Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics

This article investigates the historical development of the use of ‘als ob’ (‘as if’) in a diachronic corpus of German narrative fiction prose from the 18th century until 2009. The results of this corpus-stylistic study suggest that ‘as if’-statements are associated with the recurring profile of an eloquent narrator who is more empathic than he is well-informed about the mental state of characters. Finally, we will show that this narrator profile has been used with historical variance that can be explained by literary historical considerations.

As Monika Fludernik (2011) points out, creative metaphors receive less attention than conceptual metaphors in cognitive studies. The complex role of metaphor in literature and its narrative function needs to be further explored. Realistic novellas do not display a predilection towards elaborate creative metaphors. They contain other figures of speech and more conventional figurative forms such as symbols, allegories and similes – the latter to approximate an experience or perception. My hypothesis is, however, that in realistic texts metaphorical agency is often contained and instigated by virtual micronarratives (digression, memory, association, imagination and dream). How does metaphoricity relate to virtual parts of the storyworld? In order to investigate this question I use Wilhelm Raabe’s poetic realist novella Keltische Knochen (Celtic Bones, published 1864) as a case study. Raabe’s travel account shows how virtual passages can receive and entail a metaphorical dimension. In Raabe’s novella the narrator witness claims that it does not manipulate reality by rhetorical tricks and metaphorical transformations, and therefore makes a clear distinction between the virtual and real parts of the storyworld. At the same time this distinction is undermined because the virtual events interfere with the real events and transform them into metaphorical sequences. The metaphorical sequences open up alternative segments of the storyworld that can be coined as paranarratives. The case study exposes the negotiability and the co-text dependence of literary metaphoricity and contributes to the exploration of the narrative potential of figurativeness in literary texts.

Eliza Haywood’s narrators often display what could be termed ‘uncooperative narration’ in that they defy the smooth course that fictional narration is supposed to take, and claim to be unable to narrate strongly emotional states (in Love in Excess, 2000; first published 1719) or precipitate readers’ reactions to future events (in The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, 1998; first published 1751). Haywood’s strategies of uncooperative narration are based on rhetorical figures which flout the cooperative principle underlying human communication according to Grice: the denial of narration, adynaton, flouts the maxim of quantity; the time-based playing with readers’ meaning-making, prolepsis, flouts the maxim of manner. This article will develop an account of uncooperative narration on the basis of Gricean pragmatics (Grice, 1989) and Tomasello’s work on communication and cooperation in human evolution (Tomasello, 2008), which extends the traditional narratological focus on unreliable narration. Uncooperative narration challenges readers to find the communicative purpose behind flouting figures like adynaton and prolepsis, contributes to the characterisation of the narrator and, in Eliza Haywood’s fiction, often holds up a mirror to readers themselves.

Lyric poetry is a genre where discourse types such as description, argumentation, contemplation and narrative can occur together, though in varying combinations. During the last two decades, research has been devoted to the question of how to describe and to study such use of narrativity in lyric poetry. As Hühn (2007) puts it, ‘poetry can profitably be analysed on the basis of narratological categories’. However, this article argues that such a narratological analysis can never replace the traditional lyric analysis. The aim of this article is to combine the means of classical lyric analysis and narratological toolboxes with those of the new rhetorical narratology, in order to explore the impact of figurativity (i.e. micro-narrative stylistic characteristics on the ‘discours level’ of the poem) on the ‘histoire level’ (or the level of the enounced, Müller-Zettelmann, 2002) and on the reader of the poetic text in question. As an example, I will study English and German poetic epitaphs from the 17th century, because this early sub-genre of lyric poetry provides enough distance from a restrictive mainstream-romantic understanding of poetry and, at the same time, shows a high degree of figurativity with complex functions. In these texts, figurative elements such as synecdoche and metonymy create ‘discourse events’ at the level of enunciation (with the ‘lyrical I’ as the agent of a decisive change in consciousness or attitudes), but in some cases figurative elements even create (decisive changes that ‘the reader is meant to perform’, Hühn, 2007) that steer the reader’s mental construction of the poem’s ‘story world’, as a key aspect of the text’s narrativity.

This article analyses the constructive potential of synecdoche as a text-building mechanism. All too often not properly distinguished from its close and better-known relative, metonymy, synecdoche deserves to be treated as a separate figure, with its own individual function to perform. In this capacity it has already been mentioned by Giambattista Vico (1984 [1744]) as the trope of essentiality, pointing to outstanding features that pertain to individuals and objects. Synecdoche has retained its unique status among Kenneth Burke’s (1962 [1945]) master tropes and among Hayden White’s (1973, 1985a [1978], 1985b [1978], 1999a, 1999b) basic tropes, which organize various forms of narrative discourse. Synecdoche as a microfigure is usually confined to phrases or, at most, clauses but its genuinely discursive function becomes visible when it acts as a macrofigure, forming synecdochical chains that structure larger stretches of texts. Following the cognitivist claim about the predominance of the experience related to our own bodies over other types of perception, I turn my attention to one of frequent types of synecdoche that represents living organisms through their body parts. The chains of body parts synecdoches will be examined, drawn from Marcel Proust’s prose, as well as from a set of poems by Sylvia Plath and a set of poetic works by Czesław Miłosz. The structuring force of synecdoche becomes visible in the texts’ overall cohesion. Finally, an important theoretical aspect of the application of macrosynecdoche is its smooth transition into a megafigure, a tacit rhetorical strategy that underlies the entire text and influences its ultimate interpretation.

Contrary to widespread assumptions, metaphor in narrative is not a pre-established, extra-textual form appearing in different instances of discourse, but rather an event resulting from a strategic distribution of information in the narrative process. Hence, the appeal to conceptual cultural knowledge is to be considered as a consequence, not as a prerequisite, of metaphor interpretation. By means of the concept of the paranarrative, we highlight the rhetorical interconnectedness of metaphor with other figures of speech (such as metonymy) and we explore the narrative integration of diacritic forms of indirectness. In order to illustrate the terminology that can address these focal concerns, the article discusses the relation between tropes and narrative, via selected examples from narrative texts (both fictional and non-fictional) written by Juli Zeh, Herta Müller, Jürgen Nieraad, and Siddhartha Mukherjee. As their common denominator, these examples channel through narrative figurative domains considered to be known intuitively, to wit: personifications; iconic pars pro toto references to concentration camps; and metaphors for cancer in disease biographies.

Modern stylistics is in the process of emerging completely from the shadows of the New Critical prohibitions on discussing the intentional and psychological fallacies in literary reading. Informed by cognitive linguistics and the psychology of cognition, a strong tradition of cognitive poetics has become established within stylistics, serving as a powerful challenge to the psychological fallacy in particular: readerly effects, emotions and significances in literary engagement are now regarded as part of the legitimate ground of stylistic study. In the classical terms that underpin the long view of stylistics, we now possess a good research programme in the systematic account of meaningfulness (logos) and emotional affect (pathos). What remains is the challenge of a similarly principled account of ethics.

However, just as the cognitive turn has taken an applied linguistic approach to interpretation and aesthetics, so our cognitive poetic approach to ethos must be based on a descriptive account not of authority and immanent intentionality, but on the readerly sense of adopting a position in the process of literary reading. The concept of the intentional fallacy cannot be criticised as comprehensively as the psychological fallacy, but it nevertheless poses the wrong sort of question.

This article sets out an encompassing framework for the analysis of ethics as an interaction between readerly disposition and textual imposition, to produce a sense of a ‘positioned reader’ of a literary work. Brief analytical illustrations from literary prose fiction are presented for exploration. The article draws on and questions related traditions in critical theory and psychology, with the aim of establishing a fully rounded stylistics as the foundational principle and principal method in literary study. My ultimate framing objective is an applied linguistic approach to literary scholarship that is evidential, dialogic and humane, and which completes the circle of meaning, feeling and significance familiar to generations of literary scholars.