Volume 34, Issue 2

The late Paul Werth’s model of human discourse processing, Text World Theory (Werth 1994, 1995a, 1995b, and 1999), has been subject to some dramatic evolutionary changes over the last decade. Here I examine in particular the text-worlds created by the presence of modalized propositions in literary fiction and suggest a number of modifications to Werth’s (1999) handling of this area of discourse. I question Werth’s explanation of modality and use Simpson’s (1993) modal grammar of narrative fiction to formulate a refined text-world account of the conceptual structure of modalized propositions. As a consequence of this investigation, however, I also suggest that a text-world perspective on modality may have much to offer both to Simpson’s modal grammar and to our understanding of modality as a whole.

In this paper I examine the effects of considering Levinas’s philosophy of the relation to the Other as a relation to a second person “you,” rather than to a third person “he.” To think of the Other as “you” sheds further light on the ethical encounter that Levinas terms the “Saying:” it provokes us to think of the event of reading a literary text as an event of the Saying. In the dynamic potential of the literary text to instantiate an “I” and a “you” (which is to say, an addresser and an addressee) each time it is read, and in ways that cannot be exhaustively predicted or epistemologically saturated in advance, the artwork effects an open yet responsive encounter with the Other.

The narrative use of the reverie over the past has often been seen as part of the stock-in-trade of popular fiction. This has produced scandal and silence in about equal measure. In many critical retellings of James Joyce’s “Eveline”, for example, the strategy of silence has prevailed, even when critics like Robert Scholes have attempted to make the relationship between story and récit the focus of their attention. A second form of neglect has resulted when critics attempt to read all narrative fictions as marked order narratives. To read all Joycean first-person narratives as marked order fictions is to obliterate what distinguishes chronologically ordinary and marked order narration altogether. In contrast, by focussing on the use of a marked order narrative in “Eveline”, I attempt to demonstrate how an understanding of the significance of this authorial choice can throw into relief the basis for divergent critical interpretations of the short story. Through the use of four diagrams, I also reconstruct the two different chronological possibilities that critics use when they read “Eveline”.

The poet Harryette Mullen takes the defamiliarization technique celebrated in cognitive poetics to an extreme – she manipulates not only the subject matter of her writing but the process the reader undertakes in attempting to read that defamiliarized language as well. I apply to Mullen’s poem “Wipe That Simile Off Your Aphasia” a number of ideas taken up by cognitive poetics (using Stockwell 2002 as my guide): reading versus interpretation, defamiliarization, prototypicality and actualization, sequential and summary scanning, and the mapping of conceptual metaphor. I then argue for several broader and unaccounted for challenges that Mullen’s work presents for cognitive poetic theory.

This paper attempts to exemplify a double-faceted approach to analysis of a short poem by Elizabeth Jennings. It begins traditionally by posing the question “what impression does the poem make and what are the linguistic means by which this impression is created?” This question, it is suggested, can have two kinds of answer, depending on whether the poem is treated as a product/object to be viewed from a distance, or as a process of reading. Section 1 of this paper considers the linguistic features which are salient when we treat the poem as an object, and which are responsible for the overall impression, at a distance. The paper continues, in section 2, by considering the traditional notion of foregrounding, demonstrating how the last sentence of the poem is multiply foregrounded. In Section 3 the paper shows that in the case of this particular poem the effect of foregrounding is best explained in terms of text as process, rather than product, that is in terms of the impressions made in the course of a reading. To do this it analyses the ways in which syntax processing, arrest and release function; how transitions from one discourse unit to another are signalled and recognized by the reader; how the reader’s expectations are constantly being defeated and undermined, through conflicting presuppositions, and through the use of non-factive and negative linguistic devices. The paper concludes with a pragmatic exploration of the nature of the final foregrounded question, showing how it represents the culmination of the doubts expressed earlier, while, paradoxically, seeming to express certainty.

Why does an ordinary suburban laundry call itself Soap Opera  ? Why does a local hairdressers announce itself as Snip Joint ? What motivates these playful namings, and do they reflect a shift in societal attitudes to language, laundries and hairdressers? This paper examines a range of ‘joke shop names’ of the kind found on many contemporary British high streets (as elsewhere), and offers a commentary on their linguistic structure, semantic tendencies, as well as suggesting some of their interpersonal functions and effects. Such names enact or perform difference; for joke shop name establishments, the naming asserts and demonstrates that the proprietor and perhaps the staff, the modus operandi, the ambience, the treatment of customers, and so on, are non-standard by the expectations of normal mainstream businesses. Among other claims, I propose that joke shop names are almost the opposite of the processes of image-conscious logo-fashioning, the branding and re-branding of businesses, organizations and institutions that seems to be particularly actively pursued at present, driven by competitive and often globalizing forces.