This thesis proposes an account of the effects achieved by the poetic use of rhetorical tropes and schemes in the light of recent developments in pragmatic theory. More specifically it discusses and attempts to develop the relevance theory account of poetic effects. Much recent debate in literary studies has centred on the question as to whether literary communication is best explained in terms of text-internal linguistic properties or socio-cultural phenomena. This thesis considers such views in the light of the theories of language and communication they assume. It then proposes an alternative theoretical account of literary communication grounded in cognitive pragmatic theory. It argues that the relevance theory account of poetic effects may make a significant contribution to such an account. A brief outline of relevance theory is followed by a more detailed analysis of metaphor and a brief consideration of epizeuxis and various verse effects, insofar as they contribute to poetic style. it is natural for pragmatic theory to concentrate on the communication of assumptions, propositional forms with a logical structure over which inferences can be performed. Although the account of poetic effects and poetic thoughts developed here will be partially characterised in such terms, an attempt will also be made to account for the communication of affective and other non-propositional effects. Any theory of stylistic effects in general, and poetic style in particular, must, it will be argued, include such an account. This will necessitate a broader philosophical discussion of issues having a bearing on the question of what it is that is communicated non-propositionally. More particularly it will require some discussion of emotion, phenomenal experience and aesthetic experience. This discussion will lead to a characterisation of poetic thought or poetic representation. The thesis aims, then, to make a contribution to literary studies by characterising a new theoretical notion of literariness in terms of mental representations and mental processes. It also aims to make a contribution to pragmatic theory, specifically to the pragmatics of poetic style and rhetoric within a relevance theory framework.

Abstract This thesis is, on the one hand, an investigation into Matthew Arnold’s (1822–1888) literary communications and, on the other hand, an attempt to mediate between his writings and a twenty-first century readership. Arnold’s oeuvre is substantial and varied, but this study focuses on his epic poetry, which has remained a neglected part of his body of work despite its significance both to the author himself and to developing an understanding of Arnold’s development as a poet, cultural critic, and iconic ‘Victorian sage’. Furthermore, it is his epic poetry that seems to most fully address the theme of communication, and thus these longer poems function as points of orientation for a broader inquiry into Arnold’s communications. Arnold himself was keenly aware of the complicated status of communicative acts, but these complications have not always been acknowledged by the generations of criticism that have emerged since his death. Critics have thus produced images of Arnold which have not always done justice to the complexity of his communications. Based on an understanding of ‘communicative’ as a position of mediation between writers and readers, this thesis addresses the need for a more balanced communicative framework for mediating between Arnold’s writings in general — and his epic poetry in particular — his critics, and present audiences. / Tiivistelmä Tässä väitöskirjassa tarkastellaan Matthew Arnoldin (1822–1888) kirjallista kommunikaatiota, pyrkien välittämään hänen kirjoitustensa merkityksiä 2000-luvun yleisölle. Arnoldin kirjallinen tuotanto on runsas ja monipuolinen, mutta tässä tutkimuksessa keskitytään erityisesti hänen runoepiikkansa tulkintaan. Tämä osa hänen työstään on jäänyt tutkimuksessa verrattain vähäiseen asemaan huolimatta siitä, että Arnoldin kaksi lyhyttä runoeeposta olivat tärkeitä paitsi hänelle itselleen, mutta erityisesti osana hänen kehitystään runoilijana, kulttuurikriitikkona ja ikonisena viktoriaanisen ajan julkisena intellektuellina. Arnoldin runoepiikka vaikuttaa myös tutkivan kommunikaation teemaa laajemmin kuin hänen muut runonsa, ja toimii myös tällä tavoin keskiönä hänen oman kommunikaationsa laajemmalle tarkastelulle. Arnold oli varsin tietoinen kommunikaatiopyrkimystensä haasteista, mutta näitä ongelmia ei ole hänen kuolemansa jälkeen ilmestyneessä kritiikissä aina otettu huomioon. Näin on syntynyt monia Arnold-käsityksiä, jotka eivät välttämättä tee oikeutta hänen kommunikaationsa monivivahteisuudelle. Tämä väitöskirja pyrkii tuottamaan tasapainoisemman kommunikatiivisen lähestymistavan toimiakseen välittäjänä Arnoldin kirjoitusten, eritoten hänen eepostensa, ja nykylukijan välillä. / Original papers The original publications are not included in the electronic version of the dissertation. Alarauhio, J.-P. (2012). Towards a Dialogical Approach to Matthew Arnold. In Sell, Roger D. (Ed.) Literary Community-Making: The dialogicality of English Texts from the Seventeenth Century to the Present. (131 - 142) Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Alarauhio, J.-P (2007). Sohrab and Rustum and Balder Dead – Communicating about Communication. In Nordic Journal of English Studies Volume 6, No. 2 (2007), 47 - 64. Alarauhio, J.-P (Forthcoming). Sohrab and Rustum – Matthew Arnold’s Spectacle.

A self-educated shepherd, Scottish writer James Hogg (1770-1835) spoke from a position outside the dominant discourse, depicting issues of his age related to gender, class, and ethnicity by giving voice to people from the margins and, thus (either consciously or unconsciously), revealing gender politics and Britain's imperial aims. Hogg’s contemporary critics received his work rather negatively, viewing his subjects such as prostitution, out-of-wedlock-pregnancy, infanticide, and the violence of war as violating the principles of literary politeness. Hogg’s obstinacy in addressing these issues, however, supports the thesis that his aim was far more significant than challenging the expectations of his contemporary readers. This project shows that pragmatics can be applied productively to literature because its eclecticism offers the possibility of developing a detailed discussion about three aspects of literary communication—the author, the reader and the text—without prioritising any of them. Literature is an instance of language in use (the field of pragmatics) where an author creates the texts and a reader recreates the author’s message through the text. Analysis of Hogg’s flouting of Grice’s maxims for communication strategies and of his defying the principles of politeness enables a theoretically supported discussion about Hogg’s possible intentions, as well as about how his intentions were perceived by the literary establishment of his time; while both relevance theory and Bakhtin’s socio-linguistics enriched by a historically contextualised politeness shed new light on the negative reception of Hogg’s texts.

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Face à l’incohérence apparente de la notion d’ironie, cette thèse vise, non à valoriser l’impossibilité de la définir et le protéisme de la notion, mais à construire une définition sur des principes alternatifs : attention aux traits communs plutôt qu’aux variations, aux processus longs qu’à la succession des significations, définition de l’ironie comme acte communicationnel plutôt que comme mécanique formelle. L’ironie, à partir du monde grec, est tenue pour un acte de communication, non réductible à la linguistique pragmatique : comment contrôler la socialisation en contexte dangereux, en se tenant au plus près de l’ennemi ? La résolution de ce problème dans l’échange passe par l’invention de formes, dont certaines, antiphrase en tête, s’autonomisent et deviennent des formes fixes, parmi d’autres, de l’ironie. Je m’efforce ensuite de suivre la façon dont se maintient cette définition non formelle en étant attentif, jusqu’au romantisme d’Iéna, à l’analyse de la communication à l’œuvre dans les réflexions sur l’ironie. L’œuvre fictionnelle d’André Gide, déployant une grande variété de formes d’ironie et habitée par le secret, biographique et sexuel, est relue comme remettant en jeu ce contrôle de la socialisation dangereuse et comme déployant, derrière la notion de collaboration, une réflexion sur la communication littéraire. D’autre part, l’œuvre d’André Gide est ressaisie dans la perspective d’une histoire de l’ironie au dix-neuvième siècle. L’antiphrase n’est alors pas centrale : à la figure de Voltaire s’attache l’idée de raillerie de l’idéal, qui constitue un poids sémantique déterminant l’adaptation des différentes traditions ironiques au cadre français. / Faced with the apparent inconsistency of the notion of irony, this PhD does not suggest to enhance the impossibility of defining the notion or its proteism, but to build a definition on alternative principles: the focus on common features instead of variations, on long term processes instead of the succession of meanings and the definition of irony as an act of communication rather than as a formal mechanic. Irony, ever since the Greek world, appears as an act of communication which cannot be reduced to pragmatic linguistics: how to control socialisation in a dangerous context, in staying as close to the enemy as possible? Solving this problem by exchanging supposes the invention of forms, some of which – first and foremost the antiphrasis – get autonomous and are fixed forms – but among others – of the irony. I then strive to follow the way in with this non formal definition is maintained by paying attention – until Jena romanticism – to the analysis of the communication at work in the reflexions on irony. André Gide’s fictional work displaying a great variety of forms of irony and being imbued with secret, both biographical and sexual, is read as questioning this control of dangerous socialisation and as laying out, beneath the notion of collaboration, a reflexion on literary communication. On the other hand André Gide’s work is reinterpreted in the perspective of a history of irony in the nineteenth century. The antiphrasis is the centre of perception of irony: to the figure of Voltaire is attached to the idea of taunting the ideal, which constitutes a semantic weight conditioning the adaptation of different ironic traditions to the French framework.

My thesis examines the nature of contemporary fictional narration and explores its relations to other types of narration - mainly texts where educational or informative function prevails over the aesthetic one. The whole work is divided into four parts. The first part is theoretical; it sets up basic areas of interest and names methods, tools and models that will be tested on selected examples from Slavonic literatures. The second part analyses spatial and temporal relations of fictional narrative. Chapter 2.1 treats time and space in a novel mostly from the compositional point of view (based on the example of Sasha Sokolov's A School for Fools), while in the next chapter, focusing on ideational interconnections between literary and social- political utopias, both fictionality and temporality are understood more broadly than mere narrative categories: they serve as certain points of connection between the immanent occurrence of meaning in the "world of text" and its historical background. The third part continues in this direction, only what we mean by context here is not the collective historical background, but an individual sphere of everyday life. Our focus switches to two genres standing on the boundary of literary fiction and non-fiction - personal correspondence and a travel journal (travelogue). The...

La tesi si propone di indagare l’intertestualità dantesca nell’opera volgare di Matteo Maria Boiardo. Il fenomeno è già stato oggetto di studi – indirizzati soprattutto al poema cavalleresco, e in misura minore (specie negli ultimi anni) al canzoniere lirico – che si sono mossi però nell’alveo dell’impostazione strutturalista, con una considerazione della memoria poetica da un punto di vista formalista e tipologico. Questa corrente ha consentito sviluppi importanti negli studi filologici, ma porta a vedere il fatto letterario staccato dal suo contesto di riferimento. Se questo esito in Italia è stato arginato da una forte base storicista, va detto che gli studi sulle riprese poetiche hanno però vissuto una situazione particolare. Da una parte, infatti, lo strutturalismo fra anni ’60 e ’70 ha imposto anche in Italia, attraverso una serie di importanti lavori, il suo modo di trattare la questione, senza poi che il successivo approdo semiotico incidesse in maniera significativa. Dall’altra, la reazione di chi voleva agganciare il fenomeno al dato storico ha riportato il problema all’impostazione erudita della critica delle fonti, privilegiando la raccolta dati da mettere in relazione con le informazioni sulla storia della tradizione e della circolazione. L’obbiettivo di questa tesi è fare un passo avanti, nella convinzione che per lo studio di questi fenomeni di riuso sia la circolazione manoscritta che i dati testuali e formali vadano letti in una piena prospettiva semiotica: guardare ai fenomeni di tradizione e trasmissione testuale nell’ottica dei processi ricettivi, e considerare le scelte di memoria poetica come atti comunicativi, con un valore pragmatico. La ricerca ha l’intento di giungere ad una maggior comprensione del rapporto del dotto poeta umanistico con il modello dantesco, un’interpretazione più chiara delle strategie di riuso, determinate dal particolare modo di leggere la Commedia nel contesto specifico, e perciò attraverso un preciso filtro fra quelli disponibili al tempo. Accanto all’insieme di informazioni filologiche sulle attestazioni manoscritte nelle biblioteche del tempo, l’indagine qui condotta consente – anche da un punto di vista che potremmo definire attributivo – di indicare in Benvenuto da Imola l’esegeta di riferimento per Boiardo e il suo pubblico, proprio perché l’osservazione ravvicinata dei testi e dei loro legami fa emergere questa tradizione interpretativa come la più attiva nell’elaborazione boiardesca rivolta ai lettori. Il lavoro non ha preso le mosse da un afflato teorico, teso a riconcettualizzare l’intertestualità, ma da un intento di chiarificazione sui testi e alcuni loro aspetti che non sembravano però trovare una spiegazione soddisfacente all’interno del quadro metodologico diffuso. Il lavoro, allora, ha assunto poco alla volta anche una vena metodologica sorta dall’osservazione dei fenomeni in modo nuovo. E così, accanto all’indagine storico-letteraria, e in stretta relazione con essa, è stato possibile avanzare alcune proposte ermeneutiche sui meccanismi intertestuali in base alle dinamiche della comunicazione letteraria. E nelle pagine che seguono il percorso si articola attorno a nuclei diversi ma interconnessi: da una parte la riflessione generale a carattere semiotico sui fenomeni di memoria poetica, che vengono concettualizzati grazie agli apporti di discipline come la pragmatica; segue una ricognizione storica sulle modalità di lettura e ricezione del modello dantesco – e non solo – in base alla circolazione dei testi e dei loro apparati esegetici; si arriva poi al nucleo del lavoro con l’affondo diretto su opere e paratesti esegetici con le loro relazioni, che si instaurano all’interno del laboratorio d’autore e poi da lì arrivano al pubblico.