The emergence of mind in Henry James’s notebook material

Inscribed in the field of cognitive narrative theory, this paper asks, and attempts to answer, a number of questions about the early emergence of mind in James’s notebook material for his short fiction. These questions essentially turn on the metarepresentational and aspectualizing potential of notebook entries in genetic relation to the finished tales, that is, on their capacity to present the projected storyworld, from its very conception, as a function of the subjectivity of one or several characters in the cognitive role of metarepresentational sources, or else as a dementalised lump of content to be aspectualised later in the process of execution. Analysis of the relevant notebook material yields a polarity between epistemic and contentual entries, and reveals a set of cognitive phenomena based on the alteration or continuity of the primitive balance of sources which allows one to conclude that James’s characteristic concern with the mental dynamics of his narratives, rather than being a compositional addition, was deeply embedded in his earliest fictional projects.

Worlds of evidence

The Hillsborough football stadium disaster (1989) in Sheffield, UK, led to the deaths of 96 football fans and resulted in the longest jury case in British legal history (2016). This article examines the witness statements of two Sheffield residents who claim to have attended the match. Using a mixed-methods approach that incorporates a cognitive linguistic framework (Text World Theory) with visualisation software (VUE) we consider both form and function of a number of linguistic features, such as meta-narrative, evaluative lexis, syntax, and modality to investigate how institutional voices permeate and potentially distort layperson narratives. Our analysis casts doubt on the veracity of the statements and raises questions about what can be considered evidential in a forensic investigation.

Remediating the culture industry

This article examines to what dramaturgical effect Sam Shepard’s political play States of Shock (1991) remediates strategies associated with the culture industry. In plays, spectators forge an interpretation from a medium that is considered ‘hypermedial’ or capable of combining discrete signifying systems such as dialogue, costumes, acting style and scenography at the same time. In States of Shock, genre remediation implicates its audience in the spectacle of war by juxtaposing American war heroism and military ideology with entertaining vaudeville. By examining Shepard’s appropriation of the vaudeville genre in relation to other dramatic signifying systems, the article offers a new and more layered reading of the play’s supposedly ‘blatant’ political message.

‘Actually given’ versus ‘presented as given’ and ‘actually new’ versus ‘presented as new’

This paper considers the relevance of various approaches to the study of ‘Given’ and ‘New’ to a number of practical problems: complaints from listeners to UK radio programmes that presenters place emphasis on the wrong words; inaudibility of openings of utterances in radio news bulletins; and ambiguity of pronouns. Approaches to ‘Given’ and ‘New’ to be discussed include those whose concerns are with intonation (e.g., Halliday & Matthiessen 2014), those who pay attention to definiteness/indefiniteness in the nominal group (e.g., Martin 1992), and those who are more concerned with what is in the minds of hearers and readers (e.g., Prince 1981; Lambrecht 1994). The underlying questions that are being investigated are: How free are speakers and writers to assign ‘Given’ or ‘New’ status to entities? Are there constraints on what they can do intonationally, or with definiteness, or with pronouns?

Neoliberalism’s “official crap art”?

British writer Tom McCarthy has repeatedly taken aim at what he calls a “sentimental humanism” and the contemporary cult of the “authentic self”. This article investigates his work through the lens of that critique. Extrapolating from McCarthy’s public statements, I endeavour to delineate sentimental humanism as a mode of cultural production and flesh out his linking of it to a neoliberal political economy. I show how his antagonism manifests itself in his work, particularly his debut novel, Remainder. By contrast, his latest novel, Satin Island, marks a turning point in that trajectory. Although implicitly framed by its author as a way of thematising the challenges with which Big Data has confronted literature, Satin Island more specifically reveals that his anti-humanist agenda has also reached an impasse. Much of the logic behind the critique of sentimental humanism mounted by Remainder, I argue, is in a sense pre-empted or assimilated by the kinds of corporate digital environments described in Satin Island.

Conflict-motivated acts in the open letters of two former Nigerian presidents

This study investigates conflict-motivated pragmatic acts employed in the open letters exchanged by two former Nigerian presidents (Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan). The data are analysed using Mey’s pragmatic act theory. The findings reveal that while Obasanjo employs pragmatic acts of warning, appealing, and praising in order to counsel Jonathan, Jonathan employs pragmatic acts of acknowledging, boasting, correcting, and reminding in order to defend himself. However, they both employ the pragmatic acts of insulting, complaining, accusing, and requesting. These acts are influenced by nationalist and anti-ethnic ideologies as well as the context of the open letters, i.e., conflict among political leaders in Nigeria.

Language attitudes and L2 pronunciation

Since pronunciation serves as a vehicle for both intelligibility and identity, exploring learners’ attitudes towards different accent varieties can allow both pedagogical and sociolinguistic insights into second language acquisition. This study investigates the attitudes of Flemish secondary school students towards RP and General American and the relation between these attitudes and the students’ actual pronunciation in English. Participants rated British and American accents in a verbal guise experiment, and speech recordings provided a sample of respondents’ own pronunciation. Results diverged from previous findings: while participants had more positive attitudes towards RP, they spoke with a higher proportion of GA phonological features. Almost half of the participants did not aim to speak with either a British or an American accent.

What dialog is absent from constructed dialog?

This paper is concerned with constructed dialog in conversational storytelling. Based on Clark & Gerrig’s (1990) demonstration theory, its focus is on what is absent from constructed dialog. To determine what is absent, a comparison is made between constructed dialog tokens and utterances in conversation. The inquiry uses both quantitative and qualitative methods. It is based on the Narrative Corpus (NC; Rühlemann & O’Donnell 2012), a corpus of conversational narratives extracted from the conversational component of the British National Corpus (BNC), and its systematic annotation of constructed dialog (that is, direct speech introduced by a quotative and free direct speech without any introducer). The quantitative comparison of verbalizations used in constructed dialog as opposed to verbalizations used in conversational utterances demonstrates that a particular utterance type is significantly missing from constructed dialog: the continuer utterance, whose basic function is to exhibit an understanding that a form of ‘telling’ by another speaker is going on. The qualitative analysis, based on a subset of storytellings from the NC that were re-analyzed acoustically and re-transcribed using Jeffersonian conventions based on the Audio BNC (Coleman et al. 2012), reveals a stark mismatch between the commonness of tellings in talk-in-interaction and their uncommonness in constructed dialog. The absence of continuers from constructed dialog is discussed against the backdrop of indexicality. I argue that continuers share the key properties of indexicals – semantic vacuity and an existential relationship with the ‘thing’ indicated – and can therefore be seen as indexicals themselves. As indexicals, intrinsically connected to the speech situation of their utterance, continuers cannot be included in constructed dialog, which typically occurs in a different speech situation with different interactional parameters. Finally, I offer initial thoughts on the underrepresentation of telling sequences in constructed dialog.

“Bluebeard” versus black British women’s writing

Helen Oyeyemi’s 2011 novel Mr. Fox artfully remasters the “Bluebeard” fairytale and its many variants and rewritings, such as Jane Eyre and Rebecca. It is also the first novel in which Oyeyemi does not overtly address blackness or racial identity. However, the present article argues that Mr. Fox is concerned with the status of all women writers, including women writers of colour. With Mr. Fox, Oyeyemi echoes the assertiveness and inquisitiveness of Bluebeard’s last wife, whose disobedient questioning of Bluebeard’s canonical authority leads her to discover, denounce, and warn other women about his murderous nature. A tale of the deception and manipulation inherent in storytelling, Mr. Fox allows for its narrative foul play to be exposed on the condition that its literary victims turn into detective-readers and decipher the hidden clues left behind by the novel’s criminal-authors. This article puts the love triangle between author St. John Fox, muse Mary, and wife Daphne under investigation by associating reading and writing motifs with detective fiction. Oyeyemi’s ménage à trois can thus be exposed as an anthropomorphic metaphor for the power struggle between the patriarchal literary canon, established feminist literature, and up-and-coming (black British) women writers, incarnated respectively by Mr. Fox, Mary Foxe, and Daphne Fox.