Usually, we think of punctuation as a set of rules for protecting the meaning of a text or making ideas explicit. The writers discussed in this session have another idea: they want to use punctuation (or avoid it) to create new meanings in their texts. When someone noticeably breaks what we think of as the good rules, the result can be accepted as art, but it must be seen as purposeful rather than by accident, ignorance, or carelessness. The authors discussed in this session stretch the rules related to punctuation differently while trying to achieve meanings that their writing in the usually accepted way might not reveal.
Gabrielle Kiriloff
Title: An Infinitude of Associations: Computational Approaches to the Rhetoric of Punctuation
The title reflects on Adorno’s comments on the use of ellipsis. In literary genres, punctuation is often used to represent emotional and psychological states, according to Anne Toner (2015). But the rhetorical effects of punctuation vary based on whether the punctuation occurs within dialogue or narration. An ellipsis within dialogue may signal a pause in conversation but within narration may hint at the associative nature of human thought. In order to see what was really happening, Gabrielle Kiriloff looked at a corpus of 3,000 nineteenth and twentieth-century novels (the Chicago and Chadwyck-Healey corpora) to study ellipses, dashes, parentheses, and question marks.
She found definite patterns of meaning which depended upon where they were used. Ellipsis increased between 1840 and 1920. Despite the association of the dash with more modern styles (Dickinson, Joyce), the use of the dash declined in the corpus. The link between punctuation and narration was the most suggestive. Each of the four forms of punctuation studied increased WITHIN NARRATION at the turn of the century, even if it diminished overall. Parentheticals and question marks often drew attention to the narrating voice and served a paradoxical function. The increase in the use of these forms of punctuation calls into question the notion that obtrusive narrators diminished at the turn of the century (Lubbock, 1921).
A good example of the growing use of punctuation to elicit new meanings is a work by Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne (The Wind Bloweth: 1922) that contains 920 ellipses.
Busra Copuroglu
Title: Spectres of Punctuation: Beckett Performing Erasure
Theodor Adorno in his article Punctuation Marks writes that they acquire an expression of their own. Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology remarks that punctuation is the best example of a nonphonetic mark in writing. Martin Heidegger develops and conceptualizes the concept of UNDER ERASURE in his Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics as a writing practice and employs it as a device to demonstrate the multiplication of meaning in a text in some unusual way: he prints a word, but then crosses it out and leaves it. The word is both absent and present.
Some works by Samuel Beckett are classic examples of Heidegger’s idea. A number of Beckett’s works, Ping, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstword Ho, are devoid of commas and could be interpreted as an emancipation of reading space and rhythm that engenders a new mode of reading. (The verbal text is constituted by concealment as much as by revelation--says Gayatri Spivak, in the preface of Derrida's Of Grammatology.) Beckett’s lack of commas can be interpreted as the emancipation of space and rhythm that engenders a different mode of reading and makes the texts acquire different meanings as readers, possibly, add their own commas. Beckett performs writing UNDER ERASURE by cancelling the commas and letting the preceding and proceeding words instead set a different rhythm of reading.
Lindsey Seatter
Title: Accidentals and the Narrative Pause: Affective Punctuation in the Female Authored Romantic Novel
An article by Jacqueline Labbe (2015) argues that the warp and weft of literary cross-reference is exemplified in how the writings of one author are meshed and manipulated into the work of others. Using Labbe’s theory we can see that the foundation of Jane Austen’s style—the fabric of her text—can be observed in the writings of Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Mary Brunton. They use particular sequences of punctuation to mimic vocal expression and stream of consciousness in their writing.
Kathryn Sutherland (1999) argues for the significance of accidentals—punctuation, spelling, capitalization, italicization, and contractions—as lexical and syntactical conduits for communicating aural traces in a written text. While Sutherland asserts that irregular punctuation is a characteristic of Austen’s narrative discourse, it is actually a trait shared by an influential network of Romantic women novelists. Using em-dashes, ellipses, question marks, and exclamation points, these female authors attempt to simulate and amplify voice. Employing accidentals judiciously, Burney, Edgeworth, and Brunton embody a narrative non-linearity in their oscillation between the perspective of the character and that of the narrator—a narrative mode later recognized as free indirect discourse that was developed and popularized by Austen. In effect, these authors were using a narrative technique that helped facilitate the emergence of the modern novel.