Personal Blogs

I am currently reading The Mersault Investigation (Daoud 2014, trans 2015).  This is a telling of the story of Camus' L'Etranger from the point of view of the brother of the murdered Arab.  There is the following a very interesting passage, where the narrator discusses the way that he uses a different language (I assume French) from his mother (I assume she speaks Arabic):

"And for a long time, she would make me feel impossibly ashamed of her - and later it pushed me to learn a language that could serve as a barrier between her frenzies and me.  Yes, the language.  The one I read, the one I speak today, the one that's not hers.  Hers is rich, full of imagery, vitality, sudden jolts and improvisations, but not too big in precision.  Mama's grief lasted so long that she needed a new idiom to express it in.  In her language, she spoke like a prophetess, recruited extemporaneous mourners, and cried out against the double outrage that consumed her life: a husband swallowed up by air, a son by water.  I had to learn a language other than that one.  To survive.  And it is the one I'm speaking at the moment.  Starting witrh my presumed fifthteenth birthday, when we withdrew to Hadjout, I became a stern and serious scholar.  Books and your hero's language gradually enables me to name things differently and to organise the world with my own words"  (page 37)

The extract shows how people can choose languages or varieties of language to mark difference or, in more extreme cases, create barriers.  Here, he seems to want to make a barrier and mark the diffeernce between himself and his mother.  He seems to be wary of her emotion and links this to the language and this gives him the motive to use French, which is seen as more precise.  The precision also seems to be used in contrast with the "richness" of his mother's langugae,  It is also interesting that he refers to being able to "organise the world with his own words".  Again this might be a contrast with the world that her mother lives in (and perhaps the word "improvisations" is significant, suggesting unpredictability.

This passage seems to have relevance to many of the OU's languages courses such as L161 and E301.

Reference:

Daoud K (2014, trans 2015) The Mersault Investigation London: Oneworld

I have just been reading a translation of an unusual book by Pessoa (1991) and was particularly intrigued by some thoughts on grammar towards the end of it.  Many of them seem to relate interestingly to concepts covered in E303 and E301.

The first is "grammar is a tool not a law" (page 231).  This seems to relate to the ideas of SFL where there is such an emphasis on the functions that language serves.

There is then a long paragraph where he suggests that "someone who understands what is involved in speaking often needs to make a transitive verb intransitive and vice versa" and that "If I wanted to talk about my existence as an entity that both directs and forms itself.....I would have to inventa transitive form and say grammatically supreme 'I exist me'" (page 231).  This quote is interesting as "I exist me" seems similar to the kinds of structures used in spoken English (Carter 2004).  Pessoa also seems to be explicitly linking grammatical deviance to creative and literary texts.

There is then another call for appropriate deviance "Only those who are unable to think what they feel obey grammatical rules.  Someone who knows how to express themselves can use those rules as he pleases.  There's a story they tell of Sigismund, King of Rome, who, having made a grammatical mistake in a public speech , said to the person who pointed this out "I am King of Rome and therefore above grammar" (page 231-232). 

These points resonated with many of my thoughts recently.  For example, I was thinking of this as I heard David Cameron recently say "I are...."  I have not seem this referred to in the press and I slightly wonder whether he was using the mistake/deviance as a tool for expressing (perhaps manufactured) anger about the recent EU bill.

Carter R (2004) Language and creativity: The art of common talk London: Routledge

Pessoa F (translated 1991) The Book of Disquiet London: Serpent's Tail.

(This is an adapted version of a posting on my blog at http://patrickdandrews.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/creative-language-use-in-documentary.html )

I  recently came across the Sun Ra documentary "A Joyful Noise".  It seemed an interesting time to see it as it provides examples of language use that are creative just as students on E301 (The Art of English) are thinking about creativity in spoken language in preparation for an assignment.  It also allowed me to think about my interests in creativity in jazz and language and how they might intersect.

It is, to some extent a companion piece to my posting about creative language in a football podcast .  Here are some initial thoughts about creative uses of language in this documentary.  These suggest that there is a great deal of overlap between the ways that he presents himself musically, visually and through his use of language.

It is worth providing some contextual information about Sun Ra as this seems to affect the content and the style of what he says in the film.  He was born Herman Blount but claimed to have come from Saturn (Cook and Morton 2008) and this is presumably where the name comes from.  As a result, many of his compositions have a space theme with titles like "Saturn" and "Space is the Place".  There is also an interest in ancient Egypt (and this perhaps reflects the Ra part of the name) as can be seen from the film and song titles like "Sunset on the River Nile".  The film also gives a flavour of his music with the mixture of avant garde and rather traditional styles.

There is stylised repetition throughout much of the documentary and this occurs in short extracts but also at the level of the whole film.  In terms of repetition at a local level, there is an example after about 5 minutes.  Here, there is a call and response passage where Sun Ra speaks with his group repeating what he has said (e.g "I have many names" "many names").  This is a rather unusual version of how repetition can be used creatively as part of pattern forming (Carter 2004).  He also repeats "I have many names" like the poetic repetitions of many poems.There is thus a kind of foregrounding due to grammatical and semantic parallelism (Maybin and Pearce 2006).  This foregrounding seems to have the effect of making the viewer think about the importance of names.  The names seem to be presenting a particular identity and the identity seems to be presented as complex because the names are varied and unusual.

 His asserted identity as a complex and enigmatic man is reinforced by a pun.  He says "Some call me Mr Ra.  Others call me Mister E".  This seems to also refer to "mystery" and this seems to be more obvious in the way that his band members repeat the word.  Here the pun seems to reinforce the enigmatic image presented by his name, the music, the clothes.  It seems that here the language used is working in conjunction with other aspects of how he presents himself.  This seems to have parallels to Eckert and McConnell-Ginet’s (1999 in McCrae and Swann 2006) observations about how language use combines with other features to present identity. 

 He again uses a pun at about 11.15 minutes.  He makes the link between history and his story.  His story is also contrasted with my story. It is possible that this is related to his identity as a "Black American" musician (Cook and Morton (2008) refer to this in their discussion of his supposed origins) and the ways that much history taught in schools does not reflect the history that is relevant to his life.  This identification with Black America reappears at about 19 and a half minutes when he comments that he sees "The White House" but does not see "The Black House".

The theme of history/his story is repeated at the end.  He consciously repeats "They say that history repeats itself, they say that history repeats itself, repeats itself.  But history is his story.  It's not my story.  What's your story?"  Interestingly, this rather artfully repetitive language comes just after an infectiously repetitive tune.  These repetitions of themes throughout the documentary perhaps seem to reflect the ways that musical themes are used to provide structure to music.

At around 17 minutes, it is the Egyptian interest that comes to the fore and there is again a particular use of repetition.  He sets up one idea before giving a different perspective as he says "Somehow ancient Egypt is thought of as a kingdom of bondage but it would be better to say the kingdom of discipline".  This seems interesting in several ways.  One is that it reminds us that politicians and PR consultants can use euphemisms to show unpleasant details in a more favourable light.  Secondly, one of his most famous compositions is called "Discipline" so it raises the possibility that this is the discipline being referred to.

There is also a metaphor (Cameron 2006) when he says that the" stones speak through vibrations of beauty".  Although many metaphors can be stale, this one does not seem to be and seems to be part of the general language play of his comments (Cook 2006).  This language play becomes more apparent when he plays with "ocracy" endings (around 23:30).  Mythocracy seems to be a neologism.  Interestingly this is followed by some very "free" music.  Both the word and the music seem to have a schema refreshing role.

There are intertextual elements (Maybin and Pearce 2006) as he says "We hold these myths to be potential, they hold their truths to be self evident but our myth is not self evident because it is a mystery. I am not part of history, I'm more a part of the mystery, which is my story."  Here he seems to be referring to the Declaration of Independence and his own punning of "mystery/my story". So, the references refer back to a knowledge that he assumes the audience has as well as what they have seen earlier in the film.

These are just some initial observations on how the language used in this film have a relationship with the musical and visual elements.  Sun Ra seems to use language to reflect the identity he has created for himself.  Much of the language seems to refresh the schemata of the viewers/listeners.  There also seem to be parallels between the use of language and the music he plays with references to the past but also to the new (as in the coining of new forms such as "mythocracy").  There are repetitions and revoicings of words and ideas that also seem to reflect the way that jazz tends to work through musicians improvising around themes.

References:

Cameron L (2006) "Metaphor in Everyday Language" in Maybin J and Swann J (eds) The Art of English: Literary Creativity Basingstoke: Palgrave

Carter R (2004) Language and Creativity: The Art of Common Talk Abingdon: Routledge.

Cook G (2006) "Why play with language" in Maybin J and Swann J (eds) The Art of English: Everyday Creativity Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Cook R and Morton B (2008) The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings (Ninth Edition) London: Penguin.

McCrae S and Swann J (2006 "Putting on the Style" in Maybin J and Swann J (eds) The Art of English: Everyday Creativity Basingstoke: Palgrave

Maybin J and Pearce (2006) "Literature and Creativity in English" in Goodman S and O'Halloran K The Art of English: Literary Creativity Basingstoke: Palgrave

My first experience of OU Live today (an E301 tutorial).  Overall, it seemed quite similar to Elluminate but more people seemed to have problems with sound quality.  However, this might have been chance.

Due to circumstances, I had two Elluminate sessions on the same day last Saturday (one should have been a face to face tutorial but was changed to Elluminate as the venue was closed and many students would have found it difficult to get to Bristol anyway with the transport chaos).

It was very much more tiring than a similar amount of face to face teaching would be and the intensity of Elluminate teaching was very apparent.