Causal attribution and the analysis of literary characters: A. C. Bradley's study of Iago and Othello

Abstract

A. C. Bradley's approach to character-construal in Shakespearean Tragedy (1904) has often been regarded as a good example of the humanizing approach to literary characters. His lectures on Iago, Othello or Macbeth have been criticized by other scholars for a number of reasons, but particularly for using premises and facts in his argumentation which are not found in the plays. Bradley's task is in many senses an example of person perception, which he performs without alluding to any social psychological theories or methods. In the present article I revise Bradley's reasoning in the light of Kelley's Covariance Theory of Causal Attribution, in an attempt both to re-evaluate Bradley's procedures and, especially, to determine ways in which social psychology might provide literary critics with valuable tools and insights.The main difference between good and bad critics is that the good critic points to something that is actually contained in the work of art, whereas the bad critic Brought to you by | St. Petersburg State University Authenticated | 134.99.128.41 Download Date | 12/11/13 4:57 PM

The year’s work in stylistics 2010

“…Language and Style (McIntyre and Busse, 2010) also featured a small selection of contributions on drama, including Munkelt (2010) on the universal elements of drama, Archer and Bousfield's (2010) corpus-based pragmatic analysis of King Lear, and McIntyre and Culpeper (2010) on activity types and humour in dramatic discourse. Analyses of Shakespearean drama were to be found in the work of Arenas (2010) and Kikuchi (2010).…”