Barbara Korte. Body Language in Lit

Barbara Korte. Body Language in Literature. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1997. vii + 329 pp. $22.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8020-7656-4; $61.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8020-0706-3.

Reviewed by Kate Anderson (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Published on H-LIS (January, 1999)


A nod. A touch. A folding of hands. Barbara Korte ar-gues that, in narrative literature, references to body lan-guage are never just throwaway lines. Instead, these in-stances of nonverbal communication create a body semi-otics, an “important signifying system in the literary text” that “contributes to the text’s potential significance and effect” (p. 4). Based on a reader’s everyday competence to interpret nonverbal communication as well as an ac-quired literary one, the interpretation of a text’s body language gives the reader a useful tool to read, or mis-read, the individual characters and the interactions be-tween characters. In Body Language in Literature, Bar-bara Korte systematically brings nonverbal communica-tion to the fore, adding a new type of language to the study of the body in literary criticism.

is language comes from the fields of expression psychology, social psychology, and sociology. Korte, Professor of English literature at the University of Tub-ingen in Germany, expands the more traditional literary focus on “gesture” or “posture” in order to incorporate the terminology of nonverbal communication, a field of psychological research coming out of the early sixties. Unlike the field of physiognomy that studies permanent features, the field of nonverbal communication studies the body in motion. (Korte uses “body language,” “non-verbal communication,” and “nonverbal behavior” inter-changeably.) Originally published in Germany in 1993 as Korpersprache in der Literatur: eorie und Geschichte am Beispiel englischer Erzahlprosa, Korte’s work focuses mainly on English and North American literature, liter-ature heavily influenced by European culture. e texts range from John Bunyan’s 1678 Pilgrim’s Progress to W. Somerset Maugham’s 1944 e Razor’s Edge, from Geof-frey Chaucer’s fourteenth century e Canterbury Tales to Margaret Atwood’s 1985 e Handmaid’s Tale. Careful to emphasize that her work is based on a highly selective sample, Korte rightly makes no claims to completeness or statistical reliability but instead emphasizes her desire to set up a critical framework for an analysis of body lan-guage that could be applied to any narrative text. A er


the introductory section, Part II sets up the critical frame-work, and Part III gives an historical overview of body language in the novel of the British Isles from the six-teenth century to the present. Korte also provides three useful bibliographies: one for the primary sources she has used; one for secondary sources on body language in literature, theatre, film, and art; and one for secondary sources on nonverbal-communication research.

Much of Part II consists of defining the terms of non-verbal communication and giving examples from literary texts. Korte divides nonverbal communication into two classifications: modal and functional. e modes or types of body language consist of Kinesics (body movements, particularly facial expression and eye behavior); Haptics (touch); and Proxemics (spatial orientation). e func-tion of the body language consists of emotional displays and externalizers, regulators and illustrators, and em-blems. For example, a “stooping carriage” is a body pos-ture (kinesic) that can, depending on the literary context, function as an emotional display of mourning (p. 63). us, Korte argues, each instance of body language can be coded for what it is and what it does. Korte plots the body language of a text onto a “Modal-Functional Clas-sification System,” a chart with the modal classifications down the side and the functional classifications across the top. She counts the instances of body language, codes them, and fills in the boxes. From this painstaking ap-proach, Korte can give a general profile of what types of body language are used for what purposes. e drawback to this method, of course, is the rigidity of the chart. Be-cause Korte assumes that nonverbal communication “al-ways plays a particular role within the situation in which it occurs and can thus be assigned to a particular func-tional class” (p. 36), her readings–at times, forced–o en leave li le or no room for ambiguity.

A er defining her terms, Korte turns to the literary texts. Korte is most successful when her readings of the nonverbal communication contribute to a larger read-ing of the text. Her readings of Laurence Sterne and


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H-Net Reviews



Margaret Atwood are particularly good, adding new lay-ers of perspective to the vast criticism on these authors. Here, Korte’s interdisciplinary approach of using exist-ing terminology in a new field is note worthy and use-ful. Korte is least successful when she moves from one quick example of body language to the next without con-nections between texts or across literary time periods. While she herself argues that we must know the cul-tural specifics before assigning a particular meaning to a particular gesture, her own examples tend to dehis-toricize her texts. In one such case of literary whiplash, Korte moves from William Golding’s 1955 e Inheritors to Anita Brookner’s 1987 A Friend from England to J.D. Salinger’s 1950 “For Esme–with Love and Squalor” to Samuel Richardson’s 1747-49 Clarissa all in the space of a page and a half (pp. 143-44). Unfortunately, Korte does not stop to analyze why the body language is important in these texts or how the cues differ across the centuries; she only states that the body language is there. Too o en, Korte’s readings become laundry lists of here body lan-guage, there body language, everywhere body language.

While Part II can be slow going (especially for those of us unfamiliar with expression psychology), it does end with a particularly useful section entitled “Body Lan-guage in the Narrative Text: An Open Catalogue of es-tions” (pp. 172-73). e questions clearly summarize Korte’s main points, reminding us to ask what the fre-quency, context, and role of the body language are within the text.

When Korte turns to the historical perspective at the end of her work, Body Language in Literature comes alive. In Part III, Korte concentrates on the historical develop-ment of body language in the novels of the British Isles



from the sixteenth century to the present. While her sample size of eighty novels is admi edly too small and the bulk of her texts really represent eighteenth century to the present, she reasonably argues that “body language is increasingly gaining ground in the aesthetic of the En-glish novel” (p. 178). In the post-Richardson novel, “Ev-eryday life gains significance as material for the novel; the concreteness and credibility of the world portrayed become important principles” (p. 184). She emphasizes a growing “a ention to detail” that creates a need for nov-els to be “particular” (p. 187). Part of this need for the particular stems from the rise of photography and, in the twentieth century, motion pictures as new ways of see-ing the body. In Part III, Korte nicely supplements her close readings with evidence from painting and other vi-sual arts, giving her readings a forcefulness that is o en lacking in Part II.

In Body Language in Literature, Barbara Korte does set up an interesting framework for bringing the termi-nology of expression psychology into the realm of liter-ary criticism. I do, however, hope that she pushes her own analysis and follows up with “further research” she suggests at the end of this work. A systematic study of gender or a systematic look at etique e books (something Karen Hal unen has done very well for American liter-ature in Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870) or a system-atic look at body language medical writings would be the needed touch to make Korte’s work truly stand out.

Copyright (c) 1999 by H-Net, all rights reserved. is work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact [e-mail].


If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at: h p://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.

Citation: Kate Anderson. Review of Korte, Barbara, Body Language in Literature. H-LIS, H-Net Reviews. January, 1999.

URL: h p://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=2714

Copyright © 1999 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate a ribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at [e-mail].








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Kết quả (Việt) 1:

Barbara Korte. Body Language in Literature. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1997. vii + 329 pp. $22.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8020-7656-4; $61.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8020-0706-3.Reviewed by Kate Anderson (University of Wisconsin-Madison)Published on H-LIS (January, 1999) A nod. A touch. A folding of hands. Barbara Korte ar-gues that, in narrative literature, references to body lan-guage are never just throwaway lines. Instead, these in-stances of nonverbal communication create a body semi-otics, an “important signifying system in the literary text” that “contributes to the text’s potential significance and effect” (p. 4). Based on a reader’s everyday competence to interpret nonverbal communication as well as an ac-quired literary one, the interpretation of a text’s body language gives the reader a useful tool to read, or mis-read, the individual characters and the interactions be-tween characters. In Body Language in Literature, Bar-bara Korte systematically brings nonverbal communica-tion to the fore, adding a new type of language to the study of the body in literary criticism.is language comes from the fields of expression psychology, social psychology, and sociology. Korte, Professor of English literature at the University of Tub-ingen in Germany, expands the more traditional literary focus on “gesture” or “posture” in order to incorporate the terminology of nonverbal communication, a field of psychological research coming out of the early sixties. Unlike the field of physiognomy that studies permanent features, the field of nonverbal communication studies the body in motion. (Korte uses “body language,” “non-verbal communication,” and “nonverbal behavior” inter-changeably.) Originally published in Germany in 1993 as Korpersprache in der Literatur: eorie und Geschichte am Beispiel englischer Erzahlprosa, Korte’s work focuses mainly on English and North American literature, liter-ature heavily influenced by European culture. e texts range from John Bunyan’s 1678 Pilgrim’s Progress to W. Somerset Maugham’s 1944 e Razor’s Edge, from Geof-frey Chaucer’s fourteenth century e Canterbury Tales to Margaret Atwood’s 1985 e Handmaid’s Tale. Careful to emphasize that her work is based on a highly selective sample, Korte rightly makes no claims to completeness or statistical reliability but instead emphasizes her desire to set up a critical framework for an analysis of body lan-guage that could be applied to any narrative text. A er phần giới thiệu, phần II thiết lập khung quan trọng, làm việc, và một phần III cho một tổng quan về lịch sử của ngôn ngữ cơ thể trong tiểu thuyết của quần đảo Anh Quốc từ thế kỷ thứ sáu-teenth đến nay. Korte cũng cung cấp ba bibliographies hữu ích: một cho các nguồn chính cô đã sử dụng; một cho các tài liệu phụ trên cơ thể ngôn ngữ trong văn học, nhà hát, phim ảnh, và nghệ thuật; và một cho các tài liệu phụ trên nonverbal truyền thông nghiên cứu.Much of Part II consists of defining the terms of non-verbal communication and giving examples from literary texts. Korte divides nonverbal communication into two classifications: modal and functional. e modes or types of body language consist of Kinesics (body movements, particularly facial expression and eye behavior); Haptics (touch); and Proxemics (spatial orientation). e func-tion of the body language consists of emotional displays and externalizers, regulators and illustrators, and em-blems. For example, a “stooping carriage” is a body pos-ture (kinesic) that can, depending on the literary context, function as an emotional display of mourning (p. 63). us, Korte argues, each instance of body language can be coded for what it is and what it does. Korte plots the body language of a text onto a “Modal-Functional Clas-sification System,” a chart with the modal classifications down the side and the functional classifications across the top. She counts the instances of body language, codes them, and fills in the boxes. From this painstaking ap-proach, Korte can give a general profile of what types of body language are used for what purposes. e drawback to this method, of course, is the rigidity of the chart. Be-cause Korte assumes that nonverbal communication “al-ways plays a particular role within the situation in which it occurs and can thus be assigned to a particular func-tional class” (p. 36), her readings–at times, forced–o en leave li le or no room for ambiguity.A er xác định điều khoản của cô, Korte hóa các văn bản văn học. Korte là thành công nhất khi cô đọc giao tiếp nonverbal đóng góp cho một đọc lớn hơn-ing của văn bản. Cô đọc Laurence Sterne và 1 H-Net đánh giá Margaret Atwood đặc biệt tốt, thêm mới lay-ers của cái nhìn vào những lời chỉ trích lớn trên các tác giả. Ở đây, cách tiếp cận liên ngành của Korte của việc sử dụng thuật ngữ ing tồn tại trong một lĩnh vực mới là xứng đáng chú ý và sử dụng-ful. Korte là ít nhất là thành công khi cô di chuyển từ một ví dụ nhanh chóng của ngôn ngữ cơ thể kế tiếp mà không có côn-nections giữa các văn bản hoặc qua giai đoạn văn học. Trong khi bà lập luận rằng chúng ta phải biết chi tiết cụ thể cul-tural trước khi gán một ý nghĩa đặc biệt cho một cử chỉ cụ thể, ví dụ của riêng mình có xu hướng để dehis-toricize văn bản của mình. Trong một trường hợp của văn học whiplash, Korte di chuyển từ William Golding 1955 e Inheritors để Anita Brookner năm 1987 A Friend từ Anh đến J.D. Salinger 1950 "cho Esme-với tình yêu và Squalor" để Samuel Richardson 1747-49 Clarissa tất cả trong không gian của một trang và một nửa (trang 143-44). Thật không may, Korte không dừng lại để phân tích lý do tại sao ngôn ngữ cơ thể là quan trọng trong các văn bản hoặc làm thế nào differ tín hiệu qua nhiều thế kỷ; cô ấy chỉ nói rằng ngôn ngữ cơ thể là có. Quá o en, của Korte đọc trở thành danh sách Giặt ủi của đây cơ thể lan-gauge, có ngôn ngữ cơ thể, ở khắp mọi nơi ngôn ngữ cơ thể.Trong khi phần II có thể chậm đi (đặc biệt là đối với những người trong chúng ta không quen với biểu hiện tâm lý học), nó kết thúc với một phần đặc biệt hữu ích mang tên "cơ thể Lan-gauge trong văn bản tường thuật: một danh mục mở của es-tions" (tr. 172-73). e câu hỏi rõ ràng tóm tắt điểm chính của Korte, nhắc nhở chúng tôi để yêu cầu những gì fre-quency, bối cảnh, và vai trò của ngôn ngữ cơ thể là trong văn bản.Khi Korte hóa quan điểm lịch sử ở phần cuối của công việc của mình, cơ thể ngôn ngữ văn học trở nên sống động. Trong phần III, Korte tập trung vào lịch sử phát triển-ment của ngôn ngữ cơ thể trong tiểu thuyết của British Isles từ thế kỷ 16 cho đến nay. Trong khi kích thước mẫu của cô của tám mươi tiểu thuyết admi edly quá nhỏ và số lượng lớn của cô văn bản thực sự đại diện cho thế kỷ 18 cho đến nay, cô hợp lý lập luận rằng "ngôn ngữ cơ thể ngày càng đạt được mặt đất trong thẩm Mỹ của tiểu thuyết En-glish" (p. 178). Trong tiểu thuyết bài-Richardson, "cuộc sống Ev-eryday thu ý nghĩa như vật chất cho tiểu thuyết; concreteness và độ tin cậy của thế giới mô tả trở thành nguyên tắc quan trọng"(p. 184). Cô nhấn mạnh một phát triển "một ention đến từng chi tiết" tạo ra một nhu cầu cho tháng mười một-els là "đặc biệt" (p. 187). Một phần của điều này cần cho cụ thể bắt nguồn từ sự nổi lên của nhiếp ảnh, và trong thế kỷ XX, hình ảnh chuyển động như cách thức mới để xem-ing cơ thể. Một phần III, Korte độc đáo bổ sung của cô đọc chặt chẽ với các bằng chứng từ bức tranh và nghệ thuật vi-sual khác, cho bài đọc của mình một kể là o en thiếu một phần II.
In Body Language in Literature, Barbara Korte does set up an interesting framework for bringing the termi-nology of expression psychology into the realm of liter-ary criticism. I do, however, hope that she pushes her own analysis and follows up with “further research” she suggests at the end of this work. A systematic study of gender or a systematic look at etique e books (something Karen Hal unen has done very well for American liter-ature in Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870) or a system-atic look at body language medical writings would be the needed touch to make Korte’s work truly stand out.

Copyright (c) 1999 by H-Net, all rights reserved. is work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact [e-mail].


If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at: h p://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.

Citation: Kate Anderson. Review of Korte, Barbara, Body Language in Literature. H-LIS, H-Net Reviews. January, 1999.

URL: h p://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=2714

Copyright © 1999 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate a ribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at [e-mail].








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