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Extemporaneous Blending: Conceptual Integration in Humorous Discourse from Talk Radio
Violeta Sotirova
Repetition in Free Indirect Style: A Dialogue of
Minds?
Debra San
Hiatus of Subject and Verb in Poetic Language
Catherine Addison
Stress Felt, Stroke Dealt: The Spondee, the Text,
and the Reader
Martin Ramey
Cognitive Science Applied to Pauline Metaphors in
1 Thessalonians: Conceptual Blending and the Sleep and Death Motif
Amit Marcus
The Self-Deceptive and the Other-Deceptive Narrating
Character: The Case of Lolita
Robert E. Kohn
Parody, Heteroglossia, and Chronotope in Don DeLillo’s
Great Jones Street
SEANA COULSON, “Extemporaneous Blending: Conceptual Integration in Humorous Discourse from Talk Radio” / 107
Conceptual integration, or blending, is a theoretical framework for describing how people combine information from different domains to yield new concepts. Previous work suggests that blending processes are important for humor production and comprehension, as humorous examples often involve the construction of hybrid cognitive models in so-called blended spaces. However, such work has focused mainly on blends that underlie written and scripted language. The use of blending processes in more spontaneous examples of humorous discourse can be demontrated by an analysis of an excerpt from the syndicated talk radio show Loveline. This analysis suggests that humorous discourse between the show’s hosts displays many of the same types of blending processes at play in more scripted examples. In addition, it suggests that humorous conceptualizations that occur in the course of extemporaneous blending are shaped in part by the demands of conversational interaction.
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VIOLETA SOTIROVA, “Repetition in Free
Indirect Style: A Dialogue of Minds?” / 123
I explore the validity of a claim made by two narratologists that recent
findings on repetition in spoken discourse are hard to apply to the written
language. To test their predictions I turn to D. H. Lawrence, well known
for his stylistic habit of repetition—a peculiarity sometimes criticized,
sometimes lauded. Finding parallels between the uses of repetition in conversation
and its deployment in the portrayal of character consciousness, I show
that conversation and such crafted genres as novelistic prose may be more
closely aligned than previously thought. The implications of this study
are twofold: its results bear on narrative theories of point of view and
support a dialogic framework for the analysis of free indirect style; its
significance for Lawrence studies is in establishing that his repetitions
are meaningful and not redundant and that they have a dialogic intranarrative
function.
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DEBRA SAN, “Hiatus of Subject and Verb in
Poetic Language” / 137
English-language readers expect a verb to follow fairly swiftly after
its grammatical subject, but poems often separate the two for prolonged
stretches. Such interrupted syntax does not, as in enjambment, continue
to the next line. It suspends itself over several intervening lines
before it resumes. Because syntactic hiatuses are often difficult
for readers to work their way through, recognizing and understanding the
phenomenon of subject-verb hiatus can help to clarify seemingly cryptic
lines of poetry. Examples are given from poems by Arnold, Auden,
Blake, Browning, Coleridge, Cowper, Dickinson, Donne, Eliot, Graves, Gray,
Milton, Shelley, Spenser, Whitman, and Wordsworth.
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CATHERINE ADDISON, “Stress Felt, Stroke
Dealt: The Spondee, the Text, and the Reader” / 153
Using the word spondee to refer fairly broadly to the phenomenon of
contiguous stresses in English poetry — and, occasionally, speech — this
article is a sustained demonstration of the relation between prosodic stress
and emotional stress. It also summarizes the debate about the spondee’s
existence, in both the literary and the linguistic context, concluding
that this existence depends on both textual and readerly factors. The textual
factors include a potentially stressful semantics, a diction favoring monosyllabic,
lexical words, and a syntax that omits many of the nonlexical items such
as articles and prepositions. The readerly factors include a reader
both willing and able to pronounce spondaic rhythms and a reading event
in which emotional and prosodic stresses are emphasized. All these factors
are derived from poetic analyses that show how a particular intonation
of a line is a manifestation of a particular interpretation. Some of the
lines are taken from Shakespeare and Donne, but more attention is paid
to the style of Hopkins and Crane, two poets whose verse is unusually spondaic.
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MARTIN RAMEY, “Cognitive Science Applied
to Pauline Metaphors in 1 Thessalonians: Conceptual Blending and the Sleep
and Death Motif” / 175
Cognitive science meets theology in this essay in a manner that could
lead to new and better interpretations of biblical texts. Mark Turner’s
work on blended spaces offers scientific critical apparatus for scholars
interested in the biblical text. Metaphors are limited when applied to
disanalogies, and theology has too often resorted to phrases such as “beloved
paradox” and “apparent contradiction.” The sleep and death language in
1 Thessalonians is not paradoxical, as is often thought. The scientific
nature of Turner’s work demonstrates that the disanalagous correspondence
of the sleep and death language for which Paul opts in his letter to Thessalonica
addresses the real fears of the believers. Paul attempts to relieve their
fears through a new idea: for Paul, the Christian does not die like anybody
else. The “dead in Christ” are in a special sleep state that can be described
by using Turner’s concept of blended space, created in this instance by
ideas drawn from the input spaces of sleep and death.
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AMIT MARCUS, “The Self-Deceptive and the
Other-Deceptive Narrating Character: The Case of Lolita” / 187
In the essay I adopt Tamar Yacobi’s “communication model” for settling
discrepancies and inconsistencies in fictional texts and use it to demonstrate
that the hypothesis of unreliable narration does not necessarily entail
only one kind of interpretation. To support this point, I offer the distinction
between self-deceptive and other-deceptive narrating characters, and I
argue that some texts constantly cause the reader to hesitate between conflicting
interpretations of the narrator as belonging to one of these two types.
Such equivocation on the part of the reader is then extended to competing
interpretations of the text, in accordance with each type of narrator.
The chosen novel for this purpose is Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.
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ROBERT E. KOHN, “Parody, Heteroglossia, and
Chronotope in Don DeLillo’s Great Jones Street” / 206
Mikhail Bakhtin observed that in world literature there are many works
whose parodic nature has not been suspected. Because there are numerous
parallels in the lives of Bucky Wunderlick, the protagonist of Great Jones
Street, and Milarepa, the eighth-century Tibetan Buddhist saint, it is
argued that DeLillo modeled the former after the latter. Bakhtin’s discussions
of heteroglossia and of the chronotope of threshold also inform criticism
of Great Jones Street, where both are in evidence. That the protagonist
achieves epiphany through wordlessness suggests an epistemological connection
to Buddhism. Likewise the narrowing of time and space in DeLillo’s novel
intimates an ontological connection to Buddhism.
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