Course Project - stylistics
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SEUENG380Week02ChapterPPT_Simpsonunit01.pptxUnit 1, Sections A and B: What is stylistics? Developments in stylistics
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ENG 380: Stylistics
Section A: What is stylistics?
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ENG 380: Stylistics
“a method of textual interpretation in which primacy of place is assigned to language.” (Simpson 2004)
Analyzing the language used in literature: innovation and creativity
Stylistics
Language
Literature
Stylistics
"[Wood bridge rural]" photo by [Hanna Bergblau] licensed under [CC0 1.0] via [StockSnap.io]
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ENG 380: Stylistics
In 21 century, stylistics is flourishing in books, journals, scholarly conferences, and dictionaries.
Sub-disciplines growth: stylistics methods are enriched and enabled by theories of discourse.
Pedagogical: language teaching and language learning
Creative writing: techniques of creativity and invention in language
Stylistics
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ENG 380: Stylistics
Cognitive psychology cognitive stylistics
Feminist theory feminist stylistics
Discourse analysis discourse stylistics
Etc.
Influences on the branches of stylistics
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ENG 380: Stylistics
The object of stylistics:
Literature
Noncanonical forms of writing
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ENG 380: Stylistics
Creativity and innovation in language are not exclusively found in literature (e.g., music, advertising, conversation, newspapers).
Techniques of Stylistic analysis are as much about deriving insights about linguistic structure and function as they are about understanding literary texts.
Caveats
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ENG 380: Stylistics
There appears to be a belief in many literary critical circles that a stylistician is simply a dull old grammarian who spends rather too much time on such trivial pursuits as counting the nouns and verbs in literary texts. Once counted, those nouns and verbs form the basis of the stylistician’s ‘insight’.
Myth
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ENG 380: Stylistics
Stylistics is interested in language as a function of texts in context, and it acknowledges that utterances (literary or otherwise) are produced in a time, a place, and in a cultural and cognitive context. These ‘extra-linguistic’ parameters are inextricably tied up with the way a text ‘means’.
Fact
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ENG 380: Stylistics
Exploring creativity in language use and its impact on a literary text
Enriches
our ways of thinking about language
Our understanding of literary texts
Stylistic analysis, as a method of inquiry, explores texts where the rules of language are bent, distended or stretched to breaking point.
The Purpose of Stylistics
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ENG 380: Stylistics
Stylistics should be…
Rigorous – “based on an explicit framework of analysis” (Simpson 2004)
Retrievable- has defined and agreed upon terms that can be used to describe a style
Replicable- analysis can be checked by other stylisticians using the same method on the same text or beyond the text.
Example: Moore’s work is ‘invertebrate’.
This isn’t a retrievable analysis (‘invertebrate’ is not a common term that can be easily defined by stylisticians).
It isn’t appropriate metalanguage (language used to describe language).
Three Basic Principles
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ENG 380: Stylistics
Section B: Developments in stylistics
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ENG 380: Stylistics
Pre-20th century:
Classical period: “relationship between patterns of language in a text and the way a text communicates” (Simpson 2004)
Greek rhetoricians: “tropes and devices that were used by orators for effective argument and persuasion” (Simpson 2004)
Early 20th century:
Russian Formalism (Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Tomashevsky)
Prague School Structuralism (Jan Mukarovsky, Wilhem Mathesius)
Formalism + Structuralism (Roman Jakobson)
History of Stylistics
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ENG 380: Stylistics
form of textual patterning with an artistic (literary-aesthetic) purpose
A technique of defamiliarization (ostranenie)
“Making strange” in a language
Shklovsky (Russian Formalist)
Works at any level of language
An aspect of the text is made salient through…
Stylistic Distortion (deviation from the norm)
Repetition or Parallelism
Foregrounding
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ENG 380: Stylistics
To draw attention to a textual pattern and makes it notable to the reader.
This notability is motivated by literary considerations rather than a personal preferred stylistic of the writer. E.g. Jonathan Swift’s monosyllabic words.
In sum, if a particular textual pattern is not motivated for artistic purposes, then it is not foregrounding.
Purpose
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ENG 380: Stylistics
1st issue: It is impossible to define “norms” in the English language, so how can one measure deviation from the norm?
2nd issue: when a once deviant pattern becomes established in a text. Does it stay foregrounded for the entire duration of the text? Or does it gradually slip into the background?
Problematizing Foregrounding
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ENG 380: Stylistics
Hemingway’s The Old Man in the Sea
How many times can the ‘no-adjective’ pattern stay foregrounded before one stops noticing it?
What if Hemingway put an adjective in the text?
Is the foregrounding the ‘no adjective’ pattern because this deviates from the normal discourse norm? Or...
Is the foregrounding the use of an adjective, because this deviates from Hemingway’s style?
Internal foregrounding: deviation within a deviation
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ENG 380: Stylistics
Six Functions of Language:
Conative
Phatic
Referential
Emotive
Poetic
Metalingual
“The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination” (Jakobson 1960).
Jakobson’s Poetic Function
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ENG 380: Stylistics
He ________ in the dead of winter.
Opening line from W. H. Auden’s ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’ (1939)
Make a list of words to “fill in the blank”.
Think of the phonetic, semantic qualities, and poetic function of each word choose.
Cloze Test Activity
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ENG 380: Stylistics
He disappeared in the dead of winter.
Phonetic Qualities:
Three syllables
Alliteration: occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning of words
Assonance: vowel harmony
Semantic Qualities:
Death: dead, disappeared
Conceptual metaphor: “Death is a journey”
Poetic Function:
a principle of equivalence: establish connections
the axis of selection: the pool of possible words
the axis of combination: the words in the poetic line
The actual sentence…
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ENG 380: Stylistics
It is essential to view the poetic function not as an exclusive property of literature but rather as a more generally creative use of language
Caveat
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ENG 380: Stylistics
Simpson, P. (2004). Stylistics: A Resource Book for Students (2nd ed.). London: Routledge. ISBN 9780415644969 (print edition).
References
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ENG 380: Stylistics
