Poetic Thoughts and Poetic Effects: a Relevance Theory Account of the Literary Use of Rhetorical Tropes and Schemes
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POETIC THOUGHTS AND POETIC EFFECTS: A RELEVANCE THEORY ACCOUNT OF THE LITERARY USE OF RHETORICAL TROPES AND SCHEMES. Adrian Pilkington Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of PhD University College London May 1994 ( LONDOIJ ABSTRACT This thesis proposes an account of the effects achieved by the poetic use of rhetorical tropes and schemes in the light of recent developments in pragmatic theory. More specifically it discusses and attempts to develop the relevance theory account of poetic effects. Much recent debate in literary studies has centred on the question as to whether literary communication is best explained in terms of text-internal linguistic properties or socio-cultural phenomena. This thesis considers such views in the light of the theories of language and communication they assume. It then proposes an alternative theoretical account of literary communication grounded in cognitive pragmatic theory. It argues that the relevance theory account of poetic effects may make a significant contribution to such an account. A brief outline of relevance theory is followed by a more detailed analysis of metaphor and a brief consideration of epizeuxis and various verse effects, insofar as they contribute to poetic style. it is natural for pragmatic theory to concentrate on the communication of assumptions, propositional forms with a logical structure over which inferences can be performed. Although the account of poetic effects and poetic thoughts developed here will be partially characterised in such terms, an attempt will also be made to account for the communication of affective and other non-propositional effects. Any theory of stylistic effects in general, and poetic style in particular, must, it will be argued, include such an account. This will necessitate a broader philosophical discussion of issues having a bearing on the question of what it is that is communicated non-propositionally. More particularly it will require some discussion of emotion, phenomenal experience and aesthetic 2 experience. This discussion will lead to a characterisation of poetic thought or poetic representation. The thesis aims, then, to make a contribution to literary studies by characterising a new theoretical notion of literariness in terms of mental representations and mental processes. It also aims to make a contribution to pragmatic theory, specifically to the pragmatics of poetic style and rhetoric within a relevance theory framework. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract 2 Table of Contents 4 Acknowledgements 6 Introduction 8 Chapter 1 Literary Studies and Literary Theory 12 1 .1 Introduction: Approaches to Literary Studies 12 1 .2 Artwork and Aesthetic Experience 14 Chapter 2 Theoretical and Anti-Theoretical Positions within Literary Studies 28 2.1 Introduction 28 2.2 Literariness as a Linguistic Property of Texts 29 2.3 Literary Codes and Conventions 36 2.4 Literary Reading Conventions as Maxims 46 2.5 Reader-Response and Text-Response 50 2.6 Literary Theory 57 2.7 Conclusion 67 Chapter 3 Pragmatic Theory 72 3.1 Introduction 72 3.2 Code and Context 74 3.3 Code, Inference and Intention 82 3.4 Utterance Interpretation and the Principle of Relevance 92 Chapter 4 Metaphor 111 4.1 Metaphor and Pragmatic Theory 111 4.2 Creative Metaphor 130 4.3 Knowledge Representation and Metarepresentation 140 4.4 Poetic Imagery and Aesthetic Value 149 4 Chapter 5 Schemes and Verse Effects 154 5.1 Introduction 154 5.2 Epizeuxis 154 5.3 Verse Effects 164 5.3.1 Metrical Variation 164 5.3.2 Rhyme and Alliteration 172 Chapter 6 EmotIon, Attitude and Sentimentality 176 6.1 Introduction: Emotion and Poetry 176 6.2 Properties of Emotional States 179 6.3 The Evolution and Relevance of Emotion 182 6.4 Analysing Emotions as Belief/Desire Sets 183 6.5 Emotions and Attitudes 189 6.6 On Sentimentality 197 6.7 Conclusion 200 Chapter 7 Varieties of Affective Experience 202 7.1 Introduction: What is Communicated? 202 7.2 Mutual Affect 204 7.3 Qualia and Consciousness 210 7.4 Aesthetic Qualia 219 7.5 Precision and Indeterminacy 221 7.6 Conclusion: Phenomenality, Memoire Involontaire and Aesthetic Pleasure 227 Chapter 8 Conclusion 235 References 243 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would first like to thank Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber for contributing so substantially to my education over the last five or six years, both through private discussion and public lecture. I have been encouraged to think in new and challenging ways about the kind of things I like to think about, as well as about things I would never have thought of thinking about pre- Relevance. I owe a great deal generally to the Linguistics Department at University College London. In particular, the pragmatics reading group that started up in 1988 was an excellent forum for expressing and developing ideas. I have learned a lot from everyone who contributed to that group. In particular I would like to thank Marjolein Groefsema, Billy Clark and VIad Zegarac for many stimulating discussions and for helping to make my thesis-writing experience a lot less lonely than it would otherwise have been. Of the many others who have discussed ideas and offered encouragement, I would particularly like to mention John Tynan, Begonia Vicente and Eva Delgado, all friends and former colleagues in the English Department at the University of the Basque Country, Spain. I would like to thank my supervisor, Robyn Carston, for her patience, tolerance, friendship, and the many hours of stimulating discussion over recent years which I have greatly enjoyed. Last and most, I would like to thank Anna for her support and her poetic metaphors. 6 'No one can have read at all deeply in the anti-essentialist literature on art without recognising the extent to which they tend to flatten the works they address out under interpretation - how all the works addressed are finally deconstructed in such a way that they all more or less say - more or less "really" say since these theories only give deep interpretations - the same thing over and over. The message is always one of oppression or of subversion. And I have often felt it a tragedy that those who went into the study of literature or art out of love for painting or poetry should have fallen under the spell of "theory" and to find themselves dealing only and always with the same flat grey deep substance underlying the works whose surfaces theory has enabledthem to penetrate..................................................................But my theory, being philosophical, leaves things as they are.' (Danto 1993:207) 7 INTRODUCTION The main aim of this thesis is to examine a problem that is relevant to literary criticism and literary theory, as well as to pragmatic theory. The problem can be expressed in terms of the following question: how is literary (or poetic) communication successful and distinctive qua literary communication? This question, covering both literary prose and poetry, is a version of the one that l.A.Richards asks at the beginning of Principles of Literary Criticism: 'What gives the experience of reading a certain poem its value?' (Richards 1924:1). Literary criticism is centrally concerned with evaluating works of literature. The aesthetic value to be obtained from works of literature derives from a particular kind of reading experience. This reading experience may be said to involve a particular kind of thinking, what Les Murray calls 'the only whole thinking' in his poem On Religion and Poetry. What, then, is this particular kind of thinking? What are the characteristic properties of a poetic thought? Pragmatic theory is concerned with developing an account of verbal communication, with the questions: what is verbal communication and how is it achieved? As poetic thoughts are communicated verbally, pragmatic theory should have something to say about the communication of poetic thoughts or poetic effects, as well as about more general aspects of style. It should be able, in principle, to provide a theoretical answer to a literary critical question. The main problem that pragmatic theory faces in answering this question follows from widely accepted intuitions about the nature of poetic effects. Poetic effects cannot be 8 characterised simply in propositional terms: poetic thoughts do not just consist of sets of assumptions or propositional forms. They involve the communication of nonpropositional effects of various kinds (though what precisely these effects are is difficult to determine). Pragmatic theory provides an account of how certain assumptions come to be represented in the mind of an addressee during communication, how those assumptions are placed in the context of other assumptions, and how inferential rules (of some specific kind) operate over these sets of assumptions to yield further assumptions. There seems to be no place for nonpropositional effects in any workable pragmatic theory. If it is the case that pragmatic theory deals in propositional effects and that literary criticism! literary communication is primarily concerned with nonpropositional effects then it would follow that pragmatic theory cannot offer a genuine theory of style or, in particular, of poetic style. This thesis was initially inspired by the relevance theory account of poetic effects found in Sperber and Wilson (1986a). Not only does relevance theory offer a more sophisticated pragmatic account of poetic effects in terms of implicatures, and hence propositional forms, it also recognises and offers an explanation for the problem of the communication of nonpropositional effects. Mainstream literary stylistics seeks to explain the meanings communicated by poems in terms of the lexical and syntactic choices made by poets. The other main attraction of relevance theory is that, as a cognitive pragmatic theory, it can offer genuine theoretical explanations for the linguistic choices that poets make (as well as for our stylistic intuitions as readers) in terms of mental representations and processes, in terms of thoughts and thinking.