How Words Make Things Happen

Written by a leading literary critic, this engaging volume studies the words of a wide range of speakers and writers to explore the nature of persuasion, the effects of words, and how words can lead to action.

Sooner or later, our words take on meanings other than we intended. How Words Make Things Happen suggests that the conventional idea of persuasive rhetoric (which assumes a speaker's control of calculated effects) and the modern idea of literary autonomy (which assumes that 'poetry makes nothing happen') together have produced a misleading account of the relations between words and human action. Words do make things happen. But they cannot be counted on to produce the result they intend.

This volume studies examples from a range of speakers and writers and offers close readings of their words. Chapter 1 considers the theory of speech-acts propounded by J.L. Austin. 'Speakers Who Convince Themselves' is the subject of chapter 2, which interprets two soliloquies by Shakespeare's characters and two by Milton's Satan. The oratory of Burke and Lincoln come in for extended treatment in chapter 3, while chapter 4 looks at the rival tendencies of moral suasion and aestheticism in the poetry of Yeats and Auden. The final chapter, a cause of controversy when first published in the London Review of Books, supports a policy of unrestricted free speech against contemporary proposals of censorship. Since we cannot know what our own words are going to do, we have no standing to justify the banishment of one set of words in favour of another.

David Bromwich is among the most accomplished literary critics writing in the United States today. More than that, he is a major intellectual voice there. He brings considerable reserves of historical knowledge and philosophical insight to the various issues that concern him...his work extends beyond the confines of any disciplinary boundary....He is a chanllenging and miltifaceted thinker, but he is distinguished, above all, by his moral seriousness.

Autorentext
David Bromwich is a scholar of British and American romanticism. He is Sterling Professor of English at Yale University, where he has taught since 1988. Among his books are Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic, Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth's Poetry of the 1790s, and The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke.

Inhalt

• Preface

• 1: Does Persuasion Occur? (Austin, Aristotle, Cicero)

• 2: Speakers Who Convince Themselves (Shakespeare, Milton, James)

• 3: Pledging Emotion for Conviction (Burke, Lincoln, Bagehot)

• 4: Persuasion and Responsibility (Yeats, Auden, Orwell)

• 5: What Should We Be Allowed to Say? (Rushdie, Mill, Savio)