There has been a growing awareness that ambiguity is not just a necessary evil of the language system resulting, for instance, from its need for economy or, by contrast, a blessing that allows writers to involve readers in endless games of assigning meaning to a literary text. The present volume contributes to overcoming this alternative by focusing on strategies of ambiguity (and the strategic avoidance of ambiguity) both at the production and the reception end of communication. The authors examine ways in which speakers and hearers may use ambiguous words, structures, references, and situations to pursue communicative ends. For example, the question is asked what it actually means when a listener strategically perceives ambiguity, which may happen both synchronically (e.g. in conversations) as well as diachronically (e.g. when strategically ambiguating biblical texts in order to make them applicable to moral lessons). Another example is the question of whether ambiguity awareness increases the strategic use of ambiguity in prosody. Moreover, the authors enquire not only into the effects of ambiguous meanings but also into the strategic use of ambiguity as such, for example, as a response to censorship or as a means of provoking irritation. This volume brings together several contributions from linguistics, literary studies, rhetoric, psychology, and theology, and it aims to provide a systematic approach to the strategic production and perception of ambiguity in a variety of texts and contexts.
The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
Introduction: Strategy Meets Ambiguity
Matthias Bauer and Angelika Zirker
I. Textual Strategies
Enduring Ambiguity
Veronika Ehrich
The (Strategic) Ambiguity of Poem Titles
Matthias Bauer and Martina Bross
The Strategic Use of Ambiguous Images in Multisemiotic Textures
Nicolas Potysch
Radical Text Theory and Textual Ambiguity: With Two Analyses of Dadaist Anti-Text Strategies
Joachim Knape
The Case of Epistemic Ambiguity and Its Strategic Production: Connecting Text and Cognition
Florian Rohmann, Lisa Ebert, Elias-Jason Güthlein and Carolin Munderich
Political Ambivalence and Dramatic Ambiguity: Bertolt Brecht’s Lehrstück Die Maßnahme (1930/31)
Sebastian Meixner
II. Productive Perception
(Non)Strategic Production Planning and Ambiguity: Experimental Evidence
Bettina Remmele, Sophia Schopper, Robin Hörnig and Susanne Winkler
Reading Aloud Strategic Ambiguities in Poetic Texts
David Fishelov
Does Reanalysis Need Ambiguity?
Ulrich Detges
Are Hearer Strategies Strategic? Relevance Theory and the Strategicness of Hearer Action in Everyday Language and Language Change
Gesa Schole and Carolin Munderich
Ambiguation as Rhetorical Strategy in Sermo 38 by Maurice of Sully
Nikolai M. Kohler and Mirjam Sigmund
"To Define Is to Distrust": Intertextual Ambiguity in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and James Joyce’s Ulysses
Leona Toker
Sacred Drama, the Law, and Ambiguities of Form in Nineteenth-Century England
Jan-Melissa Schramm
Annotating Ambiguity across Disciplines: The Tübingen Interdisciplinary Corpus of Ambiguity Phenomena (TInCAP)
Jutta M. Hartmann, Lisa Ebert, Gesa Schole, Wiltrud Wagner and Susanne Winkler
Biography
Matthias Bauer is Professor of English Philology at Eberhard Karls University Tübingen, Germany. His fields of research include early modern English literature (with an emphasis on metaphysical poetry), nineteenth-century English literature (with an emphasis on Dickens), the language of literature, and literature and religion. He was the chair of the Research Training Group 1808 "Ambiguity: Production and Perception," and he co-chairs several further research projects on interpretability in context and reading competence, as well as co-creativity in early modern English literature. He is the co-founder and editor of Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate and co-editor of Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch.
Angelika Zirker is Associate Professor of English Literatures and Cultures at Eberhard Karls University Tübingen, Germany. After completing her PhD on the Lewis Carroll’s Alice books (The Pilgrim as Child: Play, Language, and Salvation) in 2010, she published her second book, titled William Shakespeare and John Donne: Stages of the Soul in Early Modern English Poetry, in 2019 with Manchester University Press. Her research interests include nineteenth-century literature, with a special focus on Charles Dickens, as well as early modern poetry and drama. She is involved in various interdisciplinary research projects, and she is the co-editor of two journals, Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch and Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate.
