The Pragmatics of Literary Interaction in James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

Abstract

Hogg's Confessions was fiercely criticised by the Edinburgh post-Enlightenment literati who considered his writing unsophisticated. A literary-pragmatic investigation, however, reveals Hogg's strategic use of conversational principles through which he conveys additional, subversive meanings. Politeness theories, in fact, demonstrate that Hogg's Confessions may have been perceived as a Face Threatening Act against the positive face of bourgeois women. A cognitive approach based on relevance theory, on the other hand, admits the simultaneous validity of both the psychological and supernatural interpretations of the character Gil-Martin. Indeed, Hogg consistently flouts the maxim of Manner as described in Grice's Cooperative Principle, thus creating areas of ambiguity which readers interpret in accordance with their personal cognitive environment.