The linguistics of reading literature

Abstract

In this paper, I attempt a bridge between linguistics, in particular text pragmatics, and school reading of literary texts. I propose a linguistic model of these peculiarities of the reading of literary texts, especially poetry, that have been called ‘aesthetic reading’, arguing that a linguistically founded basis is what is lacking for school engagement with (not only literary) texts. In the last years there has been extensive research on the linguistics-literature interface; however, what is surprisingly still missing, is a consistent linguistic model of literary reading. In this paper, I propose such a model and show that ‘aesthetic reading’ involves a distinct reading strategy that can be captured in terms of text-world-models and the differentiation between coherence and text sense displaying. Consciously reading poetry amounts, linguistically seen, to a close reading (i) especially focusing marked expressions, i.e., deviations from phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic and textpragmatic routines, (ii) maintaining of unsolved ambiguities and thus (iii) generating an array of ‘authorized inferences’ that can be productively used for a principled plurality of interpretations. I specify this proposal and illustrate it with two cases of marked pronominal reference, arguing that my proposal has some important implications that make it particularly suitable for school context.