On Pragmatic Functions and their Correlation with Syntactic Functions: A Functionalist Perspective
A. Jesús Moya
Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha
The aim of this paper is to analyse two different text types within a discourse functional framework, in order to determine whether there is a difference in their formal realizations of new and known topics. This will be done by investigating how introductory and given topics are realized in clause structure in a sample of sixty news items and tourist brochures. In line with Biber, I have assumed that linguistic features vary with communicative purpose and topic. The results of the analysis carried out seem to conflict with Dik's claim that the new topics tend to be located towards the final slot of the clause. The study also shows that these two text types differ in terms of how the known topics are realized syntactically.
KEYWORDS: Functional Grammar; text type; new topic; known topic; subject; initial position
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1999, A Closet Odyssey: Sexual Discourses in Eyes Wide Shut
Celestino Deleyto
Universidad de Zaragoza
Eyes Wide Shut offers at least three perspectives on sex: sex as death, sex as commerce, and sex and love. In this essay I explore the third of these perspectives, that is, the relation between sex as love, one that has so far been neglected in critical accounts of the film. The nature of this relationship, as articulated by the text, culminates in the final scene in which Alice (Nicole Kidman) takes the initiative in the reconciliation with her husband Bill (Tom Cruise). This dialogue works as a complex summary of twentieth-century discourses about sex, including concepts such as the sexualisation of love, confluent love, intimacy, or the tension between love and desire. This scene, less ironic than it may seem, celebrates the most positive dimensions of sex and its inextricable link with love in our culture.
KEYWORDS: film studies; love; intimacy; heterosex; marriage; fantasy; Stanley Kubrick
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"A Stranger in a Strange Land": An Existentialist Reading of Fredrick Clegg in The Collector by John Fowles
Andrés Romero Jódar
Universidad de Zaragoza
This essay analyses the influence of French Existentialism in John Fowles's The Collector, making use of three of Albert Camus's works, Le mythe de Sisyphe, L'Étranger, and L'Homme révolté, and how the protagonist of John Fowles's novel fits the pattern of the absurd man established by Camus. The Collector is not only just an allegorical representation of the power struggle between the Few and the Many, a recurrent topic in the fictions of Fowles; it is also a practical example of the evil nature of Camus's absurd man, stemming from his absurd innocence. Clegg, like Meursault, the protagonist of L'Étranger, is an isolated (anti)hero who struggles against his passions in an existence of the Absurd. A Tantalus-like figure, the collector's aimless efforts are the fruit of chance. He is a stranger in a strange land of Existence provoking the nausea, in Sartre's terms, of both Miranda and the reader.
KEYWORDS: 1950s English literature; John Fowles; The Collector; Existentialism; Albert Camus; Jean-Paul Sartre; the absurd; intertextuality; The Tempest
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Julie Taymor's Titus (1999): Framing Violence and Activating Responsibility
Clara Escoda Agustí
Universitat de Barcelona
This essay argues that Julie Taymor's film Titus (1999) offers a successful deconstruction of the violence in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (1594), thus continuing the debate on the film's explicit violence. The essay begins by analyzing the added scenes that correspond to the visions and flashbacks of the protagonists, arguing that Taymor does not deconstruct violence by subverting its values and then pointing out alternative discourses or new patterns of interaction, but by reproducing it as a symptom of a larger, cultural reality. However, she also wants to actively implicate the audience in imagining alternative paths of conflict-resolution to the violence portrayed, and she does so by introducing the figure of the witness, with which the audience must identify. The witness characterizes itself by being able to empathize with difference, and this quality is visually represented by his androgynous look, as well as by his non-hierarchical mode of relating. Strategically, the witness's experiences are shown in a fragmented manner, thus, if the audience wants to provide closure, it must recreate the hidden story from these unconnected elements of repair. Finally, this exercise on the part of the audience acquires the same character of solitary responsibility as that of the witness with which it identifies.
KEYWORDS: identity; testimony; violence; media; intertextuality
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A New Parameter for the Description of Subject Assignment: The Term Hierarchy
Carolina Rodríguez Juárez
Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
The theoretical framework of Functional Grammar proposed by S. C. Dik highlights the relevance of implicational hierarchies for the different grammatical operations found in natural languages. In the case of the grammatical operation of Subject assignment, a group of priority hierarchies which predict the accessibility of term positions by virtue of their intrinsic properties have been claimed to directly impinge on the operation of Subject assignment. These typological hierarchies present term properties which are related to the term itself and to their referents. After balancing the postulates of Classical Dikkean Functional Grammar in general and the above-mentioned priority hierarchies in particular to a sampling of written material from the LOB Corpus, the main conclusion that emerges is that the internal structural complexity of the term must be recognised as a new relevant parameter for Subject assignment in English. Thus, I propose a new hierarchy, viz. the Term Hierarchy, which predicts the accessibility of term positions taking into account the internal structural complexity of the term in question.
KEYWORDS: accessibility; functional (discourse) grammar; implicational hierarchies; Subject assignment
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Female Iconography and Subjectivity in Eavan Boland's In Her Own Image
Laura Mª Lojo Rodríguez
Universidade de Santiago de Compostela
In 1980 the Irish poet Eavan Boland published In Her Own Image a volume of poetry which stands as a landmark in her career as a writer for its subversive potential to revise creational myths that have contributed to the traditional construction of female subjectivity. The aim of this paper is to discuss Boland's textual strategies in In Her Own Image and see how she subverts the traditional female iconography that constrains the female psyche and disempowers women. Rather than a set of ornamental female figures, Boland's volume produces more authentic representations of women that move away from man's own image and from his icons, which have often been taken as "natural" within the construction of female subjectivity. Resistance to such genderings provides, as the volume illustrates, emancipatory possibilities for the woman writer who regains control over her own body image within the very terms of a culture and of a particular poetic tradition.
KEYWORDS: Eavan Boland; In Her Own Image; Ireland; women's poetry; female iconicity; subjectivity
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Nilda de Nicholasa Mohr. El Bildungsroman y la aparición de un espacio puertorriqueño en la literatura de los EEUU
Pilar Bellver Sáez
University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
In his classic study The Way of the World Franco Moretti argues that the characteristic journey from youth to maturity that the Bildungsroman narrates amounts to a symbolic representation of the integration of the bourgeoisie self into modernity. According to Moretti, this genre becomes obsolete by the end of the First World War, when the loss of faith in the civilizing ideals of modernity make it impossible to represent integration into a coherent social whole. However, many critics argue that the genre is being revitalized by writers who stand in the margins of modern society due to their gender, race or class. Nilda, by, Nicolasa Mohr, illustrates the transformations the Bildungsroman undergoes in the hands of the US born-and-raised Puerto Rican writer of the second half of the 20th century. In Nilda the education of the heroine does not symbolize the poor immigrant's successful acceptance and integration into mainstream culture. On the contrary, the awakening of the self serves as a metaphor for the appearance of a distinctive Puerto Rican space within the American literary experience, a complex space from which Mohr reaffirms her heritage while at the same time she critically examines pervading patriarchal roles within Puerto Rican culture.
KEYWORDS: Bildungsroman, Latino literature, Puerto Rican literature, Puerto Rican women writers, feminist literature, US ethnic writers, twentieth-century novel
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Gathering the Limbs of the Text in Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl
Carolina Sánchez-Palencia Carazo
Universidad de Sevilla
Manuel Almagro Jiménez
Universidad de Sevilla
Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl is not simply a new recreation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in hypertext format; it also tries to develop some of the implications in the original text from the paradigms of contemporary science and criticism. This study is an attempt to bring to light the ways in which these paradigms, characterized by their emphasis on fragmentariness, are made to interact dialogically with Shelley's novel in order to produce a postmodern version of the old Promethean myth. Apart from exploring the filial connections that one might expect in any rewriting exercise, this essay focuses on the way Jackson questions the concept of authorship, origin(ality) and literary property, and related issues such as intertextuality and assemblage, all of which are indices of the theoretical concerns underlying Jackson's text and of the ways in which it follows, re-writes or invites us to re-read Shelley's "hideous progeny."
KEYWORDS: hypertext; re-writing; intertextuality; postmodern literature; Mary Shelley; Shelley Jackson; Frankenstein
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© AEDEAN. The Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies.
