Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Literature and Film, DispositionedLiterature

Literature and Film, Dispositioned: Literature [Where in the world is language, and where in language is the world? Where, in other words, in another’s words, ‘is the place where language works?’1 Without doubt, the whereabouts of literary beings are never simply geographical. Location is also a case of locution. For a literary being, language is their whole world. Whenever such a creature wonders where in their world they are, whether or not their question is throwaway, their question is a wonderfully literary one. From Jean Martle’s query in Henry James’s The Other House (1896) — ‘“Where am I?” her scared silence seemed for the moment to ask’ — to a character called Neary’s qualification of the question of ‘where?’ with ‘if and when’ in Samuel Beckett’s Murphy (1938), this is so.2 In fiction, the distance or nearness of a narrative to a character is constantly in question. The narrative that tells us a character’s story may be in the first person, or in the third; second person perspectives are also of course possible if not as commonplace. But if with first person narrative we think of ourselves as being especially cosy with a character, then when such a narrative is told in the past tense the ‘I’ doing the telling is necessarily at a remove from the ‘I’ it tells us about. In third person narratives, meanwhile, we often find ourselves astonishingly close to a character’s most intimate feelings and thoughts, despite these being communicated by someone or something else — be that ‘else’ anonymous, omniscient, or otherwise.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

Literature and Film, DispositionedLiterature

Download PDF
32 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/springer-journals/literature-and-film-dispositioned-literature-Bv3U1BWLTG

References (0)

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan UK
Copyright
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2014
ISBN
978-1-349-45185-2
Pages
1 –33
DOI
10.1057/9781137295453_1
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[Where in the world is language, and where in language is the world? Where, in other words, in another’s words, ‘is the place where language works?’1 Without doubt, the whereabouts of literary beings are never simply geographical. Location is also a case of locution. For a literary being, language is their whole world. Whenever such a creature wonders where in their world they are, whether or not their question is throwaway, their question is a wonderfully literary one. From Jean Martle’s query in Henry James’s The Other House (1896) — ‘“Where am I?” her scared silence seemed for the moment to ask’ — to a character called Neary’s qualification of the question of ‘where?’ with ‘if and when’ in Samuel Beckett’s Murphy (1938), this is so.2 In fiction, the distance or nearness of a narrative to a character is constantly in question. The narrative that tells us a character’s story may be in the first person, or in the third; second person perspectives are also of course possible if not as commonplace. But if with first person narrative we think of ourselves as being especially cosy with a character, then when such a narrative is told in the past tense the ‘I’ doing the telling is necessarily at a remove from the ‘I’ it tells us about. In third person narratives, meanwhile, we often find ourselves astonishingly close to a character’s most intimate feelings and thoughts, despite these being communicated by someone or something else — be that ‘else’ anonymous, omniscient, or otherwise.]

Published: Oct 8, 2015

Keywords: Literary History; Person Narrative; Silent Film; Paradise Lost; German Linguist

There are no references for this article.