ABSTRACT
Mary Louise Pratt in Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse (1977) shifts the emphasis from Culler’s reader-oriented theory of interpretive practice to the general question of the relation between speech acts, their participants and their context. She argues that the Formalists, particularly their late twentieth-century representative, R.Jakobson, base their methods and assumptions upon the limiting and restrictive concept of autonomous textuality. In short, the signifying abilities of poetic language are rescued from intrageneric collusion with those of non-poetic language by the uniquely depersonalised nature of the poetic artefact. She notes that ‘the overriding tendency to disguise all notions of intention, perception, and value by converting them into textual attributes has a conspicuous stylistic effect on almost all formalist and structuralist writings’ (p. 74). The poem is an ‘it’ with ‘its’ own characteristics, intentions, impositions, derivations, purposes, possessions, effecting the apparent exclusion of the poet (his/hers) and the reader (ours, yours, etc.): the left-hand column of the sliding scale subjugates the right; diagram 2 encroaches upon diagram 1. Pratt’s overall objective is to refocus the attention of critic and linguist upon the continuum of expressive and receptive cohabitation in which literary and non-literary texts share ‘context-dependent’ features.
The poetic text, which ‘forms itself’ and ‘orients itself’ according to its own intentions and values, is every bit as mechanistic, as divorced from the reality of human communication as the ‘ordinary’ utterance that ‘transmits merely information about the outside world’.
(p. 75)