Phonaesthetic Phonological Iconicity in Literary Analysis Illustrated by Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber”

• Authors: Gwóźdź, Maja

Abstracts

EN

The article offers a phonosemantic analysis of Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber.” The phonosemantic investigation has been based on the corpus of nineteen relevant sound-related descriptions of the sea. Although most excerpts identified contain aural metaphors and are not phonologically iconic per se, there seem to exist at least three fragments which are particularly interesting from a phonosemantic point of view. Most notably, phonaesthemes /gl/, /l/, /r/ have been found to carry substantial meaning contributing to the overall interpretation of the story in question. Accounting for the inevitable subjectivity concerning iconicity, and in this case phonological iconicity, a few theories are presented in order to support the author’s reading of each phonaestheme’s contextual significance. The paper briefly reviews the chronological development of the field of phonosemantics and then combines the aural images theory (proposed by Richard Rhodes) with the “aural semiotic process” theory (the term coined by the author). Each analysis is further supplemented with scholarly views on respective phonaesthemes. On the whole, the paper does not aim to polemicize with the well-established definition of a phoneme and its generally accepted arbitrariness. Nevertheless, it has been observed that a speculative phonosemantic analysis of a literary work may yield noteworthy results.

Keywords

EN

Angela Carter; iconicity; phonaesthemes; phonosemantics; “The Bloody Chamber”

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Łódzki. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Journal: Analyses/Rereadings/Theories: A Journal Devoted to Literature, Film and Theatre
• Year: 2014
• Volume: 2
• Issue: 2

Dates

published

2014

Contributors

author

Gwóźdź, Maja

other

Jagiellonian University

other

Maja Gwóźdź is a BA student at the Jagiellonian University, Cracow. Her academic interests include mainly diachronic paremiology, phraseology, logico-semiotics, and theoretical linguistics. Lately, her research (supervised by Prof. Grzegorz Szpila) has also encompassed the role of music in contemporary literature, paremiostylistics in Martin Amis’s London Fields and the analysis of the relationship between masculinity and pornography in the aforementioned novel

Identifiers

URI

http://hdl.handle.net/11089/22045