Literariness

Toronto by night

Embedded in the Iconicity conference in Toronto is a pleasant surprise: a three-day workshop entitled Cognitive Poetics: A Multimodal Approach. Speakers include Reuven Tsur, David Herman, Margaret Freeman, David Miall, Zoltan Kövecses, Yeshayahu Shen, Mark Changizi, and of course the organizer, the colourful Paul Bouissac. (As an aside, I can’t resist quoting the latter on the omnirelevance of semiotics: “My definition of semiotics is everything that is interesting.”)

The programme features quite a bunch of unlikely bedfellows, but there is at least one thing uniting most of them: they theorize about written language. I don’t — I focus on spoken discourse, and everyday conversational discourse at that. So I’m one of the odd ones out. Unsurprisingly, just like the others, I’m inclined to count my own perspective among the more worthwile. But besides ego, I think I may also count time on my side. The point being that spoken language of course is primary on both the evolutionary and ontogenetical timescales: it comes before writing in the history of mankind and in the history of each and every individual. It seems to me, then, that if one wants to find out how and why authors structure texts, how recipients engage with them, and how meaning emerges in the process, the natural place to start looking would be spoken discourse — the primordial home of communication (Levinson 1983).

Yet what I’ve heard so far leaves me with the feeling that many literary theorists somehow operate on the unchecked assumption that the phenomena they are exploring are unique to literature. I think a more inclusive approach would have far more potential: aren’t these issues best tackled by looking at verbal art in the widest sense, including not just written, but also oral and signed forms of artful language? Quite probably, all of the literary phenomena we’ve heard about in the past few days —aesthetic involvement, enaction, evocation, foregrounding, multi-modality, intermediality, and yes, literariness— ultimately derive from affordances of spoken language in its various forms.

Or to make the point in one sentence: had I videotaped the coffee breaks, we would have been able to observe all these forms of ‘literariness’ in their natural habitat.