA
Paulo Ghiraldelli, Jr.,
Centro de Estudos em Filosofia Americana, Brazil

ISSN: 1572-3429

Contemporary Pragmatism is an interdisciplinary, international journal for discussions

of applying pragmatism, broadly understood, to today's issues. This journal will
consider articles about pragmatism written from the standpoint of any tradition and
perspective, but it will concentrate on original explorations of pragmatism and
pragmatism's relations with humanism, naturalism, and analytic philosophy. The
journal welcomes both pragmatism-inspired research and criticisms of pragmatism.
We cannot consider submissions that principally interpret or critique historical
figures of American philosophy, although applications of past thought to
contemporary issues are sought. Contributions may deal with current issues in any
field of philosophical inquiry. CP encourages interdisciplinary efforts, establishing
bridges between pragmatic philosophy and, for example, theology, psychology,
pedagogy, sociology, medicine, economics, political science, or international
relations.

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[email protected] www.rodopi.nl
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