The Pragmatics of Literary Interaction in James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

Citation

Leonardi B (2011) The Pragmatics of Literary Interaction in James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. In: Kaufhold K, McCulloch S & Tominc A (eds.) Papers from the Lancaster University Postgraduate Conference in Linguistics and Language Teaching. Papers from LAEL PG 2010, 5. LAEL PG 2010: Lancaster University Postgraduate Conference in Linguistics and Language Teaching, Lancaster, 05.07.2010-05.07.2010. Lancaster: Lancaster University, pp. 92-108. http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/pgconference/v05.htm

Abstract
Hogg's Confessions was fiercely criticised by the Edinburgh post-Enlightenment literati who considered his writing unsophisticated. A literary-pragmatic investigation, however, reveals Hogg's strategic use of conversational principles through which he conveys additional, subversive meanings. Politeness theories, in fact, demonstrate that Hogg's Confessions may have been perceived as a Face Threatening Act against the positive face of bourgeois women. A cognitive approach based on relevance theory, on the other hand, admits the simultaneous validity of both the psychological and supernatural interpretations of the character Gil-Martin. Indeed, Hogg consistently flouts the maxim of Manner as described in Grice's Cooperative Principle, thus creating areas of ambiguity which readers interpret in accordance with their personal cognitive environment.