Current Postdoctoral Research
12.06.2024
| Dr. Catherine Laliberté - The Language of Historical Fiction |
| The study of telecinematic language is currently being rediscovered as able to bring forth nuances to our understanding of language, since performance constitutes an intrinsic part of language use and human behavior. My project aims to contribute to this burgeoning perspective by investigating language use in a specific genre, namely English-language historical fiction. Historical fiction is particularly interesting from a linguistic point of view in that it makes use of various strategies to convey pastness which function by producing estrangement effects – that is, by creating a dissonance between the “real” world and the imagined world in which the story takes place. Authors themselves often speak of the genre as a balancing act between portraying language in the past in a way that is “accurate” and the necessity of using language that is sufficiently familiar to avoid jeopardizing communication with their readers (Baker 2021; Brayfield and Sprott 2013). Works of historical fiction being linguistically distinctive implies that the genre’s features can be pinpointed in systematic ways empirically, using corpus-linguistic methods. The first phase of this project will entail the compilation of a large representative corpus of present-day televisual historical fiction, which can then be analyzed using a diverse range of quantitative methods. The aim is, on the one hand, to explore known or assumed features of pseudo-historical language, such as the overrepresentation of certain modal verbs (cf. Laliberté, Keller & Wengler fc), and, on the other hand, to uncover more abstract patterns that distinguish this genre from others, such as the over- or under-representation of certain word classes and semantic categories (cf. Castro 2023). These steps seek to go beyond the analysis of individual works, which is typical of much of current research, and capture a wide range of characteristics of the genre generally. Hence, this first part of the project has the potential to improve our understanding of performed language and its methodological implications in corpus linguistics (see e.g. Egan 2019). Building on these findings, the second phase of the project will focus on the relationships between language, fiction and history. Accounting for the role of language in portraying the past on television can also illuminate the perceived relationships between language and the past. Television, especially, is the main vehicle for the packaging of history for the general public and plays a significant role in shaping people's understanding of their past (cf. de Groot 2008). Historians such as Alison Landsberg (2015) and Robert A. Rosenstone (2024) have argued that telecinematic historical fiction is legitimate historiography: fiction is able to spark “historical thinking” and memory formation – that is, it is able to fulfill the same cognitive and affective aims as academic history-writing. It follows that popular telecinematic representations of historical language, may, too, trigger linguistic-historical thinking and affective engagement with the history of English. This is, I believe, most obviously demonstrated by public discourse around the language of popular films and television shows. The second phase of the project will analyze this discourse in order to theorize the public’s reception of the language of historical fiction and the ways in which language history, as a construct, is reflected upon by non-linguists. The project therefore intends to be relevant across disciplines, from linguistics and literary theory to public history. |