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This book, first published in 1990, combines an introduction to
speech-act theory as developed by J. L. Austin with a survey of
critical essays that have adapted Austin's thought for literary
analysis. Speech-act theory emphasizes the social reality created
when speakers agree that their language is performative - Austin's
term for utterances like: "we hereby declare" or "I promise" that
produce rather than describe what they name. In contrast to formal
linguistics, speech-act theory insists on language's active
prominence in the organization of collective life. The first
section of the text concentrates on Austin's determination to
situate language in society by demonstrating the social conventions
manifest in language. The second and third parts of the book
discuss literary critics' responses to speech-act theory's
socialisation of language, which have both opened new
understandings of textuality in general and stimulated new
interpretations of individual works. This book will be of interest
to students of linguistics and literary theory.
This book, first published in 1990, combines an introduction to
speech-act theory as developed by J. L. Austin with a survey of
critical essays that have adapted Austin's thought for literary
analysis. Speech-act theory emphasizes the social reality created
when speakers agree that their language is performative - Austin's
term for utterances like: "we hereby declare" or "I promise" that
produce rather than describe what they name. In contrast to formal
linguistics, speech-act theory insists on language's active
prominence in the organization of collective life. The first
section of the text concentrates on Austin's determination to
situate language in society by demonstrating the social conventions
manifest in language. The second and third parts of the book
discuss literary critics' responses to speech-act theory's
socialisation of language, which have both opened new
understandings of textuality in general and stimulated new
interpretations of individual works. This book will be of interest
to students of linguistics and literary theory.
The period 1830 1832 witnessed a remarkable series of cultural and
political milestones in France. In 1830, a revolution overturned
one monarchy, only to replace it with another. In 1831, Charles
Philippon's caricature of Louis-Philippe, the new monarch, as a
pear achieved extraordinary popularity. Drawn on walls from one end
of France to another, the pear caricature became a national
obsession. In that same year, George Sand moved from the provinces
to Paris and challenged gender stereotypes by adopting men's
clothes and writing fiction in a man's voice. During 1830 1832,
Stendhal and Balzac developed the techniques of the realist novel
that still dominate much of the world's fiction. Sandy Petrey
explores the factors accounting for such consequential innovations
in so short a time, so restricted a space. In Petrey's view, these
disparate events betoken a common recognition of society's capacity
to make and unmake what it recognizes as real.Petrey's first two
chapters explore the popularity of the pear caricature. The
remaining chapters focus on Balzac, Stendhal, and Sand, addressing
these writers' concern with society's power to define and transform
the identity of its members. For Petrey their work continually
recalls the hybrid character of Philippon's pear, both totally
unlike the king and the king's spitting image. While the French
government declared the July Revolution a nonevent and the July
Monarchy an incontrovertible fact, French fiction concentrated on
society's power to declare an individual a nonperson or to make
presence out of absence, plenitude out of emptiness."
Sandy Petrey here looks at the emergence of nineteenth-century
French realism in the light of the concept of speech acts as
defined by J. L. Austin and as exemplified by the history of the
French Revolution. Through analysis of the techniques of
representation in works by Balzac, Stendhal, and Zola, Petrey
suggests that the expression of a truth depends on the same
collective forces necessary to change a regime. According to
Petrey, political legitimacy in the Revolution, the Empire, and the
Restoration was established by means of a series of demonstrations
that what words say cannot be interpreted without reference to the
community to which they speak. Petrey first discusses the creation
of France's National Assembly in 1789 as a foundational example of
how speech acts can bring about historical transformation. He then
challenges the most powerful twentieth-century assault on realist
aesthetics, Roland Barthes's S/Z, and also considers the views of
such contemporary critics as Jacques Derrida, Barbara Johnson, and
Stanley Fish. During the Revolution, Petrey says, statements of
truth were not descriptions of what was, but rather exhortations to
produce what was not. Nineteenth-century French fiction represents
in literary form a similar collectively authorized linguistic
performance; the "real" in realism comes from representing facts
not as they are in themselves but as they are produced and rejected
in society. In the course of illuminating readings of three central
realist works-Balzac's Pere Goriot, Stendhal's The Red and the
Black, and Zola's Germinal-Petrey takes the position that the
dilemmas of representation, far from being one of realism's blind
spots, figure among its major narrative subjects.
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