John Benjamins Publishing Company
Literary practices and imaginative possibilities
Abstract
Adopting a pragmatic approach to iconicity, this paper focuses on literary practices as imaginative undertakings, thus practices bound up with the projection of possibilities. Literary texts need not claim as their raison d’être anything more than the projection and exploration of diverse forms of possibility. The exhibition of such forms is intimately linked to the iconic features of literary texts. At the same time, in exhibiting the barely imaginable, they frequently embody traces of brute actuality and intimations of elusive significance. Thus, the work of iconic signs is, in literary texts, characteristically conjoined to that of indices and symbols. Moving from this level of generality to the way such texts work, in particular, to some of the iconic functions in literature, I will consider, above all else, the diagrammatic function of literary texts. Here, the sentences inscribed across a page are at once verbal diagrams and, in however attenuated a form, spatial diagrams. As diagrams of such a hybrid character, they are capable of presenting spatial, temporal, and other relationships, though the spatial features of such verbal diagrams often bear anything but a straightforward relationship to their imaginable objects. Such inscribed diagrams are spatial figurations in which the most salient features of spatiality are in certain respects exploited and, in other respects, effaced or, at least, suspended. A number of examples from literature (including texts by Henry James, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, among others) are used to substantiate these claims.
Abstract
Adopting a pragmatic approach to iconicity, this paper focuses on literary practices as imaginative undertakings, thus practices bound up with the projection of possibilities. Literary texts need not claim as their raison d’être anything more than the projection and exploration of diverse forms of possibility. The exhibition of such forms is intimately linked to the iconic features of literary texts. At the same time, in exhibiting the barely imaginable, they frequently embody traces of brute actuality and intimations of elusive significance. Thus, the work of iconic signs is, in literary texts, characteristically conjoined to that of indices and symbols. Moving from this level of generality to the way such texts work, in particular, to some of the iconic functions in literature, I will consider, above all else, the diagrammatic function of literary texts. Here, the sentences inscribed across a page are at once verbal diagrams and, in however attenuated a form, spatial diagrams. As diagrams of such a hybrid character, they are capable of presenting spatial, temporal, and other relationships, though the spatial features of such verbal diagrams often bear anything but a straightforward relationship to their imaginable objects. Such inscribed diagrams are spatial figurations in which the most salient features of spatiality are in certain respects exploited and, in other respects, effaced or, at least, suspended. A number of examples from literature (including texts by Henry James, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, among others) are used to substantiate these claims.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Preface and acknowledgements vii
- List of contributors ix
- Introduction: Signergy 1
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Part I. Theoretical approaches
- Literary practices and imaginative possibilities 23
- The bell jar, the maze and the mural 47
- Iconicity as meaning miming meaning and meaning miming form 73
- A view from the margins 101
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Part II. Visual iconicity
- Iconic and indexical elements in Italian Futurist poetry 129
- Taking a line for a walk 157
- Iconicity and naming in E. E. Cummings’s poetry 179
- Bunyan and the physiognomy of the Wor(l)d 193
- From icon to index and back 211
- The poem as icon of the painting 225
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Part III. Iconicity and historical change
- Iconicity and etymology 243
- Iconicity typological and theological 259
- An iconic, analogical approach to grammaticalization 279
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Part IV. Iconicity and positionality
- Iconic signs, motivated semantic networks, and the nature of conceptualization 301
- Iconicity and subjectivisation in the English NP 319
- Metrical inversion and enjambment in the context of syntactic and morphological structures 347
-
Part V. Iconicity and translation
- Translation, iconicity, and dialogism 367
- Iconicity and developments in translation studies 387
- Author index 413
- Subject index 417
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Preface and acknowledgements vii
- List of contributors ix
- Introduction: Signergy 1
-
Part I. Theoretical approaches
- Literary practices and imaginative possibilities 23
- The bell jar, the maze and the mural 47
- Iconicity as meaning miming meaning and meaning miming form 73
- A view from the margins 101
-
Part II. Visual iconicity
- Iconic and indexical elements in Italian Futurist poetry 129
- Taking a line for a walk 157
- Iconicity and naming in E. E. Cummings’s poetry 179
- Bunyan and the physiognomy of the Wor(l)d 193
- From icon to index and back 211
- The poem as icon of the painting 225
-
Part III. Iconicity and historical change
- Iconicity and etymology 243
- Iconicity typological and theological 259
- An iconic, analogical approach to grammaticalization 279
-
Part IV. Iconicity and positionality
- Iconic signs, motivated semantic networks, and the nature of conceptualization 301
- Iconicity and subjectivisation in the English NP 319
- Metrical inversion and enjambment in the context of syntactic and morphological structures 347
-
Part V. Iconicity and translation
- Translation, iconicity, and dialogism 367
- Iconicity and developments in translation studies 387
- Author index 413
- Subject index 417
