Poetics, Linguistics and History: Discourses of War and Conflict
The papers collected on this disc represent a comprehensive view of the proceedings of PALA XIX. The Poetics and Linguistics Association held its 19th annual conference in March 1999 at the Potchefstroom University, South Africa. The timing of the meeting was significant and interesting in many ways. The conference marked the centenary of the Anglo-Boer War, the first modern ‘world’ war and a precursor of many other conflicts in the intervening years. It was a conflict that introduced much of the technology, terms and trappings of modern war to the 20th century: from ideological propaganda to concentration camps. As the last of the living voices of first-hand direct witnesses die away, the experience of the war remains available only through letters, journals, poetry, prose and drama. One hundred years later, this history was reconsidered through the language and literature it generated, in the Autumn of 1999 and in the middle of an election campaign in the new South Africa.
The papers were originally collected and edited by Ina Biermann and Annette Combrink. Participants’ talks were collected in written form, and edited only for consistency of formatting. The proceedings were then distributed in book form to the conference participants across the world. More recently, the PALA committee has decided to make the collection more widely available in an electronic format. This compilation was produced by Peter Stockwell and Martin Wynne, and published by the Humanities Computing Unit at Oxford University. Individual authors retain copyright on their work, but permissions for reproduction and contact may also be made through the PALA committee.
PALA is an international academic association, with members throughout the world. However, almost all of the papers in this collection are written by South Africans and Europeans. There is a focus, unsurprisingly, on the historical moment of the Anglo-Boer War, a conflict not just between Europe and Africa, but involving other complexities of race, ethnicity and rhetoric. Yet there is a tradition at PALA conferences of tolerating tangents around the stated conference theme, and there are a significant number of papers in this collection that deal with other dimensions of war and conflict. More recent issues in South Africa’s history are explored; other wars and other rhetorics are examined; and throughout there is a sense of interrogation of the discourses not only of the source material in history and literature, but also of the discursive practices of academic exploration. By this holistic eclecticism, PALA meetings often come to the complex heart of the matter by a process of intellectual triangulation, and the Potchefstroom conference was a particularly fruitful example of this principle.
The collection is divided for convenience into four sections. The first, shortest section consists of three papers which set out the conceptual ground for a stylistic approach to war and conflict. The second section addresses the language representing the South African context directly. These papers take a historical view specific to the local geographical occasion of the conference: ranging from explorations of the Anglo-Boer War and its writing, through intervening years in South African history, right up to the transcripts of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings. The third section extends the stylistic exploration out to other wars and other conflict situations around the world, broadening out the historical and geographical sweep. Finally, the fourth section extends the scholarly circumference of the discussion, to consider the place of stylistics and poetics in their widest applications.
Taken as a whole, the papers collected here represent the focus and its tangents of discursive conflict. They take a wide range of analytical approaches to their particular material, and this too adds to the interleaved complexity of the collection. While the papers draw their sights on a range of discourses, they thus also represent a range of discursive practices in theory and method. There is precise and systematic linguistic analysis here, as well as thorough and rigorous cultural criticism. The collection does not represent an integrated or even consistent monolithic view; instead, the different angles offered by the papers represent the best principled eclecticism of genuine academic debate, that characterises PALA meetings.
Of course, what you do not get in a conference proceedings collection such as this are the questions and considerations in the margins and between the papers. All the lively discussion and thinking that make the conference a historical event of its own can only be suggested by the written discourse into which the event is transformed and presented here. However, we hope that the unique sense of PALA is retained in these pages, even as they are transferred from paper to the digitised optics of a disc.
Peter Stockwell
Go to the contents page
The papers were originally collected and edited by Ina Biermann and Annette Combrink. Participants’ talks were collected in written form, and edited only for consistency of formatting. The proceedings were then distributed in book form to the conference participants across the world. More recently, the PALA committee has decided to make the collection more widely available in an electronic format. This compilation was produced by Peter Stockwell and Martin Wynne, and published by the Humanities Computing Unit at Oxford University. Individual authors retain copyright on their work, but permissions for reproduction and contact may also be made through the PALA committee.
PALA is an international academic association, with members throughout the world. However, almost all of the papers in this collection are written by South Africans and Europeans. There is a focus, unsurprisingly, on the historical moment of the Anglo-Boer War, a conflict not just between Europe and Africa, but involving other complexities of race, ethnicity and rhetoric. Yet there is a tradition at PALA conferences of tolerating tangents around the stated conference theme, and there are a significant number of papers in this collection that deal with other dimensions of war and conflict. More recent issues in South Africa’s history are explored; other wars and other rhetorics are examined; and throughout there is a sense of interrogation of the discourses not only of the source material in history and literature, but also of the discursive practices of academic exploration. By this holistic eclecticism, PALA meetings often come to the complex heart of the matter by a process of intellectual triangulation, and the Potchefstroom conference was a particularly fruitful example of this principle.
The collection is divided for convenience into four sections. The first, shortest section consists of three papers which set out the conceptual ground for a stylistic approach to war and conflict. The second section addresses the language representing the South African context directly. These papers take a historical view specific to the local geographical occasion of the conference: ranging from explorations of the Anglo-Boer War and its writing, through intervening years in South African history, right up to the transcripts of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings. The third section extends the stylistic exploration out to other wars and other conflict situations around the world, broadening out the historical and geographical sweep. Finally, the fourth section extends the scholarly circumference of the discussion, to consider the place of stylistics and poetics in their widest applications.
Taken as a whole, the papers collected here represent the focus and its tangents of discursive conflict. They take a wide range of analytical approaches to their particular material, and this too adds to the interleaved complexity of the collection. While the papers draw their sights on a range of discourses, they thus also represent a range of discursive practices in theory and method. There is precise and systematic linguistic analysis here, as well as thorough and rigorous cultural criticism. The collection does not represent an integrated or even consistent monolithic view; instead, the different angles offered by the papers represent the best principled eclecticism of genuine academic debate, that characterises PALA meetings.
Of course, what you do not get in a conference proceedings collection such as this are the questions and considerations in the margins and between the papers. All the lively discussion and thinking that make the conference a historical event of its own can only be suggested by the written discourse into which the event is transformed and presented here. However, we hope that the unique sense of PALA is retained in these pages, even as they are transferred from paper to the digitised optics of a disc.
Peter Stockwell
Go to the contents page