EEd 326

stylistics &
Discourse
Analysis
Assoc. Prof. LEOLANDA ACLAN-BALILLA
HISTORY
STYLISTICS
history of stylistics
The development of Stylistics, given
that it combines the use of linguistic
analysis with what we know about the
psychological processes involved in
reading, depended (at least in part) on
the study of Linguistics and
Psychology (both largely twentieth-
century phenomena) becoming
reasonably established.
 Stylistics, then, is a sub-discipline that grew up in the
second half of the twentieth century: Its beginnings in
Anglo-American criticism are usually traced back to the
publication of the books listed below. Three of them are
collections of articles, some of which had been presented
as conference papers or published in journals a little
earlier:
 Fowler, Roger (ed.) (1966) Essays on Style in Language. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Freeman, Donald C. (ed.) (1971) Linguistics and Literary Style.New
York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Leech, Geoffrey N, (1969) A
Linguistic Guide to English Poetry. London: Longman.
Sebeok, Thomas A. (1960) Style in Language. Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press.
Perhaps the most influential article is that by Roman Jakobson in
Sebeok (1960: 350-77). It is called 'Closing Statement: Linguistics
and Poetics' because it was a contribution to a conference that
Sebeok (1960) published as a collection of papers. It is pretty
difficult, so we wouldn't recommend nipping off to read it until
you've done a bit more stylistics, but, as we shall see below,
Jakobson is an important figure who connects various strands in
the development of Stylistics.
.
Stylistics can be seen as a logical extension of
moves within literary criticism early in the
twentieth century to concentrate on studying
texts rather than authors. Nineteenth-century
literary criticism concentrated on the author,
and in Britain the text-based criticism of the two
critics I. A. Richards and William Empson, his
pupil, rejected that approach to concentrate on
the literary texts themselves, and how readers
were affected by those texts. .
This approach is often called Practical Criticism,
and it is matched by a similar critical movement
in the USA, associated with Cleanth Brooks,
René Wellek, Austin Warren, and others, called
New Criticism.
New Criticism was based almost exclusively on
the description of literary works as independent
aesthetic objects, but Practical Criticism tended
to pay more attention to the psychological
aspects involved in a reader interacting with a
work.
. However, these two critical movements shared
two important features:
(i) an emphasis on the language of the text
rather than its author and
(ii) an assumption that what criticism needed
was accounts of important works of literature
based on the intuitional reading outcomes of
trained and aesthetically sensitive critics.
These critics did not analyze the language of texts very
much, but, rather, paid very close attention to the
language of the texts when they read them and then
described how they understood them and were affected
by them.
Nearly a hundred years later, this approach is still very
influential in schools and universities in the Western
world and gives rise to the kind of critical essay where
writers make a claim about what a text means, or how it
affects them, and then quote (and perhaps discuss) a
textual sample to illustrate the view argued for. This
could perhaps be called the 'Claim and Quote' approach
to literary criticism.
In general terms, stylisticians believe that the
'Claim and Quote' strategy is inadequate in
arguing for a particular view of a text, because,
like the slip 'twixt cup and lip, there are often
logical gaps between the claim and the quotation
intended to support it. In other words, stylisticians
think that intuition is not enough and that we
should analyze the text in detail and take careful
account of what we know about how people read
when arguing for particular views of texts.
However the Stylistics approach in
Western Europe and North America
clearly grows out of the earlier critical
approaches associated with Practical
Criticism and New Criticism.
Stylisticians also use the same kind of
approach on non-literary texts.
There is another important strand of influence
in the development of Stylistics (the one which
Roman Jakobson was involved in) which comes
from Eastern Europe. In the early years of the
twentieth century, the members of the Formalist
Linguistic Circle in Moscow (usually called the
Russian Formalists), like I. A. Richards, also
rejected undue concentration on the author in
literary criticism in favor of an approach which
favored the analysis of the language of the text
to psychological effects of that linguistic
structure.
The group contained linguists, literary critics
and psychologists, and they (and the Prague
Structuralists: began to develop what became a
very influential aspect of textual study in later
Stylistics, called foregrounding theory. This
view suggested that some parts of texts had
more effect on readers than others in terms of
interpretation, because the textual parts were
linguistically deviant or specially patterned in
some way, thus making them psychologically
salient (or 'foregrounded') for readers. The
Russian Formalists were, in effect, the first
stylisticians.
. However, their work was not
understood in the West because of
the effects of the Russian
Revolution in 1917. After the
revolution, formalism fell out of
favor, and, in any case, academic
communication between what
became the Soviet Union and
Western Europe and North America
virtually ceased.
Roman Jakobson became one of the most
influential linguists of the twentieth century,
and the reason for his considerable influence
on Stylistics, in addition to his academic
brilliance, was that he linked various schools
of Linguistics together. He left Moscow at
the time of the Russian Revolution and
moved to Prague, where he became a
member of the Prague Structuralist circle,
who were also very interested in the
linguistic structure of texts and how they
affected readers.
Then, when Czechoslovakia also
became communist, he moved to
the USA. Rather like a beneficial
virus, he carried the approach that
later became called Stylistics with
him and helped those who wanted
to develop Practical and New
Criticism in more precise
analytical directions.
https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/p
rojects/stylistics/introduction/hist
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