College Literature

I

That there is a "natural" conjunction between literature and linguistics is a truism regularly voiced by scholars in either discipline: after all, both fields deal with the raw material of human communication and expression, language. Given that linguists and literary scholars often depict the foundational nexus of their fields as self-explanatory and natural, it is surprising that they do not explore and exploit it more often and/or more systematically. To the contrary: both in research and teaching contexts, reciprocal prejudices keep the disciplinary siblings of linguistics and literary studies apart: while one is seen to be empirical and descriptive, the other is considered interpretive and analytical.

For practitioners of either discipline, such distinctions may be conducive to a disciplinary self-affirmation that is as justified as it is desirable. Far be it from us to propose the destruction of disciplinary identity, as overeager [End Page 85] champions of interdisciplinarity tend to do. Interdisciplinary cooperation cannot (and should not) render disciplinary identity obsolete. We know from experience that interdisciplinary cooperation may have the surprising, counterintuitive effect of sharpening and refining the disciplinary contours of the cooperating fields. In other words, interdisciplinary work may make us even more aware of the boundaries of our fields and our place within them.

At the same time, however, interdisciplinarity may also broaden our self-image, widen our horizons and open up scope for self-critique. Linguistic methodology can provide literary studies with new empirical rigor, grounding intuitive insights in quantitative evidence. In so doing, it can also revive methods of traditional philology which—though currently unfashionable—are basic to teaching and research. Moreover, since the evidence gleaned through linguistic analysis may challenge prior, intuitive interpretations, they potentially challenge and reformulate critical views. Linguistics helps us to "trust the text" (Sinclair 1992), in other words, to interpret the text, rather than impose interpretations upon it. In short, linguistics is a timely reply to literary scholarship that seems to have given up on the text in favor of a vague notion of culture, which, rather than seeing texts as aesthetically meaningful artifacts in themselves, treats them as largely interchangeable products of a discursive system.

Equally, there are benefits for linguists, some of whom see literary language above all as a deviant version of ordinary speech, different from everyday language use. This radical distinction between literary and ordinary language, however, clearly oversimplifies matters. Literary language not only constitutes a large part of our everyday language use, it is (and always has been) an influential shaper of our knowledge and hence, our worldview (consider, for example, the use of metaphor in advertising, popular music as well as academic writing). Linguistics—the study of language—cannot comfortably ignore literary language by claiming that is it exceptional or deviant, at best relegating its analysis to the field of stylistics. The reciprocal influencing of the literary and the everyday puts literary language squarely within the purview of the linguists.

However, to call for the more emphatic interaction between linguists and literary scholars is not to propose a naïve positivism. If literature and linguistics are mutually illuminating, they also mutually illuminate their limitations. While some cultural theorists would endorse the idea that "a quantitative approach is too mechanical, too insensitive to variation, to be illuminating by itself" (Burke 2004, 22), most linguists (in particular corpus linguists) would argue that a qualitative approach can only be successful if it places individual phenomena in their larger context of language use. Variation can only be [End Page 86] explained in quantitative terms as it presupposes a norm; the degree or direction of variation is only significant in comparison to normative expectations.

Although the application of linguistic empirical tools to literature may not lead to ultimate truths, it can nevertheless bring precision to otherwise often impressionistic treatments of texts. What is more, the conjunction of literature and linguistics bears upon the way we understand cultural analysis in more general terms. The representative corpora investigated by linguists, for instance, provide repositories of actual language use that document the linguistic condition of a culture at a given point in time. They enable us to test smaller corpora (e.g., based on literary texts) for their exceptionalism and specificity; in fact, such a comparative analysis may be the only way to understand their place in a larger cultural context. Literary texts are not composed in a vacuum: a balanced and varied corpus of everyday language use provides a general matrix against which the aesthetic distinctiveness of literature (or the lack thereof) may become visible. If linguistics places literature more firmly and credibly in its context, it simultaneously can help illuminate those features which distinguish literary artifacts from their cultural context. It thereby may also be able to rescue literary studies from being assimilated by the increasingly ubiquitous and monolithic Cultural Studies.¹ The comparative use of corpora may not only defy the idea that literature merely participates in general cultural discourses, it may also illustrate the difference—indeed the beauty—of art.²

In turn, it undermines generalized conceptualizations of a culture on the basis of limited data, furthering instead the kind of broad, "thin" description³ needed to really understand a culture's social reference points and mentalities. Language use reveals the influence of culture on individual and collective identity as well as its internal fault lines. It reveals how ideas and conceptualizations come to shape our perceptions of reality and, concurrently, how that very same reality is able to undermine our perceptions. It illustrates the reciprocal interaction between self and structure,⁴ revealing how the individual "makes sense" of a world of meanings that are less fixed and stable than we sometimes think. Finally, the analysis of everyday language use affirms that it is in the realm of art that these challenges are most pertinent and tangible.

II

The following essays map out the ground for fruitful interaction between literature and linguistics. The first two contributions, by Nigel Fabb and Morris Halle and Mzenga A. Wanyama, make innovative methodological forays into established fields of research: metrical analysis and stylistics. The paper by Elena Tapia and the contribution from Oliver Mason and [End Page 87] Rhiannon Platt show possibilities for joint applications of linguistics and literary studies in the teaching context.

Fabb and Halle's article on Christina Rossetti's poetry is informed by their critique of purely descriptive metrical analyses of poetry. Although these are typical for this field of study, they fail to adequately capture the aesthetic specificity of poetry, in particular the role of metre in sustaining that specificity. The crucial failure of most metrical analyses is that they do not distinguish rhythm (the poem as an utterance) and metre (the covert representation of that utterance), two discrete levels of the poetic artefact which may contradict and thus undermine each other. The particular complexity of Rossetti's work arises from the difference between the phonological/rhythmical and metrical representations of the poem's lines, posing a particular challenge to readers and interpreters. Fabb and Halle's generative theory of metre, developed in their sophisticated close reading of a selection of poems by Rossetti, provides an extraordinary method to illuminate these different levels of her work and interpret their interaction.

Wanyama's contribution very elegantly explores Bakhtin's theory of novelistic style through his own analysis of cohesive stylistic devices in the works by Alex La Guma, the influential South African novelist who writes about the struggles in and against Apartheid. Wanyama is interested in the many different voices, and hence ideologies, present among South Africa's social and cultural groups ("heteroglossia" in Bakhtin's terms), made apparent through the author's shifts in style and narrative point of view. This is most obviously illustrated by the use of dialects by certain characters, identifying their membership in particular social groups. La Guma evaluates situations by deliberately withholding commentary on his part. His depiction of torture, for example, avoids any kind of emotional involvement by refraining from adjectival specification or other stylistic devices. This stylistic sterility creates a further dimension of social heteroglossia, letting the situation speak for itself. By contrast, deictic constructions foreground individual identities and involve the reader in different ways. Wanyama's essay provides an insightful addition to Bakhtin's theory by pointing out how an author's idiosyncratic stylistic patterns add to the artistic quality of a work.

In her article, Elena Tapia presents her classroom experiences of teaching conceptual metaphor (as developed by Lakoff and Johnson). With the aid of self-exploratory exercises, she enables her students to detect pervasive conceptual metaphors in their own everyday language use, leading them to appreciate conceptual metaphor as the most powerful tool in construing socio-cultural meaning. Beginning with examples from public discourse, Tapia then investigates various types of conceptual metaphor (as well as their interaction with other relevant figurative stylistic devices) in literary prose, [End Page 88] for instance, the use and function of ontological metaphor in Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour." The students are equipped with an analytical toolkit as she guides them through detailed exercises, examples and sample analyses of their own, some of which she uses to illustrate her approach and document its success. Tapia thereby captivatingly demonstrates that providing students with alternative methods of analyzing literature may result in fresh insights and new readings as well as, on a more general level, a heightened awareness of the linguistic choices made by themselves and others.

Oliver Mason and Rhiannon Platt move a step further still by presenting a linguistic method applicable to textual analysis in general, be it poetry, prose, or political speeches. In their corpus-assisted analysis of a speech by George W. Bush, following the first round of attacks on Afghanistan in January 2002 the authors show how Bush, respectively his speech writers, exploit collocational expectations raised in ordinary language use by deliberately disappointing them. The premise here is that members of a particular speech community have expectations about a culture's (or social group's) "normal" way of communicating about issues, which are derived from language practice. If speakers deviate from the norm, listeners commonly infer supplementary meaning. Obviously, such assumptions imply recognition of statistically relevant frequencies and distributions of linguistic patterns and phenomena across a wide range of everyday language use. These are captured in large, balanced corpora, which provide background information about linguistic expectations that can then be contrasted with actual linguistic occurrences in a text under investigation. Of particular interest here are the concepts of "semantic preference" and "semantic prosody" which partly overlap. Based on information about the significant co-occurrence, that is: "collocation," of words or larger linguistic units, semantic prosody captures the evaluative aspect a language user (consciously or unconsciously) puts forward by choosing one expression over another. If a word usually co-occurs with negative words, it will carry a negative evaluation itself. Employing this word in a positive context may leave the hearer/reader confused as to the speaker's/writer's intentions. The same principle holds true for semantic preference, where words co-occur with other sets of words from recognizable semantic fields. Again, placing a word in unexpected semantic company will also induce additional pragmatic work in the recipient. Mason and Platt's truly eye-opening analysis of the lexical choices in George Bush's speech makes a persuasive general argument that political consciousness is based on linguistic awareness.

Together, the four papers in this focus issue illustrate a cross-section of innovative linguistically based analyses of literary and/or "creative" language use. Their underlying message is that rigorous investigation of actual textual [End Page 89] phenomena can yield interpretive insights that are difficult or impossible to gain without either a quantitative-qualitative approach and/or a sound theoretical matrix. Most importantly, however, the essays demonstrate that a heightened linguistic awareness is not only desirable, but—with the appropriate use of linguistic methodology—indeed possible, thus affirming the intrinsic critical dimension of Humanities scholarship and teaching.⁵