PROVERBS IN MARTIN AMIS’S LONDON FIELDS A STYLISTIC ANALYSIS
Barra lateral del artículo
155-192
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Contenido principal del artículo
Resumen
The aim of this paper is to present how Martin Amis uses proverbs in order to achieve a particular stylistic effect. The study draws on the corpus of 18 proverbs identified in London Fields of which paremias used in the canonical form represent precisely 50%. The findings show that the most qualitatively considerable alteration of proverbial structure includes changes in terms of lexical substitution. Examples are provided in order to examine the hypothesis that the proverbs altered by means of lexical substitution display polemics with traditional wisdom, whereas adages used in the canonical form are an attempt to re-evaluate proverbial truths. It has been observed that the use of structural changes or canonical forms has a different value for a given discourse. As regards the methodological tools used in this study, the analysis of proverbs with different paradigmatic relations and their literary relevance is largely based on the semiotic commutation test and the systemic-functional grammar approach applied as a component of discourse analysis. In particular, the transitivity theory proposed by M.A.K. Halliday is used to investigate the semantic links between proverbs and discourse. The conclusions drawn from this analysis may be further used for stating that Martin Amis’s novel displays a high level of stylistic dexterity as regards the use of proverbs to suit literary purposes.
Detalles del artículo
Citas
Abrahams, Roger D. and Barbara A. Babcock 1977. The Literary Use of Proverbs. The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 90, No. 358, 414-429.
Amis, Martin and Patrick McGrath 1987. Martin Amis. BOMB, No. 18, 26-29.
Amis, Martin 2003. London Fields. London: Vintage Books.
Apperson, George L., et al. 2006. The Wordsworth Dictionary of Proverbs. St Ives: Wordsworth Editions Ltd.
Bernard, Catherine 1997. A Certain Hermeneutic Slant: Sublime Allegories in Contemporary English Fiction. Contemporary Literature, Vol. 38, No. 1, 164-184.
Bloomfield, Morton W. 1976. Stylistics and the Theory of Literature. New Literary History, Vol. 7, No. 2, Poetics: Some Methodological Problems, 271-311.
Burke, Kenneth 2007. Literature as Equipment for Living. In: Richter, David (ed.) The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 645-649.
Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de 1998. Don Quixote. Great Britain: Wordsworth Editions Ltd.
Chandler, Daniel 2007. Semiotics. The Basics. New York, NY: Routledge.
Cobley, Paul 2001. The Routledge Companion to Semiotics and Linguistics. New York, NY: Routledge.
Crews, Brian 2010. Martin Amis and the Postmodern Grotesque. The Modern Language Review, Vol. 105, No. 3, 641-659.
Diedrick, James 2004. Understanding Martin Amis. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.
Dirven, René and Günter Radden 2004. The Cognitive Basis of Language: Language and Thought. In: Dirven René; Marjolijn Verspoor (eds) Cognitive Exploration of Language and Linguistics. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1-21.
Dundes, Alan 1968. Introduction to the Second Edition. In: Propp, Vladímir Morphology of the Folk Tale. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 6-28.
Finney, Brian 2008. Martin Amis. New York, NY: Routledge.
Fontanille, Jacques 1999. Sémiotique et littérature: introduction. In: Fontanille, Jacques Sémiotique et Littérature: Essais du méthode. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1-15.
Grzybek, Peter 1994. Foundations of Semiotic Proverb Study. In: Mieder, Wolfgang (ed.) Wise Words: Essays on the Proverb. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 31-71.
Halliday, M.A.K. and Ruqaiya Hasan 1989. Language, Context, and Text: Aspects of Language in a Social-semiotic Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Halliday, M.A.K. 1996. Linguistic Function and Literary Style: An Inquiry into the Language of William Golding’s The Inheritors. In: Weber, J.J. The Stylistics Reader. New York: Arnold, 56-86.
Halliday, M.A.K. and M.I.M. Matthiessen 2014. Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar. New York, NY: Routledge.
Honeck, Richard P. 1997. A Proverb in Mind: The Cognitive Science of Proverbial Wit and Wisdom. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Jeffries, Lesley and Dan McIntyre 2012. Stylistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Langlotz, Andreas 2006. Idiomatic Creativity. A cognitive-linguistic model of idiom-representation and idiom-variation in English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Mieder, Wolfgang 2008. “Wisdom Is Better Than Wealth”: Proverbs as Expressions of Culture and Folklore. “Proverbs Speak Louder Than Words”: Folk Wisdom in Art, Culture, Folklore, History, Literature, And Mass Media. New York, NY: Peter Lang, 9-44.
Mieder, Wolfgang 2008. “Tilting at Windmills”: A Proverbial Allusion to Cervantes’ Don Quixote. “Proverbs Speak Louder Than Words”: Folk Wisdom in Art, Culture, Folklore, History, Literature, And Mass Media. New York, NY: Peter Lang, 277-316.
Mieder, Wolfgang 2009. International Bibliography of Paremiology and Phraseology. 2 vols. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Mieder, Wolfgang and George B. Bryan 1996. Proverbs in World Literature. A Bibliography. New York, NY: Peter Lang.
Mieder, Wolfgang and Anna Tóthné Litovkina 2002. Twisted Wisdom: Modern Anti-Proverbs. Hobart, Tasmania: DeProverbio.com.
Mittleman, Leslie B. 1991. London Fields by Martin Amis. World Literature Today, Vol. 65, No. 1, 123.
Molinié, Georges 1995. Stylistique et Tradition Rhétorique. Hermès, La Revue, Vol. 1, No. 15, 119-128.
Naciscione, Anita 2010. Stylistic Use of Phraseological Units in Discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Norrick, Neal R. 1981. Semiotic Principles in Semantic Theory. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Norrick, Neal R. 1985. How Proverbs Mean: Semantic Studies in English Proverbs. Amsterdam: Mouton.
Self, Will 1993. An Interview with Martin Amis. Mississippi Review, Vol. 21, No. 3, 143-169.
Siertsema, Bertha 1955. The Commutation Test. In: A Study of Glossematics: Critical Survey of its Fundamental Concepts. Dordrecht: Springer, 166-181.
Smith, Penny et al. 2003. Pity the Planet: London Fields (1989). In: Tredell, Nicholas (ed.) The Fiction of Martin Amis. A reader’s guide to essential criticism. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 97-125.
Stokes, Peter 1997. Martin Amis and the Postmodern Suicide: Tracing the Postnuclear Narrative at the Fin de Millennium. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Vol. 38, No. 4, pp. 300-311.
Szpila, Grzegorz 2007. Paremiologia a stylistyka. Stylistyka Vol. XVI, pp. 613– 632.
Szpila, Grzegorz 2008. Paremic Verses: Proverbial Meanings in Salman Rushdie’s Novels. Journal of Literary Semantics Vol. 37, No. 2, 97-127.
Szpila, Grzegorz 2011. Literary Paremic Loci in Salman Rushdie’s Novels.
Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis Vol. 128, 171-177.
Žolkovskij, Alexandr K. 1978. At the Intersection of Linguistics, Paremiology and Poetics: On the Literary Structure of Proverbs. Poetics Vol. 7, 309-332.