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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Poetry & poets
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How Words Make Things Happen (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R877
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How Words Make Things Happen (Hardcover)
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Sooner or later, our words take on meanings other than we intended.
How Words Make Things Happen suggests that the conventional idea of
persuasive rhetoric (which assumes a speaker's control of
calculated effects) and the modern idea of literary autonomy (which
assumes that 'poetry makes nothing happen') together have produced
a misleading account of the relations between words and human
action. Words do make things happen. But they cannot be counted on
to produce the result they intend. This volume studies examples
from a range of speakers and writers and offers close readings of
their words. Chapter 1 considers the theory of speech-acts
propounded by J.L. Austin. 'Speakers Who Convince Themselves' is
the subject of chapter 2, which interprets two soliloquies by
Shakespeare's characters and two by Milton's Satan. The oratory of
Burke and Lincoln come in for extended treatment in chapter 3,
while chapter 4 looks at the rival tendencies of moral suasion and
aestheticism in the poetry of Yeats and Auden. The final chapter, a
cause of controversy when first published in the London Review of
Books, supports a policy of unrestricted free speech against
contemporary proposals of censorship. Since we cannot know what our
own words are going to do, we have no standing to justify the
banishment of one set of words in favour of another.
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