Strategies of Ambiguity.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bauer, Matthias.

Contributor:

Zirker, Angelika.

Series:

Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature Series

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (375 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

2023.

Milton : Taylor & Francis Group, 2023.

Summary:

There has been a growing awareness that ambiguity is not just a necessary evil of the language system resulting, for instance, from its need for economy or, by contrast, a blessing that allows writers to involve readers in endless games of assigning meaning to a literary text. The present volume contributes to overcoming this alternative by focusing on strategies of ambiguity (and the strategic avoidance of ambiguity) both at the production and the reception end of communication. The authors examine ways in which speakers and hearers may use ambiguous words, structures, references, and situations to pursue communicative ends. For example, the question is asked what it actually means when a listener strategically perceives ambiguity, which may happen both synchronically (e.g. in conversations) as well as diachronically (e.g. when strategically ambiguating biblical texts in order to make them applicable to moral lessons). Another example is the question of whether ambiguity awareness increases the strategic use of ambiguity in prosody. Moreover, the authors enquire not only into the effects of ambiguous meanings but also into the strategic use of ambiguity as such, for example, as a response to censorship or as a means of provoking irritation. This volume brings together several contributions from linguistics, literary studies, rhetoric, psychology, and theology, and it aims to provide a systematic approach to the strategic production and perception of ambiguity in a variety of texts and contexts. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Contents:

Cover

Half Title

Series

Title

Copyright

Contents

List of Figures

List of Contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Strategy Meets Ambiguity

I Textual Strategies

1 Enduring Ambiguity

2 The (Strategic) Ambiguity of Poem Titles

3 The Strategic Use of Ambiguous Images in Multisemiotic Textures

4 Radical Text Theory and Textual Ambiguity: With Two Analyses of Dadaist Anti-Text Strategies

5 The Case of Epistemic Ambiguity and Its Strategic Production: Connecting Text and Cognition

6 Political Ambivalence and Dramatic Ambiguity: Bertolt Brecht's Lehrstück Die Maßnahme (1930/31)

II Productive Perception

7 (Non)Strategic Production Planning and Ambiguity: Experimental Evidence

8 Reading Aloud Strategic Ambiguities in Poetic Texts

9 Does Reanalysis Need Ambiguity?

10 Are Hearer Strategies Strategic?: Relevance Theory and the Strategicness of Hearer Action in Everyday Language and Language Change

11 Ambiguation as Rhetorical Strategy in Sermo 38 by Maurice of Sully

12 "To Define Is to Distrust": Intertextual Ambiguity in Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy and James Joyce's Ulysses

13 Sacred Drama, the Law, and Ambiguities of Form in Nineteenth-Century England

14 Annotating Ambiguity Across Disciplines: The Tübingen Interdisciplinary Corpus of Ambiguity Phenomena (TInCAP)

Index.

Notes:

CC BY-NC-ND

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9781000987843

1000987841