Speech Acts in Literature

Release on 20012001 by Joseph Hillis Miller

Author: Joseph Hillis Miller

Publisher: Stanford University Press

ISBN: 9780804742160

Category: Literary Criticism

Page: 238

View: 714

This book demonstrates the presence of literature within speech act theory and the utility of speech act theory in reading literary works. Though the founding text of speech act theory, J. L. Austin's How to Do Things with Words, repeatedly expels literature from the domain of felicitous speech acts, literature is an indispensable presence within Austin's book. It contains many literary references but also uses as essential tools literary devices of its own: imaginary stories that serve as examples and imaginary dialogues that forestall potential objections. How to Do Things with Words is not the triumphant establishment of a fully elaborated theory of speech acts, but the story of a failure to do that, the story of what Austin calls a "bogging down." After an introductory chapter that explores Austin's book in detail, the two following chapters show how Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man in different ways challenge Austin's speech act theory generally and his expulsion of literature specifically. Derrida shows that literature cannot be expelled from speech actsrather that what he calls "iterability" means that any speech act may be literature. De Man asserts that speech act theory involves a radical dissociation between the cognitive and positing dimensions of language, what Austin calls language's "constative" and "performative" aspects. Both Derrida and de Man elaborate new speech act theories that form the basis of new notions of responsible and effective politico-ethical decision and action. The fourth chapter explores the role of strong emotion in effective speech acts through a discussion of passages in Derrida, Wittgenstein, and Austin. The final chapter demonstrates, through close readings of three passages in Proust, the way speech act theory can be employed in an illuminating way in the accurate reading of literary works.

Literary Criticism

Language: en
Pages: 472

Acts of Literature

Authors: Jacques Derrida

Categories: Philosophy

Type: BOOK - Published: 2017-09-25 - Publisher: Routledge

First published in 1992. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Language: en
Pages: 532

Classified bibliography of literature on the Acts of the Apostles

Authors: Mattill

Categories: Religion

Type: BOOK - Published: 2019-07-01 - Publisher: BRILL

Books about Classified bibliography of literature on the Acts of the Apostles

Language: en
Pages: 272

Samuel Beckett and the Terror of Literature

Authors: Christopher Langlois

Categories: Philosophy

Type: BOOK - Published: 2017-06-09 - Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Samuel Beckett and the Terror of Literature addresses the relevance of terror to understanding the violence, the suffering, and the pain experienced by the narrative voices of Beckett's major post-1945 works in prose: The Unnamable, Texts for Nothing, How It Is, Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho. Through

Language: en
Pages: 222

The Singularity of Literature

Authors: Derek Attridge

Categories: Literary Criticism

Type: BOOK - Published: 2017-04-07 - Publisher: Taylor & Francis

The Iliad and Beowulf provide rich sources of historical information. The novels of Henry Fielding and Henry James may be instructive in the art of moral living. Some go further and argue that Emile Zola and Harriet Beecher Stowe played a part in ameliorating the lives of those existing in

Language: en
Pages: 146

A bibliography of the periodical literature on the Acts of the Apostles, 1962-1984

Authors: Mills

Categories: Religion

Type: BOOK - Published: 1986-06-01 - Publisher: BRILL

Books about A bibliography of the periodical literature on the Acts of the Apostles, 1962-1984