Titles - a challenge, an insight, a mystery, a joke? AS Lang and Lang Lit and A2 Lang

Titles are a fascinating area and one you must master for the articles you are required to write.

Below is the end of an article by Barbara Bleiman from Emagazine (number 15) - don't forget to use the link and login on our Moodle page to look for info on all our topics in this great resource (use the 'emagazine' tab when you've clicked the link, 'student area' and then the password is all caps).

Lang Lit should especially notice the mention of one of our texts in the last paragraph!

Telling Titles  (the end of an article by Barabara Bleiman)
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Writers suggest genres by their choice of language and sometimes even write counter to the genre implied by the title, to play with the reader's expectations. Margaret Atwood's title The Blind Assassin has all the marks of a thriller and there are many elements of the thriller in the novel. It turns out, however, that 'The Blind Assassin' is a book written by a character in the novel and is not the whole story. Interestingly, the question of who the blind assassin is and what Atwood means by it is one of the most thought-provoking and exciting aspects of the novel. Here the title is working very hard for its writer.

Some writers like to use word play, so that the title isn't just giving us a taste of what's to come, or telling us about it, but is actually part of the paradoxes and thematic complexities of the novel. So Ian McEwan's Enduring Love offers us the two different ways of reading 'enduring' as a verb - having to suffer or endure love - and as an adjective - love that endures. Both the verb and the adjective are relevant to the themes of the novel and the title forms part of our reading of those themes.

Titles can refer to other texts, accruing all the good associations of those other texts and gaining from all their rich reverberations. Famous lines from Shakespeare are a good source of titles (The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner, pinched from Macbeth), or from famous poems, (such as Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, taken from a sermon by John Donne), or biblical references (such as The Grapes of Wrath).

Whatever else a title has to do, it must act as an invitation to the reader, whether by being appealing, or intriguing or vulgar or simple or strong. And though there are tried and tested patterns, there's always someone ready to break the rules, to make the bookshop browser stop in their tracks as they roam the shelves. Though not strictly fiction I know, the most eye-catching title in recent months must be A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, an autobiographical work by Dave Eggers which, incidentally, has all the power of the best fiction. Eggers has taken an imagined quotation from the ideal review, such as you find on most book covers, and promoted it to the position of title. It's shameless self-publicising but it can be forgiven because it's tongue-in-cheek, one great big joke. Or is it? You have to read the book to find out. And would exactly the same book, with a different title, such as The True Life Adventures of Dave Eggers, or Dave, or Loss or Toph and Me, or Coping and Surviving or All the World's a Stage or any number of other possibilities, have ever stood a chance of selling the millions that this book has now sold?