In short, we are better equipped to address issues of creative imagination and readerly effects in literary scholarship, and address some of Wimsatt and Beardsley’s concerns that textual analysis was not yet able to deal with creativity and aesthetics with sufficient subtlety. Though in their time the formalist and New Critical reaction to the impressionism and biographical speculation of the day was entirely justified, more recent innovations in the linguistic toolkit available to stylisticians mean that we are able to return to these key questions with greater systematicity and rigour. Stylistics has been embracing psychological and affective matters for some time now, both implicitly in much modern stylistics of the last four decades, and explicitly in the form of a cognitive poetics. Though the position was later restated more subtly ( Wimsatt, 1976), authorial design and intention have remained inimical to stylistics as a discipline until very recently (see Sotirova, 2014 Stockwell, 2015). These have widely been taken to have asserted a formalist, textual constraint on literary analysis, and prohibited consideration of authorial imagination and creativity on one hand, and readerly psychology or affect on the other. Of course, the relationship that readers develop with fictional characters is a main motivating factor in reading literature at all, and more recently, narratological scholars have reconnected with this general sense that character and consciousness are essential elements in narrative, and events are there simply to elucidate, stress, or vivify the people who are caught up in them ( Hogan, 2011 Palmer, 2004 Vermeule, 2010).įurthermore, much traditional narratology and stylistics across the 20th century was heavily influenced by Wimsatt and Beardsley’s (1954a, 1954b) arguments against ‘the intentionalist fallacy’ and ‘the affective fallacy’. Characters were elements that the plot happened to, in this perspective ( Margolin, 1983, 1990, 1995). It used to be regarded as paradigmatic that any essential definition of narrative could be captured either by the notion of a sequence (A and then B and then C) or by a plot (B, after A, leading to C) or by an evaluative plot (B, because of A, but for the occurrence of C). One of the most significant shifts in narratology in recent years has been the recognition that literary narrative fiction can be defined not by event but by character. Dick is a thematically and authorially significant character in the novel, and we move towards a rigorous account of the reader’s modelling of authorial intention. Using the CLiC tool (Corpus Linguistics in Cheshire) developed for the exploration of 19th-century fiction, we investigate the textual traces in non-quotations around this character, in order to draw out the techniques of characterisation other than speech presentation. Dick from David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. In this article, we explore our understanding of mind-modelling through the characterisation of Mr. Therefore we are able to employ corpus linguistic techniques systematically to identify textual patterns that function as cues triggering character information. Crucially, our approach to mind-modelling is text-driven. The model also aims to deal with the modelling of the author’s mind in line with the modelling of the minds of fictional characters. The article sets out our cognitive poetic model of characterisation that emphasises the continuity between literary characterisation and real-life human relationships. In this article, we focus on the way that readers engage in mind-modelling in the process of characterisation. We suggest an innovative approach to literary discourse by using corpus linguistic methods to address research questions from cognitive poetics.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |