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“Resources for Discourse Analysis in Composition Studies”
Joseph Carroll
“Adaptationist Literary Study: An Emerging Research
Program”
Susan Peck MacDonald
“Prose Styles, Genres, and Levels of Analysis”
Craig A. Hamilton and Ralf Schneider
“From Iser to Turner and Beyond: Reception Theory
Meets Cognitive Criticism”
Todd W. Reeser and Steven D. Spalding
“Reading Literature/Culture: A Translation of ‘Reading
as a Cultural Practice’”
John Burrows
“The Englishing of Juvenal: Computational Stylistics
and Translated Texts”
James W. Underhill
“Meaning, Language, and Mind: An Interview with
Mark Turner”
Kenneth Holmqvist and Jaroslaw Pluciennik
“A Short Bibliographical Guide to Theory of the
Sublime”
David Durian
“Corpus-Based Text Analysis from a Qualitative Perspective:
A Closer Look at NVivo.”
This review essay first describes new resources for discourse analysis from the field of linguistics and then considers resources for discourse analysis within the field of composition studies. The essay focuses upon three areas in composition studies: applied linguistics and the study of academic discourse, discourse analysis and the study of texts in a variety of contexts, and discourse analysis in an interdisciplinary relationship with English studies. The essay argues for an increased role for discourse analysis in the field of composition studies, based upon its methodological potential to answer questions about the production, interpretation, and acquisition of written language.
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Joseph Carroll. “Adaptationist Literary Study:
An Emerging Research Program”
Adaptationist literary study now constitutes a distinct school.
Adaptationist literary critics believe that human nature consists in a
complex set of behavioral and cognitive dispositions that have evolved
through a process of natural selection, and they regard human nature as
both the source and subject of literary representations. The author
contrasts adaptationism with other ways of connecting evolution and literature,
surveys publications in adaptationist literary study, and evaluates competing
hypotheses about the adaptive function of the arts.
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Susan Peck MacDonald. “Prose Styles,
Genres, and Levels of Analysis”
Recent work on genres from the fields of rhetoric/composition and applied
linguistics can help inform our understandings of non-fictional styles.
Work in these two fields of discourse studies occurs at four different
levels of analysis, from macro to micro: systems of genres, genres, styles,
and language features. Recent research at all four levels shows how
styles are patterned clusters of language features helping to do the work
of genres. This article examines recent findings about the continuum
of non-fictional styles from the verbal to the epistemic, with particular
attention to the epistemic style of scientific and academic research.
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Craig A. Hamilton and Ralf Schneider.
“From Iser to Turner and Beyond: Reception Theory Meets Cognitive Criticism”
In this essay, we review the work of Wolfgang Iser, the major proponent
of reception theory, and Mark Turner, the major proponent of cognitive
criticism. The two theoretical lines advocated by Iser and Turner
focus on the cognitive processes involved with reading literary texts.
Unfortunately, bibliographic blind spots in both lines lead to the assumption
that there is little overlap between reception theory and cognitive criticism.
We put this assumption to rest by comparing and contrasting works by Iser
and Turner in detail, starting with Iser’s work in the mid-1970s and ending
with Turner’s work in the late 1990s.
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Todd W. Reeser and Steven D. Spalding.
“Reading Literature/Culture: A Translation of ‘Reading as a Cultural Practice’”
In 1983, Pierre Bourdieu and Roger Chartier concluded an interdisciplinary
conference in the French town of Saint-Maximin with a discussion on the
practice of reading. Drawing upon several of the conference’s themes, their
dialogue is a stimulating development of the principle that “reading [.
. .] can never be reduced to what is read.” Approaching reading as a cultural
practice opens up a number of horizons of critical research, from the politics
of reading competency to the symbolic power of the intellectual. Their
exchange suggests various ways to conduct a cultural analysis of the act
of reading.
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John Burrows. “The Englishing of Juvenal:
Computational Stylistics and Translated Texts”
Traditional and computational forms of stylistics have more in common
than is obvious at first sight. Both rely upon the close analysis of texts,
and both benefit from opportunities for comparison. They also complement
each other by virtue of their differing strengths and limitations. The
present article compares fifteen English versions of Juvenal’s Tenth Satire.
The analysis is directed at three main lines of investigation. To what
extent is it possible to identify the “stylistic signature” of a translator,
an authorial agent whose contribution is clearly not that of an original
author? What, if any, common features run through these fifteen versions
of an original? And to what extent can computer-assisted comparisons throw
light on particular versions of a poem whose English translators and imitators
include John Dryden and Samuel Johnson?
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James W. Underhill. “Meaning, Language,
and Mind: An Interview with Mark Turner”
This interview deals with the importance of metaphor in everyday speech.
It explores the Lakoff-Johnson hypothesis that metaphors are not mere rhetorical
or stylistic tropes used to color discourse but rather form part of fundamental
conceptual frameworks (called protometaphors by Lakoff and Johnson) by
which we interpret the world in which we live. It then goes on to consider
the Turner-Fauconnier hypothesis of blending, a theory in which metaphor
forms part of a process of conceptual mapping in which one mental space
is thought of in terms of another and which results in a new emerging structure
(the blend) after certain aspects of the two mental spaces have been selected.
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Kenneth Holmqvist and Jaroslaw Pluciennik.
“A Short Bibliographical Guide to Theory of the Sublime”
The article concerns selected important issues of poetics and its history.
The authors analyze and interpret the history of the notion of the sublime.
The article is an introduction to a theoretical part of a book about a
possible theory of the literary work of art and communication that results
from the experience of the sublime. The introductory article presents to
the reader questions which are relevant to the sublime mainly in contemporary
theoretical reflection (cf. Lyotard). The survey accounts for the period
from the first century AD till the twentieth century and deals with the
theories of the sublime by Pseudo-Longinos, Nicolas Boileau, Edmund Burke,
Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Georg Wilhelm Hegel, Artur
Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, J.-F. Lyotard and others.
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David Durian. “Corpus-Based Text Analysis
from a Qualitative Perspective: A Closer Look at NVivo.”
NVivo is a powerful yet easy-to-use entry-level qualitative text analysis
software program released by Qualitative Solutions and Research Pty, Ltd.,
an Australian software company. NVivo is the latest version of NUD-IST,
a qualitative analysis program originally created in the early 1990s by
QSR and used in fields such as sociology, sports psychology, and education.
This review presents an overview of the program’s capabilities, discusses
its system requirements, and presents suggested applications for the use
of the program in corpus-based text analysis, something which has been
previously unexplored in the text analysis software review literature.
Examples of the types of analyses NVivo can perform are discussed, and
a brief overview of key features of the program is provided. Similarities
and differences between NVivo and the popular quantitative text analysis
programs TACT and Wordsmith Tools are also discussed, and the different
analytical approaches facilitated through the use of these programs are
explored.
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