Negation, Expectation and Ideology in Written Texts


Book Description

During an election campaign in 2008, Ken Livingstone said to a newspaper reporter “this election is not a joke”. By doing so, he introduced an expectation into the discourse that someone does, in fact, think it is a joke. This book explores how it is that saying what is not the case communicates something about what is. Bringing together a focus on text with cognitive and pragmatic approaches, a case is made for an application of linguistic negation as a tool of analysis. This tool is used to explore the ideological implications of projecting or reflecting readerly expectations. This book contributes to the growing field of Critical stylistics and aims to add to the range of stylistic insights which anchor the analysis of discourse to a consideration of the nuances of language choice.




The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics


Book Description

This second edition of The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics provides a comprehensive introduction and reference point to key areas in the field of stylistics. The four sections of the volume encompass a wide range of approaches from classical rhetoric to cognitive neuroscience. Issues that are covered include: historical perspectives, centring on rhetoric, formalism and functionalism. the elements of stylistic analysis, including foregrounding, relevance theory, conversation analysis, narrative, metaphor, speech and thought presentation and point of view. current areas of influential research such as cognitive poetics, corpus stylistics, critical stylistics, multimodality, creative writing and reader response. four newly commissioned chapters in the emerging fields of cognitive grammar, forensic linguistics, the stylistics of children’s literature and a corpus stylistic study of mental health issues. All of these new chapters are written by leading researchers in their respective fields. Each of the 33 chapters in this volume is written by a specialist. Each chapter provides an introduction to the subject, an overview of its history, an instructive example of how to conduct a stylistic analysis, a section with recommendations for practice and a discussion of possible future developments in the area for readers to follow up on. The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics, second edition is essential reading for researchers, postgraduates and undergraduate students working in this area.




The Language of Contemporary Poetry


Book Description

This book introduces a new way of looking at how poems mean, drawing on the framework first developed in the author’s book Critical Stylistics, but applied here to aesthetic more than ideological meaning. The aim is to empower readers of poetry to articulate the features of poetic language that they come across and explain to themselves and others why these features convey the meanings that they do. While this volume focuses on contemporary poets writing in English and mostly based in the UK and Ireland, the framework will work just as well for other eras’ poetry, as well as for other cultures and languages.




Sherko Bekas


Book Description

This book explores poetry by Sherko Bekas, a Kurdish writer and Swedish Tucholsky award winner, providing contextualising biography (with original new information from an interview with his son) and critical stylistic analyses of two selected poems. The authors also include a section on the Kurdish language and translation of the poems into English. There are very few English translations of some of Bekas' poems and no book so far on the stylistic or even linguistic analysis of his work, with the result that Bekas is not widely known in the "Western" world. This book aims to fill this lacuna in the literary and linguistic canon, and it will be of interest to students and scholars of Translation, Stylistics, Middle Eastern History and Literature.




The Routledge Handbook of Language in Conflict


Book Description

The Routledge Handbook of Language in Conflict presents a range of linguistic approaches as a means for examining the nature of communication related to conflict. Divided into four sections, the Handbook critically examines text, interaction, languages and applications of linguistics in situations of conflict. Spanning 30 chapters by a variety of international scholars, this Handbook: includes real-life case studies of conflict and covers conflicts from a wide range of geographical locations at every scale of involvement (from the personal to the international), of every timespan (from the fleeting to the decades-long) and of varying levels of intensity (from the barely articulated to the overtly hostile) sets out the textual and interactional ways in which conflict is engendered and in which people and groups of people can be set against each other considers what linguistic research has brought, and can bring, to the universal aim of minimising the negative effects of outbreaks of conflict wherever and whenever they occur. The Routledge Handbook of Language in Conflict is an essential reference book for students and researchers of language and communication, linguistics, peace studies, international relations and conflict studies.




Curved Thought and Textual Wandering


Book Description

This wide-ranging and provocative study traces Gertrude Stein's production of avant-garde texts that radically disrupted traditional notions of how fiction should be defined, valued, and read. The book combines feminist and postmodern perspectives to illuminate new facets of Stein's novels and to situate them within an expanded definition of the postmodern. The author argues that if we fail to consider the contexts within which postmodern innovations occur, and if we subsume all formal disruptions under a generalized postmodern mode, we obscure important differences among authors and distort the notion of the postmodern itself. The study expands our understanding of Stein as a novelist and a narrative theorist, repositions her work within a revised notion of literary history, and thus clarifies points of relation and divergence between modernism and postmodernism. It also assists in the historicizing of the postmodern literary emergence by insisting on the centrality of gender as a category of analysis. Finally, it argues for the importance of constructing definitions of postmodernism that will allow space to consider the complexity and diversity of its cultural practices. Curved Thought and Textual Wandering will be welcomed by scholars of modernism, of Gertrude Stein, and of feminist and narrative theory and postmodern culture.




Teaching and Studying Transnational Composition


Book Description

Transnational composition is a site for engaging with difference across populations, economies, languages, and borders and for asking how cultures, languages, and national imaginaries interanimate one another. Organized in three parts, the book addresses the transnational in composition in scholarship, teaching, and administration. It brings together contributions from institutional, geopolitical, and cultural contexts ranging across North America, Europe, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the Caribbean and covers writing in English, Chinese, multiple European languages, Latin American Spanish, African and West Indian Creoles, and Guianan French. Exploring the relationship among transnational, international, global, and translingual approaches to composition--while complicating the term composition itself--essays draw on theories of border work, mobility, liminality, cross-border interaction, center-periphery contours, superdiversity, and transnational rhetoric and address, among other topics, models of cognitive processing, principles of universal design, and frames of critical literacy awareness.




Language, Power and Ideology


Book Description

The topic of Language and Ideology has increasingly gained importance in the linguistic sciences. The general aim of critical linguistics is the exploration of the mechanisms of power which establish inequality, through the systematic analysis of political discourse (written or oral). This reader contains papers on a variety of topics, all related to each other through explicit discussions on the notion of ideology from an interdisciplinary approach with illustrative analyses of texts from the media, newspapers, schoolbooks, pamphlets, talkshows, speeches concerning language policy in Nazi-Germany, in Italofascism, and also policies prevalent nowadays. Among the interesting subjects studied are the jargon of the student movement of 1968, speeches of politicians, racist and sexist discourse, and the language of the green movement. Because of the enormous influence of the media nowadays, the explicit analysis of the mechanisms of “manipulation”, “suggestion”, and “persuasion” inherent in language or about language behaviour and strategies of discourse are of social relevance and of interest to all scholars of social sciences, to readers in all educational institutions, to analysts of political discourse, and to critical readers at large.




Colonial Ideology and the classical 'Bildungsroman'


Book Description

This book examines the ideological affinity that can be established between the classical ‘Bildungsroman’ and colonialist ideology on the basis of a literary analysis of ‘Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre’—considered by most critics to be the origin of the genre—and ‘Great Expectations’—one of the paradigmatic examples of the development of the Bildungsroman in English literature. This ideological affinity is understood as an example of what the Palestinian critic Edward Said has called a ‘structure of attitude and reference’: the convergence of different cultural manifestations that, although formally independent, contribute to a common purpose. The monograph also undertakes a study of the main characteristics of the classical ‘Bildungsroman’ from a formal and thematic point of view, and an analysis of the relationship between genre theories and Eurocentric discourses.




Shelley


Book Description

Attacked by T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis, Shelley's poetry has, over the last few decades, enjoyed a revival of critical interest. His radical politics and arrestingly original poetic strategies have been studied from a variety of perspectives - formalist, deconstructionist, new historicist, feminist and others. Of all the Romantics, Shelly has benefited most from the so-called 'theoretical revolution', as is borne out by the wide range of recent critical work represented in this volume. The 134 essays selected analyse many of Shelley's finest poems, including Alastor, Julian and Maddalo, Prometheus Unbound, Adonais and The Triumph of Life. Michael O'Neill's informed Introduction explores the contours of this debate. Detailed headnotes to the individual essays, explanations of difficult terms, and a further reading section provide invaluable guides to the reader. This collection illuminates the enduring and contemporary significance of the work of a major poet.