The Politics of Language Corpora and Literary Theory

Abstract

Further moves in extirpating literary sources from linguistics mentioned at the end of the last chapter were performed in the development of corpus-based projects, like Quirk’s SEU project. And further moves in the invigoration of literary theory via general linguistics led toward the institutionalization of Theory in literary disciplines. Whereas the former seemed to evolve an apolitical methodology, the latter engendered explicit political commitments. This chapter discusses these somewhat contrary directions in English linguistics and literary theory, by focusing first on early corpus-based projects and early moves toward constituting the political impetus of literary theory/Theory. It is, however, only the narrow focus on corpus-based linguistics which places these as contrary directions. In fact, developments in other areas of linguistics — especially discourse analysis and sociolinguistics (discussed in Chapters 7 and 8 below) — were imbued with political objectives very similar to those in literary theory/Theory, though continuing to confirm and harden the separation of linguistics and literary studies, or continuing the distinct departures of both from philology.