Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse

by Mary Louise Pratt

Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse

Genres: Nonfiction

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Mary Louise Pratt is Silver Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, and the Department of Iberian and Latin American Studies at New York University, where she is affiliated with the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics.

Reviews

[Garrett Mikulka · Rating 5 out of 5]

As far as theoretical works go, I really enjoyed this book. It’s age is apparent when talking about “unmarked” conventions in novels (Pratt hints at the emergence of the “new novel” in the final chapter, but she’s still defining the “marked” cases against a literary standard that doesn’t quite exist anymore, or at least the “marked” cases are plentiful enough to be a separate category of unmarked cases at this point). I think she does a good job of challenging the assumptions of Austin, Searle, and others, that speech acts in literature are ultimately impossible, that they are only quasi-speech acts. As Pratt shows, speech acts in literature not only exist, but are necessarily two-fold: the speech act of the author (i.e. the literary work itself) and the speech acts of the fictional speaker(s). Examining the dissonance between the two concurrent speech acts can yield fruitful analysis (and in some cases, Robert Henryson’s beast fables, for instance, you have layers upon layers of speech acts: characters and the narrator and all their speech-qcty utterances, the fable proper and the morality (two speech acts that talk to each other) all inside the umbrella speech act which is the poem itself. What a joy).

[lola · Rating 3 out of 5]

que risa darle una review a esto...se siente trampa pero chica, si me lo he leido, lo digo!!!!!! en fin eso, qué decirte...útil pero no groundbreaking

[Parlei · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even though this could use some updating on where attitudes are today in the great "literary language" debate I think Pratt did a good job of laying out the stakes of the claims made by structuralists and linguists. Pratt seeks to correct a few misconceptions in this book (and also later in her article, “Ideology and Speech-Act Theory,”) both of which reconfigure speech-act theory as a literary device—not simply a device of “ordinary” language, to which it had previously been limited. Pratt’s application of narrative criticism to speech-act theory allows us to conceptualize dialogues within literary works as speech acts, and therefore implicate codes of locutionary and illocutionary acts as they function in the novel.

I found her arguments very easy to follow and well thought out. You don't see a lot of writing like this nowadays so I also appreciated its clarity and slow pace. I can still tell from my linguistics classes that there is still a lot of misconceptions going around about literature as a field imbued with value and linguistics as a field which attempts to simply take language at face-value without considerations of ideology and power. Pratt's later article "Ideology and Speech-Act Theory" addresses this really well and I hope that, despite being written in 1986, it can be included more in linguistic discussions. It's time to end for good the misconception that language can be adequately analyzed as a benign, neutral activity while its speakers are observed detached from any conceptions of power and hierarchy.

[Nikolina Hatton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pratt presents a well constructed case against a formalist, essentialist view of literature as unique and special. Rather, she maintains that literature has its roots in everyday language and human experience and that we bring certain expectations to literature because we know it to be literature in the first place. She supports this by drawing similarities between William Labov's work on natural narrative (people telling their own personal stories/anecdotes) and literary narrative. Further, she argues that H.P. Grice's cooperative principle can be applied to literature, since writing is usually voluntary, as is reading. When the cooperative principle is violated, it is usually due to the fact that the author is purposefully flouting the principle in order to implicate additional meaning to the reader. This is how readers identify irony in works of literature...

It's a relatively easy read, especially since Pratt provides lots of entertaining literary examples along the way. Her argument that literature grows out of daily communication problems and their resolutions is extremely compelling; such an approach also acknowledges the complexity already prevalent in everyday communication.