Key Terms in Stylistics

276 Pages·2010·0.815 MB·English

by  Nina Nørgaard, Beatrix Busse, Rocío Montoro

Key Terms in Stylistics
Key Terms series
The Key Terms series offers undergraduate students clear, concise and
accessible introductions to core topics. Each book includes a comprehensive
overview of the key terms, concepts, thinkers and texts in the area covered
and ends with a guide to further resources.
Titles available in the series:
Key Terms in Linguistics, Howard Jackson
Key Terms in Pragmatics, Nicholas Allott
Key Terms in Second Language Acquisition, Bill VanPatten and Alessandro
G. Benati
Key Terms in Semiotics, Bronwen Martin and Felizitas Ringham
Key Terms in Systemic Functional Linguistics, Christian Matthiessen, Kazuhiro
Teruya and Marvin Lam
Key Terms in Syntax and Syntactic Theory, Silvia Luraghi and Claudia Parodi
Key Terms in Translation Studies, Giuseppe Palumbo
Key Terms in Semantics, M. Lynne Murphy and Anu Koskela
Forthcoming titles:
Key Terms in Discourse Analysis, Paul Baker and Sibonile Ellece
Key Terms in Phonology, Nancy C. Kula and Wyn Johnson
Key Terms in Stylistics
Nina Nørgaard, Rocío Montoro and Beatrix Busse
Continuum International Publishing Group
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© Nina Nørgaard, Rocío Montoro and Beatrix Busse 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system,
without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
Nina Nørgaard, Rocío Montoro and Beatrix Busse have asserted their right un-
der the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identifi ed as A uthor
of this work.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-0-8264-1288-1 (hardcover)
978-0-8264-1948-4 (paperback)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nørgaard, Nina.
Key terms in stylistics / Nina Nørgaard, Rocío Montoro and Beatrix Busse.
p. cm.—(Key terms)
ISBN 978–0–8264–1288–1 (hardcover)
ISBN 978–0–8264–1948–4 (pbk.)
1. Language and languages—Style. 2. Style, Literary. I. Montoro, Rocío.
II. Busse, Beatrix. III. Title. IV. Series.
P301.N56 2010
410—dc22 2010000323
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India
Printed and bound in India by Replika Press Pvt Ltd
Contents
Introduction 1
Key Branches in Stylistics 7
Key Terms in Stylistics 49
Key Thinkers in Stylistics 169
Key Texts in Stylistics 217
Index 261
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Introduction
What is stylistics?
Stylistics is the study of the ways in which meaning is created through
language in literature as well as in other types of text. To this end, stylisti-
cians use linguistic models, theories and frameworks as their analytical tools
in order to describe and explain how and why a text works as it does, and
how we come from the words on the page to its meaning. The analysis typi-
cally focuses qualitatively or quantitatively on the phonological, lexical, gram-
matical, semantic, pragmatic or discoursal features of texts, on the cognitive
aspects involved in the processing of those features by the reader as well
as on various combinations of these. While some stylistic approaches prima-
rily show an interest in the producer of the text, investigating the style of
a particular author, for instance, other stylisticians focus more on the text
itself (broadly understood to encompass all types of discourse) and still oth-
ers devote their attention to the reader and the role readers play in meaning
construction. New developments in stylistics emphasize that the production
of meaning needs to be accounted for as a double exercise encompassing
as much text-informed inferences as the mental processes that allow text
comprehension.
Stylistics is often regarded as a linguistic approach to literature – and
understandably so, since the majority of stylistic attention so far has been
devoted to literary texts. In actual fact, however, the range of discourses
that stylisticians are currently engaged with has expanded considerably to
include non-fictional forms such as advertising, academic writing, news
reports as well as non-printed forms such as TV and pictorial advertising,
film, multimodal publications, etc. With its base in linguistics, stylistics is
(ideally) characterized by an informed, systematic, retrievable, and (usually
also) contextual analysis, which is rigorous, consistent and open to falsifica-
tion. Because of the ‘scientific’ nature of linguistics as compared to other
2 Introduction
fields in the humanities, the stylistic approach to text analysis may seem
more objective than other branches of literary criticism. It is important to
note, however, that in spite of stylisticians’ concern with rigour, no stylistic
analysis can be totally objective, but it will always be influenced by a myriad
of factors, such as the stylistician’s individual preferences and foci, as well as
the linguistic paradigm employed for analysis or the chosen methodology.
Notwithstanding this reservation, stylistics has proved itself to provide use-
ful tools and methods which allow its practitioners to conduct informed
analyses of the ways in which meaning is created in texts by linguistic means.
Stylistics is interdisciplinary in scope – most obviously so by its bringing
together linguistics and literary studies. Yet, the eclectic claims of the field
have furthermore allowed views borrowed from disciplines such as philoso-
phy, cultural theory, sociology, history and psychology to find their way into
the stylistic analyses of literature. While sometimes criticized for its interdis-
ciplinariness, stylistics has been praised by others for its interdisciplinary
character which is considered one of the advantages and inspiring poten-
tials of the approach.
Branches of stylistics – a brief historical overview
Historically, stylistics may be seen to date back to the focus on the style of
oral expression, which was cultivated in rhetoric following the tradition of
Aristotle’s Rhetoric. The real flourishing of stylistics, however, was seen in par-
ticular in Britain and the United States in the 1960s, and was largely spurred
by work done in the field by proponents of Russian Formalism such as Roman
Jakobson and Viktor Shklovsky. The Russian Formalists wished to make literary
inquiry more ‘scientific’ by basing it firmly on explicit observations about the
formal linguistic features of the texts under scrutiny. They were particularly
interested in ‘literariness’ and devoted their stylistic study to phonological,
lexical and grammatical forms and structures such as parallelism and linguistic
deviation which would make a text ‘poetic’ (see formalist stylistics and fore-
grounding). The formalists focused their stylistic investigations almost solely
on poetry. While praised – at least in stylistic circles – for their devotion to
the linguistic aspects of literary meaning-making, and for the systematic and
rigorous nature of their work, formalist stylisticians were sometimes criticized
for their overriding focus on linguistic form at the expense of the function and
effects of the formal features put up for examination, and for their tendency
Introduction 3
to ignore the significance of contextual factors such as the pragmatic, social
and historical contexts of these texts.
The focus on literature in general and poetry in particular, on the one
side, and the interdisciplinary character which was visible even in the early
years of stylistics, on the other, made some see stylistics only as a sub-branch
of literary criticism. Also, it was questioned whether stylistics could be
regarded as anything other than a method and whether, due to its eclecti-
cism, it contained any ideological or theoretical foundations. Therefore,
matters relating to function and context were increasingly addressed from
the late 1970s, which witnessed a functional turn in stylistics (see function-
alist stylistics). Of particular impact was Halliday’s functional model of
language, with its focus on language as a ‘social semiotics’, that is, a model
of linguistic meaning-making as a social phenomenon influencing and influ-
enced by the context in which it occurs. With Halliday, every linguistic choice
came to be seen as functional, and the analyst, whether linguist or stylisti-
cian, would consequently investigate the (experiential, interpersonal and
textual) functions of language as it is actually used in a specific context (see
M. A. K. Halliday). The functionalist approach furthermore entailed an inter-
est in longer stretches of text, which provided analytical tools for stylisticians
who wished to devote their attention to longer texts such as narrative fic-
tion and play texts.
Due to its focus on social context and the realization by any given text of
contextual factors such as register, genre and ideology, Hallidayan linguistics
came to play a significant role in branches of stylistics with an interest in the
linguistic manifestation of ideology, like those of feminist stylistics (see entry)
and critical stylistics (see entry). Feminist stylisticians are especially concerned
with the realization and maintenance of (unequal) gender relations in literary
as well as other types and texts and may, in fact, be seen as a variant of critical
stylistics whose focus lies with the linguistic embodiment of social inequality,
power structures and ideology more generally.
Also basically functional in nature are various pragmatic approaches to
text analysis (see pragmatic stylistics), which emerged in the 1960s, but only
really came to play a role on the stylistics scene from the late 1980s and the
beginning of the 1990s. Like functionalist stylistics, pragmatic stylistics is con-
cerned with language in use and the significance of contextual factors such
as, for example, the linguistic, social, cultural and authorial contexts of the
production and reception of texts. At the crux of pragmatic stylistics is the