Sylvia Plath and the Language of Affective States: Written Discourse and the Experience of Depression

Description

Focusing on the first journal in ‘The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath’, this book writes a convincing case for the value of corpus-based stylistics and narrative psychology in the analysis of representations of the experience of affective states. Situated at the intersection between language study, psychology and healthcare, this study of the personal writing of a poet and novelist showcases a cutting-edge combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches, including metaphor analysis, corpus methods, and second person narration. Techniques that systematically account for representations of experiences of affective states, such as those in this book, are rare and crucial in improving understanding of these experiences. The findings and methods of this book therefore potentially have bearing on the study, diagnosis and treatment of depression and other mental illnesses. Zsófia Demjén follows the cognitive turn in both literary studies and linguistics here, emerging with a greater understanding of Plath, her diarized output and her experience of her inner world. Cover Half-title Title Copyright Contents List of Abbreviations List of Concordances List of Figures and Tables Acknowlegements 1. Introduction 1.1 The structure of this book Part One: Background to the Study 2. Sylvia Plath and her Journals 2.1 Personal journals 2.1.1 A note on discourse types 3. Language and Affective States – Setting the Theoretical Scene 3.1 Stylistics and applied linguistics 3.1.1 Mind style 3.1.2 Systemic functional grammar 3.2 Language and psychology 3.2.1 Linguistic indicators of mental illness 4. Linguistic Characteristics of the Smith Journal – Corpus Analysis I 4.1 Brief introduction to corpus linguistics 4.2 Corpus methodology 4.2.1 Interpreting corpus results – Biber (1988) 4.3 Key features of the Smith Journal 4.3.1 Differences in parts-of-speech 4.3.2 The semantic make-up of the Smith Journal 4.3.3 Discussion of quantitative results 4.3.4 Implications for Part II of the book Part Two: Zooming In: Investigating Key Linguistic Features 5. Self-description and Direct References to Affective States 5.1 Semantic fields relevant to affective states and the self 5.2 Self-description: I am and You are 5.3 Qualitative analysis of a set of sample entries 5.3.1 The sample 5.3.2 Findings 5.3.3 Questions about the self 5.3.4 Conclusions 6. Affective States and Metaphor 6.1 Introduction to metaphor theory 6.1.1 Cognitive metaphor theory – an approach to metaphor 6.1.2 Systematic metaphor – an alternative approach 6.1.3 Metaphor and affective states 6.1.4 Accounting for metaphorical patterns in language 6.2 Methods of metaphor analysis 6.2.1 Identifying figurative language 6.2.2 Which metaphors are relevant for affective states? 6.3 Metaphors of affective states in the Smith Journal 6.3.1 A preliminary example 6.3.2 Positive affective states 6.3.3 Negative affective states 6.3.4 Summary and conclusions 7. You and Plath 7.1 Personal pronouns in interaction and narration 7.1.1 Second-person pronouns and narration 7.2 The role of You in the Smith Journal 7.2.1 Different types of You 7.2.2 Second-person narration in the Smith Journal 7.2.3 Conclusions 8. Investigating Second-person Entries Further – Corpus Analysis II 8.1 Methodology 8.2 Comparing different types of entries 8.2.1 Parts-of-speech results 8.2.2 Semantic results and discussion 8.3 Summary and conclusions 9. So What? 9.1 Zooming Out Notes References Index