I’ve always thought that it would do the field of linguistics (and the humanities generally) a whole lot of good if linguists were also doing literary studies. I’m an old-fashioned philologist in this way and I have never been able to see that much good ever came from separating linguistics and literary studies and language education from each other.
A great novel, which will do more for your understanding of language, migration and human rights in our times than many a learned journal article in the field is Two Caravans by Marina Lewycka. It’s a novel about a group of migrant agricultural workers in the UK. One of the linguistic gems of the novel includes a conversation between a British farmer and a Ukrainian university student, who is picking strawberries on his farm. Irina’s English is quite proficient and the following excerpt is a good example of intercultural miscommunication where the miscommunication is entirely the native speaker’s fault:
He spoke slowly and very loudly, as though I was deaf as well as stupid, waving his hands about.
‘NO GOOD. NO BLOODY GOOD. YOU’VE GOT TO PICK FASTER. ALL FILL UP. FULL. FULL.’ He swept his arms wide, as if to embrace all his pathetic punnets. ‘DO YOU UNDERSTAND?’
No, I didn’t understand – the shouting was flustering me.
‘OTHERWISE YOU’RE DOWN THE ROAD.’
‘Road?’
‘ROAD. DOWN THE BLOODY ROAD. YOU GET IT?’
‘I get blood on road?’
‘NO, YOU SILLY COW, YOU GET ON THE ROAD!’
‘I get silly cow on road?’
‘OH! FORGET IT!’ (p. 35)
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This is such an interesting post, and I’m going to check out this book. I definitely think that connecting language and literature also helps us to understand the role of culture in language. The less we isolate language from its actual use and the people who use it, the better, in my opinion.
The following information might be of your interest:
1. Linguistics & Literary Studies: Interfaces, Encounters, Transfers
(http://www.frias.uni-freiburg.de/lang_and_lit/veranstaltungen/studies-lili)
There may have been a time when linguists and literary scholars were both working side by side, studying a national language and its literature. This affinity between literature and language studies inside the philological disciplines devel¬oped in the late eighteenth century and was deeply rooted in and linked to the na¬tion-building processes at the time… in the first half of the 20th century, structuralism, radically changed this situation… The connection bet¬ween linguistics and literary studies became further attenuated with the diversification of literary and linguistic research in the second half of the twentieth century, particularly with the advent of increasingly computerised mo¬dels in linguistics. For more than forty years, literary research and linguistics have undergone a series of theory shifts which have driven these two halves of philology departments apart…
2. On convergence versus divergence between linguistics and literary studies
(http://www.gxnu.edu.cn/Personal/szliu/Linguistics%20and%20literature.doc)
1) Divergence: literary circle took a skeptical attitude towards the function of linguistics in the study of literary works; linguistics circle overlooked the study of the written language or was wondering around the edge or verge as to whether speech and writing, or langue and parole should be the focus or object in research; two separate disciplines of study.
2) Convergence: brought about in the 1960s with the rise of sociolinguistics, and the introduction of speech act theory and text linguistics; a number of linguists and literary critics have moved from the two extremes to a merge of the two disciplines, with the linguists taking literary language as their subject of investigation, and the critics adopting a linguistic approach; new branch of learning = linguistic stylistics or new stylistics.
3) Stylistics: the study of literary discourse from a linguistic orientation (or to treat literature as discourse, and adopt a linguistic approach) (Widdowson, 1975)
It is generally true today that literary studies and linguistics do not communicate very much with one another. Even though people may say art is larger than life, but in the final analysis art originates from life. Both linguists and literary analysts study language and its social meaning. Literary works, in its own right, are language products of real-life people in a given social historical condition, and meanwhile a constituent part of the particular culture. In humble opinion, bringing together linguistics and literary studies would be valuable to both camps.