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In Search of (Non)Sense
Editor: Elżbieta Chrzanowska-Kluczewska and Grzegorz Szpila
Date Of Publication: Apr 2009
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-0345-8
Isbn: 1-4438-0345-6

[…] it would seem natural to assume that the disciplines of literary studies and linguistics should by rights converge regularly to exchange views as each pursues its own goals. Is such a convergence possible on the question of sense and nonsense?

James W. Underhill (this volume)

The contributors to the present volume have focused their attention on two sets of problems that are leitmotifs in all the articles gathered. Firstly, should literary semantics – the linguistic study of texts/discourses marked with the feature of ‘literariness’ and ‘poeticalness’ – strive after an interpretation of all such texts at all costs? Are all literary texts interpretable? How do we cope with such troublesome linguistic phenomena as anomaly, deviance, and absurdity? Aren’t we, by any chance, fascinated by nonsense? Do we try to make it at least partly meaningful? Is interpretability our default value? The introductory article by the renowned scholar Margaret H. Freeman is an important voice, indeed a manifesto of sorts of literary semanticists in this respect.

Secondly, while trying to answer all these questions, well aware of the fact that literary semantics is a fuzzy branch of linguistic studies, we have attempted at exploring its borderline zone to see to what extent we have to draw from various theoretical sources. Literary semanticists have often proved that they are capable of arguing contrastively in the atmosphere of openness to such neighbouring fields as: discourse analysis, literary pragmatics and reader-response theories, narratology, literary semiotics and hermeneutics, translation studies and – very importantly – the philosophy of language.

The authors contributing to this book, an international company of regularly cooperating linguists and literary scholars, strike a nice balance between the cognitive and the more traditionally or philosophically-oriented frameworks of study, being a vivid proof that cognitive and other “denominations” are perfectly capable of fruitful coexistence. The volume ends with a short presentation by Radosław Nowakowski, already known to academic and artistic audiences in Europe as a creator and propagator of liberature – the art of unusual bookmaking, the art of the book liberated from our traditional preconceptions.

We hope that our volume will be of interest to academics and students of literary theory and linguistics alike, especially those involved in literary semantics, stylistics and poetics. Naturally, the book is also addressed to members and sympathizers of IALS (International Association of Literary Semantics) and the readers of Journal of Literary Semantics, scattered across the world.

Prof. Dr. hab. Elżbieta Chrzanowska-Kluczewska is Professor of Linguistics and Head of the Institute of English Philology at the Jagiellonian University of Kraków, Poland. Her main areas of interest include theoretical and literary semantics, stylistics and the philosophy of language, on which she has published extensively in various periodicals and collective volumes. Her research has centred, among others, around the issue of possible worlds, especially in what concerns their application in discourse analysis and poetics. In turn, her monograph Language-Games: Pro and Against (Kraków: Universitas, 2004) is devoted to theoretical and philosophical aspects of linguistic games. At present, she is working on another monograph focused on metatropes as large figures of human thought and language. She has delivered guest lectures at various universities in Poland, Germany, Armenia, Taiwan, Ukraine, and Georgia. An active board member of IALS (International Association of Literary Semantics), she is serving currently on the editorial board of Journal of Literary Semantics. She is also a member of PASE (Polish branch of ESSE), PTJ (Polish Linguistic Society) and PALA. As a collaborator of the National Museum in Kraków she has translated into English over thirty books on fine arts in Poland.

elzbieta.chrzanowska-kluczewska@uj.edu.pl

Grzegorz Szpila, Ph.D., has worked in the Institute of English Philology of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, since 1994. His interests include Polish and English lexicology, lexicography, phraseology, phraseography, paremiology and paremiography. His current research focuses on phraseostylistics and paremiostylistics. He is an author of five books and more than 60 articles and reviews. He is a member of the European Society of Phraseology, the Polish Association for the Study of English, and the International Association of Literary Semantics. Since 2003 he has been a member of the Phraseological Committee of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

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