Modern Language Association 2020 Convention
Washington State
Convention Center
Session 100,
Thursday, January 9, 3:30--4:45 p.m., Room 606
Presiding: Albert E.
Krahn
Purposeful
Perversions of Pointing
Usually, we think of punctuation as a set of rules for
protecting the meaning of a text or making ideas explicit. The writers
discussed in this session have another idea: they want to use punctuation (or
avoid it) to create new meanings in their texts. When someone noticeably breaks
what we think of as the accepted rules, the result can be considered art, but it
must be seen as purposeful rather than by accident, ignorance, or carelessness.
The authors discussed in this session stretch the rules related to punctuation differently
while trying to achieve meanings that their writing in the usually accepted way
might not reveal.
Gabrielle Kiriloff
An Infinitude of
Associations:
Computational
Approaches to the
Rhetoric of
Punctuation
The title reflects on Adorno’s comments on the use of
ellipsis. In literary genres, punctuation is often used to represent emotional
and psychological states, according to Anne Toner (2015). But the rhetorical
effects of punctuation vary based on whether the punctuation occurs within
dialogue or narration. An ellipsis within dialogue may signal a pause in
conversation but within narration may hint at the associative nature of human
thought. In order to see what was really happening, Gabrielle Kiriloff looked at a corpus of 3,000 nineteenth
and twentieth-century novels (the Chicago and Chadwyck-Healey
corpora) to study ellipses, dashes, parentheses, and question marks.
She
found definite patterns of meaning which depended upon where they were used. Ellipsis
increased between 1840 and 1920. Despite the association of the dash with more
modern styles (Dickinson, Joyce), the use of the dash declined in the corpus. The
link between punctuation and narration was the most suggestive. Each of the
four forms of punctuation studied increased WITHIN NARRATION at the turn of the
century, even if it diminished overall. Parentheticals and question marks often
drew attention to the narrating voice and served a paradoxical function. The
increase in the use of these forms of punctuation calls into question the
notion that obtrusive narrators diminished at the turn of the century (Lubbock,
1921).
A
good example of the growing use of punctuation to elicit new meanings is a work
by Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne (The Wind Bloweth: 1922) that
contains 920 ellipses.
Busra
Copuroglu
Spectres of
Punctuation:
Beckett Performing
Erasure
Theodor Adorno in his article Punctuation Marks writes that they
acquire an expression of their own. Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology remarks
that punctuation is the best example of a nonphonetic
mark in writing. Martin Heidegger develops and conceptualizes the concept of
UNDER ERASURE in his Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics as a writing practice
and employs it as a device to demonstrate the multiplication of meaning in a
text in some unusual way: he prints a word, but then crosses it out and leaves
it. The word is both absent and present.
Some
works by Samuel Beckett are classic examples of Heidegger’s idea.
A number of Beckett’s works (Ping, Ill Seen Ill Said,
and Worstword Ho) are devoid of commas and could be
interpreted as an emancipation of reading space and rhythm that engenders a new
mode of reading. (Says Gayatri Spivak,
in the preface of Derrida's Of
Grammatology: The verbal text is constituted by concealment as much as by
revelation.) Beckett’s lack
of commas can be interpreted as the emancipation of space and rhythm that engenders a different
mode of reading and makes the texts acquire different meanings as readers,
possibly, add their own commas. Beckett performs writing UNDER ERASURE by
cancelling the commas and letting the preceding and proceeding words instead set
a different rhythm of reading.
Lindsey Seatter
Accidentals and the Narrative Pause:
Affective Punctuation in the Female Authored
Romantic Novel
An article by Jacqueline Labbe (2015) argues
that the warp and weft of literary cross-reference is
exemplified
in how the writings of one author
are meshed and manipulated into the work of others.
Using Labbe’s theory we can see that the foundation of
Jane Austen’s style—the fabric of her text—can be
observed in the writings of Frances Burney, Maria
Edgeworth, and Mary Brunton. They use particular
sequences of punctuation to mimic vocal expression
and stream of consciousness in their writing.
Kathryn
Sutherland (1999) argues for the significance of accidentals, such as punctuation,
spelling,
capitalization, italicization, and contractions, as lexical and syntactical
conduits for communicating aural
traces in a written text.
While
Sutherland asserts that irregular punctuation is a characteristic of
Austen’s narrative discourse,
it is actually a trait shared by an influential network of Romantic
women novelists. Using em-dashes,
ellipses, question marks, and exclamation points, these female authors
attempt to simulate and amplify voice.
Employing accidentals judiciously, Burney, Edgeworth, and Brunton embody a narrative non-linearity in
their oscillation between the perspective of the character and that of
the narrator—a narrative mode later
recognized as free indirect discourse that was
developed and popularized by Austen. In effect, these
authors
were using a narrative technique that helped facilitate
the emergence of the modern novel.
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The Punctuation Page
The purpose of this site is to promote the study of punctuation with a view toward understanding it better. To avoid confusion, however, the site is devoted particularly to punctuation in American English.
Definition: Punctuation in English is a linguistic system of symbols and spaces used in the graphic medium called writing for the purpose of displaying and preserving the integrity of the canonical sentence.
Sources and Definitions for Punctuation
Over the years, writers of some books and handbooks on punctuation have attempted to understand what makes punctuation work. Unfortunately, many of them have compared punctuation to interesting but irrelevant concepts which often mislead a person seeking genuine help.
Hot links for help
Although there is not much information available about the theory and principles of punctuation, there are some sites that will provide immediate help for answers to specific questions. The sites listed here are not necessarily being endorsed, but they may provide reasonably accurate help when you need it. Generally, there are no easily found sites for a theoretical discussion of punctuation. But if you need a quick answer for a particular punctuation problem you are having, try one of the following.
This OWL is linked to by a number of colleges and universities.
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/566/01/
The Capitol Community College site offers mostly well-reasoned advice.
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/marks/marks.htm
NASA has an interesting site with plenty of examples.
http://www.sti.nasa.gov/sp7084/ch3.html
The Chicago Manual of Style Online offers some help. The Q & A section can be browsed without charge. Search on "punctuation" or one of the features of punctuation.
http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/home.html
Paul Robinson offers an interesting philosophy of punctuation.
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/721833.html
Other ways of approaching punctuation
A dissertation which takes a new approach
can be accessed at: dc.uwm.edu/etd/465
Frequently Asked Questions
One goal of this site is to provide a forum for an on-going discussion of punctuation. Perhaps, in time, a longer list of frequently asked questions could be made available. Or explanations for pervasive punctuation problems could be provided. For example, the problem of its and it's might be a candidate for a FAQ. One nomination might be the problems sown by confused writers who use the apostrophe with ordinary plurals. The following curiosity, for example, seems to be spreading: here are the do's and dont's or sometimes do's and don'ts. Some editors, apparently, are more interested in appearance than accuracy. Oddly enough, if you add all the required apostrophes and have to frame it with single quotes, it just might look like it is raining: 'do's and don't's.' One frequent argument involves the series comma.
A web site for the discussion of punctuation also exists. To join, send an email to punctuation-list@uwm.edu.
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