LANGUAGE AND THE FICTIONAL WORLD

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LANGUAGE AND THE FICTIONAL WORLD
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Notion of realism

• credibility
• verisimilitude
• authenticity
• objectivity
• vividness

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LANGUAGE, REALITY AND REALISM

• FICTION

• LITERATURE

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REALITY AND MOCK REALITY
How, in the world of history and public events,
does language serve to build up or to extend our
model of reality?

• The language of the newspaper headlinesnewspaper
  headlines are an extreme case of the influence of
  background knowledge on interpretation. Eg. Man
  helping murder police

• The language of the newspaper report in its
  narrative functions, comes a step closer to
  fictional discourse and one could also imagine in
  it the basis for a short story

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SPECIFICATION OF DETAIL SYMBOLISM AND REALISM

• What was the precise sequence of events?
• What did the protagonists say to one another?
• Precisely when, where, and how did the kidnap,
  the murder, the release, the suicide take place?
• Why did each event take place?

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What kind of detail, and how much detail, should
be added to fill out the model of reality?
THE ARTISTIC CRITERIA OF RELEVANCE
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VERISIMILITUDE

• the colour of a chair
• the time at which the train leaves
• the kind of wood a table is made of
• the name of a person

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CREDIBILITY
SCIENCE FICTION
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REAL SPEECH AND FICTIONAL SPEECH
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REALISM IN CONVERSATION
Its the ability to render in writing the
characteristic of spoken conversational language
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FEATURES OF NORMAL NON- FLUENCY

• Hesitation pauses
• False starts
• Syntactic anomalies

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• My first meeting with Oscar Wilde was an
  astonishment. I never before heard a man talking
  with perfect sentences, as if he had written them
  all overnight with labour and yet all
  spontaneous.
•  W. B. Yeats, The trembling of the Veil

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DIALECT AND IDIOLECT
From Dickens we may take at random Sam Wellers
rendering of w as v in Pickwick Papers there
a pair of Vellingtons a good deal vorn
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EYE-DIALECT

• The impression of rendering non-standard speech
  by non-standard spelling is pure illusion and
  its not only a literary phenomenon.

• He wos wery good to me, he wos in Bleak House
• cats n dogs

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THE FUNCTIONS OF DIALECT ANDIDIOLECT ARE VARIOUS
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THE RENDERING OF THE FICTION
Function of stylistic choice

• interpersonal
• textual
• ideational

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Three corresponding function in the reading of
fictions

• Fictional point of view it correspond to the
  interpersonal function
• of style and present the slanting of the
  fictional world
• towards reality as apprehended by a particular
  
• partecipant in the fiction
• Fictional sequencing it is an aspect of a more
  general topic
• which belongs to the textual function of
  language
• Descriptive focus an area of fictional technique
  where mock reality
• interacts with the ideational choices of meaning
  through which it is
• portrayed

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The writer has to chose the sequencing

• Psychological sequencing, the order in which a
  character comes to learn about the components of
  the fiction
• Chronology
• Presentational sequencing, the appropriate order
  in which the reader should learn the elements of
  the fiction
• Physical and abstract description
• Subjective and objective description

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SPEECH AND CHARACTER
Is this place of abomination consecrated
ground? I dont know nothink of consequential
ground, says Jo, still staring... Is it
blessed? Im blest if I know, says Jo, staring
more than ever but I shouldnt think it warnt.
Blest? repeats Jo, something troubled in his
mind. It ant done it much good if it is.
Blest? I should think it was tothered myself.
But I dont know nothink!

• There are pronunciation
  like
• Warnt for wasnt
• Nothink for nothing
• Double negatives such as I dont know nothink