Tellability and politeness in ‘the miller's tale’: First steps in literary pragmatics

The creation of Chinese personae in Steinbeck’s fiction

“…In broaching the antinarratable subject, Steinbeck has flouted what Sell (1985: 504) terms ‘selectional politeness’, where writers ‘scrupulously observe all the taboos and conventions of social and moral decorum’ and thus ‘would never choose anything to say, or any words to say it in, that would be in the least bit offensive to his likely readers’. Meanwhile, he is aware of the potential risk of readerly offence and has thus adopted mitigation measures by violating ‘presentational politeness’, where writers ‘observe the Cooperative Principle at all costs, so that his readers would never be in the slightest doubt as to what was happening, what he meant, or why something was tellable’ (Sell, 1985: 504). Therefore, a kind of ritual equilibrium between selectional politeness and presentational politeness must be at once observed and not observed here, just as Sell (1985: 505) emphatically proclaims that ‘[a]bsolute politeness will never do!’ To return to Steinbeck’s ‘Johnny Bear’, it is notable that interracial romance is never explicitly narrated but its narrative information is unambiguously communicated to the reader through implicatures, which require the audience to ‘infer the intended meaning of the communication from its context’ (Rosaler, 2016: 78).…”

Contrastive Pragmatics in a Diachronic Perspective: Insights from Othello

“…Studies that probe into the historical dimension of these areas coincide with topics of historical pragmatics which springs off from pragmatics combined with historical linguistics and philology. In the 1980s, however, pragmatic studies on historical data were conducted under various labels.1 Topics of early studies that have proved important for historical pragmatics include politeness that has broadened to impoliteness and become a main trend; the politeness notion was first applied to Chaucer's texts at the interface of literary pragmatics (Sell 1985a and1985b). Another much discussed topic is the relation between the written and the spoken modes (Österreicher and Koch 1985); the line continues with speech-related studies (e.g.…”

Three major handbooks in three years: Stylistics as a mature discipline

“…For Boase-Beier (R.: 393-407; see also B.: 231-243), stylistics in translation courses is not prominent for the good reason that not all translation scholars are stylisticians, which is a pity according to Lin (C.: 587) because this discipline could offer major insights to translation theories. A rapprochement that has already yielded fruitful results but that needs further exploration is that between literary pragmatics, relevance theory and stylistics: in the wake of Sell (1985) advocating a 'demythologisation' of literature through an analysis of interactive processes between writer and recipient, Warner shows how literary pragmatics can highlight the communicative dimensions of the literary enterprise (R.: 362-377). Chapman also forcefully underlines how pragmatic theory can provide a useful tool for literary analyses (B.: 78-91) while Clark shows that research on inference does not even necessarily require the adoption of a particular theoretical framework (C.: 300-314; for the application of relevance theory see Clark, R.: 155-174).…”