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Defining the Elegiac Genre in the Anglo-Saxon World: an Analysis of Expressive Speech Acts

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Master’s Degree in Language Sciences Final Thesis Defining the Elegiac Genre in the Anglo-Saxon World: an Analysis of Expressive Speech Acts Supervisor Prof. Marina Buzzoni Assistant supervisor Dott. Elisa Cugliana Graduand Mariateresa Caggiano 877623 Academic Year 2019 / 2020 To my family and to my love Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………………………6 1. Presentation of the corpus considered……………….……………………………..11 1.1. The Exeter Book ………………………………………………………………………12 1.1.1. The Date of the Exeter Book........………..……………………………..13 1.1.2. The Authorship and the Format………………………………………...13 1.1.3. The Nine Elegiac Texts: a brief overview………...…………………....15 1.2. Three further Compositions: Guthlac B, The Lay of the last Survivor, The Father’s Lament……………………………………………………………….26 2. The Genre “Elegy”…………………………………………………………………29 2.1. The Genre Theory: Literature Review………………………………………...29 2.2. Defining Anglo-Saxon Elegy: Themes, Tones and Formulaic Language ……34 2.3. Definitions Diverging from Traditional Criticism…………………………….46 3. Semantic-Pragmatic Analysis of Elegies: a new Proposal…………………………53 3.1. Speech Acts as a Tool of Investigation……...………………………………53 3.1.1. Speech Acts Theory: Literature Review………………………………..56 3.1.2. For a Taxonomy of Illocutionary Speech Acts…………………………60 3.2. From Speech Acts to Literary Genres…………………………………………64 4. The Illocutionary Speech Acts in the OE ‘Elegies’………………………………...69 4.1. Research Questions……………………………………………………………69 4.2. Speech Acts Analysis of the Corpus…………………………………………..70 4.2.1. The ‘Elegies’ from the Exeter Book…………………………………….70 4.2.1.1. The Wanderer…………………………………………………...70 4.2.1.2. The Seafarer…………………………………………………….77 4.2.1.3. The Riming Poem……………………………………………….83 4.2.1.4. Deor……………………………………………………………..85 4.2.1.5. Wulf and Eadwacer……...……………………………………………89 4.2.1.6. The Wife’s Lament………………………………………………91 4.2.1.7. Resignation...……………………………………………………96 4.2.1.8. The Husband’s Message……………………………………….101 4.2.1.9. The Ruin…………………………………….…………………103 4.2.2. Elegiac Passages from Beowulf………………………………………..106 3 4.2.3. Guthlac B……………………………………………………………...108 4.3. Final Remarks………………………………………………………………...110 Conclusions……………………………………………………………………………113 Bibliography……………………………………………………….………………….117 Acknowledgments………………………………………………………..…………...125 4 5 Introduction Oft ic sceolde ana uhtna gehwylce mine ceare cwiþan. [The Wanderer, ll. 8-9b] The act of lamenting about personal pain and suffering, the causes of which may vary from the loss and distance of a beloved one to an impossible love, from sorrowful living conditions to loneliness, seems to be at the basis of each composition of the elegiac genre. That pain is therefore the characterizing element of elegiac texts seems to have been confirmed also by Todorov (1976), who, in an enlightening study on the birth of literary genres, emphasized that at the origin of the elegy genre there is exactly pain, and the need to complain about suffering. During the 19th century, some scholars began to assign to the elegiac genre nine compositions of the 10th-century manuscript Exeter Book (also known with the name of Codex Exoniensis), and some passages of texts belonging to other literary genres. In particular, critics have defined with the expression ‘Old English Elegies’ The Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Riming Poem, Deor, Wulf and Eadwacer, The Wife's Lament, Resignation, The Husband's Message and The Ruin, distributed in this order within the Codex Exoniensis but intermingled with other poems of different generic attribution, along with two passages from Beowulf, the Lay of the Last Survivor and The Father's Lament, and the final lines of Guthlac B, a hagiography on the life of St. Guthlac, also contained in the Exeter Book. Together with the most famous Old English epic poem Beowulf, and some other poetic texts of the Anglo-Saxon literary context, the Anglo-Saxon elegies are among the most fascinating compositions of the English medieval world. In particular, these texts have always been a source of discussion among critics because of their complexity and 6 peculiarities. In fact, defining the term elegy within the Anglo-Saxon literary scenario and especially deciding which compositions can be identified under the label of elegy has always been a very complex operation. Unlike the classical elegy where the elegiac distichus – a dactylic hexametre followed by a dactylic pentametre- represents the distinctive element of the genre, the so-called Old English ‘elegies’ do not show a precise identifying metre for the elegiac genre. In addition to the absence of a distinctive metre, another problem that increases the difficulty in the definition attempt is represented by the apparent lack of a specific term for the denotation of the elegiac genre within the Anglo-Saxon corpus. The same nine compositions of the Exeter Book do not appear grouped together within the manuscript, but as mentioned above are intermingled with other texts. As often happens, modern critics are those who create literary genre taxonomies through retrospective analyses, sometimes inaccurate for being filtered by a modern critical eye and for being based on few certainties. As far as the Anglo-Saxon 'elegiac' genre is concerned, scholars have used two main approaches to the study of Old English ‘elegies’. The first methodology generally consisted in applying the term 'elegy', as understood by the classical and then romantic tradition, to these compositions of dubious classification. As a result, the critics selected and grouped under a single label those texts that had an elegiac character, consisting of precise thematic and tonal features. In particular, the element that seems to be able to act as a glue between all these compositions is the meditative and lamenting tone. However, as will be seen in the second chapter of this work, this elegiac character of classical- romantic derivation brings with it some intrinsic problems when applied to Anglo-Saxon compositions. A second methodological proposal, instead, would consist in the formulation of the definition of the Anglo-Saxon elegiac genre and in the identification of which elegies would fall within it, starting from the compositions themselves. However, also this methodology, based on the identification of themes, tones, vocabulary and structures common to the various ‘elegiac’ texts, shows a fundamental problem, that of being too subjective. Several scholars have developed different theories, according to the elegiac criteria adopted, sometimes excluding some texts and other times including new ones. Even today, discussions on the Anglo-Saxon elegiac question are still open and leave room for many unresolved questions. 7 The present work is part of this difficult discussion, in an attempt to understand if it is possible to talk about an Anglo-Saxon elegiac genre and to identify which compositions would fall within this genre. For this purpose, an approach different from the traditional one will be used, taking into consideration not the thematic, tonal and lexical aspects of Anglo-Saxon 'elegies', but rather their pragmatic structure. Pragmatics, indeed, represents a branch of linguistics focussed on the relationship between language and action, or, in other words on how language is used and organised for certain specific purposes. This discipline is based on the idea that speech and action are tied together, so that every time human beings utter something, they are also performing specific actions. Hence, expressing emotional states, asserting, predicting, promising, threatening, cursing and so on are actions performed through language, also known with the term of speech acts. The first steps towards the formulation of the Speech Acts theories were taken during the 50s of last century, with the illuminating assertions elaborated by John L. Austin. However, if Austin might be considered the father of the speech acts studies, his taxonomy of speech acts and theories of discourse have been abandoned by critics for some inaccuracies, and his philosophical analysis has been overcome by new proposals. Among these, John Roger Searle's theory has been considered by critics the backbone of pragmatics. Indeed, with his studies the scholar systematised the first Austinian theoretical and taxonomical attempts, creating a new precise classification of speech acts based on some precise rules. The scholar distinguished five main kinds of what he called illocutionary speech acts: representatives, directives, commissives, expressives and declarations, which according to Searle comprise all the speech acts that one might perform through language depending on different purposes. As for the pragmatic analysis of the Anglo-Saxon elegiac corpus taken into consideration here, the study will be conducted on two levels: a micro-structural level, i.e. focussing on the single speech acts recurring at the level of single sentences, and a macro-structural level, i.e. that of the whole discourse. In the first case, Searle's theories and taxonomy will be adopted, in order to observe the different types of speech acts recurring within the elegiac compositions. In particular, we will focus on the quantity and distribution of speech acts within the discourse. The second type of analysis, the one conducted at the macro-structural level, represents the second step of this study. In details, we will no longer look at the individual illocutionary speech acts expressed within individual sentences, but instead at the illocutionary purpose of a sequence of sentences 8 or of the
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