Heteroglossia in G.H. Musengezi's "The Honourable MP"

ABSTRACT: Shakespeare, the 17th century Universal and Humanist Bardic figure has sown his transnational seeds throughout time and space through the ample usage of appropriations in the literary sphere. While Alexander Huang posits that “the idea that Shakespeare belongs to the world has become a cliché” (Huang, 2006), Linda Hutcheon pinpoints that Shakespeare offer a heteroglossic understanding of the postmodernist concern to grasp the what (Forms), Who? Why? (Adapters), How? (Audiences), Where? When? (Contexts)(Hutcheon, 2006). The fabula, that is, the story or the plot, being the googol of any text has opened up the avenues for Shakespeare’s plays to be appropriated and adapted in a palimpsest literary, media, games, cartoons, and musical comedies on a multi-global arena. Shakespearean appropriations have spread their tentacles to Mauritius, Canada, Italy, Bulgaria, South Africa, USA, U.K, Japan, Caribbean islands, France, Czechoslovakia, Tunisia, India to name a few. Though appropriations demand a lot of effort in preserving the 17th aura, gist and zeitgeist, its complexity brings about polyphonic receptions according to the context, race, age, language, culture, politics, religion and society. Keywords: Shakespeare, humanist, transnational, heteroglossic, palimpsest, appropriation, polyphonic, zeitgeist, gist, postmodernist.

Gabriella Mazzon and Luisa Fodde (eds.) Historical perspectives on forms of English dialogue. Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2012

This paper focuses on how the language of play-texts has changed in tandem with their contexts. In the first part of the paper, I will consider three aspects of context: (1) the play-text and its relationship with performance; (2) theatrical context, specifically the relationship between the stage and the physical setting of the theatre and the audience; and (3) the discoursal context, including the roles of the participants. The overall purpose of the next section, section 2, is to point out that there have been huge contextual changes, changes which are likely to have shaped the play-text. In the following section, section 3, I will consider three aspects of discourse: (1) turn-taking (speaker change and overlap; the timing of turns; turn signalling); (2) repetitive elements and adjacency pairs; and (3) pragmatic noise (especially the case of AH). The overall purpose of this section is to consider whether there have been changes in the language of the play-text, changes which may have come about as a consequence of the contextual changes. I will not be tracking how all these aspects have changed step-by-step over the years, but instead throughout I will compare present-day plays with early modern plays, in both cases concentrating mainly on comedies. In support of my arguments, I will report some of my earlier work, notably corpus-based work, undertaken with Jane Demmen (especially, Culpeper and Demmen 2011) and Merja Kytӧ (especially, Culpeper and Kytӧ 2010). Although I have been researching the language of plays for 25 years, this paper affords me the first opportunity to put some of the various pieces together, in order to see the larger picture of change.

I. Abstract: This paper makes an earnest attempt to enquire into the serious epistemological and linguistic dilemmas a translator (the present author himself) had been fortunate enough to encounter with, while endeavouring to translate some plays composed in multilingual spaces, with affiliations to the peculiar tradition of 'native' or 'indigenous' theatre in India, into Malayalam language, the native tongue of Kerala State. These plays were originally written in their respective vernaculars or the playwrights' native languages, and later translated into English mostly by the authors themselves or rarely in some special cases, by some other creative translators. Translating the genre of drama that realizes into life in performance textuality into the partisan literary textuality was the first task of the translator. The amount of difficulty in considering plays as literary texts and to translate them from a non-existent supposed/deficient identity into a different linguistic medium of its origin had substantially increased because, the plays the author experimented upon belonged to the highly individualized theatre cannon conspicuous with a sharp identity that has been celebrated as 'Theatre of Roots' which was instrumental to establish native or indigenous drama tradition as one among the most important theatre schools in Indian theatre history. To make an observation here that may cause some controversy, 'Theatre of Roots' movement had obviously succeeded in fulfilling the responsibility Indian theatre history entrusted with it by establishing itself as the first theatre cannon supported by sufficient theorization, the second being 'Indian English Urban Theatre'. II. III. As we are often reminded of, drama being a visual art offers a lot of constraints to read and understand when embodied as literary texts. While reading, the reader is supposed to imagine a lot about the implications of paratexts consisting of the gestures and reactions of the characters on which most of the action of the play depend on. Improvisations that take shape in and induced by the PAGE 1

English Text Construction, 2013

Folium, 2024

This paper will focus on how Shakespeare often introduces characters with language challenges or difficulties in his plays. These come in a range of forms and include, to name but a few, malapropisms with unintentional comic effect, non-native English speakers whose mispronunciation of English provides much amusement and misunderstandings and various other garblers of the English language. These verbal failings are usually viewed as Shakespeare poking fun at the ignorance of commoners or foreigners, in contrast, of course, to the more eloquent voices of their social superiors. One can, however, view these utterances as a subversive means of ridiculing or deflating the pompous language of the rich and powerful. Perhaps these garblers are yet another kind of wise clown or fool used by Shakespeare, so effectively in the comedies in particular, to comment insightfully on the events transpiring on stage.

Mediterranean Journal of Humanities, 2013

This paper aims at briefly demonstrating how the major procedures of discourse analysis (i.e. speech acts, presuppositions, and the cooperative principle in conversation and general discourse relations) may be fruitfully applied to drama dialogue. Such a kind of purposive approach, in turn, makes it rather reasonable to distinguish between literary criticism and theatrical analysis, but not so that one is deemed to be superior to the other. "Co-operative Labour Division" is crucial because a production of a play is in effect "a play-an interpretation of it". In terms of this context, literary criticism should also take the text as its object of investigation and develop techniques of textual analysis to cope with the implied aspects embedded within a set of linguistic or sociological conventions. All this does suggest that the most important sets of linguistic conventions for interpretation are those which govern language use. This effect means treating the text as a series of communicative acts, not just as a configuration of elements belonging to various levels of language.

2020

The purpose of the present article is to investigate Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997) within a theoretical context set by Linda Hutcheon’s definition of parody. In Hutcheon’s view, parody is a repetition with critical distance. Hucheonian parody allows the adapted work to challenge and ironically transform the form and the content of the hypotext in order not to ridicule but to create. The central questions of this research are: How does Jack Maggs employ Hutcheonian parody within the broader postmodern narrative discourse to view its source text with a critical distance? And, how does Hutcheonian parody engage Jack Maggs in contemporary social debates? In order to answer these questions, the research applies various aspects of Hutcheonian parody to Carey’s novel. The present paper demonstrates that Carey’s Jack Maggs recontextualizes Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1860) in a new Australian setting. It also argues that the novel, which has mostly received positive responses and...

Journal of Language and Translation, 2014

This study aims at investigating voices in the Persian translation of Katherine Mansfield's The Garden Party. In so doing, after a stylistic analysis of the voices in the original is done, it is argued by the authors that the polyphonous nature of the story is to a great extent due to the deployment of various sociolects in the story as well as the choice of Free Indirect Discourse (FID) as the mode of narration. Then, considering these stylistic features, a comparison is made between the original text and translation. In the light of the comparison, it is revealed that the range of voices heard from the translation is limited compared to the original. This diminishing of the voices in the translation is argued that is partly attributable to the observed decrease in the range of sociolects in the translation as well as the partial failure in reproducing the grammatical features of FID. All in all, this study adds one more piece of evidence to the hypothesis made in the discussio...

A play is meant for stage performance. Translating a dramatic work is in many ways different from translating the other genres of literature, for the language spoken in a play is colloquial and not necessarily formal. It is not simply an act of transferring linguistic or verbal rhetoric per se; it is an act of cultural shift and remaking, involving cross-cultural interaction of homogeneity, and adaptation of cultural heterogeneity. It is both a linguistic and cultural exchange of conversations and dialogues. Drama translation involves actability of the characters, performativity of the roles, clarity of thoughts, and brevity of speeches. Time, place and action, as well as the stage and the audience, are to receive special consideration as far as drama translation is concerned. The paper investigates the extent to which translation theory gives rise to the strategy of 'intentional betrayal' to attain the 'translatability' of the 'untranslatability.' The paper again attempts to validate the analogical dichotomy between theory and practice in translation studies, focusing on the dynamics of translation based on a translational process of loss and gain.

This paper analyses the dramatic text of William Shakespeare"s plays namely Titus Andronicus and Coriolanus from the standpoint of Louis Althusser"s theoretical framework provided in the notion of Ideological State Apparatus and Interpellation. The paper foregrounds that ideological state apparatuses in the said plays work alongside the coercive arm of the state in subjecting protagonists of the plays in throes of processes of Interpellation. The effect of such interpellation and operation of ideological state apparatuses is the ascension of structures in dominance in the plays Titus Andronicus and Coriolanus by Shakespeare.