Chapters 1-6 PDF

CHAPTER 1. What is literature, what is a text? 1.1. Literary Language and Ordinary Language 1.1.1. The language of literature: Formalist approaches 1.1.2. Oracy, literacy and literature 1.2. Reading Literature 1.3. Genre, Text Type and Discourse 1.4. Primary and Seco...

CHAPTER 1. What is literature, what is a text? 1.1. Literary Language and Ordinary Language 1.1.1. The language of literature: Formalist approaches 1.1.2. Oracy, literacy and literature 1.2. Reading Literature 1.3. Genre, Text Type and Discourse 1.4. Primary and Secondary Sources 1. What is literature, what is a text? Look up the term literature in any current encyclopedia and you will be struck by the vagueness of its usage as well as an inevitable lack of substance in the attempts to define it. In most cases, literature is referred to as the entirety of written expression, with the restriction that not every written document can be categorized as literature in the more exact sense of the word. The definitions, therefore, usually include additional adjectives such as “aesthetic” or “artistic” to distinguish literary works from texts of everyday use such as telephone books, newspapers, legal documents and scholarly writings. Etymologically, the Latin word “litteratura” is derived from “littera” (letter), which is the smallest element of alphabetical writing. The word text is related to “textile” and can be translated as “fabric”: just as single threads form a fabric, so words and sentences form a meaningful and coherent text. The origins of the two central terms are, therefore, not of great help in defining literature or text. It is more enlightening to look at literature or text as cultural and historical phenomena and to investigate the conditions of their production and reception. Underlying literary production is certainly the human wish to leave behind a trace of oneself through creative expression, which will exist detached from the individual and, therefore, outlast its creator. The earliest manifestations of this creative wish are prehistoric paintings in caves, which hold “encoded” information in the form of visual signs. This visual component inevitably remains closely connected to literature throughout its various historical and social manifestations. In some periods, however, the pictorial dimension is pushed into the background and is hardly noticeable. Not only the visual—writing is always pictorial—but also the acoustic element, the spoken word, is an integral part of literature, for the alphabet translates spoken words into signs. Before writing developed as a system of signs, whether pictographs or alphabets, “texts” were passed on orally. This predecessor of literary expression, called “oral poetry,” consisted of texts stored in a bard’s or minstrel’s memory which could be recited upon demand. It is assumed that most of the early classical and Old English epics were produced in this tradition and only later preserved in written form. This oral component, which runs counter to the modern way of thinking about texts, has been revived in our century through the medium of radio and other sound carriers. Audio literature and the lyrics of songs display the acoustic features of literary phenomena. The visual in literary texts, as well as the oral dimension, has been pushed into the background in the course of history. While in the Middle Ages the visual component of writing was highly privileged in such forms as richly decorated handwritten manuscripts, the arrival of the modern age—along with the invention of the printing press—made the visual element disappear or reduced it to a few illustrations in the text. “Pure” writing became more and more stylized as an abstract medium devoid of traces of material or physical elements. The medieval union of word and picture, in which both components of the text formed a single, harmonious entity and even partly overlapped, slowly disappeared. This modern “iconoclasm” not only restricts the visual dimensions of texts but also sees writing as a medium which can function with little connection to the acoustic element of language. It is only in drama that the union between the spoken word and visual expression survives in a traditional literary genre, although this feature is not always immediately noticeable. Drama, which is —traditionally and without hesitation—viewed as literature, combines the acoustic and the visual elements, which are usually classified as non-literary. Even more obviously than in drama, the symbiosis of word and image culminates in film. This young medium is particularly interesting for textual studies, since words and pictures are recorded and, as in a book, can be looked up at any time. Methods of literary and textual criticism are, therefore, frequently applied to the cinema and acoustic media. Computer hypertexts and networks such as the Internet are the latest hybrids of the textual and various media; here writing is linked to sounds, pictures or even video clips within an interdependent network. Although the written medium is obviously the main concern in the study of literature or texts, this field of inquiry is also closely related to other media such as the stage, painting, film, music or even computer networks. As a result of the permeation of modern textual studies with unusual media, there have been major controversies as to the definition of “text.” Many authors and critics have deliberately left the traditional paths of literature, abandoning old textual forms in order to find new ways of literary expression and analysis. Visual and acoustic elements are being reintroduced into literature, and media, genres, text types and discourses are being mixed. 1.1. Literary Language and Ordinary Language Does literature have a language of its own, perhaps rather unrepresentative of, or rather different from, ordinary language (e.g. old-fashioned, obscure, pretentious, generally ‘difficult’)? The simple answer to this old question is no, there is nothing uniquely different about the language of literature. But a fuller answer will reveal why the language to be found in literary texts is often particularly interesting for language learners. Of the three broad areas surveyed in Part 1, culture and curriculum, reading of literature and the language of literature (this chapter), research to date has told us most about the language of literature. This is a well researched area, and some issues and conclusions are already relatively well defined, though ongoing research, particularly in corpus linguistics, is also opening up fascinating new dimensions of the topic. there is no clear and obvious literary/non-literary divide to be defined on strictly linguistic principles; literary language cuts across dichotomies like spoken/ written (oral/ literate) and formal/ informal; creativity may be a larger category than the literary, and with more explanatory power across both literary and more everyday discourses; it is now recognised that discourse types such as metaphor or narrative are central to all language use, whether literary, professional or more everyday spoken interactions; Literature, especially modern literature, is a kind of writing unusually, perhaps distinctively, tolerant of linguistic variety, including incorporation of many features of spoken language. Paradoxically, the study of literary language has indirectly provoked a better understanding of language and language use as a whole, just as diverse areas of descriptive linguistics, cognitive linguistics and discourse analysis have unexpectedly shown us the pervasively poetic and creative nature of everyday language use. Far from a peripheral concern, in sum, language used in literature is in many ways central to understanding language and language use in more general terms. Literature is made of, from and with ordinary language, which is itself already surprisingly literary. In so far as literature exists as an identifiable linguistic phenomenon, independent of readers and contexts of reading, ‘literariness’ is a matter of degree rather than kind: Quote 1.1 Literary language Features of language use more normally associated with literary contexts are found in what are conventionally thought of as non-literary contexts. It is for this reason that the term literariness is preferred to any term which suggests an absolute division between literary and non-literary. It is, in our view, more accurate to speak of degrees of literariness in language use. (Carter and Nash 1990: 18; also quoted and discussed in Verdonk 2002)  Common sense nevertheless traditionally opposes a stereotype of ‘literary’ language to ordinary language. Literary language in this view is flowery (or, more positively, ‘elevated’), unusually figurative, often old-fashioned and difficult to understand, and indirect (for example, ‘symbolic’); all in all totally unlike the language we use and encounter in everyday life. Our prototype of literary language is perhaps obscure modernist poetry. Where everyday language is used to exchange information, we tend to think, literary language has designs on our souls and deals with metaphysical ideas or ethical dilemmas. Readers and teachers of literature will recognise a limited validity to these kinds of charges. Those who resist the introduction of literary texts into language learning classrooms have often relied on such characterisations of literary language, as have those who wish to preserve their own literary turf. Those who advocate literature in language classrooms need to be able to offer an informed response to these charges of linguistic irrelevance and inappropriate difficulty. In practice, as we shall see, research has found it difficult to identify any clear boundaries between literary and non-literary uses of language, or to catalogue any definitive list of distinguishing features. Although some tendencies undoubtedly emerge from linguistic investigations into the language of literary texts, even these do not quite conform to the stereotype with which we began. Indeed a provocative formulation of the research reviewed in this chapter could be the surprising degree of literariness of the ordinary, and the equally pervasive ordinariness of the literary, particularly in the modern period. Most crucially for the language teacher, it could be that the language of literature is noticeably different in that it is typically more interesting and varied and representative than the language of dreamed-up dialogues in chemists’ shops or reprinted AIDS leaflets, as found in many of the best intentioned classrooms today. But these are matters for empirical investigation. Quote 1.2 Literary language as discourse... by raising these questions about the notion of literature, I have been taking for granted the existence of another coherent notion, that of ‘non-literature’. Perhaps we need to begin by questioning this notion.’ (Todorov 1990: 9) A definition of language is always, implicitly or explicitly, a definition of human beings in the world. (Williams 1977) 1.1.1. The language of literature: Formalist approaches Traditional views of the language of literature in the Anglo-American context derive from Romanticism via New Criticism, and typically characterize literature as ‘the best that is known and thought in the world’, in Arnold’s well-known formula, and therefore an appropriate model for students to revere, if not aspire to. Such a rationale lies behind the traditional modern foreign languages curriculum which culminates in the study of literature, with the implication that the literary classics represent in some sense ‘the best’ uses of the language to date. Key figure 1 Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) Poet, from the 1870s a man of letters, perhaps the first important ‘literary critic’, much concerned to establish standards and values for literary reading, as opposed to ‘Philistinism’. Arnold was also Senior Inspector of Schools (1870), later Chief Inspector of Schools (1884), and what he saw in his professional visits convinced him of the importance of literature, particularly in an age when conventional Christianity was losing its hold on the urban masses of the Victorian cities. Poetry, for Arnold, would represent alternative and better values than those that surround most of us most of the time, ‘a criticism of life’. His key work is Culture and Anarchy (1869)  Concept 1.1New Criticism New Criticism: a generic label given (after Ransom’s 1941 book of that name) to the dominant critical and pedagogical approaches to literature for most of the twentieth century and beyond. Reacting against the reduction of the meaning of literary texts to the biography and intentions of the author, or to historical contexts, or to the responses of readers, New Critics like Eliot (1951), Richards (1929), Brooks (1947) or Wimsatt and Beardsley (1954) insisted on ‘close reading’ of the words of the poem itself. Value was assigned to the literary text to the degree that ambiguities, paradoxes and ironies were structurally posed and resolved in the language of the poem itself. The language of poetry was opposed to the referential language of science or of logic. A poem, in this view, represents a unique experience, and is not translatable or generalisable into other terms (Brooks, ‘The Heresy of Paraphrase’). A poem should not mean but be’, in MacLeish’s famously self-contradictory poetic pronouncement. In established models, literature is viewed as complex, demanding, stretching the resources of the language to its limits. It is difficult to avoid clichés in representing this kind of perspective, though such an idea also anticipates the discussion of more rigorous Formalist ideas in what follows. ‘In major literary works we have the fullest use of language’; Literature is ‘the supreme creative act of language’ (F. R. Leavis, Cambridge Professor of English and a key founder of literary studies in the UK quoted in the context of a useful discussion of formalist approaches by Birch 1989: 44, 51). Poetry, for such critics, is found in writings like those of the Victorian Hopkins. But is all literary language really this difficult? How typical is such poetry? I caught this morning morning’s minion, kingdom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! (Hopkins 1990: 144. Poem 120. Simplified typography) Jakobson (not coincidentally a great admirer of Hopkins’ poetry) notoriously described poetry as ‘organised violence committed on ordinary speech’, at three distinct linguistic levels: sound-structure (alliteration, assonance, rhyme, metre); choice of words (metaphor, archaism, variety); and combination of words (unusual collocations, inverted word order, marked parallelisms, ellipsis, etc.). Other modern ‘formalists’ or ‘textualists’ – as opposed to ‘contextualists’ – include Bradford (1993, 1997) and Fabb (1997). Certainly, one feature of at least some literary writing is an unusually effective deployment of language, though it may not be the defining feature such commentators would wish for, and in any case, one would need to ask, ‘effective’ for who? noting the variety of response to any given utterance in art as in life. The query is, however, elided in arguing for the value of writers who use ordinary language in extraordinary ways. Taken to logical extremes, the Formalist position becomes untenably mystical. A critical discourse analyst would wish to probe who is exactly is doing the ‘isolating’ in my next quotation, and why: Quote 1.3 Poetic language The poem isolates itself, so to speak, from its context in ordinary experience to take on a separate, unique and indestructible existence of its own – independent not only of our ordinary experience, but also of its own separate constituents of sense and sound. (Reeves 1956, quoted in Birch 1989: 76) The attention to the ‘words on the page’, which was the slogan of New Criticism, was importantly prefigured in the first important historical attempts to identify and methodically describe the ‘literariness’ of literary language by the so-called ‘Russian Formalists’ in the early twentieth century. Generally these writers, too, accepted the idea of ‘poetry’, particularly modern or modernist poetry as the highest and so most typical form of literature. Concept 1.2 Russian Formalism Russian Formalism: an approximate label for publications deriving from members of the Moscow Linguistic Circle (started 1915) and Opojaz (The Society for the Study of Poetic Language). Prominent members included Roman Jakobson, Victor Shklovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum, Tomashevsky and Tynyanov. Jakobson continued his work from the 1930s in Prague, then emigrating with other members of the Prague Circle such as Rene Wellek, to the USA, where they had a direct influence on New Critical thinking, including the idea of the importance of the ‘structure’ of a literary work. We should pause here to note at the outset a certain circularity in the Formalist programme. ‘Literature’ (more typically ‘Poetry’) is defined as writing with dense manifestations of ‘literary/poetic features’. The ‘dominant’ feature of a poem is that it draws the reader’s attention to the language it uses, the forms (hence ‘formalism’). Predictably, therefore, for example, Shklovsky had little or little good to say about realist novels, because they are less literary (less ‘literariness’ features), even though many readers would want to claim (say) Middlemarch as a great work of literature. Consideration of any discussion of ‘literary language’ always needs to ask which particular body of that amorphous notion ‘literature’ is being privileged for analytical purposes, which writers, which works. I return in section 1.2 and elsewhere to this need for historical and cultural perspectives in considering ‘the’ language of ‘literature’. It is the need for this kind of contextualisation that prompts me to describe literature under the rubric of ‘discourse’ in this section and book as a whole, and finally to mistrust, of whatever limited use it undoubtedly is, the kind of intrinsic (anti-contextualist) formalist approaches to literature described here. Nevertheless, in the spirit of the Russian Revolution and of the new scientific twentieth century, the Formalists sought to put the study of literature on a firm foundation by establishing what literature actually was (there is still little agreement over this) and its distinguishing features, in other words, to identify in what the ‘literariness’ of the object of study ‘literature’ might consist. The answer was found to lie in a conjunction of psychological response and the use of language which prompted such acts of attention to particular language features. Here we find too an early characterisation of literary language as opposed to ordinary everyday language. The Formalists took a functional view, asking what was literature ‘for’? The answer given by Shklovsky and his colleagues was that the purpose of literature was to ‘defamiliarise’ our everyday world, to make a reader perceive afresh the phenomenal and social world around. Cook (1994) offers a more modern version of the idea, informed by cognitive psychology. Literary text worked, it was proposed, by making a reader halt and ponder over the unusual language it used, which ‘deviates’ from that found in more everyday contexts, which the Formalists called ‘practical language’. Literature in this view consists of special uses of language. The idea that what distinguished literary language was that it was carefully pondered and constructed by the literary writer, and consequently, often, by the reader too, remains influential, and can be shown to be the case in many instances. ‘People who live by the sea no longer hear the waves,’ Shklovsky observes in ‘Art as Technique’ (1917), often taken as a manifesto for Formalism, and widely reprinted (e.g. in Rice and Waugh 2001). Art should ‘de-automatise’ or ‘de-habitualise’, especially in the modern world. Quote 1.4 Habitualisation and defamiliarisation Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife and the fear of war. ‘If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been.’ And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important. (Shklovsky, in Lemon and Reis 1965: 12; emphases in the original). Ideas of noticing and prolonged perception will be familiar and attractive to those interested in second language acquisition research (compare Schmidt 1990; Ellis 1993). Readers of literature, as we shall see in Part 2, particularly second language readers, do indeed pause longer over words and remember surface forms better than ‘ordinary’ readers of other kinds of writing. The Formalists were right to suggest that some poetry at least ‘foregrounds’ utterances in the consciousness of (some) readers and audiences, making them more aware of the linguistic ‘devices’ which are communicating the literary idea, whether creative metaphor, unusual syntax or word order (‘deviance’) or marked repetitions or ‘parallelisms’, or whatever other device calls attention to the form itself. The Czech Formalists in the ‘Prague School’ developed and extended the Russian Formalists’ insights. For Mukarovsky, poetic language aims at ‘the maximum of foregrounding’, that is, ‘the aesthetically intentional distortion of linguistic components’. Similarly Shklovsky had written: ‘Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important’ (1917). Quote 1.5 Poetic language In poetic language foregrounding achieves maximum intensity to the extent of pushing communication into the background as the objective of expression, and of being used for its own sake; it is not used in the services of communication, but in order to place in the foreground the act of expression, the act of speech itself. (Mukarovsky, quoted in Carter 1994: 2247) In such a perspective, the language is more important than the content. This seems to overstate a good case, since for many ‘what’ is said is as important as how it is said. In perhaps the most well-known development of such Formalist ideas, which brought Formalism to the attention of New Criticism in the USA and UK, Jakobson (1960) proposed that the dominant focus in poetic communication is on the form of the message itself. Thus ‘I like Ike’, though not in the end poetry because of its dominant ‘persuasive’ function in political life, holds our attention as a presidential campaign button because of the foregrounded, ‘poetic’ sound effects, which are deviant, but also parallel, where parallelism (the term is borrowed, significantly, from Hopkins) is singled out for attention by many of those who wish to argue for intrinsic linguistic features of literary texts; ‘patterning’ (e.g. repetition) promotes attention to the language. Thus Yeats’ ‘Easter 1916’ is memorable for its repeated line ‘A terrible beauty is born’. What distinguishes literature from advertising in such a view is the ‘function’, what it is designed to do, rather than specific linguistic features. Similarly, Jakobson is known for his interest in ‘sound symbolism’, an area back in favour again today, mainly through the efforts of cognitive stylisticians, though now as ‘Iconicity’. This is the idea that sounds have meanings which audiences for a poem (or any utterance) understand and respond to at some level, just as writers and performers exploit these latent expressive meanings of the sound system. Thus Bolinger (1950), in a much-cited paper, proposed that the initial fl- sound in English (as in flag, flight, flower, fly) typically expresses movement; that initial gl- tends to denote light, while -itter, -ow, and -are suggest, respectively, intermittent, steady, continuity and intense, hence flitter, flow, flare or glitter, glow, glare). Such ideas of form possessing meaning are characteristically ‘Formalist’ and obviously of interest to language learners and teachers. But Jakobson’s central question in his highly influential ‘Poetics’ (1960), is ‘What makes a verbal message a work of art?’ He claims to identify ‘the differentia specifica of verbal art in relation to the other arts and in relation to other kinds of verbal behaviour’. In a reprise of the now familiar if difficult distinction, then, the question is what makes a literary use of language literary, and not ‘ordinary’, and whether there is a purely linguistic criterion. Jakobson as a Formalist believes such a linguistic argument can be made, though he is already, however unwillingly, straying into more pragmatic, even discoursal areas: ‘focus on the message for its own sake, is the POETIC function of language’. But again we must ask whose focus is this exactly? Perception requires an agent perceiving, and here Attridge’s (1988: 199) poststructuralist critique of Jakobson is surely on target when he argues that Jakobson’s argument proceeds by ‘excluding the reader’ and the contexts of any actual reading. Some readers (say) may wish to read Sylvia Plath’s poetry as language exercises; many more have responded to it as expressions of an individual life. Jakobson is particularly well known for his overwhelming demonstrations of parallelism and patterning focusing the reader’s attention in texts like Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 (Jakobson 1980), and again, most readers of poetry would readily assent that devices like rhyme, rhythm, assonance or alliteration are integral to successful poetic performance. The criticism those writers who claim a special status for these features in literary work have to answer, is that the very features we tend to think of as prototypically ‘literary’ (patterning, imagery, word play, ambiguity and the rest) are not exclusive to literature, but pervasive, for example, in advertising too (e.g. Cook 1992) and even in everyday conversation (Tannen 1989; Johnstone 1994; Carter 2004) and children’s play (Crystal 1998; Cook 2000). This point is developed later in the chapter in discussing ‘Creativity’. Werth (1976), for example, in a good-humoured article, early pointed out that one of the best examples to be found of parallelism in a text is a telephone directory, long lists of near identical entries which nevertheless hardly constitute poetry! Culler (1975/2002) notoriously (Jakobson himself just ‘couldn’t see it’) demonstrated how parallelism dominated Jakobson’s own prose. Jakobson’s response was to insist that it was a matter of degree, emphasis and, above all, of function: ‘Any attempt to reduce the sphere of the poetic function to poetry or to confine poetry to the poetic function would be a delusive oversimplification’ (p. 15), he concedes; he is writing only of ‘the predominant function’ of any message. The point remains that Jakobson privileges writings with dense parallelism demonstrable as ‘literary’ to a high degree, where other readers (Bakhtin, for example, reading the novelist Dostoevsky: see section 1.6 below) will value other features more highly. Certainly, a pedagogy based on the perception of complexities of texts will inevitably tend to give the expert teacher a starring role; and concomitantly, to intimidate the less accomplished or non-specialist student coming to these literature texts for the first time. Language learners want and need to focus on form, but not to take on difficulty for its own sake. Fortunately, not all or even most literature is textually or linguistically difficult. Crucially, as the rest of this chapter argues, the language of literature is not fundamentally different from more ordinary language, but very much related to it. Formalists’ increasing tendency to stress function rather than form is a concession to this position. In conclusion, the Formalists’ idea of Literature as a particular interest in form, the words themselves (and consequently in difficulties of meaning, ambiguities, paradox and other interpretative dilemmas), in reading as well as in writing literary works, is a fruitful one, which has taught us much about typical features of much literary language, but reservations must be entered: This account deals best with poetry, and more especially modern and modernist poetry. Literariness as defined by the Formalists is not equally applicable to all works usually considered literary, across times and genres. Given the range, it is doubtful if any such account of ‘literature’ as a whole ever could be convincing. The Formalists actually described and contributed to a specific socio-cultural historical moment of the reading of literature; form, ‘the words themselves’ do not force ‘foregrounding’; it is a preference of the trained literary reader to notice certain aspects of a work in literary contexts. The kind of ‘literariness’ the Formalists identify is to be found well beyond literary genres – compare discussion following of Creativity 1.1.2. Oracy, literacy and literature A dominant eighteenth-century meaning of ‘literature’ was ‘a written text’, as today we might receive ‘literature’ from a double glazing company through the post. For Samuel Johnson, in his Dictionary (1755), the word literature signalled ‘Acquaintance with “letters” or books; polite or humane learning; literary culture’ (quoted Miller 2002: 2). The nineteenth century tried to restrict literature even further to ideas of valued plays, poems and fiction, despite the widening contemporary ambit of literary efforts in the novel in particular, and the growth of popular literature. The historical spread of literacy through European and Western populations, industrialised print technologies and the introduction of compulsory schooling have been basic to the growth of the idea and practice of literature as it has been known, as have nationalist ideologies. Today, some see new electronic media making the idea of written literature particularly problematic if not obsolete, even as ideas of monolingual nation states with clearly defined national cultures are no longer tenable. We will need to return to the vexed question of literature as writing, and the relation of this kind of writing to the wider spoken language and to cultural contexts. Certainly, literature understood as ‘verbal art’ (now usually written) evolved from and remains intimately related to oral forms of verbal art. Quote 1.6 Oral vs. written language There is no clear-cut line between ‘oral’ and ‘written’ literature, and when one tries to differentiate between them – as has often been attempted – it becomes clear that there are constant overlaps. (Finnegan 1992: 2) Our modern notion of literature (imagination, creativity, originality), in tension with a spoken everyday vernacular, derives importantly from Wordsworth, T. S. Eliot and the classic writers read, or read about, in literary educations. Quote 1.7 Poetic language and ordinary language Every revolution in poetry is apt to be, and sometimes to announce itself as, a return to common speech. That is the revolution which Wordsworth announced in his prefaces and he was right... and the same revolution was due again something over a century later. (Eliot 1942; quoted in Adamson 1998: 589) Literary history is always necessarily a selective retrospective narrative (Perkins 1992) and we are right to be particularly suspicious of protagonists’ versions. Nevertheless, Wordsworth’s manifesto, to write a new dialogic poetry, ‘a man speaking to men’ (‘Preface’ to the Lyrical Ballads, 1802), and Eliot’s slightly mischievous kidnapping of the idea, point to the fruitful tension that always holds between language perceived to be marked as ‘poetic’, and the ‘everyday’. However, where Eliot suggests some kind of eternal cycle of formal alterations in the service of defamiliarisation (compare Jakobson and Tynyanov 1928; Bradford 1993), we should observe rather the increasing historic trend to use more colloquial or informal language, in literature as in other areas, through the nineteenth century to the present day. A tendency from the earliest times, the reproduction or rather representation of ordinary language in literary contexts, becomes the norm in modern times (Blake 1981). Attridge (1988: 4) has written of the ‘oscillating and unstable relationship’ between ordinary language and literary language, remarked on since Aristotle advocated the use of ‘unusual words’ to distinguish the literary work as something special, but ‘the use of normal speech’ too in due moderation, a kind of tension between the need to be interesting and the need to be comprehensible (Attridge 1988: 2) which faces the creative writer. Ordinary language haunts or inhabits literary language, just as supposedly literary language informs the ordinary. Bradford has a similar proposal to Attridge’s. Quote 1.8 Linguistic creativity in literature Literary styles can feature in non-literary discourses, and vice versa, but a literary text is defined by a tension between these two elements that permeates its entirety: modernism has shown how far this tension can be stretched. Bradford (1997: 168) Adamson’s (1998) account is the best modern literary history of ‘conversationalisation’. In outline, what Adamson traces is the increasing acceptability in modern literary writings, through the last two centuries in the West, of linguistic features more usually thought of as ‘spoken’, unplanned or unedited discourse, even colloquial speech, as opposed to the standard and educated forms of traditional literary genres. At the same time, we observe the paradox that literary language is planned, ‘rehearsed’ to an unusual degree – perhaps only the drafting of international treaties involves such careful editing and rewriting. More an appearance of spontaneity, then, than the real thing. Wordsworth advocated for literary usage the real language of men speaking to men. He used the ballad form (Lyrical Ballads) because it could legitimately allow representations of ordinary speakers to be taken seriously, as well as generally displaying many features of the oral tradition of narrative. In this way Wordsworth’s ballads prefigure and initiate the tradition of the modern literary work, which is increasingly likely to contain representations of speech, as well as dialect features, clichés, parataxis rather than hypotaxis, repetitions, parenthesis and digression (Adamson), contractions, second-person pronouns, ellipses and other such characterisations of ‘spoken’ language. At the discourse level, intertextuality and the incorporation of voices of other speakers are increasingly obvious from Dickens, through Eliot (‘The Waste Land’) to John Ashbery in our own day. Where early representations of non-standard speech were merely comic or distractions such voices become fully legitimate, often barely noticed features of literary characters and narrators, or aggressively valorised in a writer like Tony Harrison (‘V’, 1984), or James Kelman (How Late it Was, How Late, 1995; see Toolan in Bex et al., 2000.. These uses of vernacular diction are ‘acts of identity’ in the term Adamson borrows from Le Page and Tabouret Keller’s (1985) classic sociolinguistic work on Caribbean creoles. In fact, vernacular language features strongly in postcolonial literature from the time of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn to Walcott and Rushdie today. Adamson also suggests that modern literature in English seeks for stylistic range, and that this has dictated, due to the decline or virtual disappearance of ‘high’ languages like Greek or Latin, the greater acceptability in modern literature of swearing, scatological language and the like: Harrison again (‘V’), but already, though more shocking, in 1960s Larkin: ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad...’. If readers tend to think of modernism as difficult, elliptical, disconnected, demanding on the reader (Joyce, Ulysses), Adamson’s account would suggest that this is partly a result of the incorporation into literary writing of the kind of spoken features illustrated here, which occurred gradually through the modern era. The language of modern literature is often private, with the reader a kind of over hearer rather than addressee – just like much of modern advertising copy: ‘Wish you were here,’ Harrison writes in an imagined postcard to his dead father. Or consider: This is where we are spending our vacation. A nice restful spot. Real camp life. Hope you are feeling fine. (Ashbery, quoted in Adamson, p. 675) This is not textually or linguistically difficult. It is every day, ordinary language, if ever such a thing existed (though notably ‘written’ here), but found increasingly in apparently literary works, which will prompt reader-elaboration to produce a properly ‘literary’ response (compare discussion of Culler 1982, and literary reading practices, Chapter 3 below). At the linguistic level we understand. The problem for the literary reader is often, rather, ‘What does it all mean and why am I (the reader) being told this?’ These are central concerns of literary reading, the need to infer, which is also a key skill for all learners to develop more widely. The second point to underline, which emerges from any historical consideration of the styles of literatures in English in the modern age, is that ‘English Literature’, or other national literatures, despite misleading statements in the British National Curriculum or equivalent documents, has not been written exclusively or often even predominantly in what is known as Standard (British) English. If such a thing ever existed anywhere out of the textbooks which tried to teach it, it was not in literary writing that it was to be found. This is of course ever more true as postcolonial new ‘literatures in English’ (Naipaul (Trinidad), Rushdie (India), Coetzee (South Africa), Derek Walcott (Caribbean) or Les Murray (Australia), never mind Kelman (Scotland) or Doyle or Heaney (both Ireland) are accepted into the canon. The key point here, then, is the unusually wide linguistic range of literary texts. Jeffries’ (1993) survey of twentieth-century English language poetry notes the pervasive ‘spread of non standard English’ and ‘an unprecedented use of vocabulary from areas of life not traditionally recognised as poetic’: ‘The choice of vocabulary (sometimes called ‘diction’) for a poet has probably never been wider than in the twentieth century’. This will be a challenge for the learner, but widening of vocabulary is now commonly recognised as essential and often at the same time a neglected aspect of language learning. 1.2. Reading Literature Amidst the gushing river of popular culture, the turbulent climate of politics, media bias, and misinformation, the tornadic winds of modern educational theories, and the volcanic eruption of screens and technology, a pertinent set of questions exists: Why read literature? Of what value is literature? It is helpful to think about the role of literature in the context of cultural problems—for literature has always persisted in the midst of and in response to a fallen, often chaotic world. Assuredly, Wordsworth’s lament applies to all ages, a prescient vision of the past, present, and future: The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! Truly, we have given our hearts away, disconnecting ourselves from God, nature, and others—but literature has the capability of providing a restorative cure. So then, what kind of literature holds such power? The answer is the Great Book. Samuel Johnson said in his “Preface to Shakespeare” that “the only test of literary greatness is length of duration and continuance of esteem.” Moreover, a book may be considered great if it meets three criteria. The first is universality. A great book speaks to people across many ages—affecting, inspiring, and changing readers far removed from the time and place in which it was written. Second, it has a Central One Idea and themes that address matters of enduring importance. And third, it features noble language. A great book is written in beautiful language that enriches the mind and elevates the soul. Now that we have established what kind of literature to read, let’s consider why we should read literature. Here are six reasons: 1. Reading great literature exercises the imagination. We enjoy stories; it is a pleasure to meet characters and to live in their world, to experience their joys and sorrows. In a practical sense, an active imagination helps us perceive truth, make value judgments, and deal with the complexities of life in creative ways. It even aids in our ability to use logic and to reason well. 2. Reading literature transports us out of our current context and into other ages and places. Interacting with characters across space and time diminishes our ignorance. Mark Twain once remarked, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, narrowmindedness, and bigotry. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all of one’s lifetime.” Because most of us cannot pilot a steamboat along the Mississippi River, or travel to many parts of the world as Twain was able to do, literature serves as a worthy guide and vessel for our exploration. 3. Reading literature enables us to see the world through the eyes of others. It trains the mind to be flexible, to comprehend other points of view—to set aside one’s personal perspectives to see life through the eyes of someone who is of another age, class, or race. Reading literature nurtures and develops the power of sympathetic insight. 4. Great works of literature have played a fundamental role in shaping society. For example, The Epic of Gilgamesh initiated the archetypal narrative of the hero embarking on an epic quest, which became a popular and influential blueprint for literature the world over. Some other landmark texts include Homer’s Odyssey, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Cervantes’ Don Quixote, which is credited as the first novel in the Western world, creating a genre that has since become the dominant form of literature in the modern era. A little later, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther was deeply influential (though not necessarily in positive ways); Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads initiated the Romantic era in English literature, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin helped push a divided nation into civil war over slavery. In the early twentieth century, Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle exposed the horrors of America’s meatpacking industry and caused many reforms in the mass production of food. Books have the power to shape culture and history. 5. Reading literature fosters contemplation and reflection, and improves our facility with language and vocabulary. Interacting with these texts requires deliberate, conscious thinking in order to understand and retain longer units of thought. The average number of words per sentence in the sixteenth century was 65-70 words, but, not surprisingly, that number has steadily declined through the modern era to about 15 words today. Likewise, the average number of letters per word has declined, revealing a decrease in the use of longer, higher-level words. The continual exposure to elaborate, elevated syntax and diction develops not only our thinking abilities, but our speaking and writing skills too. We begin to conceive of sentences in the manner of the great writers, imitating their techniques in style and vocabulary. In his poem Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot prophesied that we would be “distracted from distraction by distraction.” Alas, we are unable to retain and reflect upon an idea for any meaningful length of time. Reading great literature is an active push against this tendency. 6. Finally, reading literature helps us to know ourselves—in short, to understand man. For the subject of literature is man. In its pages, we learn about our creative and moral faculties, our conscience, and most importantly, our soul. We see man at the height of his glory and the depth of his folly—with every heartrending thought, action, emotion, and belief in between. In other words, literature holds a mirror up to human nature, revealing its inner depths and complexities, its array of virtues and vices; and moreover, it holds a mirror up to a cultural age, illuminating its shape and ethos. Long ago, inscribed on the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi was the maxim, “Know thyself.” Reading literature remains the surest means to do just that—to live the life Socrates declared the only one worth living: the examined life. After all, literature may simply be the creative expression of metaphysics and being: In some mysterious way, each life is every life, and all lives are one life—there is something of ourselves in each and every character we meet in the hallowed pages of a Great Book. 1.3. Genre, Text Type and Discourse Literary criticism, like biology, resorts to the concept of evolution or development and to criteria of classification to distinguish various genres. The former area is referred to as literary history, whereas the latter is termed poetics. Both fields are closely related to the issue at hand, as every attempt to define text or literature touches not only upon differences between genres but also upon the historical dimensions of these literary forms of expression. The term genre usually refers to one of the three classical literary forms of epic, drama, or poetry. This categorization is slightly confusing as the epic occurs in verse, too, but is not classified as poetry. It is, in fact, a precursor of the modern novel (i.e., prose fiction) because of its structural features such as plot, character presentation and narrative perspective. Although this old classification is still in use, the tendency today is to abandon the term “epic” and introduce “prose,” “fiction” or “prose fiction” for the relatively young literary forms of the novel and the short story. Beside the genres which describe general areas of traditional literature, the term text type has been introduced, under the influence of linguistics. Texts which cannot be categorized under the canonical genres of fiction, drama and poetry are now often dealt with in modern linguistics. Scholars are looking at texts which were previously regarded as worthless or irrelevant for textual analysis. The term text type refers to highly conventional written documents such as instruction manuals, sermons, obituaries, advertising texts, catalogues, and scientific or scholarly writing. It can, of course, also include the three main literary genres and their sub-genres. A further key term in theoretical treatises on literary phenomena is discourse. Like text type, it is used as a term for any kind of classifiable linguistic expression. It has become a useful denotation for various linguistic conventions referring to areas of content and theme; for instance, one may speak of male or female, political, sexual, economic, philosophical and historical discourse. The classifications for these forms of linguistic expression are based on levels of content, vocabulary, syntax, as well as stylistic and rhetorical elements. Whereas the term text type refers to written documents, discourse includes written and oral expression. In sum, genre is applied primarily to the three classical forms of the literary tradition; text type is a broader term that is also applicable to “non-canonical” written texts, i.e., those which are traditionally not classified as literature. Discourse is the broadest term, referring to a variety of written and oral manifestations which share common thematic or structural features. The boundaries of these terms are not fixed and vary depending on the context in which they appear. 1.4. Primary and secondary sources Traditional literary studies distinguish between the artistic object, or primary source, and its scholarly treatment in a critical text, or secondary source. Primary sources denote the traditional objects of analysis in literary criticism, including texts from all literary genres, such as fiction, poetry or drama. The term secondary source applies to texts such as articles (or essays), book reviews and notes (brief comments on a very specific topic), all of which are published primarily in scholarly journals. In Anglo-American literary criticism, as in any other academic discipline, regularly published journals inform readers about the latest results of researchers. Essays are also published as collections (or anthologies) compiled by one or several editors on a specific theme. If such an anthology is published in honor of a famous researcher, it is often called a festschrift, a term which comes from the German but is also used in English. Book-length scholarly treatises on a single theme are called monographs. Most dissertations and scholarly books published by university presses belong to this group. In terms of content, secondary literature tries to uphold those standards of scholarly practice which have, over time, been established for scientific discourse, including objectivity, documentation of sources and general validity. It is vital for any reader to be able to check and follow the arguments, results and statements of literary criticism. As the interpretation of texts always contains subjective traits, objective criteria or the general validity of the thesis can only be applied or maintained to a certain degree. This can be seen as the main difference between literary criticism and the natural sciences. At the same time, it is the basis for the tremendous creative potential of this academic field. With changes of perspective and varying methodological approaches, new results in the interpretation of texts can be suggested. As far as documentation of sources is concerned, however, the requirements in literary criticism are as strict as those of the natural sciences. The reader of a secondary source should be able to retrace every quotation or paraphrase (summary) to the primary or secondary source from which it has been taken. Although varying and subjective opinions on texts will remain, the scholarly documentation of the sources should permit the reader to refer back to the original texts and thus make it possible to compare results and judge the quality of the interpretation. As a consequence of these conventions in documentation, a number of formal criteria have evolved in literary criticism which can be summarized by the term critical apparatus, which includes the following elements: footnotes or endnotes, providing comments on the main text or references to further secondary or primary sources; a bibliography (or list of works cited); and, possibly, an index. This documentation format has not always been followed in scholarly texts, but it has developed into a convention in the field over the last several centuries. forms of secondary sources publishing media essay (article) journal note anthology (collection) book review festschrift review article book monograph formal aspects of secondary literature aspects of content footnotes objectivity bibliography lucid arguments index general validity of thesis quotations The strict separation of primary from secondary sources is not always easy. The literary essay of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is a historical example which shows that our modern classification did not exist in rigid form in earlier periods. This popular genre treated a clearly defined, abstract or theoretical topic in overtly literary language, and thus possessed the stylistic features of primary sources; however, the themes and questions that it dealt with are typical for scholarly texts or secondary sources. From a modern perspective, therefore, the literary essay bridges two text types. In the twentieth century, the traditional classification of primary and secondary sources is often deliberately neglected. A famous example from literature in English is T.S.Eliot’s (1888– 1965) modernist poem The Waste Land (1922), in which the American poet includes footnotes (a traditional element of secondary sources) in the primary text. In the second half of the twentieth century, this feature has been further developed and employed in two ways: elements of secondary sources are added to literary texts, and elements of primary sources—e.g., the absence of a critical apparatus or an overtly literary style—are incorporated in secondary texts. The strict separation of the two text types is therefore not always possible. Vladimir Nabokov’s (1899–1977) novel Pale Fire (1962) is an example of the deliberate confusion of text types in American literature. Pale Fire consists of parts—for instance, the text of a poem—which can be labeled as primary sources, but also of other parts which are normally characteristic of scholarly treatises or critical editions of texts, such as a “Foreword” by the editor of the poem, a “Commentary” with stylistic analysis as well as critical comments on the text, and an “Index” of the characters in the poem. In the (fictitious) foreword signed by the (fictitious) literary critic Charles Kinbote, Nabokov introduces a poem by the (fictitious) author Francis Shade. Nabokov’s novel borrows the form of a critical edition, in which the traditional differentiation between literary text and scholarly commentary or interpretation remains clearly visible. In the case of Pale Fire, however, all text types are created by the author Vladimir Nabokov himself, who tries to point out the arbitrariness of this artificial categorization of primary and secondary sources. The fact that this text is named a novel, even though it has a poem at its center, calls attention to the relativity inherent in the traditional categorization of genres. CHAPTER 2. Literary Form 2.1. What is Literary form? 2.2. Invariant Facts about iambic Pentameter Line 2.3.There are ten metrified syllables in the iambic pentameter line \ 2.1. What is literary form? A text has literary form if certain statements are true of the text. Consider, for example, the following statements about a text: It is a sonnet. It is divided into lines. The lines are grouped by rhyme into a group of eight lines and a group of six lines. It is in iambic pentameter. These statements are all true of the following text: Say over again, and yet once over again, That thou dost love me. Though the word repeated Should seem ‘a cuckoo-song’, as thou dost treat it. Remember, never to the hill or plain, Valley and wood, without her cuckoo-strain Comes the fresh Spring in all her green completed. Belov`ed, I, amid the darkness greeted By a doubtful spirit-voice in that doubt’s pain Cry, ‘Speak once more – thou lovest!’ Who can fear Too many stars, though each in heaven shall roll, Too many flowers, though each shall crown the year? Say thou dost love me, love me, love me – toll The silver iterance! – only minding, Dear, To love me also in silence with thy soul. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese, XXI, 1847–50 (Browning 1889:IV, 55) Generally, how does literary form hold of a text? I will propose two different but compatible answers, which distinguish the variable from the invariant aspects of literary form. Both answers come from linguistics but from two different kinds of linguistics: generative metrics will explain the invariant aspects of form and linguistic pragmatics will explain the variable aspects of form. The fact that there are two fundamentally different kinds of literary form, both of which can hold of a text, is a kind of formal multiplicity. This is just one among many kinds of formal multiplicity which we find wherever we find literary form. In this text another kind of formal multiplicity can be seen in the grouping of lines. The rhyme scheme of ABBAABBA+CDCDCD tells us that the text is grouped as 8+6 but punctuation and meaning tell us that the text is grouped as 6+8. The two divisions are incompatible and yet both hold to some extent of the text; this is possible because both groupings hold as interpretations of the text rather than as observer independent facts about the text. In this way, literary form is seen to be a kind of meaning, a description of itself which the text communicates to its reader, and has all the complex characteristics associated with meaning: uncertainties, ambiguities and contradictions. I suggest that we experience the inherent complexities and multiplicities of literary form as aesthetic. In this I follow Shklovsky... The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. (Victor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’, 1917 (Lemon and Reis 1965: 12))... and Gascoigne:. the verse that is to easie is like a tale of a rosted horse (George Gasgoigne (1575:53)) Implied form, explicit form and generated metrical form One kind of literary form which holds of this poem is ‘being a sonnet’ or sonnethood. Sonnethood holds of a text with a certain degree of strength; in Browning’s poem, sonnethood holds strongly. I propose that sonnethood is a kind of form which holds of a text by implicature; the text implies that it is a sonnet and hence the reader infers that it is a sonnet. This is the only sense in which it is a sonnet: the reader ‘holds the text to be a sonnet’ and as a result ‘sonnethood holds of this text’. This is a kind of implied form. I will argue that many kinds of literary form are kinds of implied form. The notion of ‘strength’ is fundamental to this approach: all thoughts are held with a degree of strength corresponding to the thinker’s commitment to their truth; the more strong the thinker’s commitment, the more strongly the form holds of the text. Another kind of form which holds of this text is ‘being in lines’ or lineation. Instances of this kind of form include ‘there are fourteen lines in this text’ and ‘the first line ends on the word “again”’. These might seem to be facts about the text which exist independently of a reader, but in chapter 5 I will argue that they are all kinds of implied form which hold only by virtue of being inferred. The closest we can get to an observer-independent fact about the text is ‘there are fourteen printed words which have no words to the right of them’ and ‘the word “again” has no words to the right of it’. Like the thoughts which are of implied form, I suggest that these also hold as thoughts about the text rather than just being determinate facts, but I acknowledge their relatively unmediated status by classifying them as explicit form. ‘Rhyme’ is a kind of form which holds of this poem and specifically the rhyme pattern ABBAABBACDCDCD. Is rhyme a kind of implied form or a kind of explicit form? Rhyme holds between syllables which are alike but need not be identical; here there is a rhyme between ‘repeated’ and ‘treat it’ which is based on the similarity between the sound sequence [i t d] and [i t t]. The fact that similarity is involved rather than identity means that rhyme has to be judged to be present, which suggests that it is a kind of implied form rather than a kind of explicit form. On the basis of inferring rhyme we can also infer that the poem falls into two groups, an eight-line group followed by a six-line group, each with separate rhyme patterns. The grouping of lines is another kind of implied form, the topic of chapter 6. There I show that even where lines are grouped by layout, grouping is still a kind of implied form, based on the explicit evidence drawn from the page. For all these kinds of implied form, one of the reasons for thinking that they are implied is that they can hold weakly of a text, and kinds of implied form can contradict one another. In this poem, the rhyme implies a division of the text into an eight-line unit and a six-line group, but the organisation of meaning, sentence structure and punctuation does not support this division of the text into parts; indeed, a division into a six-line unit followed by an eight-line unit is supported by these kinds of form. Complexities of this kind are found wherever we find literary form. They arise because literary form is implied. They are, I suggest, one source of aesthetic experience; as Thomas Hardy says, ‘dissonances, and other irregularities can be produced advisedly, as art, and worked as to give more charm than strict conformities’ (Taylor 1988:63). Kinds of explicit form are all facts about a particular instance of the text, whether spoken or printed, and the kinds of explicit form vary according to whether the text is spoken or printed. I will refer to particular instances of a text as performances of it in any medium; the printed text given earlier is a performance of this text. A text can be realised by any number of different performances but if it is made of language then it also has an underlying linguistic representation. The linguistic representation of the text is the abstract representation of the sounds which comprise it (its phonological structure), the words from which it is made (its lexical structure), and the relations between those words (its syntactic structure). While a text may have any number of performances, it will normally have just a single underlying linguistic representation with discrete and determinate characteristics. In some kinds of literary text – most obviously, metrical verse – the underlying linguistic representation of the text seems to be the basis of another kind of literary form, which is the metrical form of the text. Metrical form is built by a set of rules and conditions, based on the underlying form of the text, and it fixes certain aspects of the text, most importantly the number of syllables in the line. In this book I assume generative linguistics (Chomsky 1957, Chomsky and Halle 1968) as a theory of linguistic form, and generative metrics (Halle and Keyser 1971, Halle 2001) as a theory of metrical form. This kind of metrical form of a text is a type of generated form; I usually call it the generated metrical form of the text, and describe it in the rest of this chapter. Metricality Metricality is a complex characteristic, a mixture of explicit, implied and generated form. To examine the explicit and implied metrical forms of a line from the poem, consider a performance in speech of the ninth line. Cry, ‘Speak once more – thou lovest!’ Who can fear There are many possible ways of saying the line; one way of saying the line can be abstractly represented as a pattern of relatively unstressed syllables marked x, and relatively stressed syllables marked / as follows: / / x / x / x / x / Cry, ‘Speak once more – thou lovest!’ Who can fear This is an abstract representation of an observable fact of a performance of the text. It is an example of what I call explicit form. Form is inherently abstract and general but this is as close to concrete and unique as form gets, expressing a specific characteristic of a specific instance of the text. The text can be spoken in other ways and when it is, it will have different explicit forms. Explicit form holds of a particular performance of the text, not of the text in the abstract. This explicit form resembles a much more abstract and general version of the rhythm of a line, which could be represented like this: x/x/x/x/x/ This is a representation of a conventional metre called ‘iambic pentameter’, where there are ten syllables, with unstressed syllables in odd positions and stressed syllables in even positions. As a kind of form it is not tied to any specific text or performance (unlike the explicit form), but instead it holds as a kind of ideal or norm, a generalisation over many texts, and one of the things that we might know if we know about English poetry. The above representation is a metrical template for iambic pentameter. The explicit rhythm (a) resembles the metrical template (b); they have the same number of elements and differ in just one. (a)/ / x / x / x / x / explicit rhythm (b) x / x / x / x / x / metrical template We say that the performed line is ‘in iambic pentameter’ because the explicit rhythm (a) approximates fairly closely to the metrical template (b). This relation of resemblance or approximation can be understood as a relation of implication. The explicit form implies the metrical template by resembling it, and because the line implies the form, the form therefore holds of the text. Because the resemblance is not exact, the implicature is correspondingly weak, so that the rhythm of the line implies fairly strongly but not with full strength that it is in iambic pentameter. The relation between the explicit rhythm and the metri-cal template is tendential or approximate, which fits with the fact that iambic pentameter (as a normative rhythm) holds by being implied. But there are also some facts about this line which are not tendencies or approximations but are rigid facts of the matter, true of this line and of every iambic pentameter line. The two facts are as follows. Fact A. A line has ten projected syllables. Fact B. A stressed syllable within a polysyllabic word must be projected syllable 2, 4, 6, 8 or 10 or is the first syllable in the line. In the rest of this chapter the author explains what these facts are (e.g. what a ‘projected syllable’ is) and show that they are true of Browning’s poem. Together they constitute ‘iambic pentameter’ as a kind of generated metrical form. Thus the poem is ‘in iambic pentameter’ twice, in two different ways; ‘iambic pentameter’ holds of the text both as a kind of implied form and as a kind of generated metrical form. This is a kind of formal multiplicity, one of the many kinds of complexity which are characteristic of literary form, and which arise because literary form is a matter of the text’s psychological reception and not inherent to the text itself. 2.2 Invariant facts about the iambic pentameter line Facts A and B are not facts about a performance of the text, and may not hold true of any specific performance. The first line of Browning’s text can be performed with ten, eleven or twelve syllables, which goes against fact A. This is because the word ‘over’ can be pronounced as one or two syllables (I symbolise the one-syllable pronunciation here as ‘ov’r’): Say over again, and yet once over again, 12 Say ov’r again, and yet once over again, 11 Say over again, and yet once ov’r again, 11 Say ov’r again, and yet once ov’r again, 10 Similarly, ‘without’ is a polysyllabic word, and while its natural stress is on the second syllable, we can pronounce it any way we like so that nothing prevents us pronouncing it with the first syllable given greatest stress: /xx//xx/x/ Valley and wood, without her cuckoo-strain If we perform the line like this, then it will have a stressed syllable within a polysyllabic word as its fifth syllable. This goes against fact B. Any text can be performed in a variety of ways, some of which might fit with facts A and B and some of which will not. More generally the fact that there is variation in performance means that if there are fixed facts about iambic pentameter lines, then these must be facts about something other than a performance of the line. Performances of texts correspond to underlying abstract linguistic forms. The parts of the utterance, or performance, correspond to representations of sound (its phonological representations), of words (its lexical and morphological representations), and of phrases and sentences (its syntactic representations). Linguistic representations are more abstract than their instantiations as actual bits of speech or writing, and can also be less fully specified. This is true of both syllabification and stress. In an utterance, the word ‘over’ can be pronounced as one or two syllables, but there is an abstract level of representation for the word (its lexical entry, where the word is stored in memory) where the word always has two syllables. A syllable may be present or absent in performance but it is always present in the lexical entry. This means that for a given line of poetry we can construct a completely stable and invariant representation of the line which has a specific number of syllables; whether these syllables are all pronounced or not is irrelevant (if we see the linguistic representation as prior to performance then the pronunciation ‘hasn’t happened yet’). Only once we have a stable number of syllables can we begin to say how many syllables there are in the line of text. The same applies to stress. Stress is a relational characteristic: rather than being an isolated phonetic fact of the syllable, the stress of a syllable is relative to the syllables which surround it. If we look just at words in isolation, then syllables within a polysyllable will have stress, and one syllable will have greatest stress. But monosyllables will not have stress at all in isolation, because there is nothing for the stress to be relative to. It is only once we put monosyllables into sequence that some are more stressed than others. This difference between polysyllables and monosyllables means that we can construct a representation of the sentence in which syllables in polysyllables have stress but syllables in monosyllables do not. There is a second difference between polysyllables and monosyllables, which is that how monosyllables are stressed is to a much greater degree a matter of performance than the stressing of specific syllables in polysyllables (which tend to be invariant). Here are four different ways of performing one of the lines from the poem, which illustrates that stress on monosyllables varies from performance to performance: / x / / x / x / x / x Comes the fresh Spring in all her green completed. / x x / x x x / x / x Comes the fresh Spring in all her green completed. / x x / x / x / x / x Comes the fresh Spring in all her green completed. x / x / x / x / x / x Comes the fresh Spring in all her green completed. The fact that monosyllables are not fixed in their relative stress has long been recognised, along with its significance for metrical form. Thus King James VI of Scotland says of monosyllables that ‘the maist pairt of thame are indifferent, and may be in short or lang place, as ye like’ (1584:215). Similarly John Rice says that ‘Accent, properly speaking, and considered as distinct from Emphasis, hath nothing to do with Monosyllables’ (1765:89). Thus we can only begin to state invariant facts about the iambic pentameter line if we state them in terms of an abstract linguistic representation of the line, rather than by reference to any of the actual performances of the line. 2.3. There are ten metrified syllables in the iambic pentameter line An abstract linguistic representation of all the lines in Browning’s poem gives a count of between ten and twelve syllables in the line. I indicate each syllable with an x below the line, and put the count in the left-hand margin. Say over again, and yet once over again, 1 12 x x x x x x x x x x x x That thou dost love me. Though the word repeated 2 11 x x x x x x x x x x x In this representation of the lines, the syllables vary in number from ten to twelve. I will now present a set of rules which when applied are able to transform this into a metrical representation in which there are exactly ten syllables in every line. These are the projection and non-projection rules. This is the projection rule (the non-projection rules state limited exceptions to it): Projection rule Project a syllable as an asterisk. This means writing an asterisk beneath each syllable. For line 4, it has the following result: Remember, never to the hill or plain, ∗∗ ∗ ∗∗∗∗∗∗ ∗ The asterisks are counted. Here there are ten asterisks. The first non-projection rule (which is sometimes called ‘extrametricality’) is: Non-projection rule (a) Do not project a syllable at the (right-hand) end of the line which is unstressed or weak in stress and which comes after a strongly stressed syllable. If we apply this to the poem then lines 2, 3, 6 and 7 will each have their rightmost syllable not projected and hence not counted, which will bring them to ten syllables each. Here for example is the metrical representation of line 2. Syllables which are projected have ∗ beneath them, and syllables which are not projected are marked for convenience by putting beneath them. That thou dost love me. Though the word repeated 2 (a) 10 ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗∗∗ The number of syllables is now 10, indicated in the left margin, where I have also indicated that non-projection rule (a) has applied to the line. We can apply another non-projection rule (which is sometimes called ‘synaloepha’). Non-projection rule (b) Optionally: do not project a syllable which ends on a vowel, when that syllable precedes a syllable which begins on a vowel. This rule looks for certain sequences of syllables and whenever it finds such a sequence it can choose not to project the first syllable. Consider for example line 8. By a doubtful spirit-voice in that doubt’s pain 8 11 x x x x x x x x x x x Here there is a syllable ending in a vowel (‘by’) which precedes a syllable beginning in a vowel (‘a’). If the rule chooses not to project the first syllable, this will be the metrical representation, with ten projected syllables. By a doubtful spirit-voice in that doubt’s pain 8 (b) 10 ∗∗ ∗ ∗∗∗ ∗∗ ∗ ∗ If the rule does choose to project the first syllable, this will be the metrical representation, with eleven projected syllables. By a doubtful spirit-voice in that doubt’s pain 8 11 ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗∗∗∗∗∗∗ ∗ I suggest that optional rules like (b) apply where necessary in order to bring the number of syllables to the right number, here applying to bring the number of syllables to ten. CHAPTER 3. Major Genres in Textual Studies 3.1. Fiction 3.2. Poetry 3.2.1. Sound and meter in poetry 3.3. Drama 3.3.1. Stylistic applications to drama 3.4. Film As early as Greco-Roman antiquity, the classification of literary works into different genres has been a major concern of literary theory, which has since then produced a number of divergent and sometimes even contradictory categories. Among the various attempts to classify literature into genres, the triad epic, drama, and poetry has proved to be the most common in modern literary criticism. Because the epic was widely replaced by the new prose form of the novel in the eighteenth century, recent classifications prefer the terms fiction, drama, and poetry as designations of the three major literary genres. The following section will explain the basic characteristics of these literary genres as well as those of film, a fourth textual manifestation in the widest sense of the term. We will examine these types of texts with reference to concrete examples and introduce crucial textual terminology and methods of analysis helpful for understanding the respective genres. 3.1. Fiction Although the novel emerged as the most important form of prose fiction in the eighteenth century, its precursors go back to the oldest texts of literary history. Homer’s epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey (c. 7th century BC), and Virgil’s (70–19 BC) Aeneid (c. 31–19 BC) influenced the major medieval epics such as Dante Alighieri’s (1265–1321) Italian Divina Commedia (Divine Comedy; c. 1307–21) and the early modern English epics such as Edmund Spenser’s (c. 1552–99) Faerie Queene (1590; 1596) and John Milton’s (1608–74) baroque long poem Paradise Lost (1667). The majority of traditional epics center around a hero who has to fulfill a number of tasks of national or cosmic significance in a multiplicity of episodes. Classical epics in particular, through their roots in myth, history, and religion, reflect a self-contained worldview of their particular periods and nationalities. With the obliteration of a unified Weltanschauung in early modern times, the position of the epic weakened and it was eventually replaced by the novel, the mouthpiece of relativism that was emerging in all aspects of cultural discourse. Although traditional epics are written in verse, they clearly distinguish themselves from other forms of poetry by length, narrative structure, depiction of characters, and plot patterns and are therefore regarded—together with the romance—as precursors of the modern novel. As early as classical times, but more strongly in the late Middle Ages, the romance established itself as an independent genre. Ancient romances such as Apuleius’s Golden Ass (2nd century AD) were usually written in prose, while medieval works of this genre use verse forms, as in the anonymous Middle English Arthurian romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (fourteenth century). Despite its verse form and its eventful episodes, the romance is nevertheless considered a forerunner of the novel mainly because of its tendency toward a focused plot and unified point of view. While the scope of the traditional epic is usually broad, the romance condenses the action and orients the plot toward a particular goal. At the same time, the protagonist or main character is depicted with more detail and greater care, thereby moving beyond the classical epic whose main character functions primarily as the embodiment of abstract heroic ideals. In the romances, individual traits, such as insecurity, weakness, or other facets of character come to the foreground, anticipating distinct aspects of the novel. The individualization of the protagonist, the deliberately perspectival point of view, and above all the linear plot structure, oriented toward a specific climax which no longer centers around national or cosmic problems, are among the crucial features that distinguish romance from epic poetry. The novel, which emerged in Spain during the seventeenth century and in England during the eighteenth century, employs these elements in a very deliberate manner, although the early novels remain deeply rooted in the older genre of the epic. Miguel de Cervantes’ (1547–1616) Don Quixote (1605; 1615), for instance, puts an end to the epic and to the chivalric romance by parodying their traditional elements (a lady who is not so deserving of adoration is courted by a not-so-noble knight who is involved in quite unheroic adventures). At the same time, however, Cervantes initiates a new and modified epic tradition. Similarly, the Englishman Henry Fielding (1707–54) characterizes his novel Joseph Andrews (1742) as a “comic romance” and “comic epic poem in prose,” i.e., a parody and synthesis of existing genres. Also, in the plot structure of the early novel, which often tends to be episodic, elements of the epic survive in a new attire. In England, Daniel Defoe’s (1660–1731) Robinson Crusoe (1719), Samuel Richardson’s (1689– 1761) Pamela (1740–41) and Clarissa (1748–49), Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), and Laurence Sterne’s (1713–68) Tristram Shandy (1759–67) mark the beginning of this new literary genre, which replaces the epic, thus becoming one of the most productive genres of modern literature. The newly established novel is often characterized by the terms “realism” and “individualism,” thereby summarizing some of the basic innovations of this new medium. While the traditional epic exhibited a cosmic and allegorical dimension, the modern novel distinguishes itself through grounding the plot in a distinct historical and geographical reality. The allegorical and typified epic hero metamorphoses into the protagonist of the novel, with individual and realistic character traits.  These features of the novel, which in their attention to individualism and realism reflect basic socio-historical tendencies of the eighteenth century, soon made the novel into a dominant literary genre. The novel thus mirrors the modern disregard for the collective spirit of the Middle Ages that heavily relied on allegory and symbolism. The rise of an educated middle class, the spread of the printing press, and a modified economic basis which allowed authors to pursue writing as an independent profession underlie these major shifts in eighteenth-century literary production. To this day, the novel still maintains its leading position as the genre which produces the most innovations in literature. The term “novel,” however, subsumes a number of subgenres such as the picaresque novel, which relates the experiences of a vagrant rogue (from the Spanish “picaro”) in his conflict with the social norms of society. Structured as an episodic narrative, the picaresque novel tries to lay bare social injustice in a satirical way, as for example Hans Jacob Christoph von Grimmelshausen’s (c. 1621–76) German Simplizissimus (1669), Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) or Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), which all display specific traits of this form of prose fiction. The Bildungsroman (novel of education), generally referred to by its German name, describes the development of a protagonist from childhood to maturity, including such examples as George Eliot’s (1819–80) Mill on the Floss (1860), or more recently in Doris Lessing’s (*1919) cycle Children of Violence (1952–69). Another important form is the epistolary novel, which uses letters as a means of first person narration, as for example Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740– 41) and Clarissa (1748–49). A further form is the historical novel, such as Sir Walter Scott’s (1771–1832) Waverly (1814), whose actions take place within a realistic historical context. Related to the historical novel is a more recent trend often labeled New Journalism, which uses the genre of the novel to rework incidents based on real events, as exemplified by Truman Capote’s (*1924) In Cold Blood (1966) or Norman Mailer’s (*1923) Armies of the Night (1968). The satirical novel, such as Jonathan Swift’s (1667–1745) Gulliver’s Travels (1726) or Mark Twain’s (1835–1910) The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), highlights weaknesses of society through the exaggeration of social conventions, whereas utopian novels or science fiction novels create alternative worlds with which to criticize real socio-political conditions, as in the classic Nineteen Eighty-four (1949) by George Orwell (1903–50) or more recently Margaret Atwood’s (*1939) The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). Very popular forms are the gothic novel, which includes such work as Bram Stoker’s (1847– 1912) Dracula (1897), and the detective novel, one of the best known of which is Agatha Christie’s (1890–1976) Murder on the Orient Express (1934). The short story, a concise form of prose fiction, has received less attention from literary scholars than the novel. As with the novel, the roots of the short story lie in antiquity and the Middle Ages. Story, myth, and fairy tale relate to the oldest types of textual manifestations, “texts” which were primarily orally transmitted. The term “tale” (from “to tell”), like the German “Sage” (from “sagen”—“to speak”), reflects this oral dimension inherent in short fiction. Even the Bible includes stories such as “Job” or “The Prodigal Son,” (c. 4th–5th century BC) whose structures and narrative patterns resemble modern short stories. Other forerunners of this subgenre of fiction are ancient satire and the aforementioned romance. Indirect precursors of the short story are medieval and early modern narrative cycles. The Arabian Thousand and One Nights, compiled in the fourteenth and subsequent centuries, Giovanni Boccaccio’s (1313–75) Italian Decamerone (1349–51), and Geoffrey Chaucer’s (c. 1343–1400) Canterbury Tales (c. 1387– 1400) anticipate important features of modern short fiction. These cycles of tales are characterized by a frame-narrative—such as the pilgrimage to the tomb of Saint Thomas Becket in the Canterbury Tales—which unites a number of otherwise heterogeneous stories. On their way to Canterbury, the pilgrims tell different, rather self-contained tales which are only connected through Chaucer’s use of a frame-story. The short story emerged as a more or less independent text type at the end of the eighteenth century, parallel to the development of the novel and the newspaper. Regularly issued magazines of the nineteenth century exerted a major influence on the establishment of the short story by providing an ideal medium for the publication of this prose genre of limited volume. Forerunners of these journals are The Tatler (1709–11) and The Spectator (1711–12; 1714), published in England by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, who tried to address the educated middle class in short literary texts and commentaries of general interest (essays). Even today, magazines like The New Yorker (since 1925) still function as privileged organs for first publications of short stories. Many of the early novels appeared as serial stories in these magazines before being published as independent books, for example, Charles Dickens’ (1812–70) The Pickwick Papers (1836–37). While the novel has always attracted the interest of literary theorists, the short story has never actually achieved the status held by book-length fiction. The short story, however, surfaces in comparative definitions of other prose genres such as the novel or its shorter variants, the novella and novelette. A crucial feature commonly identified with the short story is its impression of unity since it can be read—in contrast to the novel—in one sitting without interruption. Due to restrictions of length, the plot of the short story has to be highly selective, entailing an idiosyncratic temporal dimension that usually focuses on one central moment of action. The slow and gradual build-up of suspense in the novel must be accelerated in the short story by means of specific techniques. The short story’s action therefore often commences close to the climax (in medias res—“the middle of the matter”), reconstructing the preceding context and plot development through flashbacks. Focusing on one main figure or location, the setting and the characters generally receive less detailed and careful depiction than in the novel. In contrast to the novel’s generally descriptive style, the short story, for the simple reason of limited length, has to be more suggestive. While the novel experiments with various narrative perspectives, the short story usually chooses one particular point of view, relating the action through the eyes of one particular figure or narrator. The novella or novelette, such as Joseph Conrad’s (1857–1924) Heart of Darkness (1902), holds an intermediary position between novel and short story, since its length and narratological elements cannot be strictly identified with either of the two genres. As this juxtaposition of the main elements of the novel and the short story shows, attempts to explain the nature of these genres rely on different methodological approaches, such as reception theory with respect to reading without interruption, formalist notions for the analysis of plot structures, and contextual approaches for delineating their boundaries with other comparable genres. The terms plot, time, character, setting, narrative perspective, and style emerge not only in the definitions and characterizations of the genre of the novel, but also function as the most important areas of inquiry in film and drama. Since these aspects can be isolated most easily in prose fiction, they will be dealt with in greater detail in the following section by drawing on examples from novels and short stories. The most important elements are: Plot (What happens?) Characters (Who acts?) Narrative perspective (Who sees what?) Setting (Where and when do the events take place?) Plot is the logical interaction of the various thematic elements of a text which lead to a change of the original situation as presented at the outset of the narrative. An ideal traditional plot line encompasses the following four sequential levels: exposition—complication—climax or turning point— resolution The exposition or presentation of the initial situation is disturbed by a complication or conflict which produces suspense and eventually leads to a climax, crisis, or turning point. The climax is followed by a resolution of the complication (French denouement), with which the text usually ends. Most traditional fiction, drama, and film employ this basic plot structure, which is also called linear plot since its different elements follow a chronological order. In many cases—even in linear plots—flashback and foreshadowing introduce information concerning the past or future into the narrative. The opening scene in Billy Wilder’s (*1906) Sunset Boulevard (1950) is a famous example of the foreshadowing effect in film: the first person narrator posthumously relates the events that lead to his death while drifting dead in a swimming pool. The only break with a linear plot or chronological narrative is the anticipation of the film’s ending— the death of its protagonist—thus eliminating suspense as an important element of plot. This technique directs the audience’s attention to aspects of the film other than the outcome of the action. The drama of the absurd and the experimental novel deliberately break with linear narrative structures while at the same time maintaining traditional elements of plot in modified ways. Many contemporary novels alter linear narrative structures by introducing elements of plot in an unorthodox sequence. Kurt Vonnegut’s (*1922) postmodern novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) is a striking example of experimental plot structure which mixes various levels of action and time, such as the experiences of a young soldier in World War II, his life in America after the war, and a science-fiction-like dream-world in which the protagonist is kidnapped by an extra-terrestrial force. All three levels are juxtaposed as fragments by rendering the different settings as well as their internal sequences of action in a non-chronological way. Kurt Vonnegut offers an explanation of this complex plot structure in his protagonist’s report on the unconventional literary practice of the extra-terrestrial people on the planet Tralfamadore:  Tralfamadorian…books were laid out—in brief clumps of symbols separated by stars…each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message—describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end…What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen at one time.1 Kurt Vonnegut is actually talking about the structure of his own novel, which is composed of similarly fragmentary parts. The different levels of action and time converge in the mind of the protagonist as seemingly simultaneous presences. Vonnegut’s technique of non-linear narrative, which introduces traditional elements of plot in an unconventional manner, conveys the schizophrenic mind of the protagonist through parallel presentations of different frames of experiences. Slaughterhouse-Five borrows techniques from the visual arts, whose representational structures are considered to be different from literary practice. Literature is generally regarded as a temporal art since action develops in a temporal sequence of events. The visual arts, however, are often referred to as a spatial art since they are able to capture one particular segment of the action which can then be perceived in one instant by the viewer. Vonnegut and other experimental authors try to apply this pictorial structure to literary texts. Multi-perspectival narratives which abandon linear plots surface in various genres and media, including film and drama, always indirectly determining the other main elements, such as setting and character presentation. Characters While formalist approaches to the study of literature traditionally focus on plot and narrative structure, methods informed by psychoanalysis shift the center of attention to the text’s characters. A psychological approach is, however, merely one way of evaluating characters; it is also possible to analyze character presentation in the context of narratological structures. Generally speaking, characters in a text can be rendered either as types or as individuals. A typified character in literature is dominated by one specific trait and is referred to as a flat character. The term round character usually denotes a persona with more complex and differentiated features. Typified characters often represent the general traits of a group of persons or abstract ideas. Medieval allegorical depictions of characters preferred typification in order to personify vices, virtues, or philosophical and religious positions. The Everyman-figure, a symbol of the sinful Christian, is a major example of this general pattern in the representation of man in medieval literature. In today’s advertisements, typified character presentations re-emerge in magazines, posters, film and TV. The temporal and spatial limitations of advertising media revive allegorical and symbolic characterization for didactic and persuasive reasons comparable to those of the Middle Ages. A good example of the purposeful use of typified character presentation occurs in the opening scene of Mark Twain’s, “A True Story” (1874). It was summer-time, and twilight. We were sitting on the porch of the farmhouse, on the summit of the hill, and “Aunt Rachel” was sitting respectfully below our level, on the steps —for she was our servant, and colored. She was a mighty frame and stature; she was sixty years old, but her eye was undimmed and her strength unabated. She was a cheerful, hearty soul, and it was no more trouble for her to laugh than it is for a bird to sing… I said: ‘Aunt Rachel, how is it that you’ve lived sixty years and never had any trouble?” She stopped quaking: She paused, and there was a moment of silence. She turned her face over her shoulder toward me, and said, without even a smile in her voice. “Misto C—, is you inarnest?”2 The first paragraph of this short story provides a very formal configuration, where characters are reduced to mere types, yet still reflect a highly meaningful structure. The most significant constellation is rendered in one sentence: “Aunt Rachel’ was sitting respectfully below our level, on the steps—for she was our servant, and colored.” The phrase “Misto C—, is you inarnest?” further specifies the inherent relationship. Twain manages not only to juxtapose African Americans and whites, slaves and slave-owners, but also female and male. In this very short passage, Twain delineates a formal relationship between two character types which also represents a multi-leveled structure of dependence. He introduces typified characterization for a number of reasons: as a stylistic feature of the short story which does not permit lengthy depictions, and as a meaningful frame within which the story evolves. The analyses of African American and feminist literary theory focus on mechanisms of race, class, and gender as analogously functioning dimensions. By juxtaposing a black, female slave with a white, male slave-owner, Twain highlights these patterns of oppression in their most extreme forms. The setting—a farm in the South of the United States—and, above all, the spatial positioning of the figures according to their social status (“‘Aunt Rachel’ was sitting respectfully below our level, on the steps”) emphasizes the mechanisms of dependence inherent in these mere character types. The individualization of a character, however, has evolved into a main feature of the genre of the novel. Many modern fictional texts reflect a tension between these modes of representation by introducing both elements simultaneously. Herman Melville’s (1819–91) novel Moby Dick (1851), for instance, combines allegorical and individualistic elements in the depiction of its main character in order to lend a universal dimension to the actio