Our research pursues an answer to the question of the influence of the general creative potential upon the creative performance in coining and interpreting new complex words. This chapter presents fundamental views, theories, and principles of the concept of creativity and because creative potential has been studied and evaluated by various psychological methods, we provide a general overview of various aspects of approaches to creativity from the psychological point of view. Attention is devoted to various methods used for the study and evaluation of creativity. Special focus is on the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking because it is crucial to our research. This is followed by a critical overview of various approaches to the concept of linguistic creativity, and more specifically, to word-formation and word-interpretation creativity. This chapter introduces our approach that relies on (i) an onomasiological theory of word-formation (ii) an onomasiological theory of meaning predictability, and (iii) a theory of competition in word-formation and word-interpretation.

In Celtic studies, scholars have debated the prevalence of secular learning in early Ireland, and stances on this matter vary widely. In 1910, Heinrich Zimmer offered up a theory for the pre-eminence of the Irish in classical learning based on the ‘direkte Handelsverbindungen’ (‘direct trading-connections’) between Ireland and Gallo-Roman Aquitaine. The wine trade with Gaul, Zimmer argued, provided the means for the exodus of throngs of scholars from western Gaul to Ireland in the period of migration. These traders brought with them late antique Christian learning, including the works of Ausonius of Bordeaux, Sulpicius Severus, and Martin of Tours.

Three years later, in a lecture given to the School of Irish Learning in September of 1912, Kuno Meyer argued that in a twelfth-century Leiden manuscript he found further evidence for late antique Gallic scholars fleeing to Ireland. Both Meyer and Zimmer believed this note to be of the sixth century and no later:

Zimmer and Meyer take ‘Hiberia’ to mean ‘Irish’ and ‘British’, and Meyer argues that in this twelfth-century account there is clear evidence of the arrival of Gallic scholars in Ireland by the fifth century. This thesis is proved, Meyer argues, in the earliest extant writings of Irish provenance, as St Patrick refers to ‘dominicati rhetorici’ (Confessio 238.23-24), those rhetoricians in comparison to whom he felt rustic and uneducated. And with Zimmer and Meyer a long debate ensued that would continue into the twenty-first century. Meyer's claims have been tempered to the extreme, but the case on classical learning in the fifth through the eighth centuries has not been closed.

Chapter 8 foregrounds the ethics and politics of the second person in ‘postcolonial’ writing, addressing the use of ‘you’ in yet two other genres, that of the essay in Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place (1988) and that of the short story with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s ‘The Thing Around Your Neck’ published in an eponymous collection in 2009. Kincaid and Adichie use two different techniques to have the reader reflect on her own beliefs and prejudices through a rhetoric of contrast. Kincaid targets specific readers (‘you the tourist’) as representative of the white western tourists who fly every day to her native island Antigua to get away from their daily burden. She thus reduces the reference of ‘you’ to a specific membership category she stigmatises in her very powerful interpellation of the self-centred tourists, denouncing the tourist industry her native island Antigua is subjected to. Whilst Kincaid uses direct forceful address, Adichie chooses a You type that brings the reader to align with the character’s perspective in a more indirect yet as forceful way that the pragma-linguistic analysis of the short story will precisely display.

What is particularly interesting in Quilt (2010) by Nicholas Royle narrating the impossible mourning of a man after the death of his beloved father, is its diverse pronominal shifts (it starts as a first-person narrative before becoming a third- then a second-person one), grammatically reflecting the slow disappearance of the first-person protagonist from the narrator’s position and then from the narrative altogether. The clearly-marked ‘you’ passages in Quilt highlight the ghostly presence of a narrator speaking on behalf of a character who is trying to keep it all together but is slowly losing it. The chapter displays that not only does the novel go down the pronominal hierarchy in the switch from first-person to third-person narrative via the second person, but it also stylistically subverts the Animacy Hierarchy through a generic ‘you’ that knits together different pockets of voices in a most experimental way. Royle’s novel is completed by an afterword calling on to the reader in a classical manner, which serves as a transition to Parts III and IV devoted to this (para)textual call to the reader/viewer.

Chapter 4 concentrates on a trauma narrative, Winter Birds (1994) by Jim Grimsley, relating the childhood of a young child named Daniel Crell in a household marked by violence, alcoholism and sexual abuse on the part of a maimed father. The testimony of the protagonist (who is also the narrator) is carried out by the second-person pronoun that, combined with other linguistic elements, serves as a coping mechanism throughout the narration. Drawing from socio-cognitive theories and cognitive stylistics (and in particular Text World Theory), it shows how Grimsley’s narrative does not confine itself to inform us about the author’s own traumatic experience through Dan but makes readers enact it through an embodied style performing the character’s vulnerability rather than describing it.

Chapter 9 focuses on paratext from the eighteenth century to Victorian novels, highlighting the revival of omniscience in twenty-first-century storytelling before taking a technological leap to hypertext. Building on theories put forward by specialists of the field, it shows to what extent the notion of ‘interactivity’ and the reader’s higher implication in the creative process in digital fiction as opposed to print fiction need to be narratologically and pragmatically qualified. As the reader is strongly invited to (virtually) perform the action mentioned in the hyperlink by clicking on it if the story is to go on at all, the reference model (of Chapter 1) is tested and adapted to foreground the limits but also the potentialities of digital art. In response to Warhol’s distinction (1986, 1989, 1995) between ‘engaging’ and ‘distancing’ narrators, Chapter 9 also proposes a new model of implication in fiction, taking the perspective of actual readers. Given their degree of engagement and immersion in the narrative addressed to ‘you’, distinctions between ‘engaged’, ‘distanced’ and ‘immersed’ readers are suggested in a flexible model allowing for intermediate positioning.

Chapter 2 delves into George Orwell’s use of the second-person pronoun in Down and Out in Paris and London published in 1933. It has been rarely noted in Orwell’s autobiographical essay and yet, alternating between the ‘I’ pronoun and the indefinite ‘one’, it uniquely brings the reader to more directly experience what other sentient beings living in deprivation are going through. A detailed quantitative as well as qualitative analysis is offered, classifying the different ‘you’ that pervade the text based on linguistic clues and contextual parameters, exposing all the plasticity of the pronoun. The results show that ‘you’ oscillates between specificity and genericity in a way subtly exploited by Orwell in his attempt at implicating the reader in re-living his experience as a tramp through writing about it.

Whenever I have been asked by friends, ‘so what are the effects of “you” in the end?’, I have answered that (1) we need to agree on the scope of reference for each ‘you’ encountered; (2) see what it linguistically collocates with; (3) highlight the overall pragmatic objectives; (4) consider the genre of the text along with the narratological framework – who speaks to whom, through whom and on behalf of whom; (5) take into account the author’s personal history and the socio-cultural context of the narrative’s emergence; and, lastly, (6) acknowledge the potential difference in acts of reading depending on readers’ dispositions, histories and backgrounds. By that point, I had lost all my listeners expecting a simple answer.