Abstract
In this short but dense book, Jeffries examines how opposition is constructed in texts, and in particular how this is done when the opposition is not conventionally encoded. Jeffries’ analysis covers a range of fiction and non-fiction textual genres, and addresses the cognitive and ideological effects of opposition drawing on Text World Theory (Werth, 1999), which aims to relate language to the mental space or text world constructed by those engaged in a discourse.
The first of the book’s five chapters deals with the thorny issue of defining opposites, covering a mass of material from the Aristotelian square of opposites to Derrida’s claim for their ubiquity. Despite the tightly packed argument, however, some important issues are neglected; this reviewer misses, for example, a discussion of Billig et al.’s (1988) work on ideological dilemmas, which could provide great insight into the function of opposition in focusing and confining discourse within particular dimensions.
Chapter 2 examines the distinction between canonical opposites – generally and conventionally recognizable as such – and the constructed opposites on which the book focuses, that is to say, those formed in the specific context of a text. Jeffries theorizes that constructed opposites are achieved by a variety of structural and lexical triggers. Structural features that trigger the construction of opposites in text include negation (e.g. ‘He was a social scientist not a linguist’), parallel structures (e.g. ‘We have an argument. We don’t have a fight.’), coordinating conjunctures (e.g. ‘She was clever but beautiful’) and comparatives (e.g. ‘He was strong rather than tender’). Constructed opposites can also be formed by using words that explicitly set up a contrast. Lexical triggers of constructed opposites need not be so straightforward, and Jeffries points to what she calls ‘auto-evocation […] a technique of invoking an oppositional relationship by the use of only one of the relevant terms’ (p. 52). An example might be ‘In theory, the complex form was a way to keep things fair for everyone’.
Having established her theoretical foundations, the author moves to constructed opposites in literature in Chapter 3. She argues that the creative ways in which opposites are constructed, played with and shaped into fresh meanings in the poems she explores is only possible because of the simultaneous presence of stable conventional opposites that provide the materials from which constructions can be formed. This characteristic of opposites points to the dual stable/changeable nature of language. Here, the implication seems to be that since opposites are illustrative of this central feature, opposition is in itself central to language. Chapter 3 also draws on a corpus of opening passages drawn from 100 novels of varied types. A pattern of constructed opposites occurring more often in narrative passages than in the dialogues of fiction is one of the empirical observations offered.
In Chapter 4, the empirical material moves from literature to print journalism. Jeffries’ main aim in covering these different genres is to show that constructed opposites are a wide-ranging phenomenon. Her analysis of the reporting of the British General Election shows ‘a similar range of created opposites, using the same range of triggers’ (p. 82). She also notes a tendency in this political coverage to use mutually exclusive opposites, and also the presence of some co-existent or converseness to the opposites, for example where a politician’s public pretty face seems to require the existence of ugly manipulation in private. In looking at responses to the 9/11 attacks, Jeffries focuses on a series of journalistic pieces in the British newspaper The Guardian penned by creative writers. Here, she finds writers using constructed opposites with an ‘oxymoronic’ aspect (e.g. ‘malign majesty’) in forming their responses to this particular event. In women’s magazines, Jeffries again finds constructed opposites to be a key feature, and she observes how most constructed opposites here were related to the three conventional oppositions between normal/abnormal, natural/unnatural and good/bad. For her final text-type, Jeffries presents work on the coverage of the Danish Cartoon Controversy, where again there was widespread use of constructed opposites. She notes the work done to make equivalents to some poles of the opposites (e.g. to make ‘free speech’ equivalent to ‘safeguard of all other rights’). Having shown the phenomenon in a range of text types, at least within print media, Chapter 4 leverages the number of non-fiction examples of constructed opposition to add weight to the view that ‘the creation of new opposition in the news may reflect and reinforce conflicts of ideology repeatedly and eventually establish a naturalized new conventional opposition’ (p. 110).
The closing chapter stresses the significance of opposites in discourse. Schema theory is invoked to argue that, with some modification, it can usefully describe the relationships between different types of opposites, and further ‘to hypothesize that there is a generalized image-schema of opposition based on bodily experience’ (p. 122). Jeffries suggests that textual triggering of opposites should be considered as another important linguistic feature in how text worlds are created. Jeffries provides an understanding of how opposites are triggered in a way that adds to the mechanisms of text world creation. This supplemented Text World Theory is offered to account for how the ideological effects of discourse are processed.
Jeffries provides interesting insights into how constructed opposites are formed and points to the importance of opposition in discourse more generally. Discourse analysts from a variety of disciplines with an interest in analysing opposition may be inspired to probe some of the phenomena Jeffries touches on (e.g. the relative frequencies of different types of opposites in different text types), explore the construction mechanisms she identifies and link with work on opposites in discourse studies not explicitly addressed in this monograph.