Im/politeness, gender and power distance in Lady Windermere’s Fan
Im/politeness has attracted considerable attention over the past decades (starting with
Lakoff 1973;
Brown and Levinson 1978;
Leech 1983) and has
kept expanding rapidly with the discursive turn (
Eelen 2001;
Mills 2003;
Watts 2003;
Bousfield 2008;
Locher 2008). There is a growing interest in examining
im/politeness from a number of perspectives, e.g. society, gender, cross-cultural etc., and multiple definitions have been
proposed, however, impoliteness as such has not had a distinct theoretical framework yet.
This study investigates impoliteness through drama translation data. It focuses on manipulation of im/politeness
in target versions of a playtext, in terms of gender, and examines how humour may be facilitated through such shifts. The aim is
to confirm that impoliteness does interact with gender (
Mills 2003), and that humour
creation draws on reversed gender stereotypes. It also shows that power (ensuing from reversed gender stereotypes) interacts with
impoliteness strategies, to manifest humour in the target versions. The study uses
Bousfield’s
(2008) model to account for im/politeness shifts, between the two versions.
Oscar Wilde’s
Lady Windermere’s Fan (
1892) is a comedy and a satire targeting the aristocratic
society of the time. The two Greek translations of the play (2006 by Karhadakis and 2010 by Belies) are a most suitable context
for examining how impoliteness interacts with power distance and gender to create humour, because of its humorous aspects and
cross-gender talk. The paper also intends to show impoliteness scholarship that translation has a rich potential for deciphering
or confirming pragmatic aspects of the phenomenon, which are elsewhere pursued through monolingual research.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Methodology and humour translation
- 3.The story, theoretical considerations and presentation of the data
- 3.1Gendered identities: Women’s talk
- 3.2Gendered identities: Men’s talk
- 4.The results: Scripts and stereotypes
- 5.Conclusion
-
References
-
Texts
References (22)
References
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Texts
Wilde, Oscar. 1892. Lady Windermere’s Fan. [URL] accessed January 23, 2019.
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2024.
Socio-pragmatic analysis of utterances with polite addressing terms: translation shift across Arabic-English cultures.
Cogent Arts & Humanities 11:1
![DOI logo](//benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
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