24/06/2016

Reading time: 7 minutes

The Double Hook (1959) is a novel by the Canadian writer Sheila Watson that centres on the lives of a group of characters in a small community in British Columbia. One of the characters, James leaves the town after killing his mother and becomes an isolated, peripheral figure. He later begins a journey home that ends in his reintegration back into the town. Literary critics generally view this return as a kind of personal redemption and as a celebration of the spiritual rebirth of both James and his community.

Yinglin Ji and Dan Shen analyse the shifting characterisation of James throughout the novel by drawing on Michael Halliday’s system of transitivity. Halliday’s model (from his systemic functional grammar) accounts for how different processes (verbs), participants in those processes (usually nouns) and circumstances of those processes (usually adverbs or prepositional phrases) are used by writers and speakers to represent their version of the world. The model is fairly complex and only a quick sketch is provided below.

Process types

Material = doing, happening

eg He kicked the ball

Behavioural = physiological or psychological behaviour

eg He breathes; she smiles

Relational = having or being

eg John has a piano; The car is red

Existential = existing

eg There is a dog

Mental = sensing, feeling and thinking

eg I saw the car; I like football; I believe in ghosts

Verbal = saying, telling

eg I shouted; I told her a story

Within a clause, participants may be attached to material processes either as agents (doing things to other participants), or as goals (having things done to them), and to other processes as entities in the various acts, states and events that the verbs depict. Circumstances function to give more information about a process, such as its manner, location and reason. So a description of a whole clause would be as follows:

The police                        caught                 the suspects             last week

participant (agent), material process, participant (goal), circumstance

Transitivity in literature is often explored in terms of patterns. Ji and Shen use this model to map out how Watson presents James’s character across the novel. They begin by summarising existing literary criticism that suggests that James’s return to his community symbolises rebirth and regeneration, and then argue that this can be shown by looking at the changes in transitivity patterns across various points in the novel. They emphasise that their analysis isn’t just about presenting the mind style of a character (see our previous digest on deixis for examples of this) but rather shows how psychological changes are foregrounded. They argue that these changes are important in our overall understanding of the novel.

To do this, Ji and Shen look at the representation of James and his actions in three chapters that show stages of his journey back to his community. They start by focusing on Chapter 8. In this chapter, they show that James is largely represented as passive with very few material processes used in which he is the agent. Indeed, Ji and Shen show that, unusually, James’s horse is given the agent’s role in many of the clauses. In contrast, James is represented through mental processes, which highlight his internal rather than his external behaviours. Interestingly, Ji and Shen also point out that, at this stage in the novel, even the mental processes tend to be ones related to perceptions and feelings (such as hearing and feeling) rather than those which are more active (such as states of knowing and believing). They argue that much of James’s psychological activity is focused on simply responding to his immediate environment, which demonstrates his inability to transcend his physical situation.

This pattern changes in Chapter 13 where James is now shown to be able to think beyond his immediate environment and engage in self-reflection. Here, Ji and Shen demonstrate that James now acts as an agentive participant at the head of material processes much more frequently. This highlights his ability to exert a physical influence over other entities in the fictional world. Furthermore, there is a pattern of more active mental processes, with James now represented as a thinker rather than a merely a feeler of sensations. Ji and Shen argue that the pattern of processes in this chapter demonstrates the mental transformation that James has undergone at this point in the novel; he is now self-reflective and self-conscious. To this end, James emerges as physically and mentally ready to return to his community.

Finally, Ji and Shen focus on Chapter 18, where James returns to his community, begins to rebuild his past and reclaims his position as an integral member of the town. In this chapter, James is now almost exclusively represented by Watson through the use of material processes that show strong action and volition. The range of process types also increases with Watson representing James and his state of being through existential processes which highlight his re-established position in the community, and through verbal processes which convey his authority and ability to express his point of view to others. Furthermore, Ji and Shen show how the representation of James and his horse in the clauses in this chapter highlight James’s transformation from a passive to an active character. In this chapter, his horse is now usually the goal in a material process, with James restored to the agent in the clauses.

Overall then, Ji and Shen seek to show that a transitivity analysis can account for Watson’s characterisation in transforming James from passivity and isolation to activity and integration back into the community. The authors argue that such an analysis can show the ‘geography of James’s mind’ and help both to support existing literary-critical responses to the novel and to provide some fresh analytical insights.

This is a digest of the following article: Ji, Yinglin and Shen, D. (2004) ‘Transitivity and mental transformation: Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook’, Language and Literature 3(4), 335-348.

Using this in teaching and learning

 You can use this research digest to support your teaching of AQA’s AS and A-level English Language and Literature specifications in the following ways.

1.Analysing characterisation in terms of transitivity patterns would be a good way of exploring individual characters in prose fiction (Imagined worlds, A level; Views and voices, AS level). Students could look at selected extracts focusing on key characters in their set novel and highlight the main processes that are used to represent them.

• To what extent do these patterns map onto ways in which the characters generally function in the novel and the ways in which they are viewed by others?
• Students could also follow Ji and Shen in tracing an individual character across various points in the novel. Are there different representations during key scenes? Can the mental or physical transformation of a character be explained using a similar approach to Ji and Shen?

These kinds of exercises could also be undertaken with texts being studied for the NEA (Making Connections, A level) and could inform an interesting investigation on characterisation either as a concept or as part of a wider thematic study.

2.Looking at transitivity patterns could also support a more extensive study of characterisation in students’ chosen set texts. For example, students could explore how representation at the level of the clause combines with other ways of presenting characters (speech and thought, physical description, body language and so on). They could think about how characters are developed in the novel and in the poems they are studying (Poetic voices, A level; Views and voices, AS level; Imagined worlds, A level), and find and comment on the connections between transitivity patterns and other ways that writers presents fictional entities.

3.The distribution of material processes (actions) and relational/existential processes (states of being/description) can also be explored through the lens of genre. When working with material for their NEA (Making Connections, A level), students could think about how certain texts (or parts of them) focus on providing either actions or description and how they might account for these by relating these to generic conventions. For example, how are events in crime thrillers told? Is there an equal distribution of processes at key moments (eg murders, discovery of bodies)? Do different writers have a noticeable style in terms of how they typically choose to present such events?

4.Equally, students could explore transitivity patterns in non-literary material/genres, drawing on the Paris Anthology (Imagined worlds, A level; People and places, AS level) and more widely, again to support their selection and analysis of non-literary material for NEA (Making Connections, A level). Some genres (eg. recipes) might typically make use of one kind of process more often than another but can students find more complex examples? And, do other factors such as audience, purpose and mode influence the ways in which writers and speakers might want to represent actions, people, states and events? This provides a useful way into exploring the concept of representation more broadly and will support students across the entire specification.

24/11/2015

Reading time: 5 minutes

Who decides what a text means? The writer? The reader? The text itself? This depends on how you view the act of reading!

Some schools of thought regard the writer of literary fiction as the ‘authority’ over its meaning and give prominence to readings that attach a biographical significance to texts, place them firmly within a historical, social and cultural content of production and foreground authorial intention. On the other hand, reader-response theories highlight the importance of a reader’s belief systems, experiences and competencies in bringing the text to life through interaction – sometimes downplaying the role of the author completely. Then there are those theories and frameworks of reading that focus on the text itself, viewing it as a self-contained entity that simply requires close analysis to unlock its meaning.

Peter Stockwell addresses the question of meaning within the parameters of recent work in stylistics, arguing that a reader is positioned to adopt a particular vantage point towards events and characters in a fictional world. Stockwell begins his paper by distinguishing between two types of reading: everyday reading that is focused on the text itself (‘direct consciousness’); and a more scholarly and inward-looking analytical reading that is focused on trying to explain how a reader engages with a literary work (‘self-consciousness’). This latter ‘thinking about reading’ is, Stockwell suggests, the focus of stylistics as a discipline. In the context of his discussion, he draws largely on a branch of stylistics called ‘cognitive poetics’ that has been influenced by advances in cognitive science, linguistics and psychology.

Stockwell is interested in a way of re-establishing what he terms the ‘ethical dimension’ of literary reading. That is, he argues for viewing literature as a ‘rhetorical act of communication’ between writer and reader. He sees reading as a combination of text-driven constraints and a reader’s own disposition, a stance that draws together aspects of both author-centred and reader-centred theories. Stockwell also suggests that readers will often attempt to assign some kind of authority/agency to their imagined version of the author (he calls this process ‘mind modelling’), arguing that the claims that “an author thought this…” is often a kind of readerly short-cut where the notions of a real life person and implied author are conflated. In other words, readers will naturally try very hard to see a reading experience as an interaction between two people.

To explain the importance of a text-driven approach, Stockwell uses the terms ‘preferred’ and ‘dispreferred responses’ (borrowed from interactional sociolinguistics) as a way of differentiating between types of reading. He argues that most literary works have a ‘text-driven preferred response’ – for example, it would be very hard (but not impossible) to read Nineteen Eighty-Four and feel attracted to the political system and government of Airstrip One. Whilst a preferred response can be very defined (e.g. the message in Nineteen Eighty-Four) or clear but undefined (e.g. when a reader feels a sense of chaos in absurdist fiction), Stockwell suggests that all literature will contain textual patterns that motivate certain kinds of interpretations and impose constraints that make others dispreferred.

In the final part of his paper, Stockwell shows how readers navigate various ethical positions, adopting mental stances that are textually realised by shifts in time, place, modalised expressions that make suggestions about how things should be or might be, metaphors, reported speech and thought, negation, and hypotheticals. Using a combination of two cognitive poetic models, Text World Theory and Deictic Shift Theory, he argues that several versions of the reading-self (or what are termed ‘enactors’) can be tracked as part of the reading process. This in turn can account for the idea that reading has a ‘transformative effect’ and readers feel moved by the narrative, shifting their attitudes towards characters, events and concepts.

Stockwell ends his discussion with a detailed analysis of three extracts from Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte), Emma (Jane Austen) and Cat’s Cradle (Kurt Vonnegurt). In each of these, he uses the concept of ‘deictic braiding’, a kind of complex patterning around the various types of deixis ¹ (person, time, space, social relations and textuality) to explain how these texts position their readers.

Overall, Stockwell is careful to point out that although it is readers, rather than texts, who create meanings, we should be mindful of the ways that textual imposition and readerly disposition work together in the complex act of meaning-making. This acknowledges the potential of texts to evoke meaningsthe relationship between author and reader and provides a motivation for rigorous stylistic analysis. Stockwell is clear to point out that that it is simply not enough to say that a reader is positioned by a text but that it is also ‘essential to observe and analyse how that positioning has occurred’.

This is a digest of the following article: Stockwell, P. (2013) ‘The positioned reader’, Language and Literature 22(3), 263–277.

Using this in teaching and learning

You can use this research digest to support your teaching of AQA’s specification in the following ways

1. The term ‘preferred response’ can also be understood as the kind of reading that is most commonly held about a particular text. Ask students to explore literary criticism and the responses of other readers (using online reviews) on their chosen novel (Imagined worlds, A level; Views and voices, AS level). What do they notice? How can they account for any radical readings (‘dispreferred responses’)?
2. John Donne, Robert Browning, Seamus Heaney and Carol Ann Duffy (Poetic Voices, A level; Views and Voices, AS level) have all been described as poets who offer strong moral messages. How might students use the terms positioned reader, preferred response and dispreferred response to discuss their work? One interesting exercise would be to take one poem that appears to have a very clear message and try to read it in alternative terms. How difficult is this? Does the language mean that some interpretations simply are less possible (or even impossible)?
3. Stockwell’s paper concentrates solely on literature but students could also explore these ideas with non-literary material and apply this to non-literary material from the AQA Anthology as well (Remembered Places, A and AS level)
4. The activities above could motivate a personal investigation on a literary text and some non-literary data (Making Connections, A level). Students could explore material that has a very strong moral message and undertake a fine-tuned analysis of the ways in which the texts impose certain points of view. This would work particularly well, for example, with science-fiction and political discourse. Can they explain how that positioning has occurred?