Roger Fowler

"Literature as discourse"

K. M. Newton

pp. 77-82

in: K. M. Newton (ed), Twentieth-century literary theory, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1997

Abstract

Adopting a linguistic approach to literature, as I do, it is tempting to think of and describe the literary text as a formal structure, an object whose main quality is its distinctive syntactic and phonological shape. This is a common approach, adopted by, for instance, the most famous of the linguistic stylisticians, Roman Jakobson.¹ It also happens to agree with the dominant formalist tendency of the more conservative schools of modern criticism. I argue that linguistic formalism is of limited significance in literary studies, and educationally restrictive. As an alternative I shall employ some linguistic techniques which emphasize the interactional dimensions of texts. To treat literature as discourse is to see the text as mediating relationships between language-users: not only relationships of speech, but also of consciousness, ideology, role and class. The text ceases to be an object and becomes an action or process.

Cited authors

Jakobson Roman