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Talking Back at the Centre: Demotic Language in Contemporary Scottish Fiction (2005)
| Content Provider | CiteSeerX |
|---|---|
| Author | Scott, Jeremy |
| Abstract | This article attempts a survey of a common trend in contemporary Scottish fiction (1994–2003): a unifying concern with issues of ‘voice ’ in narrative. The survey proceeds from an assumption that many Scottish writers make use of so-called demotic voices within their work (i.e. sociolects and dialects from everyday situations, or ‘street language’). Very often, this concern with the demotic arises out of ideological standpoints peculiar (arguably) to Scotland: attempts to create a distance from Standard English, a nationalist position, or the ambition to reassert the primacy (or, at least, the equivalency) of oral over written forms of language. The conclusion must be that choices made with regard to narrative technique are ideological choices, and that the demotic method is not without its pitfalls. This assertion is demonstrated through an exploration of three writers: James Kelman, Alan Warner and Anne Donovan. All of these demotic techniques are aided and abetted by the writer’s intense identification with place, with Glasgow (for Kelman and Donovan) or with Scotland as a whole, and the intrinsically ‘polyphonic’ |
| File Format | |
| Publisher Date | 2005-01-01 |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
