Speech Acts in Literature: An Operative Proposal from Theory to Textual Analysis

Abstract

The present work tries to be a theoretical contribution to literary communication pragmatics in its attempt to integrate the literary discourse in the same basic model of natural language that forms the rest of human communicative activities. The adopted perspective, as a common mainframe of this article, is the one by Joseph Hillis Miller who, while elaborating a harsh criticism of Austin, allows to establish a possibility to use the speech-acts theory as an important tool for literary analysis. First of all, a draft of the well-known theory of speech acts by Austin will be drawn. In the second part of the article, a series of dynamics from the observations by Hillis Miller will be synthesized, as they point to a possible separation between performative acts—including illocutionary acts as partially performative—in the form of a possible synthesis scheme. Finally, the last section will introduce a brief sample of application for these categories in a peculiar short story by Catalan writer Enrique Vila-Matas, “Chet Baker piensa en su arte”, which sets itself provocatively on the border between fictional prose and a model for a non-narrative text. This experiment analysis of a theory and its possible application will then be useful to observe the revealing power of this area between the study of language and literary configuration.