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What is politeness? The word polite appears to have been in the English language since the fifteenth century. At that time, it literally meant 'polished' or 'neat'. By the mid-seventeenth century this meaning had changed through metaphorical extension, referring to studied social behaviour modelled on the princely courts. In late seventeenth and early eighteenth century England, politeness was largely freed from the association with courts and widened significantly in scope. The term polite came to cover a whole range of meanings and was applied to several fields of usage, for example referring to people and interaction in terms of the moral standard aspired by members of an elite (polite gentleman/lady/society/conversation) or to artefacts, products and concepts in terms of constituting an aesthetic standard (polite arts/towns/buildings/learning). What do the terms politeness and polite mean today, what do they encompass? In this course, we will deal with the complexity and intricacies of the concept of politeness over time and analyse how this has been adapted on screen in British film productions of historical and modern material. |
