‘‘Why She Disappeared’’ (A Study of Illeism in Poetic Discourse)
Abstract
The paper in hand is an attempt to apply discourse analysis approach to analyze the use of illeism in poetic eloquence. Illeism is used in third-person self-reference forms for representing the views of someone else as distinctive technique of interpretation. Through this means, it creates illusion of the speaker linguistically and thematically trying to distance themselves in the narrative. The paper is an analysis of Taylor Swift’s poem “Why She Disappeared” for her sixth studio album ‘Reputation’. The study explores qualitatively poetry elements in accordance to highlight the implication of illeism through signifiers. It utilizes a literary approach and the poem as the corpus of the study. The aims of the study are to address the way illeism functioning within the poem and the interpretation of the third-person self-reference in the poem. It is found that the poem presents the use of illeism in threefold: (1) it is used to distance oneself from traumatic occurrences; (2) it is used to refer to past-self indirectly; (3) it is used to give self-motivation. The third-person terms mentioned in the poem contribute to the actions that the speaker is employing through the discourse. Further study is needed to explore more about illeism in a variety of discourse.
Downloads
References
Bahmany, L. R. (2020). Forugh Farrokhzad and Her Madness. In A Companion to World Literature, 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118635193.ctwl0268
Bär, S. (2016). “Ceci n’est pas un fragment”: Identity, Intertextuality and Fictionality in Sappho’s “Brothers Poem.” Symbolae Osloenses, 90(1), 8–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/00397679.2016.1253259
Billon, A. (2017). Basic Self-Awareness. European Journal of Philosophy, 25(3), 732–763. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.12168
Burner. B. J. (2013). Introduction to Pragmatics. New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell.
Carrington, P. (2017). Is Illeism Abnormal?. Retrieved from: https://patcarrington.com/is-illeism-abnormal
Chilton, P. (2017). Toward a neuro-cognitive model of socio-political discourse, and an application to the populist discourse of Donald Trump. Langage et société, 160-161(2), 237-249.
Dimitrova, M. (2017). Julius Caesar's Self-created Image and Its Dramatic Afterlife. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Easthope, A. (2013). Poetry as Discourse. London: Routledge.
Elledge, R. (2017). Use of the third person for self-reference by Jesus and Yahweh: a study of illeism in the Bible and ancient Near Eastern texts and its implications for Christology (Vol. 575). Bloomsbury Publishing.
Grunbaum, T. & Zahavi D. (2013). Varieties of self-awareness. In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry. Fulford, KWM., Davies, M., Graham, G (Eds.) Oxford: OUP.
Haucsa, G. M., Marzuki, A. G., Alek, A. & Hidayat, D. N. (2020). Illocutionary Speech Acts Analysis in Tom Cruise's Interview. Academic Journal Perspective: Education, Language, and Literature, 8(1), 11-19. https://doi.org/10.33603/perspective.v8i1.3304
Hirsch, B., & Craig, H. (Eds.). (2017). The Shakespearean International Yearbook: Volume 14: Special Section, Digital Shakespeares. Routledge.
van der Wal, M. J., & Rutten, G. (2013). Touching the Past: Studies in the Historical Sociolinguistics of Ego-documents. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.1
Land, V., & Kitzinger, C. (2007). Some uses of third-person reference forms in speaker self-reference. Discourse Studies, 9(4), 493–525. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445607079164
Metzger, H. M. (2013). 3VOLVE. USA.
Nistea, M. D. & Anghel, M. (2018). Illeism, the more and more frequent linguistic phenomenon. Studii de Ştiinţă şi Cultură, 14(2), 137-142.
Nordlund, M. (2017). Shakespeare’s Insides: A Systematic Study of a Dramatic Device. In The Shakespearean International Yearbook (pp. 37–56). https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315264226-2
Schupak, E. B. (2019). “I grant I am a woman”: Gender and Silence in Julius Caesar. Shakespeare, 15(2), 107–120. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2018.1459816
Simon, G. (2016). Illeism and Narcissism. Retrieved from: https://counsellingresource.com/features/2016/02/01/illeism-and-narcissism/
Tabata, K. (2017). Modernist Empathy in American Litearture: William Faulkner, Nathanael West, and Richard Wright (Florida State University). Retrieved from http://purl.flvc.org/fsu/fd/FSU_FALL2017_Tabata_fsu_0071E_14190
Copyright (c) 2020 Alek Alek, Abdul Gafur Marzuki, Didin Nuruddin Hidayat, Farhana Amalya Islamiati, Aning Rustanti Raharjo
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
By submitting the manuscript of the article, the authors agree with this policy with no specific document sign-off required.
The authors certify that:
- if the manuscript is co-authored, they are authorized by their co-authors to enter into these arrangements.
- the work described has not been formally published before in a registered ISSN or ISBN media, except in the form of an abstract or as part of a published lecture, review, or thesis.
- it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere,
- its publication has been approved by all the author(s) and by the responsible authorities – tacitly or explicitly – of the institutes where the work has been carried out.
- they secure the right to reproduce any material that has already been published or copyrighted elsewhere (it does not infringe the rights of others).
- they agree to Ethical Lingua license and copyright agreement.
All articles published by Ethical Lingua are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
License and Copyright Agreement
- Authors retain copyright and other proprietary rights related to the article.
- Authors retain the right and are permitted to use the substance of the article in own future works, including lectures and books.
- Authors grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in Ethical Lingua.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in Ethical Lingua.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post or self-archive their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.