TY  - UNPB
N2  - This thesis develops social semiotic theory by asking it to account for the
meaning-making practices of African-Canadian poets Lillian Allen and
Dionne Brand. Its primary aim is to develop the theory, though it attempts
to describe in new and interesting ways certain moments in these oral /
written texts at the margins of the literary. The research question, what is
the relationship between spoken creole and English writing? is an entry into
the political issues raised by the texts themselves, and larger issues of
clisciplinarity and the epistemologies of linguistic and literary studies.
After giving an account of their literary-historical and black feminist contexts
and an overview of the poetry of Allen and Brand, I look for a poststructuralist
semiotic model of the relationship between letter and sound in
Derrida's "The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing". Finding his
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version phonetic writing too restricted to account for the practices of Allen
and Brand, and deconstruction only a partial explanation of Caribbean
feminist poetics, I develop a critical sociolinguistic / social semiotic account of language standardisation, conventionality, and grammar. With the aid of
Saussure's Cours 4 linguistique generale, I work out the formal properties of
the sign necessary to account for these, and then go on to explain how they
work in the texts of Allen and Brand using two social semiotic principles of
production: "projection" and "embodiment". My thesis is that orality is a
mode, as is dialect (including standardised language), the English grapholect,
and the semiotic body. Each of these has certain meaning-making
affordances not accessible in the others. The writing of Allen and Brand, as
well as Allen's performance, use each of these modes to create different
meanings.
ID  - discovery10020390
PB  - Institute of Education, University of London
UR  - http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.399225
M1  - Doctoral
A1  - Casas, Maria Caridad.
TI  - Multimodality in the poetry of Lillian Allen & Dionne Brand : a social semiotic analysis
Y1  - 2002///
AV  - public
EP  - 271
N1  - Thesis: (PhD) University of London Institute of Education, 2002.
ER  -