Per un approccio linguistico all'arte verbale: metodi e strumenti diversificati Towards a linguistic approach to verbal art: Theory and practice

The participants had come together for a symposium in Bologna, Italy in September, 2004 to share their work and exchange views. The debate at the end of that 2-day conference was a lively and fruitful one. One of the questions addressed was indeed , though hardly new, still fundamental: What is literature, and why/ how is it somehow ‘different’ from other text-types? Contrasting, but not for that wholly incompatible, opinions ranged from: literature is whatever a culture considers literature to be, vs. literature is text whose meanings successfully, and lastingly, articulate a generalization on the nature of social existence. It was also noted that such a generalization might be exactly what a specific culture values in, and institutionalizes as, its literature, as well as the fact that many belief and value systems have been, are and will continue to be cross-cultural, if not universal. In any case, as the following quote brings home, the question continues to be a thorny one: ‘[…] the paradox of ‘poetic’ language [is] that there is no such thing […] but we can all recognize it when we see it’ (Halliday, 1982: 134). For all that, the participants also had to admit the problem of defining the language in literature as distinct from language in other text types, something further complicated by the co-existence of all sorts of languages and genres in verbal art itself. This was generally recognized, but one strong opinion was that, rather than concentrate on the kinds of language or even genres possible in language in literature, or even on the ‘virtual universe’ this creates, what needs to be engaged with is how the text articulates that universe and the events within that universe, and how it makes these act as a manifestation of, if you will, some profound ‘philosophical’ proposition. Another question, not unlinked to the preceding one, regarded the idea of context and its importance for the literature text, which no voice denied. What emerged were various, but again not irreconcilable, ways of defining ‘context’. All apparently agreed that the literature text had two orders of context: that from which it came, its ‘real’ context of creation (call it a Malinowskian ‘context of situation’ and/ or ‘culture’, or a ‘pragmatic’ one), (5) and that which it created, as fiction. It was rightfully stressed, however, that context in verbal art has a primacy that may not be quite as apparent in the linguistic criticism of other text types. In short, all language arises out of a context (and Halliday and Hasan, 1980 was cited on this particular point), but the feeling was that there is a special need for coherent forms of contextual involvement on the part of the linguistic critic of the literature text. Finally, the act of reading was rightly and readily acknowledged to involve its own complex problematics. Some participants clearly felt that space needed to be given to readers’ responses and their negotiation with the meanings of the text; others felt that there were ‘better’ ways of reading, ones that could be articulated and made ‘public’, externalized. In any case, as Butt judiciously puts it (this volume): ‘[…] we interpret by informed and artful inference – by reading off the choices that must have gone into making the text’. This means, however, that readers must be trained to do this. Better ways might also include attempts to put aside one’s own subjective cultural paradigm and intuitive reactions, to be able to better enter into the work, across temporal but also cultural distance, as the author understood it. Such an endeavour would make one a ‘model reader’ in Eco’s terms (1979) , or a ‘super-receiver, in Bakhtin’s (in Todorov, 1984: 110). The organizer is among those who believe in such ‘better’ ways.