Abstract
The loss of, and search for, comfort is at the heart of the 2010 social realist play Inheritance, in which the English dramatist Mike Packer explores the burst of the housing bubble in England by depicting the declining fortunes of a family. The pensioner Harry decides to buy his council house as an inheritance for his sons, but when the economic recession hits, the house is lost. This chapter gauges how the play negotiates meanings and sources of comfort by linking them with the theme of home. Packer’s play is notable for the way it connects the characters’ understanding of comfort with specific forms of subjectivity, highlighting in particular how comfort may be understood as an ethical value and how neoliberal subjects reduce such ‘ethical comfort’ to a ‘sensuous appeasement […] achieved through […] appropriate technological devices’ (Boni in Antropologia 3:133–151, 2016: 138). In order to tease out different dimensions and meanings of comfort in the play, we adopt an interdisciplinary approach, conjoining literary studies and linguistics. In presenting our results, we rely heavily on the method of semantic analysis known as the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach. The interdisciplinary analysis is presented as a first step towards establishing the heuristic value of NSM methodology for enriching the study of literary negotiations of meanings and values while also showing how the inclusion of literary texts in NSM studies helps trace semantic meaning transformations in the wake of changing life worlds.
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Notes
- 1.
Although there is a vibrant research tradition on literary representations of home, especially in the field of gender, postcolonial and transnational studies, ‘comfort’ as a key topic and analytic concept continues to remain undertheorized in literary studies on home. The recent interdisciplinary conference “Challenging Comfort as an Idea(l) in Contemporary Literature and Culture” (University of Koblenz-Landau, 8 December 2018) addressed this research gap.
- 2.
Goddard and Ye (2016: 12) comment on scholarly prejudices against NSM due to the simple language used in NSM explications: ‘there is an obvious intertextual dissonance between the simple wording of NSM and high prestige academic English’ so that scholars find it ‘difficult to take [NSM explications] seriously’.
- 3.
Our analytic approach to Packer’s play bears affinities to Anna Wierzbicka’s current NSM research project on the Nicene Creed (Wierzbicka in preparation). Wierzbicka extends lexical analysis to address how the meanings of the Nicene Creed are shaped by its dialogic relation to specific cultural contexts or intertexts.
- 4.
On friction as a source of discomfort, see Pezeu-Massabuau (2012: 15).
- 5.
Ideally, we would have liked to develop our NSM analysis in two steps: first explicating the lexical meaning of home and the meaning of comfort with the help of NSM primes before bringing both together in a definition of ‘the comfort of home’ as understood by different characters in Packer’s play. Unfortunately, such an extended analysis would take us beyond the word limit of this chapter. For the semantics of ‘home’, albeit in Portuguese and Polish, see Bulat Silva (2018b). For the NSM definition of English comfort as contrasted with Portuguese conforto, see Bulat Silva (2018a).
- 6.
- 7.
For the analysis of how meanings of ‘comfort’ shifted historically together with changing living conditions, see also Rybczyński (1996: 28–32).
- 8.
These two NSM lines quite nicely show how both representations of comfort are related to the notion of ‘safety’, in NSM terms: ‘nothing bad can happen to me’.
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We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers as well as the main editor of this volume, Bert Peeters, whose insightful comments helped improve the final version.
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Butter, S., Bułat Silva, Z. (2020). The Comfort of Home as an Ethical Value in Mike Packer’s Inheritance. In: Peeters, B., Mullan, K., Sadow, L. (eds) Studies in Ethnopragmatics, Cultural Semantics, and Intercultural Communication. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9975-7_5
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