Midlands Cadences: Narrative Voices in the Work of Alan Sillitoe

This paper will examine excerpts from a range of Alan Sillitoe’s prose fiction, most notably Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and short stories from the collection The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1958), via a comparative exploration of the texts’ representations of Midlands English demotic. Both texts enact Bakhtin’s notion of novelistic dialogism and find much expressive capital in the tension between discourses: between the oral and the written. Indeed, it could be argued that much of Sillitoe’s work functions as a direct challenge to dominant notions of the literary. The narrative discourse attempts to trace a link between the quotidian experience of the Midlands English working classes represented and the demotic language which they speak. His technique also explores the link between language and sensibility; i.e. verbal articulacy need not be a limit to expression of a character’s distinctive identity. In contrast to the more radical techniques of novelists like James Kelman and Irvine Welsh, all instances of phonetically-rendered demotic remain imprisoned by what Joyce called ‘perverted commas’ – as direct speech. However, the diegetic narrative discourse itself is redolent of registers rooted in 1950s English working class life. The texts also contain different methods of representing their protagonists’ consciousness through their own idiolect. In Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, this is evidenced by the use of the second person ‘you’. It functions simultaneously as a representation of Seaton’s consciousness in the oral register which he might choose to articulate it, and as a dialogic ‘sideways glance’ at the reader and assumed shared experience. The second is more redolent of internal monologue, using the first-person form (as seen in the homodiegetic narration of the second novel); crucially, though, it remains in Standard English, if explicitly orientated towards oral register. Sillitoe’s is a novelistic discourse which refuses to normalise itself to accord with the conventions of classic realism, and as such prefigures the ambitions of many contemporary writers who incline their narrative voices towards the oral – asserting the right of a character’s dialect/idiolect to be the principal register of the narrative. The paper will demonstrate this thesis through the ideas of Bakhtin, and through an analytical taxonomy derived from literary stylistics. It aims to propose a model which can be used to analyse and explore any fiction which has been labelled as ‘working class’, and asserts that such an approach leads to a more principled characterisation of working class fiction (based on its use of language) than current literary-critical discussions based simply on cultural/social context and biography

Embedded dialogue and dreams: the worlds and accessibility relations of Inception

In this article, Text World Theory (Gavins, 2007; Werth, 1999) and Ryan’s model of fictional worlds (1991a, 1991b) are both applied to Nolan’s blockbuster film, Inception (2010) to explore the multi-layered architecture of the narrative. The opening two scenes of Nolan’s screenplay are analysed using Text World Theory, with particular attention to the embedded nature of character dialogue, or, more generally, ‘represented discourse’ (Herman, 1993), otherwise known as Direct Speech (Leech and Short, 2007). Based on this analysis, I suggest a modification to the way in which Text World Theory deals with represented discourse, which improves the framework’s applicability to all text types. Moving from the micro-analysis of the screenplay text, to a macro-analysis of the film narrative as a whole, I outline the various different worlds that make up the reality, dream and ‘limbo’ layers in the film, explaining how most of the action takes place at a remove from the world at the centre of the textual system. I use Deictic Shift Theory’s terms PUSH and POP (Galbraith, 1995) to describe the movements between the ontological layers of the narrative and suggest that these terms are better suited to describe hierarchies of ontology rather than horizontal deictic shifts. Ryan’s taxonomy of accessibility relations is used to describe the ways in which the film differs from reality, as well as the ways in which the dreams differ from the internal reality of the film. The complex ontological structure and asymmetric accessibility relations between the worlds are ascribed as the reason for many viewers’ difficulty in processing the film’s narrative. With its attention to discourse-world factors, Text World Theory is then used to account for the myriad of reactions to Inception – as expressed on online discussion forums – which range from engagement and enjoyment to frustration and resistance

DISCOURSE COMPREHENSION

The field of discourse processing has dissected many of the levels of representation that are constructed when individuals read or listen to connected discourse. These levels include the surface code, the propositional textbase, the referential situation model, the communication context, and the discourse genre. Discourse psychologists have developed models that specify how these levels are mentally represented and how they are dynamically built during comprehension. This chapter focuses on the meaning representations that are constructed when adults read written text, such as literary stories, technical expository text, and experimenter-generated "textoids." Recent psychological models have attempted to account for the identification of referents of referring expressions (e.g. which person in the text does she refer to), the connection of explicit text segments, the establishment of local and global coherence, and the encoding of knowledge-based inferences

Study of pragmatic language ability in children with hearing loss

En Abstract Background Pragmatic language refers to how language is used socially to achieve some purpose in communication. Pragmatic language impairment can be a disorder by itself, or as a sign of other accompanying disorders. Hearing-impaired children show less clear pragmatic communication functions. Knowledge of pragmatic abilities in children with hearing loss (HL) is lacking relative to that of children with normal hearing (NH). Aim The aim of this study was to examine the pragmatic language ability in Arabic-speaking children with sensorineural hearing loss in order to apply a proper intervention program to guard against the effect of early pragmatic language skill disorders on later academic and social abilities. Participants and methods Twenty-seven children with HL were subjected to pragmatic language assessment using the Arabic version of the Test of Pragmatic Language, 2nd edition and both the Observational Rating Scale and the Pragmatic Profile subtests of the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamental, 4th edition. The results obtained were compared with the results of 27 age-matched and sex-matched NH children. Results The results of this study revealed significantly lower pragmatic abilities in children with HL compared with children with NH. Male children were significantly more impaired compared with female children. There were significant correlations between the pragmatic variables and the degree of HL, speech discrimination ability, and the duration of auditory deprivation. Conclusion HL children had significantly lower pragmatic skills compared with NH children, with greater affection correlated with increasing severity of HL and the duration of auditory deprivation. The higher susceptibility to pragmatic impairment in this category of children as well as the importance of pragmatic skills for further social communicative and academic careers should be considered in their rehabilitative plan

Online readers between the camps: a Text World Theory analysis of ethical positioning in We Need to Talk About Kevin

Recent investigations into ethical experiences of fictional narratives have discussed the ‘positions’ that readers adopt in relation to the author, narrator and characters (Phelan, 1996, 2005, 2007; Stockwell, 2009, 2011, 2013; Whiteley, 2014). This article applies Text World Theory (Gavins, 2007; Werth, 1999) as a means of accounting for the ethical experience of Lionel Shriver’s We Need To Talk About Kevin (2003). Qualitative analysis of a sample of 150 online reader responses on the reading-based social network Goodreads (2015) reveals a range of ethical responses to the novel positioned between two interpretative ‘camps’ (Shriver, 2010) and the nature/nurture debate they reflect with regards to the character, Kevin. Drawing from this dataset, I explore how stylistic features of Shriver’s epistolary novel could be seen to influence readers’ ethical positioning in relation to the multiple perspectives presented at different levels of its narrative structure. As a result of the analysis, I propose that an account of ethical experience using Text World Theory may benefit from the concept of ‘construal’ in Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar (1987, 1991, 2008). By modeling readers’ variable attention to multiple minds, including their own, a cognitive grammatical model of construal may support an understanding of ethical interpretation as an interpersonal experience within particular reading contexts