Teaching & Learning Guide for: Linguistics in the Study and Teaching of Literature

Literary texts include linguistic form, as well as specialized literary forms (some of which also involve language). Linguistics can offer to literary studies an understanding of these kinds of form, and the ways by which a text is used to communicate meaning. In order to cope with the great variety of creative uses of language in literature, linguistics must acknowledge that some texts are assigned structure by non-linguistic means, but the boundaries between linguistic and non-linguistic explanations for literary language are not clearly drawn. The article concludes with discussion of what kinds and level of linguistics might usefully be taught in a literature classroom, and offers practical suggestions for the application of linguistics to literature teaching. The Oddity of Literary Language It would seem obvious that as linguists we have a special role in the teaching of literature, because we are experts in the medium – language – from which literary texts are made. However, linguists do not have a monopoly on discussion or theorization of language in literary studies. Poets and writers, particularly in their manifestos or statements about practice, make various statements about the language of poetry which ignore or deny what linguists know about language. One characteristic claim is that a particular writing practice involves ‘a new syntax’ or that a poet ‘creates a new language’. The poet Ece Ayhan talks about ‘. . . pushing Turkish syntax overboard, eliding or “misplacing” syntactically connective tissues, so that words lose their linear context and explode from an unsettled center’ (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 484). Helmut Heissenbüttel describes his own practice as ‘connections are made not through systematic and logico-syntactical interweavings, but through connotations, through ambiguities – outgrowths of a decayed syntax’ (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 164). This is a metaphorical use of terms, such as ‘syntax’ or ‘language’, and it is not uncharacteristic of literary studies, where there is a wish for another type of language than the everyday language, a language in which new types of meaning can be communicated. How, then, can