The Department of Studies in Culture invites everyone to its second scholarly meeting on the 27th of January 2023 at 11.30 in room 215. DeSic Scholarly meetings are a series of scholarly events organized by the Department of Studies in Culture and featuring a wide range of cultural topics. The first meeting will be hosted by dr Urszula Kizelbach who will present a lecture entitled “Shakespearean allusions and uncomfortable truths in Ian McEwan's Nutshell”. Everyone is welcome!
In this ingenious rewriting of Shakespeare’s tragedy, McEwan returns to the 18th-century tradition of the self-conscious narration, presenting the unborn Hamlet who addresses his audience straight from his mother’s womb. In a Tristram Shandy-like fashion, Hamlet presents an alternative story of his life, enriched by his digressions about modern society, social media and the Western way of life. In my pragma-stylistic analysis of the novel, I want to investigate the homodiegetic narration and the narrator’s ideological viewpoint. I will use the theory of impoliteness to evaluate Hamlet’s offensive remarks and his uncooperative attitude towards his mother Trudy and the world around him. I want to demonstrate how intradiegetic impoliteness is manifested by Hamlet’s expression of impolite beliefs as a character in the story. I also want to check if (and how) the implied author might express his impolite views through the protagonist’s discourse and what could be the potential face-threatening consequences for the reader (extradiegetic impoliteness). In my analysis, I wish to demonstrate how impoliteness can serve as a useful tool for literary characterisation and how it can be employed to characterise the author-reader communication in fiction. This lecture introduces my latest research from my upcoming book “(Im)politeness in McEwan’s Fiction: Literary Pragma-Stylistics” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).
Selected bibliography
- Blitvich Garcés-Conejos, Pilar and Maria Sifianou, “(Im)politeness and Identity.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic Impoliteness, edited by Jonathan Culpeper, Michael Haugh, Dániel Z. Kádár, 227–56. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
- Culpeper, Jonathan, Language and Characterisation: People in Plays and Other Texts. (Harlow, UK: Pearson, 2001).
- Culpeper, Jonathan, Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence. (Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics 28). (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
- Dobrogoszcz, Tomasz, Family and Relationships in Ian McEwan’s Fiction: Between Fantasy and Desire. (Lanham, Boulder, New York and London: Lexington Books, 2018).
- Fludernik, Monika, An Introduction to Narratology. (Translated by Patricia Häusler-Greenfield and Monika Fludernik). (New York and London: Routledge, 2009).
- Kizelbach, Urszula, “(Im)politeness in Fiction.” In Pragmatics of Fiction, edited by Miriam A. Locher and Andreas H. Jucker, 425–54. (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2017).