+ Linguistic Features of the Absurd: You and Me Dr Jane Lugea University of Huddersfield, UK...
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+ Linguistic Features of the Absurd: You and Me Dr Jane Lugea University of Huddersfield, UK [email protected]
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Transcript of + Linguistic Features of the Absurd: You and Me Dr Jane Lugea University of Huddersfield, UK...
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Linguistic Features of the Absurd:You and Me
Dr Jane LugeaUniversity of Huddersfield, [email protected]
+Aims
to investigate whether this play can be classed as ‘absurd’
to use previous stylistic accounts of absurd fiction to do so
to identify any additional features that contribute to the absurdity
+You and Me: the play
+
originally a monolingual Catalan play (Simeon, 2011)
adapted and translated (Little Soldier Productions, 2013) into English principally, with Spanish and Catalan code-switching throughout
+You and Me
Two elderly sisters: Angeleta seems to suffer from senile dementia
Etelbina cares for her sister and humours her by acting out their memories and imaginings
The characters act out their imaginings, use illogical dialogue and absurd humour.
L: Angeleta | R: Etelbina L: Angeleta | R: Etelbina
+Initial Text-world Theory Analysis
+Text-world Theory
(Werth 1999; Gavins 2007)
A ‘Cognitive Discourse’ model, that tries to explain how we process discourse
Text World Theory posits that: discourse participants inhabit a discourse world… When we use language, we create a joint mental
representation of the discourse, called a text-world When we make changes to the spatio-temporal coordinates
of the discourse (e.g. ‘The next day…’) there is a world-switch within the text-world
When a proposition cannot be verified (e.g. modalised) we do not increment it in the text-world, but store it in a modal world, or hypothetical world
TWT allows for a micro-level and macro-level analysis
+You and Me: Initial Text-World Analysis
See extract 1 on your hand-out
The opening stage directions refer to the characters, or ‘enactors’ in text-world terms.
Although the reader might make some guesses, there is no information given about the location, ‘here’.
The stage directions are given in the present tense (e.g. “They sit”), denoting a shared time between the narrated event and its narration.
The excerpt also includes function-advancing propositions (such as “Angeleta lets out an enormous fart”), which develop the action through material processes and may be included in the text-world diagram.
+You and Me: Initial Text-World Analysis
Text-worldTime: present
Location: ‘here’Enactors: Etelbina, Angeleta (‘two old
women, sisters’, narrator
Discourse-worldTime: 12:10, 22nd June 2015Location: WG13, Huddersfield
Participants: Jane, some nice people
But what happens once the dialogue
begins?
+You and Me: Initial Text-World Analysis
Elsewhere (Lugea 2013), I have proposed an alternative method for dealing with directly represented discourse in Text-world Theory
This involves treating dialogue as a character text-world embedded inside the matrix text-world.
Following this method, the text-world diagram is developed as follows:
+You and Me: Initial Text-World Analysis
Character Text-world Time: present
Location: presentEnactors: Etelbina, Angeleta -> disgusting, sorry
Text-worldTime: present
Location: ‘here’Enactors: Etelbina, Angeleta (‘two old women’),
narrator
Discourse-worldTime: 12:12, 22nd June 2015
Location: WG13, HuddersfieldParticipants: Jane, some nice patient people
+Linguistic Features of the Absurd
+The label ‘absurd(ist)’ The play’s marketing pack (Little Soldier Productions
2013) and many reviewers (Dillon 2013; Teo 2013; Yorston 2013) describe the play - or at least moments of it – as absurd(ist)
as spectator I would intuitively agree...
...but as a stylistician, I must ask what, exactly, in the language makes the play ‘absurd’?
+What makes the play ‘absurd’?
Sherzer (1978) on absurd drama
characters infringe Gricean maxims, without seeming to notice or care (see also Simpson 1998)
‘verbal ping-pong’
repetition of similar sounds i.e. “phonic properties of language are foregrounded”
“dramatization of banality achieved by overly performative elements that are of low informational content” (1978: 282)
+What makes the play ‘absurd’?
See Extract 2 on your handout
+What makes the play ‘absurd’?
Sherzer (1978) on absurd drama You and Me?
Example
characters infringe Gricean maxims, without seeming to notice or care (see also Simpson 1998)
✓ Quantity, quality, relation and manner
verbal ping-pong ✓ Formal repetition
repetition of similar sounds i.e. “phonic properties of language are foregrounded”
✓ Who, whoever, use of Catalan as closure (Gumperz 1982)
“dramatization of banality achieved by overly performative elements that are of low informational content” (Sherzer 1978: 282)
✓ found in most matrix text-world scenes in the play, but not in hypothetical worlds
+What makes the play ‘absurd’?Gavins (2013) on absurd prose fiction
negatively shaded modality (Simpson 1993)
multiple hypothetical worlds
unreliable narrators
plot twists requiring ‘world repair’
manipulation of spatio-temporal deixis for surreal effect
genre-mixing and multimodality
foregrounded fictionality
semi-permeable membrane between the discourse worlds and text-worlds
+What makes the play ‘absurd’?
See Extract 3 on your handout
+What makes the play ‘absurd’?Gavins (2013) on absurd prose fiction
You and Me?
Example
negatively shaded modality(Simpson 1993)
✓ use of epistemic modal markers in Extract 1
multiple hypothetical worlds ✓ (not) dying -> living through funeral
unreliable narrators ✓ breaking maxims of quality
plot twists requiring world repair
not in this scene, but later ✓
We think Angeleta has died, but it turns out she’s pretending!
manipulation of spatio-temporal deixis for surreal effect
✓ present tense used in hypothetical death world
genre-mixing and multimodality
✓ music, song, dance, mime
foregrounded fictionality ✓ characters’ limited mobility is suspended
semi-permeable membrane between the discourse worlds and text-worlds
✓ actors’ physicality is brought from discourse world into fictional world
+You and Me: Initial Text-World Analysis
Hypothetical/modal worldsTime: present
Location: mortuary, airplane, Barcelona, churchEnactors: Etelbina, Angeleta (doctor, priest, mourners)
Character Text-world Time: present
Location: presentEnactors: Etelbina, Angeleta -> disgusting, sorry
Text-worldTime: present
Location: ‘here’Enactors: Etelbina, Angeleta (‘two old women’), narrator
Discourse-worldTime: 12:22, 22nd June 2015
Location: WG13, HuddersfieldParticipants: Jane, some nice patient people
+Code-switching
+Code-switches add to absurdity
You and Me was performed for a mainly Anglophone audience, so code-switching does not serve an informative function
According to Sherzer (1978, p282) in Theatre of the Absurd: “phonic properties of
language are foregrounded”
“Language makes itself conspicuous in its materiality”
+Code-switching also adds to the realism! Intersentential code-switching of isolated elements aides
anglophone understanding;
The code-switching strategies used by the bilingual actresses reflect real code-switching practices: Discourse markers, fillers and interjections in Spanish/Catalan (Poplack
1980; Gumperz 1982) To emphasise or clarify the message (Gumperz 1982) Conforms to the ‘equivalence constraint’ (Poplack 1980) “sufferers of senile dementia often revert to their first language in
second language contexts AND tend to use the same code-switching strategies as healthy speakers ” (Hyltenstam 1995: 334)
So is this a realistic representation of senility in elderly bilinguals, or a classic piece of theatre of the absurd?
+Nearly finished – I promise!
+You and Me: Initial Text-World Analysis
Hypothetical/modal worlds
Character Text-world
Text-world
Discourse-worldactors and viewers, schematic knowledge about
dementia
+You and Me: Initial Text-World Analysis
Hypothetical/modal worlds
Character Text-world
Text-worldcharacters’ reality (loneliness, isolation, boredom)
Discourse-worldactors and viewers, schematic knowledge about
dementia
+You and Me: Initial Text-World Analysis
Hypothetical/modal worlds
Character Text-worldcharacters’ dialogue (banality, infringement of
maxims, communicative dysfunction)
Text-worldcharacters’ reality (loneliness, isolation, boredom)
Discourse-worldactors and viewers, schematic knowledge about
dementia
+You and Me: Initial Text-World Analysis
Hypothetical/modal worldscharacters imaginings, wants etc.
Character Text-worldcharacters’ dialogue (banality, infringement of
maxims, communicative dysfunction)
Text-worldcharacters’ reality (loneliness, isolation, boredom)
Discourse-worldactors and viewers, schematic knowledge about
dementia
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+Conclusions
Previous work on the stylistics of absurd fiction has helped to show that this play does live up to the label ‘absurd’
In addition, the use of code-switching adds to the absurdity
Text-world Theory has shown how realism and absurdity are interspersed across the worlds of the play
Lugea, J. (in press) ‘Code-switching in the text-world of a multilingual play: the senile mind style in You and Me’. World Building: Discourse in the Mind. Bloomsbury.
+The End
+ReferencesBayles, K.A. and Kaszniak, A.W. (1987) Communication and Cognition in Normal Aging and Dementia.
Boston: College Hill Press.Gavins, J. (2007) Text-world Theory: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University PressGavins, J. (2013) Reading the Absurd. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Gumperz, J. (1982). Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Hyltenstam, Kenneth (1995) The code-switching behaviour of adults with language disorders – with
special reference to aphasia and dementia. In One Speaker, Two Languages: Cross-disciplinary perspective of Code-switching. L. Milroy and Pieter Muyksen (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp 302-43.
Little Soldier Productions (2013) You and Me. Directed by Bryony Shanahan.Lugea, Jane (2013) Embedded dialogue and dreams: the worlds and accessibility relations of Inception.
Language and Literature. 22(2). pp133-53.McIntyre, Dan (2005) ‘Logic, Reality and Mind Style in Alan Bennett’s The Lady in the Van’. Journal of
Literary Semantics. 34. pp21-40.Poplack, S. (1980) ‘Sometimes I’ll start a sentence in Spanish y termino en español’. Linguistics.
18:581-618. Russell, Bertrand. 1905. On Denoting. Mind 479-93. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 1991. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press. Semino, Elena (2002) ‘A cognitive stylistic approach to mind style in narrative fiction’. Cognitive
Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis. Elena Semino and Jonathan Culpeper (eds.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins. pp95-122.
Semino, Elena (2014) ‘Pragmatic failure, mind style and characterisation in fiction about autism’. Language and Literature. 23: 2. pp141-58.
Simeon, Roger, playwright and director (2011) Tu i jo. FilÒmans.Simpson, Paul (1998) ‘Odd Talk: studying Discourses of Incongruity. in Exploring the Language of
Drama: From text to context. J. Culpeper, M. Short, P. Verdonk. Taylor and Francis. pp34-53.Sherzer, Dina (1978) Dialogic Incongruities in the Theater of the Absurd. Semiotica 22:3/4. Werth, P. (1999) Text worlds: representing conceptual space in discourse. Harlow: Longman.
