The language of A Clockwork Orange: A corpus stylistic approach to Nadsat (original) (raw)
Related papers
Russian-Influenced English in Anthony Burgess's a Clockwork Orange
Russian Linguistic Bulletin, 2019
Throughout the history of world literature, writers have strived to experiment with various literary devices to make their work unique and stand the test of time in a manner that it can continuously be subject toanalysis. A Clockwork Orange, a novel published in 1962, displays language experimentation unlike any other, in which the author has invented a Russian-influenced English vocabulary, Nadsat, that the teenage characters of the book are using in a dystopian future of the English society. Our paper will try to exemplify this aspect and to analyse whether any social or political backdrop had influenced Burgess to undertake such a task or was it just a wordgame that a passionate linguist wanted to formulate.Considering that the novel represents an unexpurgated work of literature, containing a considerable amount of violent scenes, we will discuss the possibility that the aforementioned vocabulary can derive from a vicious youth.
Folia linguistica et litteraria, 2020
Having on its background the topic of youth culture and its language, social disorder and its criticism, the general disruption in society and the pitfalls of social and technological progress in the age of modernism, the present article critically looks at Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange (1962) with a view to analysing character, language and its functions. After a brief introduction to the context of the book’s publication, its genre, and some general remarks on the novelty of the language created in the novel, the article progresses to the presentation of the major sources of this language. The central part of the paper originally approaches Nadsat from a semantic perspective with the aim of testing and validating the functions of Nadsat already identified and further investigating (individual and group) character portrayal as unfolded by the language used. The analysis is based on a quantitative and qualitative research of the Nadsat code/(anti-)language of the novel.
The (Ab)Use of Language in Twentieth Century British Dystopias
Filozofski fakultet u Nišu , 2023
The idea that words possess power to perform existed even before the publication of J. L. Austin’s seminal work How to Do Things with Words (1962) and his speech-act theory, but the twentieth century, plagued by several prominent totalitarian regimes, pushed this realization to the forefront of both literary and non-literary texts. The paper will focus on the (ab)use of language in George Orwell’s Nineteen EightyFour (1949) and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962). The two dystopian novels, set in different societies, illustrate how language is used to wield power and construct or deconstruct identity, creating the effect of defamiliarization and inviting the readers to critically assess both the written narratives and the society they live in. More specifically, albeit from opposing angles, both works show how depriving one of language is necessarily linked to loss of power and identity. While A Clockwork Orange employs an “anti-language” (Halliday 1976) within the domineering social group that clashes with the expected social behaviour, Nineteen Eighty-Four constructs a language with the specific aim of controlling the society.
<2015> Translating the Incomprehensible: Anthony Burgess’ Nadsat Vocabulary in Translation
Starting from the traditional foreignization/domestication dichotomy and developing it into a more complex analytical tool, the paper explores the different strategies used by translators of Burgess’ text to recreate the clash between the comprehensible and incomprehensible that is one of the main characteristics of the original text, at least for monolingual readers of the English text who lack knowledge of Russian or other Slavic languages. The analysis focuses on the translation of this linguistically heterogeneous text into Russian, comparing ways of recreating the comprehensibility/incomprehensibility interplay present in the source text. The Russian target texts include translations of A Clockwork Orange by Evgenij Sinel ́ščikov and Vladimir Bošnjak, both published in 1991, and discusses them in a wider context of translations into other European languages (German, Italian, Swedish, etc.).
Corpus Stylistics in Contemporary English Dramas: Keywords and Semantic Fields of Delusions
GEMA Online® Journal of Language Studies, 2022
As reflected through contemporary Anglo-American dramas, delusion is considered a repertoire afflicted by the societal depression after World War II. Since post-war depression can be vocally expressed, it poses a question of how the theme of delusion could be portrayed through emotive phrases and how they are interconnected with the literary themes in dramas. This study investigates semantic fields demonstrated through corpus-based methodologies on a collection of contemporary dramas via Lancsbox and Wmatrix. Ten contemporary British and American dramas are constructed as a specialized corpus to compare with the reference corpus, built upon BNC and COCA imaginative texts. The comparison can generate keywords, lexical bundles, shared collocates, and extract the words indicating what the specialized corpus is about, or “aboutness.” The meta-tiered results show that “Negative,” “Wanted,” “Getting and possession,” and “Diseases” are the fields that relate to the aboutness of the contemporary dramas. The top 20 keywords can refer to the specialized corpus’s dialogic structure and highlight four characters with dilemmas regarding the delusional disorder. The collocation network, measured by GraphColl, can raise stylistic awareness where these keywords and semantic fields are interconnected and substantiate the theme of delusion. Though literary texts are interpreted through close reading, this study argues that quantitative and qualitative aspects can be integrated to undermine the absence of positivism.
Language and Verbal Art Revisited: linguistic approaches to the study of literature
2007
The book will appeal to the growing number of scholars working in, and students needing to investigate, the field of literary linguistics, or stylistics. Thus it is meant for both specialists and non-specialists. The intended readership more particularly includes: our students of English linguistic stylistics at the University of Bologna’s Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literature (in all 3 of our MA programs), for whom it would be required reading with strongly recommended purchase (approximate numbers yearly: 60). Many of the authors also assure me that the volume will be adopted in stylistics courses they periodically teach. The papers in the volume are on a wide variety of aspects of the language-literature connection, and approach it from a variety of perspectives. All include theoretical considerations and practical applications. Indeed, one of the book’s principle aims is to provide a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches to the linguistic study of literature, all of them firmly rooted in specific contexts of culture. This it does by hosting papers from scholars working within various grammatical and discursive frameworks, including SFL, pragmatics, corpus linguistics, ethnolinguistics, cultural and translation studies. It also aims at providing illustrative instances of the kind of work currently being done by researchers working in various parts of the academic world, (Europe, Australia, and Africa). Inclusion of a wide range of literary genres and world literatures is a further goal. To this end, the papers deal with, for example: Shakespeare’s plays; modern Austrian authors writing in German, such as Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek, Marlene Streeruwitz; Perrault’s Histoires et contes du temps passé and their translations by Angela Carter; the Spanish poets of the Generación del ‘50; Malaysian-Singaporean poets in English; Anglo-American Modernist poets (Frost, Stevens, Pound and D.H. Lawrence) and novelists (Woolf and Conrad); contemporary short stories by Marina Warner and Turkish-German narrative by Feridun Zamoğlu; The Gospel of St. John and Harry Potter. The main message of the volume is that, as Hasan has so succinctly put it, […] in verbal art the role of language is central. Here language is not as clothing to the body; it IS the body.” (1985/1989: 91), and that, as a result, any true ‘appraisal’ of the meanings of the literature text must address that language, with reference to the text’s specific ‘context of creation’. A further message is that, though all the contributors to the volume acknowledge this basic premise, there are a variety of linguistic theories and practices at our disposal for probing the language of verbal art. Separate introductions to each of the contributions will seek to guide above all the non-specialist reader by describing, contrasting and comparing the diverse frameworks that the volume comprises. For a similar purpose, a general introduction diachronically traces key moments in the development of the study of the language of literature seen as socio-cultural practice.
2016
Prison facilities are special: they are complexes defined by a variety of parameters, whose understanding for an ordinary person is far from perfect. It may be observed that two main cultures clash in prisons: that of jailers and that of inmates. Both groups have different rules of conduct, which results in many misunderstandings and new norms of behaviour created on a daily basis. This, in turn, gives way to a constant creation of unique vocabulary specific to the institution, its inhabitants and employees. It may be said that under such conditions prison language thrives: prison slang is extremely changeable and adapts itself to the current needs of the facility. Thus, the level of linguistic creativity is tremendously high: prisoners base their vocabulary loosely on similarities between animate and inanimate beings, which leads to the development of highly figurative language. The research undertaken here focuses on linguistic creativity in American prison settings, and by doing so, draws attention to the originality and unconventionality of prison slang. Keywords: Conceptual Blending Theory; prison slang; linguistic creativity