The Drama of Speech Acts : Shakespeare's Lancastrian Tetralogy

Austin's work thus provides a way of considering the action done in speech, and does so systematically insofar as (1) in almost every utterance, as he suggests, some speech act is done, and speech acts are done only in speech; and (2) since it is done only in language, speech action (unlike nonverbal action) is patterned in basically linguistic ways-for instance, a speech act, as 9 How to Do Things with Words, p. 101. 12 Since the present study was begun, a number of other writers have addressed themselves to questions of the usefulness of speech-act theory in literary criticism. For a good overview (with a speech-act analysis of Coriolanus), see Stanley E. Fish, "How to Do Things with Austin and Searle." The first booklength essay in speech-act criticism (I have not seen it) is This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1979.