Officially, discourse analysis was realized as a new systematic contextualized discipline in language studies in the 1970s (Van Dijk 1985, 5-7). Thenceforth, language scholars studied the relations between textual and contextual components of discourse within more developed conjoining perspectives, namely, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, semiolinguistics, and pragmalinguistics. However, contributions to literary discourse analysis have been so far both insubstantial and slippery. Leafing through the books and studies by discourse analysts like Fairclough (2006), Halliday and Hasan (1976), Van Dijk (1985), Van Leeuwen (2008), Wodak (2013), and so on proves how literature suffers marginalization in the field. Even when Coulthard (1985) devotes a chapter to literature—significantly enough, the last chapter of his An Introduction to Discourse Analysis—he carries out a detailed analysis of the stylistic features of a literary text stringently within a linguistic fabric. Literary discourse analysis, as Maingueneau (2010) contends, though claimed otherwise, is the less attended-to type of analysis in real practice. The problem, he furthers, lies in the claimants’ casual slipping up on the fact that literary texts function, of necessity, differently from nonliterary texts and thus must be differently viewed through. Literary texts, by essence, accede to multiple tentative interpretive configurations, aesthetic appreciations, and judgments by their experientially divergent readership. Thus, contouring literature prescriptively with the metrics of a single or a dual perspective, whatever it could be, and persuasively avowing it to be the whole tends to create a simulacrum rather far off from originality and taste. As a case in point, the complex hierarchical relations of micro-macro contextual circumstances of production and perception of a work might be overlooked by an analyzer renouncing a polyperspective approach (Sell 1991). This may arise, indeed, anytime we are at work with either bottom-up or top-down codification of the breadth of knowledge array in a piece of literary material. Quite interestingly, the rise of any trend in discourse analysis might raise an urge for its experimentation on a literary piece. While appropriate on a granular scale, it yields, by and large, an unfitted demonstration of the quality of the piece as a composite world.
The main argument of this paper, hence, emerges as additive responses alongside Johansen’s (2002) discursal view of literature in Literary Discourse: A Semiotic-Pragmatic Approach to Literature. The postulation is that literature should be appraised rather as an autonomous composite of discourses not reducible to the idea of mimetic representation of a reality. It is a polyvalence calling on linear, nonlinear, interactive, and transactional treatment (Miall 2003; and Rosenblatt 1978). In line with such a postulation and repurposing, and Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994) notion, we will fitly present four main argumentations to counter granularity and mimeticity of literature as advocated by Johansen (2002).
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