Hello A-Level English students and welcome to another one of the videos from this series, Paris in 5 Minutes. As you may know it'll probably take longer than 5 minutes because what we're going to do is analyse one of the AQA language and literature texts in close detail. This text is going to be Neither Here Nor There by Bill Bryson, which is the third text in the anthology.
In summary in this text Bryson is describing his experiences of visiting Paris as a tourist on two separate occasions and he considers changes in the way that he perceives the city. In the text he recalls the murderous drivers and queue jumpers, Parisian anti-social behavior. He recalls being underwhelmed by the Mona Lisa but he does discover in the Louvre a dirty painting which catches his eye. He also discusses the difficulty of relieving yourself in Paris. unless you are a bird.
With regard to context this is obviously a written text and it belongs to the genre of a travel memoir but particularly to the sub-genre of humorous travel writing. Bryson is a humorous writer and therefore his primary purpose is really to entertain. There's also a secondary purpose in that he wants to interest you and show you something new about Paris but ultimately he's seeking to amuse readers.
with this self-deprecating description of his own experience. And with regards to audience, this means that his readers, yes, they will be readers with experience of travel and national stereotypes, but ultimately they will be looking to enjoy an alternative perspective, one that's probably got a bit of culture in it, but it's also quite funny. Bryson is a big-selling author.
His books are highly popular. They are bestsellers. And he has his fans who... will probably read anything he writes regardless of the subject so it's not the case that people reading this are people with an interest in Paris it's much more likely that people are simply interested in Bryson's humorous style.
The subjects that he treats in this extract cover Parisian street culture and local customs namely being really anti-social towards people, tourism and the tourist perspective, museums, art, culture. And as we already mentioned, the rudeness of the locals. So the representations in this text, Bryson is offering here really an alternative representation of Paris.
He's overlooking the predictable experiences, the predictable touristic viewpoint, and offering instead a comedic personal anecdote, a personal perspective on it. Paris is presented through his perspective. as an unfamiliar and potentially intimidating place that is populated by aggressive locals. And Bryson is really seeking to exaggerate this through hyperbole and stereotype, because he's offering here a satirical representation of French society. Obviously, you will know that a satire is a text in which exaggeration is used for a humorous effect, often for humorous effect.
And I think it's true to say that we probably understand he's embellishing or exaggerating some of the features of Parisian culture. But Bryson is not only targeting Parisians, he also really is targeting himself. And a lot of his humor is what you would call self-deprecating, meaning that his own ineptitude, his own inabilities, his own shortcomings are the subject of humor. He's encouraging us to laugh at him. The humor is scatological in nature, focused on bodily functions, poos and wheeze and the like.
And he also is focused on taboo subjects like sex and death. And these are often features for humor. These are things that we like to laugh about.
And if you mention these things in polite company, you'll normally get a few nervous giggles. Bryson is conveying his ironic love of Paris ultimately. despite his pretty challenging experiences he actually is happy to be treated rudely.
With regard to the linguistic features in this text many of these are very effective ways of creating humor. One example would be the lexis that Bryson chooses to present taboo subjects. He is very euphemistic in his selection of fundament which is a synonym for bottom.
There are of course much more dysphemistic terms, synonyms for fundament. He also chooses the verb plugged to describe the placement of someone's finger in the fundament of another. This is creating quite an ironic tone because these are lexical choices that we associate with quite a high register, a culturally sophisticated register, and that obviously ironically contrasts with the nature of one person having their finger up the bottom. of another. The ironic adverbs are placed there to modify this information.
but also to play up the irony of it, because this action is being done in a casual and absent-minded manner. In other places in the text, he is perhaps much more direct, and rather than using euphemism, he is using dysphemism, such as in the quote, Did you know a bird's shit on your head? That's very direct.
There are, of course, many other more euphemistic lexical choices he could have used, other than shit, but in this case, he's decided to go really for the direct, inappropriate, and somewhat shocking choice of a taboo swear word. And the mixture, I guess, in this text of kind of high register, the sophisticated register creating ironic euphemism, and the more direct, dysphemistic register adds a sense of unpredictability to it, which can actually make it quite funny. There is intertextuality. And Bryson is relying on a lot of cultural references to create absurd or surrealist images.
This is often done using similes. There is a character in the text who is described as like a Russian wrestler. He describes Paris as being like a department store on the first day of a big sale.
A character like the figure in Edvard Munch's The Scream. So we've got here a lot of broad cultural references. A third-rate Spanish gigolo, which is...
quite a humorous way of describing someone's appearance and he also creates hyperbolic humor with these cultural references a thorazine from syringes the size of bike pumps i think thorazine is some kind of sedative so these are conveying a kind of absurd and surrealistic humor through hyperbole exaggeration but also in a way that's quite relatable to us you In the end, I suppose this is creating an almost cartoonish imaginative effect in his writing. There are examples of both irony and bathos in his writing. Bathos is like a letdown where you're built up to expect something and what is then finally delivered.
The punchline is kind of anticlimactic. So Katz, his traveling companion, his judgment on the Louvre, there is nothing but pictures and shit in this place. is actually quite underwhelming compared to the conventionally impressive Louvre.
You remember that in the context we talked about how Bryson is offering an alternative representation of Paris, and Katz's judgment is very much a contrast to the way the Louvre is traditionally presented. Bryson describes being looked at like a large, imperfectly formed piece of shit, which I think is a beautiful piece of description. And his... reaction to being looked at this way is to be glad.
Obviously there's a kind of irony here in the fact that we don't normally like being looked at in that way but Bryson is foregrounding the humor through the modification in the description. The large imperfectly formed piece of shit. He's laying it on quite thickly there the description and leading you to expect perhaps a different reaction from the one that you get.
The overall effect there is obviously to kind of sharpen your appreciation of Bryson's reaction and a way of foregrounding the irony in the way he feels about Paris. The text has an anecdotal discourse structure. Bryson is a storyteller and he does his work through these kinds of anecdotes.
There are discourse markers throughout the text which guide you. through a kind of chronological narrative, sequencing events clearly and giving you kind of topic focuses for particular paragraphs so you know where and when they're happening in the frame of the narrative. There are shorter forms and fragments within the text that are features of spoken mode and these help to create this sense of an anecdotal voice. So this is what happens or no urinal cakes either come to that. Features that perhaps we might expect in spoken language rather than in highly formal written language.
And these are helping to lower the formality. That's quite a lot of linguistic analysis. So how might we connect this to other texts within the anthology? There are contrasting representations of famous attractions, particularly the Louvre Lonely Planet videos do a lot to promote Paris in a much more acceptable way. than this text.
Guide texts like the rough guide obviously are helping to promote Paris in a more corporate manner. There are contrasting modes, so contrasting to a written memoir, spoken personal narratives of Zara and Anna. They are equally individual and personal, but you have a spoken mode rather than a written mode, which leads, of course, to drastically different language. Other representations of Parisian customs and public behavior are represented in memoirs, particularly Understanding Chic, where we have some notoriously difficult and challenging locals or foreign correspondents.
Understanding chic is quite similar in that the author, like Bryson, concludes that they actually quite enjoy this challenging Parisian attitude to people or the Parisian antisocial nature. So it's possible that this is an unlikely comparison to feature in an exam because those two texts are quite similar. But you could certainly look at both texts and ask yourself. how the linguistic features are similar or different based on their slightly different aims and contexts. That's everything I've got for you on this one.
That was Paris in much more than five minutes, but hopefully it gave you a fairly solid overview of this really humorous and engaging text. This has been Excel English. Don't forget to check out the playlist to look at the other videos in this series.
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