Exploring aspects of humour and irony in literary discourse: A pragmatic stylistic approach

Abstract

The paper explores a variety of ways in which humour is attached to social and cultural contexts. In an attempt to unpack humour in literary texts, an approach of pragmatic stylistics has been adopted and ways of applying traditional pragmatic concepts and principles in literary discourse analysis considered. The study exemplifies linguistic interaction involving only written language, where paralanguage and extra-linguistic cues for interpretation of humour are lost. Main research problems include 1) perception and understanding of aspects of (satirical) humour in literary discourse, 2) aspects of mutual understanding and shared background knowledge, 3) Raskin's Semantic Script Theory of Humour, 4) the notion of oppositeness employed in creating humour in single jokes and building humour as sequences of oppositeness and 5) pragmatic approaches to irony and the Co-operative and Politeness Principle. The language material analysed is a collection of short stories by Doris Lessing, London Observed (1993).