Stylistics routledge English Language Introductions

Mary Louise Pratt
(reprinted from chapter four of Pratt, M. L. (1977) 
Toward a Speech Act
Theory of Literary Discourse
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 100–19.
[. . .] The fact that storytellings, unlike other conversational contributions, require
the consent of the nonspeaking participants and that the request for this consent is
explicitly built into the formal structure of natural narratives suggests, I believe, a
rather important generalisation about what it means to be an audience. Natural narra-
tives formally acknowledge that in voluntarily committing ourselves to play the role
of audience, we are accepting an exceptional or unusual imposition. This claim, I
believe, holds for voluntary audience roles in general and is crucial to our under-
standing of the appropriateness conditions bearing on many kinds of speech
situations, including literary ones. I am claiming that in speech situations in which
no one person is clearly in authority, the unmarked case [. . .] is that all participants
have equal access to the floor and that among peers, an unequal distribution of such
access is marked and brings with it a redistribution of obligations and expectations
among the participants. This is a broad generalisation, and it merits a good deal more
analysis than I am able to give it here. It is clear, though, that equal-access-to-the-
floor rules play an important role in many situations other than conversation. Such
rules are considered crucial in decision-making gatherings of almost any kind, so that
in many societies, including our own, the turntaking rules for such gatherings are
explicitly set down (in the ‘rules of order’) and a presiding officer is appointed solely
to enforce them. There are clear, pragmatic motives behind such procedures. Battles
for the floor can easily paralyse conversation when disagreements arise. Hence, it is
not surprising that speech situations that are specifically tailored to presenting and
settling disagreements should possess some other less time-consuming mechanism –
the chairman and his rule book – for guaranteeing the equitable allocation of turns.
Understandably, speech situations that presuppose disagreement, notably debates of
any kind, make particular use of strict equal access rules and time allotments. Notice
that in such institutionalised speech situations, wherever there are rules prohibiting
interruptions of a current speaker, there are also rules guaranteeing potential next-
speakers a chance for a turn. In societies with egalitarian values the right to a turn,
that is, freedom of speech, in part defines one’s equality to one’s fellow citizens.
What happens, then, when we give up our access rights to a fellow speaker, when
we agree of our own free will to become an Audience? (I am using the capitalised
‘Audience’ in this discussion to mean voluntary audience, as opposed to audiences
who, by virtue of inferior status in the situation, have no floor rights to give up, e.g.,
employees addressed by their boss). For one thing, our expectations of the speaker
increase, and his obligations to us likewise increase. He had better make sure, in 
other words, that his contribution is ‘worth it’ to us. Boring lectures and bad jokes
annoy us more than boring turns in conversation, because we expect more of 
lectures and jokes, and we expect more because we cannot without rudeness stop the
speaker, correct him, have our own say, change the subject, or walk out before he
has finished. At most we can indicate our displeasure by some nonverbal means like
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Mary
Louise
Pratt

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facial expression or body posture. Audiences in this sense are indeed captive, and
speakers addressing Audiences are obliged to make the captivity worthwhile. [. . .]
It is important to note that a speaker’s having an authority over his subject matter
which his Audience lacks does not erase his indebtedness when the Audience is a
voluntary one. The storyteller knows something his Audience does not, yet he is
indebted to them for consenting to listen. A lecturer or after-dinner speaker may be
invited to talk because he is an ‘expert’; nevertheless, in our society at least, he is
obliged by convention to treat his Audience as equals and thus to assume a debt to
them precisely because they have chosen to attend. Such a speaker will very likely
address his Audience as ‘my fellow X’s’. The voluntary aspect of the Audience role,
in other words, serves to establish a peer relation between speaker and Audience
whether or not one existed before, because the context assumes such a relation.
Students attending compulsory lectures need not and should not be thanked by the
professor for their attention; students voluntarily attending the same professor’s
public lectures do merit his thanks like anyone else in the Audience. This presup-
posed peer relation which obtains in fact or by convention between speakers and
voluntary Audiences explains why we frequently accuse boring or unsatisfactory
speakers of conceit or contempt for their Audiences. They are felt to have treated us
as inferiors and thus to have claimed illegitimate authority over us. Failure to main-
tain this peer relation by talking ‘up’ or ‘down’ to one’s Audience is the public
speaker’s worst sin. By the same token, attending a speech by a famous personage
confers status on the Audience since for the time they are peers of the personage.
‘Getting’ an obscure allusion in a literary work has the same effect.
I have said that in compensation for the asymmetrical distribution of turn-taking
rights that prevails in speaker/Audience situations, the Audience is entitled to expect
more of the speaker than they would if they were playing a participant Role. ‘More’ is
a very unsatisfying way of characterising nonparticipant as opposed to participant
expectations; however, there does seem to be one area of speaker/Audience relations in
which this increase in expectations is explicitly acknowledged. As a rule, in giving up
floor rights, Audiences gain the right to pass judgment on the speaker’s contribution.
Conventionally, a space is allotted at the end of a performance in which the Audience
is offered the floor for the purpose of addressing its judgment to the performer(s), and
the performance is not over until this has occurred. A repertory of noises and gestures
is available for indicating Audience judgments, including handclapping, knee-
slapping, egg-throwing, foot-stomping, cheers, whistles, laughter, boos, hisses, and
standing up. At public events, applause intensity is considered a very meaningful indi-
cation of Audience judgment. [. . .] In the case of artistic performances and books,
printed reviews are an important and obvious exercise of the Audience’s right to judge.
In addition, I have already mentioned the kind of approving commentary which 
follows a successful natural narrative and the dreaded ‘so what?’ response to an unsuc-
cessful one. Some such commentary invariably follows a natural narrative in conversa-
tion. Notice, however, that when no evaluative commentary occurs, a judgment is
nevertheless understood to have been expressed, and a very damning one at that. The
fact that silence itself counts as a judgment in speaker/Audience situations provides
important support for the claim that the act of judging is presupposed to be an integral
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part of the speaker/Audience exchange. These evaluative rituals can be seen as a way of
giving the erstwhile nonparticipants a ‘turn’; the fact that this turn is specifically set
aside for judging indicates the degree to which the speaker addressing an Audience
puts himself in jeopardy. A performer who satisfies is said in English to have ‘acquitted
himself.’ Notice too that this judging goes on whether or not the performer is present
to hear it, as anyone knows who has listened in on the buzz of evaluative commentary
with which departing Audiences fill the corridors of theatres and lecture halls. We 
seldom applaud films anymore, there being no live addressees to receive the applause,
but we do invariably talk about them on the way home.
It may be that the act of expressing judgment, preferably in the performer’s pres-
ence, is the Audience’s way of reclaiming the peer status which it has voluntarily
placed in jeopardy, or of counterbalancing the asymmetry of the speaker/Audience
relation. By more or less formally building the judicial act into the performance itself,
we create a different, delayed kind of symmetry to replace turntaking. This identifi-
cation of nonparticipation with judging extends beyond formal, institutionalised
manifestations such as applause. [. . .] Voluntary nonparticipation in conversation is
labelled non- or anti-social. Perhaps because of the particularly silent and solitary
nonparticipation the literary speech situation imposes, judging is felt to be a central
part of the reader’s role in literature. Indeed, it is only rather recently that we have
begun to perceive literary studies as concerned with anything other than evaluation.
[. . .]
To sum up the argument as it applies to verbal behavior, I am proposing that we
recognise the speaker/Audience relation as one of the possible role structures that may
obtain between the participants in a speech situation. This role structure is marked
with respect to the unmarked situation among peers, in which all participants have
equal access to the floor. Participants who become an Audience temporarily waive
their access rights. The speaker who wishes to address an Audience must request and
receive permission to do so; his request counts as an imposition on his interlocutors
and thereby places him under obligation to them. For the Audience, ratifying the
speaker’s request for unique floor access counts as a favour done and entitles 
the Audience, first, to expect the speaker will repay them via the special quality of what
he says during his special floor time and, second, to pass judgment on his success 
when his turn is over. The speaker’s indebtedness and the Audience’s right to judge
persist even when the speaker has actually been invited to take the floor and when the
other participants are present for the sole purpose of being an Audience. I have argued
that this role structure can account for certain formal features of natural narratives
and of the conventions surrounding public performances and that it accurately 
represents the attitudes of the participants in those situations. Just as the appropriate-
ness conditions for conversation have to include a specification of the turn-taking 
system, so the appropriateness conditions for natural narratives, public speeches, 
and many other speech act types will have to specify the marked redistribution of
rights, obligations, and expectations that suspension of turn-taking brings with it.
The analysis holds for literary speech situations, too, and must do so if it is to hold
at all. Our role in the literary speech situation has the main formal characteristic I have
been using to define an Audience: we knowingly and willingly enter a speech situation
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in which another speaker has unique access to the floor. The formal similarities I
noted earlier between natural narrative and literary narrative are readily explained if
we posit a similar disposition of speaker and Audience with respect to the message in
both types. Titles, subtitles, chapter headings, and summaries, for example, perform
the ‘request for the floor’ role of Labov’s abstracts and similarly correspond in func-
tion to the public speaking conventions just discussed. Readers of literary works usu-
ally feel that the writer is under obligation to make their attention worthwhile, and
that they have the right to judge what he has done. Hence, even though we are not
imprisoned by a book the way we are by a lecture hall or an oral anecdote, we do 
not put down a bad book with indifference or neutrality but rather with annoyance,
frustration, disappointment, and anger at the author. We throw it across the room.
Nor are most writers unaware of their indebtedness to the Audience. The ‘dear reader’
remarks common to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels, like the ‘my fellow
X’s’ address of the orator, are readily interpreted as acknowledgments of the peer rela-
tion which holds between author and reader, of the sense of obligation the author feels
as a result of that relation, and of his awareness of being in jeopardy. From the begin-
nings of literature to the present, iconoclastic works of literature have often come to
us accompanied by prefaces, built-in self-defenses very much akin to the moderator’s
credentials list. If their role were purely discursive or commentative rather than defen-
sive, prefaces would be as well or better placed at the end of the book. But they aren’t.
And even writers who profess not to ‘give a damn what the public thinks’ are usually
careful if not eager to apprise us of this fact. Certainly, not caring what the Audience
thinks is not the same as not wanting to be read and applauded. In short, the author’s
‘authority’ in a literary work, like the authority of the speechmaking ‘expert,’ does not
suffice to put him in the clear with the reader.
Even these rudimentary similarities between literature and other speaker/Audience
situations are enough to tell us that speaker and Audience are present in the literary
speech situation, that their existence is presupposed by literary works, that they have
commitments to one another as they do everywhere else, and that those commitments
are presupposed by both the creator and the receivers of the work. Far from being
autonomous, self-contained, selfmotivating, context-free objects which exist indepen-
dently from the ‘pragmatic’ concerns of ‘everyday’ discourse, literary works take place
in a context, and like any other utterance they cannot be described apart from that
context. Whether or not literary critics wish to acknowledge this fact – and they some-
times have not – a theory of literary discourse must do so. More importantly, like so
many of the characteristics believed to constitute literariness, the basic speaker/
Audience situation which prevails in a literary work is not fundamentally or uniquely
literary. It is not the result of a use of the language different from all other uses. Far
from suspending, transforming, or opposing the laws of nonliterary discourse, litera-
ture, in this aspect at least, obeys them. At least some of the expectations with which
readers approach literary works cannot be attributed directly to the fact that the utter-
ances are literary works or works of fiction but rather to more general appropriateness
conditions governing speaker/Audience relations in the most familiar and common-
place speech contexts (to say nothing of activities not primarily verbal). To put it the
other way round, the nonparticipant Audience role, which has been considered a key
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to literary response, is a familiar component of many other speech situations as well.
The role is not part of the rhetoric of fiction but of the rhetoric of Audience-ship
which is itself defined in relation to the rhetoric of conversation.
ISSUES TO CONSIDER
In the context of Pratt’s reading, it is worth revisiting Short’s schema which was
introduced in unit A9 of this thread. Although designed to explain the embedding
of interactive levels in drama, the schema has much relevance to what Pratt says
about literary communication generally. To this extent, can you locate on the schema
the interactive position of her concept of Audience? Can you also design similar inter-
active schemata, indicating embedded interaction where appropriate, to account for
the particularised literary speech situations of any novels or poems you have read.
(Alternatively, you can use the passages provided in section C for this activity, espe-
cially those in C1, C2, C4 and C8). As a more specific follow-up activity, Julian
Barnes’ short novel