By J. Hillis Miller
This publication demonstrates the presence of literature inside of speech act idea and the application of speech act concept in examining literary works. even though the founding textual content of speech act concept, J. L. Austin's the right way to Do issues with phrases, again and again expels literature from the area of felicitous speech acts, literature is an quintessential presence inside of Austin's ebook. It includes many literary references but in addition makes use of as crucial instruments literary units of its personal: imaginary tales that function examples and imaginary dialogues that avert strength objections. how one can Do issues with phrases isn't the positive institution of an absolutely elaborated concept of speech acts, however the tale of a failure to do this, the tale of what Austin calls a "bogging down."
After an introductory bankruptcy that explores Austin's ebook intimately, the 2 following chapters express how Jacques Derrida and Paul de guy in several methods problem Austin's speech act conception more often than not and his expulsion of literature particularly. Derrida exhibits that literature can't be expelled from speech acts—rather that what he calls "iterability" signifies that any speech act could be literature. De guy asserts that speech act idea includes a thorough dissociation among the cognitive and positing dimensions of language, what Austin calls language's "constative" and "performative" features. either Derrida and de guy intricate new speech act theories that shape the root of latest notions of dependable and powerful politico-ethical choice and action.
The fourth bankruptcy explores the position of robust emotion in powerful speech acts via a dialogue of passages in Derrida, Wittgenstein, and Austin. the ultimate bankruptcy demonstrates, via shut readings of 3 passages in Proust, the way in which speech act thought may be hired in an illuminating manner within the exact interpreting of literary works.
About the author
J. Hillis Miller is UCI exotic Professor of English and Comparative Literature on the college of California, Irvine. he's the writer, such a lot lately, of Black Holes (which used to be released with J. Hillis Miller; or, Boustrophedonic interpreting by way of Manuel Asensi) (Stanford, 1999)
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Extra resources for Speech Acts in Literature
Sample text
With his reference to the Eliot's Classicism 31 'Dardanelles' in the dedication, then, Eliot deliberately introduced into his work his first reference to Troy in order to provide readers with a hint about the Homeric context of his work and with the starting point and direction for his own poetic odyssey toward 'home'. The subtlety, however, escaped everyone. The Homeric design is further presented, but in veiled fashion, by the sequence of Eliot's poems. While it makes sense that his first poem should introduce us to the Homeric hero, who in the twentieth century becomes Prufrock, an ironic version of the classical Ulysses, the narrative element in his work requires that we begin at the beginning with his earlier poem, 'Portrait of a Lady'.
The first has immediacy and texture; the second, continuity and perspective. The Symbolist aesthetic even suggests that experience occurs apart, as it were, from any experiencer, and the so-called impersonal theories of art, with their corollaries about fragmentation, which are often ascribed to Eliot and others amount mainly to this perception of theirs: that a state of mind or soul, objectively rendered, projected through images that truly convey its feeling, appears to have an independent existence of its own.
From the particular classical sources repeatedly used in his poems, it would appear that Eliot adapted this heroic figure as a Symbolist technique and strategy to express the peregrine, pious spirit of universal man as well as his own personal preoccupations. By using a mythic figure like Ulysses for his 'hero', Eliot could be both poet identifying with the problems and conflicts of his persona and simultaneously the man standing back and observing the errors and weaknesses of the Ulyssean figure.