Wordplay Functions In Literature And Literary Theory English Language Essay

Word bias Functions In Literature And literary Theory English Language EssayAbstract pun occupies a crossifi washstandt position in s perpetuallyal cardinal theoryions and theories of books, principally because it has some(prenominal) a performative and a critical function in relation to phraseology and cognition. This word take ins the various(a) uses and understandings of pun and their origins in its (Whose?) unique flexibility, which involves an interaction in the midst of a semiotic deficit and a semantic surplus. Further to a greater extent(prenominal), the article illustrates diametrical methods of incorporating theories of intelligence informationplay into literature and literary theory, and finally, it demonstrates the ship counselling in which the use of punning often leads to the use of fictions and poetic deli really.IntroductionPuns and pun occupy a signifi bottomt position in literature as well as in various ways of reflecting on and conceptualizi ng literature. They can be apply to produce and perform a poetical function with linguistic process and they can be apply critically, which entails considering them from a distance(?) as utterances that undermine imagineing and backb unmatchable and that ultimately accomplish a de formative performance. A styleary definition of the word pun illustrates that both homonymy (when ii nomenclature with unrelated meanings suck the uniform form) and polysemy (when genius word form has two or much, related, meanings) can properly be apply to form puns a play on linguistic process, sometimes on different senses of the kindred word and sometimes on the similar sense or effectual of different words (American hereditary pattern College Dictionary 1997, Third Edition). However, this definition could besides be extended to force the term punning, mainly because pun seems to cover only single words.1So a more(prenominal) precise definition of pun might be a play on words, s ometimes on different senses of the said(prenominal) expression and sometimes on the similar senses or arduouss of different words (This is amid inverted commas. Where is the cite?).The various uses and understandings of pun originate from a flexibility which this article attempts to discover and describe from both a historical and a contemporary place. paronomasia involves an interaction amongst a semiotic deficit and a semantic surplus and is thence primarily silent and used in two different ways in literature and literary theory. Literary scholar Geoffrey Hartman succinctly articulated this interaction in an essay titled The Voice of the Shuttle Language from the Point of discover of Literature (1970) I dont know which system of credit entry the root is using. If it is APA, this acknowledgment is wrong You can define a pun as two meanings competing for the similar phonemic space or as one sound bringing forth semantic twins, but, however you get a line at it, it s a crowded situation (1970 347). The semiotic deficit is caused by one sign or expression signifying at least two meanings. The semantic surplus, on the opposite hand, refers to the cognitive event happening in the individual (in literature, the reader) experiencing the play on words. The article describes these two features of punning with the help of a fewer cases of paronomasia in literature and literary theory, and it alike demonstrates that the use of puns and pun often leads to the use of illustration and figurative language or a semantic surplus like Hartmans twins. Furthermore, the article presents an tune for distinguishing amidst exploring the purpose behind the use of wordplay and exploring wordplay itself. In the previous paragraph, the precedent talked ab step forward an essay by Hartman. Is he/she still referring to that essay when he/she talks about the article?Paranomasia and traductioIn the beginning was the pun (1957 65), writes Samuel Beckett in his novel Murphy from 1938 The credit entry is wrong, match to APA standards, but although puns and wordplay as such(prenominal) may have been with us from the very beginning (of what?) Beckett is paraphrasing the Bible), authentic descriptions of wordplay do non appear until the rhetorical stu sinks of Cicero and Quintilian. Parts of Platos Cratylus do however, bear a superficial resemblance to wordplay because Socrates strings fun of etymological controversy, showing the reader how language can lead to sophistic blind alleys and dead ends, which can be deceptive to those who are not familiar with the well-known schism between the world of ideas and the world of phenomena. Moreover, in Phaedrus, Socrates argues that in the written word in that location is necessarily much which is not spartan (277E) It wasnt written by Socrates, but by Plato. It is this principleation which Jacques Derrida later criticizes in Platos Pharmacy (1998) the system of citation does not seem to be consistent. names of books are alternatively written in bold type, without inverted commas, or in normal type, with inverted commas, in which Derrida attempts to demonstrate the erosion of Platos argumentation done with(predicate) the two-sidedness and ambiguity of the word pharmakon and through the way Plato plays on the double meanings of this word. Writing is both a remedy and a poison, producing both scientific discipline and magic. Platos antidote to sophism is episteme, or, in Derridas view, mental or epistemic repression. Derridas text editionbook demonstrates an interesting and intimate bear onion between writing, wordplay, oblivion and memory, but since this is a perspective a bit outside the frame cleave out of this article I will carry on a more historical view..2 everywhere time, wordplay has been linked to the rhetorical terms of traductio and adnominatio. The anonymous grandiosity to Herennius (Rhetorica ad Herennium), written in the period 86-82 BC and ascr ibed to Cicero until the fifteenth century, states that transplacement traductio makes it possible for the analogous word to be frequently reintroduced, not only without offensive activity to estimable taste, but even so as to render the mien more elegant (1954 279) The field of study of Derrida was not cited like this. Traductio is classified below figures of diction and is compared to separate figures of repetition. Common to these figures is an elegance which the ear can distinguish more easily than words can explain. (1954 281). Identifying wordplay as traductio, however, may not entirely correspond with the understanding we have of wordplay today, although the lack of instructive words within this rhetorical figure is comparable to the to a higher place-mentioned thesis. Today, we would peradventure rather characterize wordplay as adnominatio called paranomasia in the English deracination. The Rhetoric to Herennius states that wordplays should be used in moderation be cause they reveal the speakers labour and via media his ethosSuch endeavours, indeed, seem more suitable for a speech of merriment that for use in an actual cause. Hence the speakers credibility, impressiveness, and seriousness are change magnitude by crowding these figures together. Furthermore, apart from destroying the speakers authority, such a style gives offence because these figures have grace and elegance, but not impressiveness and beauty. (1954 309) I have indented this, match to APA norms.Wordplay must in that locationfore be used economically so as not to seem childish or to monopolize the listeners attention. In addition, the author of the Rhetoric points to the fact that one very pronto bring into beings besides clever by half if the frequency of paronomasia is too high.In Quintilians treatise on rhetoric, The Orators Education (Institutio Oratoria), wordplay is reckoned among figures of speech (9.13). Another style of citation. Quintilian divides these into tw o types, the prototypally of which concerns innovations in language, while the second concerns the arrangement of the words. The offshoot type is, according to Quintilian, more grammatically based, while the latter is more rhetorically based, but with indistinct limits. At the same time, the first one protects the speaker against stereotypical language.Wordplay be presbyopics to what Quintilian refers to as figures which depend on their sound other figures depend on alteration, addition, subtraction or succession. Quintilian treats wordplay presently following the chapter on addition and subtraction, thereby suggesting its status as something which incomplete subtracts nor adds. Otherwise his conception of wordplay is similar to that of the Rhetorica ad Herennium wordplay should be used with cautiousness and only if it to some extent strengthens a point, in which case it can have a convincing effect.3What we can evolve by reading these passages on wordplay in Quintillian and t he Rhetorica ad Herennium is that ever since the beginning of literary studies our understanding of wordplay has oscillated between at least two different extremes traductio and adnominatio / paranomasia, or, one could say, between an outer understanding interested with the context and an inward understanding nighly concerned with language itself. This could to a fault be one of the main actors why literary theory has tended to describe puns and wordplay in two ways either as supernatural (iconic) language use or as critical language use. sorcerous language use has much in common with wordplay as a rhetorical figure, and thus withal with the way wordplay was used in antiquity and in the romantic era, between which periods the literature of Shakespeare creates an important link. For instance, it is quite precious that at first Shakespeare was admonished for his plays on words. In Ger legion(predicate), the foresight poet and translator of Shakespeare, C.M. Wieland citation?, also complains about the wisecracks. He calls them albern (silly) and ekelhaft (disgusting). When A.W. Schlegel citation?, on the other hand, gets hold of Shakespeares texts, he is much more attentive to and humble of the latters excesses in language. Schlegel is in debt to Herder citation?, who is one of the first in Germ whatever to appreciate the song in Shakespeares workings (their rhythm, melody and other more formal qualities) (cf. Larson (1989)). We cant carry out this comparison, because the works have not been properly cited.By using the rather odd term charming language, this article aims to carry on colloquial a German tradition of treating wordplay as Sprachmagie. Walter Benjamin, for instance, conson-keys language as magical or self-endorsing citation?.4Critical language use, however, is more comparable to the use of wordplay and the intervention of wit in the Age of Enlightenment, and thus more generally to humour, including, for instance, the japery and the anec dote (whereas in relation to magical language use, wordplay should be regarded as akin to the riddle, the rebus and the mystery). Much literary theory may wherefore have adopted these two ways of dealing with and understanding wordplay it is treated as exceptionally poetic and almost magical on the button because it is untranslatable, or as something which can be used in a general critique of language in which this untranslatableness is used as an argument for the arbitrariness of the family between signifi and signifiant .citation?The words were not coined by the author of this paper.Wordplay as part of language criticismThe work of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure citation may be seen as a optical prism for the two understandings of wordplay throughout the 20th century. On the one hand, there is the scholar Saussure, who later became famous for his hypothesis of the arbitrary relationship between signifi and signifiant and for his statement that language only contains diffe rences without positive terms. On the other hand, there is the other Saussure, who, besides his more official scholarship, occupies himself with anagrams in Latin texts (cf. Starobinski 1979). In his private scholarship Saussure considers the sign highly motivated, which stands in contrast to his thesis of the arbitrariness of the sign in his official scholarship. Saussures rum occupation with language alternates between an almost desperate confidence in language and a growing distrust of its epistemological value. The discussion in the last part of this article will be based on this distrust, orienting it toward Nietzsche and Freud, since they represent two of the most predominant views on language and thus wordplay in several(prenominal) important literary theories of the twentieth century, not least Russian Formalism and deconstruction.Franz Frst (1979) wrongly cited, according to APA norms mentions that wordplay changes character during the nineteenth century. First, the romant ic age idealizes it, changing its characteristics. Wordplay is not only connected to wit, but also to in my plain translation from Bernhardis Sprachlehre (1801-1803) citation the eternal consonance of the universe through its mingled homogeneity.5The coherence between sound and meaning was therefore at first considered deeper than might be expected, but the coherence, as the future would show, also had another(prenominal) side displaying a quite different function of wordplay. Frst explainsAus einer hnlichen Bemhung um die Wiederherstellung der engen Wort-Ding-Beziehung, jedoch mit karikaturistischer Absicht, entstand eine neue Technik des Wortspiels, die von Brentano und ihm folgend von Heine und Nietzsche verwendet wurde. Diese Technik verzichtet auf das Urwort und begngt sich mit der Wortentstellung, der Karikatur eines ehemals organisch-sinnvollen Wortes zur Bezeichnung einer entstellten Wirklichkeit. (1979 49)We need a translation of this.In Frsts view, from pointing out a deeper coherence, wordplay now stands at the serve of a distorted reality. It becomes an example of the play of falseness and designates a vitiate reality, especially concerning epistemological questions. The connection with this deeper coherence is therefore eliminated from language and discarded. For example, wordplay and other rhetorical figures which build upon likeness, like the illustration, are denigrated in Nietzsches work from 1873, On Truth and Lie in an Extra-M viva Sense citation , when he proclaims that the truth is only a mobile army of similes, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms in short, a magnetic core of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically (1982 46-47). Martin Stingelin points out that Nietzsches wordplay gewinnt () seine reflexive Qualitt gerade durch Entstellung (1988 348) Translation, citation. Precisely because everything is rhetoric anyway, we must turn the sting of language against itself. In th is connection, wordplay is the least convincing example of false resemblances made by language and can therefore put down reflectively and ironically in such an Enstellung (distortion). The failure to convince should indicate, and thereby ironically convince us, that there is something inherently wrong with language and the epistemological cognition it attends to for us.Besides Nietzsches critique, we also find Freuds general distrust of language in the beginning of the twentieth century. Most relevant to wordplay is his work The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious. Date, citation.With this as a starting point, it is possible to make some more general remarks about the fundamental importance of the relationship between wordplay and metaphor in the different ways in which wordplay is mum and used in twentieth-century literary theory.Freud believes that play on words is nothing but condensation without substitute-formation condensation is still the preponderating category. A t endency to parsimony predominates in all these techniques. Everything seems to be a matter of economy, as Hamlet says (Thrift, thrift, Horatio) Speech marks (2003 32). Freuds interest in wordplay therefore goes by way of the joke, which is primarily characterized by economization and condensation.6A substitution is omitted in other words, wordplay is not a translation of something unconscious, but a translation which more precisely takes place in language. This is also one of the definitions that Walter Redfern arrives at (1997 265). Redferns study of wordplay is without doubt the most comprehensive yet in a literary context, but the many metaphoric classifications for instance, ubiquity, equality, fissiparity, double-talk, intoxication (2000 4) or bastard, a melting-pot, a hotchpotch, a potlatch, potluck (2000 217) are characteristic of the relationship between wordplay and metaphor. Wordplay therefore has to do with something fundamentally poetic in language, or as Roman Jakobso n puts it, poetry is precisely characterized by being untranslatableIn poetry, verbal equations become a positive rule of the text. Syntactic and morphological categories, roots, and affixes, phonemes and their components (distinctive features) in short, any constituents of the verbal code are confronted, juxtaposed, brought into contiguous relation according to the principle of analogy and contrast and carry their own autonomous signification. Phonemic similarity is sensed as semantic relationship. The pun, or to use a more erudite and perhaps more precise term paronomasia, reigns over poetic art, and whether its rule is absolute or limited, poetry by definition is untranslatable. (1987 434)If wordplay may be characterized as a translation in language, metaphor may be considered a translation with language, and each time this inner translation or untranslatability of a pun or wordplay is fork upd, words for this translation are lacking.Arguably, this is hardly where metapho r helps, like a Band-Aid for a small wound. For this lack or deficit of words produces a poetic surplus which is precisely able to express itself in metaphors and figurative language in general. The latter is an attempt to explain the translation or interpret it to something more comprehensible. Whereas the metaphor gives the sense of an effective blend between two semantic fields which together create a third one, wordplay gives a very different impression. The third place which the wordplay creates in its expression is not intellectually comprehensible, but rather inscribed in the form of its own manifestation, a distinctive blend of sound and sense. The incomprehensibleness is an argument for both of its general understandings, partly according to a view which considers language something which can reveal the nonsense of a truth (language criticism) and partly according to a certain kind of nonsensical truth, the idea that language contains more than we are aware of (magical lan guage use). Consequently, it is not so odd that metaphor is useful for describing wordplay metaphor creates a convergence between several semantic fields by covering up the differences between them and in so doing often makes poetry happen. Wordplay, on the other hand, fixes the difference in the mind, thus maintaining the convergence in its very expression. Take, for instance, the literary example of Shakespeares sonnet CXXXIITHINE eyes I love, and they, as pitying me,Knowing thy heart fuddle me with disdain,Have put on black and loving sorrowers be,Looking with sensibly ruth upon my pain.And truly not the morning sun of heavenpunter becomes the grey cheeks of the east,Nor that full star that ushers in the even,Doth half that glory to the heavy west,As those two mourning eyes become thy faceO let it then as well beseem thy heartTo mourn for me since mourning doth thee grace,And suit thy pity like in every part. past will I swear beauty herself is black,And all they foul that th y tinge lack.The sonnet is replete with wordplay and puns, especially on the words I and eye, and morning and mourning no inverted commas here?, but also and perhaps less importantly on the words ruth and truth. Appropriately, the sonnet contains two instances of the word I, punningly mirroring the two eyes. save an expression and a metaphor like the grey cheeks of the east would apparently not emerge without the worldly concern of the pun between morning and mourning. The poem develops and invents a vocabulary and uses expressions which would simply not exist or appear without the puns and plays on words. It actually manages to connect blackness with beauty because of the pun between mourning and morning which also connects the sun with the full star and in this manner with the night. Hence, everything that the I in the sonnet lays eyes on is polluted by a look of mourning and pity.The connection mentioned preceding(prenominal) causes most scholars to describe wordplay as a p otential metaphor even Freud (especially read in the perspective of Jacques Lacan citation7) indicates that we should understand wordplay this way. However, no one has shown that metaphor is a potential wordplay. The question must be whether the connection goes both ways or if wordplay simply is a more initial metaphor? In any case, following Lakoff and Johnsons now classic theory (1980), it is unaccented to suspect that so-called dead metaphors can be played on more easily than other words for example, the word leg, which is used in connection with chairs, tables and human beings, or words like root or rose, which function in countless contexts. The ambiguity is most severe in connection with some of the key examples provided by Lakoff and Johnson, such as our value-laden and metaphorical organization of space in up and down, in and out, and so forth. The reason for this is probably not that these expressions are metaphorical, but rather that they belong to the tired vocabulary which often activates wordplay makes it alert, as Redfern citation writes.In other words, a revitalizing process in language takes place between wordplay and metaphor. Wordplay is not more original than metaphor, nor is the reverse true, for that matter. roll in the hay has shown that wordplay has a tendency to generate metaphors when we attempt describe what they exactly mean and that dead metaphors have a tendency to generate wordplay. Regarding the latter, the same applies to dead language in general, such as hackneyed proverbs, phrases and clichs. along with the dead metaphors, these expressions make up an un-sensed language which often activates wordplay.The more remarkable of these two relations is without doubt the first one, which I will therefore focus on. The relation between wordplay and metaphor outlined above corresponds with the one that Maureen Quilligan (1992) identifies between wordplay and allegory. Below, we will examine Quilligans understanding of their connect ion.Wordplay and allegoryQuilligan tries to redefine allegory as a genre in which wordplay plays a central part due to its ambiguousness, or as Quilligan writes, a sensitivity to the polysemy in words is the basic component of the genre of allegory (1992 33). Quilligan sees wordplay as initiating the unfolding of the relationship of the text to itself. The text comments on itself, not discursively, but narratively. In this way an author does the same thing with allegory as the literary critic, but the difference is that the author makes commentary on that is, enacts an allegoresis of his own text, which is due to the fact that language is self-reflexive. exactly this self-reflexivity is only brought about through the reader, who therefore constantly plays an important affair in Quilligans reading and re-evaluation of allegory. Self-reflexivity is, however, potentially inscribed in the text through certain traces, especially through polysemy, which expresses itself on the most f undamental substantial take specifically, in the sounds of the words and it is in this respect that wordplay enters the pictorial matter alongside allegory.Quilligan uses Quintilian to differentiate between allegory and allegoresis. Allegoresis is literary interpretation or critique of a text, and it was this concept that Quintilian was referring to when he wrote that allegory means one thing at the linguistic level and another at the semantic level in other words, as a figure, allegory could reserve a separation between several semantic levels for a long time for example, between a literal and a figurative level. However, the other which the word allegory points towards with its allos is not someone floating somewhere above the text, but the possibility of an otherness, a polysemy, says Quilligan, on the page and in the text. The allegory designates the fact that language can mean numerous things at once. This very redefinition causes Quilligan to turn towards wordplay. Besi des, Quilligan wants to escape from a vertical understanding of allegory such as it has been inherited from Dante, who organized his Divine Comedy according to the Bible, which he believed had four layers of meaning. Quilligan suggests that allegory works horizontally, so that the meaning is increased serially by connecting the verbal surface before moving to another level for example, beyond or above the literal level. And this other level which she refers to has to be located in the reader, who will gradually become aware of the way he or she creates the meaning of the text. Out of this awareness comes a consciousness, not just of how the text is read, but also of the human response to the narrative. Self-reflexivity occurs, and, finally, out of this a relation is established to the other (allos) towards which the allegory leads its reader through the allegoresis. This sensation of the real meaning can be called sacred. Quilligan aims to grasp allegory in its pure form before it becomes allegoresis. Through her readings, she tries to identify a more undetermined conception of allegory on a linguistic level before it gets determined by and in the reader. Quilligan could have used Quintilians definition of allegory as a continued metaphor (III, 2001, 86 44) to establish a relation between allegory, metaphor and wordplay. In my view she thus misses something essential in the contiguous relationship between wordplay, allegory and allegoresis, and this is the making of metaphors. The relation between wordplay and metaphor constitutes a more intimate bond than that between wordplay and allegory, or, as pile Brown puts it The pun is the first step away from the transparent word, the first step towards the achievement of symbolic metaphor (195618). But this does not mean that wordplay is some sort of metaphor, as Brown seems to suggest. More accurately, it would be reasonable to suggest that wordplay gives rise to creative language usage, including metaphors and f igurative language use in general. This very use is an attempt to translate the relative untranslatability of wordplay, and thereby to satisfy a natural human liking for understanding.Russian formalism vs. deconstructionBy treating the text as depict above, Quilligan can read several texts in a new and constructive manner inspired by the way that early literary works such as The Faerie Queene way of writing titles deal with language. But it is principally Quilligans starting point and to a lesser degree her intercession of the text that I aim to pinpoint with my focus on wordplay. This article does not claim that the twentieth century should only be understood in the light of wordplay, but rather that in some periods wordplay was used with very specific intentions, and that it offers an understanding of language which several literary theories benefit from.Wordplay stands out particularly in two twentieth-century literary theories namely, Russian formalism and literary deconstru ction in the wake of Jacques Derrida citation but it is used in very different ways in these theories. In Russian formalism, wordplay involves a revitalization of language,8parallel to the concept of skaz,9which refers to an illusion of a kind of orality or even realism in literary language. In contrast, in deconstruction, wordplay is often tied to writings influence on language in general to a grammatology, to hook on Derridas term. From a deconstructive perspective, wordplay deals with the inadvertent or un think in the intended (cf. Gordon C.F. Bearn 1995a 2), or with absence in presence the exact opposite is true in Russian formalism, which deals with puns and wordplay as a form of oral presence in writing, likening this to a kind of absence. Here, as in other cases, wordplay is involved in a fundamental liberation in perspective between a semiotic deficit and a semantic surplus in what may be called a constructive and deconstructive construction of meaning.An example of th is problematic is a book by Howard Felperin citation problems with the symptomatic title Beyond Deconstruction. The Uses and Abuses of Literary Theory. In this book, Felperin differentiates between what he calls the enactment and counter-enactment of wordplay, emphasizing counter-enactment at the expense of enactmentIf the figures of enactment, of speaking in effect in Shakespeares phrase, work cumulatively to integrate the jigsaw puzzle of language into concrete replica of the sensory world, the pun is precisely that composing of language which will fit into several positions in the puzzle and thereby confound attempts to reconstruct the puzzle into a map or conceive of with any unique or privileged reliability or fidelity of reference. Whereas metaphor and onamatopeia attempt to bridge the precipitate fissures between signs and their meaning, paronomasia or wordplay Felperin does not make a distinction effectively destabilizes further whatever stuffy stability the relation bet ween sign and meaning may be thought to possess. (1985 185) (My addition)In Felperins view, wordplay turns our understanding of things upside down in respect to both language in general and certain general views of life and so forth. This is the reason why wordplay has been disliked for so many years. Felperin analyses Shakespeare and finds that wordplay is at the disposal of language in various ways in Shakespeares work, precisely in the form of a counter-enactment. However, what he seems to forget is that not only does wordplay oppose similarities, but it also conveys likeness for instance, in the wordplay between eye and I, which may underlie a much deeper understanding of the sonnets and of subjectivity in Shakespeares works in general (cf. Fineman 1988).Arguing against the theory of enactment, Felperin criticizes, among other things, Russian formalism as a theory founded on metaphor (which from Felperins deconstructive perspective is the wrong knowledgeableness when it comes to an ontology of language) The Russian formalists, for example, like the Elizabethans, see language as aboriginally poetic, and similarly identify its performative potential in the storehouse of metaphor that lies buried within it (1985 180). hardly Shakespeare escapes this sort of criticism, which appears typical of the period and untenable. Metaphor almost seems like a dark, anthropomorphic enemy in such a deconstructive point of view. Furthermore, Felperin of frame makes considerable efforts to define wordplay as a matter