Intertextuality and Parody of Law in The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien: a Literary and a Linguistic Reading
-
Patrizia Nerozzi
Patrizia Nerozzi is Emeritus Professor of English Literature. Her fields of research include the history of the novel, eighteenth century English literature and art, new communication technologies and visual arts, literature and law. She has published extensively on Laurence Sterne, Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen and the gothic novel. Since 2000 she has directed the Tristram Shandy Web (
www.tristramshandyweb.it ). She is member of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, of AIDEL and the advisory board of Pólemos.Mara Logaldo (PhD, English Studies) is tenured Research Fellow in English language and translation at IULM (International University of Languages and Media), Milan, where she teaches courses of British culture and English for Media Studies. Her research interests include rhetoric, media discourse, urban slang (“Only the immigrants can speak the Queen’s English these days’ but all kids have a Jamaican accent: overcompensation vs. urban slang in multiethnic London,” in
From International to Local English – And Back Again , eds. Roberta Facchinetti, David Crystal, Barbara Seidlhofler (Bern: Peter Lang): 115– 144), language and law. She has published monographs on Henry James, on discourse analysis, on New Journalism and, more recently, on communication in the age of Augmented Reality (Augmented Linguistics (Milano: Arcipelago, 2012)). Among her recent publications,“ On Crimes, Punishments, and Words. Legal and Language Issues in Cesare Beccaria’s Works,” inLiterature and Human Rights. The Law, the Language and the Limitations of Human Rights Discourse , ed. Ian Ward (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015): 289– 308. She has been a member of AIDEL since 2008.
Abstract
This essay aims to provide a dual reading of Flann O’Brien’s novel The Third Policeman: a literary one, centred on the multifarious references to famous works by authors such as Sterne, Gide, Dostoevsky and Kafka, and a linguistic one, in which the intertextual game is sought in the language of legal texts, particularly those belonging to the Irish tradition. While Patrizia Nerozzi explores the interplay with literary genres, motifs and narrative patterns, Mara Logaldo’s analysis identifies wordplays and other recurring rhetorical strategies, focusing on the typical traits of Irish and Legal English. Both studies concentrate on the parody of law that permeates the text: while the literary reading highlights the complex declinations of nonsense within this novel vis-à-vis other literary texts, the linguistic analysis shows to what extent Flann O’Brien exploits the idiosyncrasies of legal language to build up, with words, his architecture of absurdity, his fable of law.
About the authors
Patrizia Nerozzi is Emeritus Professor of English Literature. Her fields of research include the history of the novel, eighteenth century English literature and art, new communication technologies and visual arts, literature and law. She has published extensively on Laurence Sterne, Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen and the gothic novel. Since 2000 she has directed the Tristram Shandy Web (www.tristramshandyweb.it). She is member of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, of AIDEL and the advisory board of Pólemos.
Mara Logaldo (PhD, English Studies) is tenured Research Fellow in English language and translation at IULM (International University of Languages and Media), Milan, where she teaches courses of British culture and English for Media Studies. Her research interests include rhetoric, media discourse, urban slang (“Only the immigrants can speak the Queen’s English these days’ but all kids have a Jamaican accent: overcompensation vs. urban slang in multiethnic London,” in From International to Local English – And Back Again, eds. Roberta Facchinetti, David Crystal, Barbara Seidlhofler (Bern: Peter Lang): 115–144), language and law. She has published monographs on Henry James, on discourse analysis, on New Journalism and, more recently, on communication in the age of Augmented Reality (Augmented Linguistics (Milano: Arcipelago, 2012)). Among her recent publications, “On Crimes, Punishments, and Words. Legal and Language Issues in Cesare Beccaria’s Works,” in Literature and Human Rights. The Law, the Language and the Limitations of Human Rights Discourse, ed. Ian Ward (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015): 289–308. She has been a member of AIDEL since 2008.
©2016 by De Gruyter
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Focus
- Equity and the Resources of Critique: Part I
- “Where the Shoe Pinches”: True Equity in Trollope’s The Warden
- Equity as a Question of Decorum and Manners: Conscience as Vision
- Millenaristic Equity. Theological Order and Legal Faith
- “… and if, in time, equity…”. An Exploration of the Time(s) of Equity Diagrammed through Image
- “From their Graves”: The Theme of Burial and the Work of the Modern Jurist in F. W. Maitland’s Equity also the Forms of Action at Common Law
- Research
- Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper: New Definitions of Human Dignity in Novel and Film
- Intertextuality and Parody of Law in The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien: a Literary and a Linguistic Reading
- Book Review
- Gary Watt: Shakespeare’s Acts of Will: Law, Testament and Properties of Performance
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Focus
- Equity and the Resources of Critique: Part I
- “Where the Shoe Pinches”: True Equity in Trollope’s The Warden
- Equity as a Question of Decorum and Manners: Conscience as Vision
- Millenaristic Equity. Theological Order and Legal Faith
- “… and if, in time, equity…”. An Exploration of the Time(s) of Equity Diagrammed through Image
- “From their Graves”: The Theme of Burial and the Work of the Modern Jurist in F. W. Maitland’s Equity also the Forms of Action at Common Law
- Research
- Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper: New Definitions of Human Dignity in Novel and Film
- Intertextuality and Parody of Law in The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien: a Literary and a Linguistic Reading
- Book Review
- Gary Watt: Shakespeare’s Acts of Will: Law, Testament and Properties of Performance
