6533b82afe1ef96bd128bed8

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Systematized impoliteness in the nonsense world of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass

subject

description

International audience; Theories of conversation very often revolve around the idea of cooperation, an idea dear to their founding father H.P. Grice (see Grice 1975). In a similar fashion, as Jonathan Culpeper points out in the introduction to his article “towards an anatomy of impoliteness”, theories of politeness often define the latter as a set of strategies “employed to promote or maintain social harmony in interaction” (Culpeper 1996:349). For those familiar or accustomed to this vision of conversation, reading Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872) might be quite an interesting (and enjoyable) experience. In Carroll’s imaginary lands, conversation is indeed more of a battlefield and the characters cultivate an altogether different behavior, which amounts to a sort of systematized impoliteness This article seeks to explore the latter as a system in its own right, with its own principle and strategies, derived from Leech's Politeness Principle turned upside-down.