Coda

The coda extends the relationship between nineteenth-century techniques of medico-literary exegesis to reading practices in the present day. The four mobile protocols discussed in the book—dissective reading, the postmortem, free indirect style, and semiological diagnostics—offer a new portrait of the cultural interchange between Romantic literary and medical fields. They also set the stage for contemporary reading practices, especially symptomatic reading. The coda argues that the much-maligned practice of symptomatic reading might be rehabilitated through a reconsideration of the history of its origins in Romantic protocols of diagnosis, which anticipate present-day debates in literary analysis about the ethics of critique. In dialogue with the medical and health humanities, the coda offers an optimistic reconsideration of symptomatic reading as a rich, transhistorical instance of how literary scholarship might draw on and inform the medical sciences.

The Madness of Free Indirect Style

This chapter considers the emergence of moral therapy in early psychiatry in order to argue that the Romantic-era innovation of free indirect style shares an affinity with eighteenth-century psychiatric diagnosis and case records. While the origin of free indirect style is often ascribed to Jane Austen, the chapter finds emergent forms of free indirect style appearing in psychiatric notebooks by mad-doctors practicing moral management, as well as in the political literature of the 1790s and in Romantic-era realist prose fiction. Free indirect style has a monitory function that abetted the psychiatric practice of moral management in the late eighteenth century: as a strategy for mediating the voice of a speaker in a text, free indirect style allowed early psychiatrists, who believed madness was transmitted orally, to regulate their patients’ conditions by moderating their speech. Free indirect style continues to bear the traces of the madhouse in novels by Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen. The chapter thus uncovers pathological traces underlying the representational device that has been called the novel’s most distinctive formal feature. Free indirect style also thus inaugurates the association of the novel with the patient’s narrative, anticipating modern discussions of “psycho-narration” as a medico-literary formal device. Ultimately, free indirect style allows the writer to intimate forms of pathology that the reader is invited to, in effect, diagnose.

The interaction of various temporal devices in the use of past followed by temporal nouns

Followed by a temporal noun, past can be synonymous with last, but not with non-deictically anchored previous (e.g., ‘I've not been feeling very well for the past/last/*previous few days’). Most dictionaries provide examples in which past occurs with the present perfect, giving the impression that past is incompatible with other tenses. A close examination of the token past retrieved from the Brown Corpus, the Frown Corpus, and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (coca), however, has revealed that it is not uncommon for past to occur with the simple past or even with the past perfect (e.g., ‘His wife had left him the past year for a wealthy Wall Street broker’) and that past occurring with the past perfect can be explained as instances of free indirect style, discourse freezing or difference in reality (i.e., the three discourse principles allowing a shift in viewpoint with last). Research on temporal reference has thus far been ‘strongly biased towards certain devices’ such as tense, Aktionsart, and aspect ( Klein, 2009 : 41). This study shows that our understanding of how time is encoded in language can benefit from research studies dealing with the relationship between tense-aspect, temporal adverbials and discourse principles.

Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? Readers’ responses to experimental techniques of speech, thought and consciousness presentation in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway

Woolf’s work has been the object of several studies concerned with her experimental use of techniques of speech, thought and consciousness presentation. These investigated the way in which different perspectives coexist and alternate in her writing, suggesting that the use of such techniques often results in ambiguous perspective shifts. However, there is hardly any empirical evidence as to whether readers experience difficulty while reading her narratives as a result of these narrative techniques. This article examines empirically readers’ responses to extracts from Woolf’s two major novels – To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway – to provide evidence for whether Woolf’s techniques for the presentation of characters’ voices, thoughts and perspectives represent a challenge for readers. To achieve this, a mixed-methods approach that combines a stylistic analysis with a detailed questionnaire has been employed. Selected extracts that were hypothesised to be complex due to the presence of free indirect style and/or interior monologue were modified by substituting these with less ambiguous modes of consciousness presentation, such as direct speech or direct thought. Readers’ responses to the modified and unmodified versions of the same extracts were compared: results show that the presence of free indirect style and/or interior monologue increases the number of perspectives identified by readers, suggesting that this technique increases the texts’ difficulty, laying a more solid ground for future investigations.

The Cognitive Grammar of drunkenness: Consciousness representation in Under the Volcano

Cognitive Grammar analyses the semantics of linguistic features in relation to human cognition; Free Indirect Style allows authors to represent their characters’ cognition with language. This article applies Cognitive Grammar to the analysis of a character’s mind that is represented with Free Indirect Style. In the tradition of mind style analysis, it aims to use linguistics to reveal some of the underlying cognitive processes and proclivities at work in the character’s psychology. The character in question is the protagonist in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, an alcoholic who is largely characterised by his drunken behaviour and ideation. This article therefore focuses on the linguistic features that serve to represent his inebriated state of mind. It analyses the semantic effects of those features primarily in terms of attentional focus, drawing on Cognitive Grammar concepts, such as objective construal, specificity, scope, profile and domain, and relating these to the protagonist’s cognitive proclivities for solipsism, partial awareness, delayed reaction, attenuated experience and self-delusion. The article also discusses the theoretical background for mind style analysis, arguing for the continued importance of focusing on the relationship between the text and a character’s mind, alongside the focus on the reader’s mind that has come to dominate cognitive stylistics.