Speech Acts, Literary Tradition, and Intertextual Pragmatics

Abstract

There is a potential kinship between some central concepts of classical literary criticism (such as tradition, genre, originality, allusion) and some more recent ones developed by formalist/structuralist criticism (intertextuality, defamiliarization) and by linguistic pragmatics (illocution, indirect speech acts, pragmatic principles and communicative maxims). Reflecting on the common ground shared by these notions may shed some light on the relationship between linguistics and literary theory. This paper discusses, as one among a wide range of pragmatic constraints on literature, the intertextual relationship between a work and the tradition it belongs to and which helps define it. It is argued that intertextual signals do not have to be overt even when deliberate, and that deliberate signals do not exhaust a work’s intertextuality (since, for one thing, it will itself give rise to new links).

La versión española de este artículo puede encontrarse en: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2101994

Keywords: Literature, Literary pragmatics, Pragmalinguistics, Speech acts, Speech act theory, Fictionality, Tradition, Intertextuality, Semiotics of literature, Literary theory