The Stylistics of 'You'
Second-Person Pronoun and its Pragmatic Effects
Published on 8. August 2024
Book
Paperback/Softback
268 pages
978-1-108-96404-3 (ISBN)
Description
This book takes 'you', the reader, on board an interdisciplinary journey across genre, time and medium with the second-person pronoun. It offers a model of the various pragmatic functions and effects of 'you' according to different variables and linguistic parameters, cutting across a wide range of genres (ads, political slogans, tweets, news presentation, literary genres etc.), and bringing together print and digital texts under the same theoretical banner. Drawing on recent research into intersubjectivity in neuropsychology and socio-cognition, it delves into the relational and ethical processing at work in the reading of a second-person pronoun narrative. When 'you' takes on its more traditional deictic function of address, the author-reader channel can be opened in different ways, which is explored in examples taken from Fielding, Bronte, Orwell, Kincaid, Grimsley, Royle, Adichie, Bartlett, Auster, and even Spacey's 'creepy' 2018 YouTube video, ultimately foregrounding continuities and contrasts in the positioning of the audience.
Reviews / Votes
'Because it is surprising how the second person may be wrapped up in many guises, and because Sorlin has presented concepts a writer may find helpful in thinking about their relationship with their audience, it is a book that may well be worth diving into.' Linda M. Davis, Technical Communication 'The Stylistics of 'You' is an excellently researched and well-argued volume that should appeal to scholars of address and reference, pragmatics, pronouns, narratology, and the ethics of authorship.' Susan Meredith Burt, LINGUIST List (https://linguistlist.org) 'Sorlin's rigorous mapping of uses of you in a wide-ranging corpus not only demonstrates the utility of her proposed model and its relevance for existing narratological frameworks and theories, but also for future interventions in diverse fields from autotheory, econarratology, trauma narratives to the recent turn against empathy in narrative studies.' Denise Wong, DiegesisMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Edition type
New edition
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
Worked examples or Exercises
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 15 mm
Weight
395 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-108-96404-3 (9781108964043)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
01/2022
Cambridge University Press
€133.50
Shipment within 15-20 days
Person
Sandrine Sorlin is Professor of English Linguistics at University Paul-Valéry - Montpellier (France), specialising in stylistics and pragmatics. Her latest book Language and Manipulation in House of Cards (2016) received an award from the European Society for the Study of English. She co-edited The Pragmatics of Personal Pronouns (2015) and edited Stylistic Manipulation of the Reader in Contemporary Fiction (Bloomsbury 2020). She is also assistant editor of Language and Literature.
Content
1. Theorising the 'you effects'; Part I. Singularising and Sharing: the Dialectics of 'You': 2. George Orwell's Down and out in Paris and London (1933): Putting yourself in the shoes of a tramp; 3. Paul Auster's ordinary life and yours: blendable singularities?; Part II. The Role of 'You' in the Writing of Traumatic Events: 4. Performing 'self-othering' in Winter Birds (1994) by Jim Grimsley; 5. Pronominal 'veering' in Quilt (2010) by Nicholas Royle; Part III. The Author-Reader Channel across Time, Tender, Sex and Race: 6. Two ways of conversing with the reader; 7. Empathy for sexual minorities in Skin Lane by Neil Bartlett (2007); 8. The ethics and politics of the second person in 'postcolonial' writing; Part IV. New Ways of Implicating through the Digital Medium?: 9. From paratext to hypertext: interactivity revisited; 10. Coercing without edifying: Kevin Spacey's 2018 'Creepy' YouTube video explained; Conclusion; References; Index.