Stylistics

Lecture 1
What are the aims of the course?
The fundamental philosophy of the course is twofold:
• To teach you a set of analytical TOOLS from the "stylistician's toolkit" that you can use to examine texts
(for example, their words, sounds, structures, or interactive aspects).
• To encourage you to use those tools on additional texts, both during and after the sessions, so that
you learn by doing
What prior knowledge of literature and language do you need to have?
• We do expect you to be interested in literature and want to study the language of texts.
What will you learn?
• Throughout the course, you will learn different aspects of how to analyse the language of texts. You will
learn about particular aspects of the structure of English (e.g. grammatical, sound and conversational
structure), at points where it is of particular relevance to the texts you happen to be studying at the
time.
What’s you role?
• You're expected to be an active participant, preferably working alongside other students, especially
when it comes to analysing text extracts. We also want you to experiment with the tools you learn each
session, by practising on additional texts.
What is stylistics?
The essential core of criticism has three major parts:
Description _____. Interpretation ______. Evaluation
(where description is mainly but not entirely linguistic).

We combine linguistic, contextual and general world knowledge,

as the basis for inferring an appropriate interpretation.

Readers are different and so bring along the possibility of fresh ways of interpreting a
particular text; but the linguistic configurations in a text are stable and common to us
all, as are the multitude of rules and procedures which we use in order to interpret
utterances. It is on these shared phenomena that we must concentrate in order to
understand how we interpret texts as well as what we understand them to mean.

Short, M. (2013). Exploring the language of poems, plays and prose. Published 2013 by Routledge
Predessessor disciplines of Stylistics were Poetics (5th centure BC,
Aristoteles and Plato) and Rhetorics (around 475 BC by a man
named Corax).
• Poetics is distinguished from hermeneutics by its focus not on the meaning of a text, but
rather its understanding of how a text's different elements come together and produce
certain effects on the reader. Most literary criticism combines poetics and hermeneutics
in a single analysis.
Interesting note: Plato found sophists morally corrupt and therefore essentially worthless.
His main argument was that they can teach people to win public debates and discussions
with weaker arguments by the use of unfair tactics such as ‘style’ and ‘emotion’. Plato
believed that people should reason logically, ethically and truthfully, without the use of
stylistic and/or affective embellishments. In short, Plato believed that the people who had
been trained by the Sophists dazzled their interlocutors with lexical and syntactic trickery,
rather than reasoning logically with them. Plato also believed in the philosophical notion of
‘truth’ and despised the oratory of the professional and political world.
 What is stylistics?
• Stylistics is the linguistic study of style in language and how
this is affected by such variables as author, genre, and the
aims of the text.
• As such, stylistics involves the detailed linguistic description
of texts as well as an assessment of the likely effects and
impact on readers of the choices made by writers.
• Stylistics explores how readers interact with the language of
(mainly literary) texts in order to explain how we understand,
and are affected by texts when we read them.
Three kinds of Style:

• The high, florid style was often reserved for literature and
poetry.

• The low, plain style was mostly used for more mundane acts of
discourse communication – for example, instruction in the
classroom.

• The middle style was invariably a blend of both, to be used in

intermediate situations.
• Style arises from motivated linguistic choices and is what allows you to
characterise a text as belonging to a particular genre or having been
written by a particular author, for instance.
• But what many contemporary stylisticians are primarily interested in is
text style. That’s what we focus on in this course. This refers to the
linguistic techniques used within an individual text to create specific
stylistic effects. These effects may be to serve the aims of the text itself -
for example, to create a particular point of view or to generate a sense of
character. Or they might be focused on getting the reader to react in a
particular way - for example, to feel a particular emotion or to be
persuaded by an argument.
• The key point is that creating stylistic effects relies on having a range of
linguistic options to choose from. What stylisticians do is describe the
language of the text in as much detail as possible before trying to connect
that linguistic description - in as replicable a way as possible - to the
effects that they have observed.
• Stylistics emerged from the Russian Formalist
movement of literary criticism prevalent in Russia
at the turn of the twentieth century.

• Modern stylistics is applied to both literary and

non-literary texts alike - though it is probably fair
to say that a lot of stylisticians are particularly
interested in literature.
Stylistics and literature
Literature is made of language. And language - in all its varieties - is the
object of study of linguistics.
At the same time, though, we need to be aware of the contextual issues
that are important in understanding language in use. And since much
stylistics involves the analysis of literature, this means being sensitive to
literary contexts too.
According to Roman Jakobson, “a linguist deaf to the poetic functions of
language and a literary scholar indifferent to linguistics are equally flagrant
anachronisms”. (Jakobson 1960: 377)
References
• Jakobson, R. (1960) Closing statement: Linguistics and poetics. In Sebeok, T. A. (ed.) Style in Language, pp. 350-77.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Sinclair, J. (2004) Trust the Text. London: Routledge.
Roman Jakobson is an important figure who connects together various
strands in the development of Stylistics.
He was a Russian-American linguist and literary theorist.
Jakobson distinguishes six communication functions
Roman Jakobson

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 own academic brilliance, was because 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 which later became called
Stylistics with him, and helped those who wanted to develop Practical and
New Criticism in more precise analytical directions.
Name
There have been a few attempts to change the name of the
enterprise: for example to 'literary linguistics' or 'critical linguistics'.
But none of the labels so far proposed covers all the aspects of field
adequately (for example the two just mentioned can just as easily
apply to areas not covered by Stylistics and do not adequately
represent the psychological aspects of the approach), and so
'Stylistics' has survived as the most popular label, despite its
shortcomings.

But is a name important?

What’s in a name?
JULIET
'Tis but thy name that is my enemy.
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet.
Romeo would, were he not Romeo called,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name, which is no part of thee
Take all myself.

(William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, II)

https://nosweatshakespeare.com/quotes/soliloquies/whats-in-a-name/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3_PxpmKvFc
Fabula and Sjužet
In 1925 Shklovsky also introduced the key terms of fabula and sjužet into
the field of narrative studies.
Fabula (Story (or Storyline)refers to the chronological order of events in a
story, while sjužet (Plot (or Discourse/Narrative Structure) refers to the
order of the events as they were narrated; for example, this might involve
things like flashbacks or gaps in the narration.
These two terms fall into the two ‘levels’ of narrative: the deep level and
the surface level. The deep level is the abstract level that contains the
fabula, while the surface level is the actual level that contains the sjužet.
Readers will read the sjužet and slowly work out the fabula by looking at
the logic of all the events and actions.
Function of literary text
Shklovsky (20th century Russian linguist) argued that as things
become more familiar, we stop paying attention to them. In some
cases we stop noticing them entirely. This is what happens to
everyday language; it gets automatised. Shklovsky thought that it
was the function of literary texts, and all other arts, to make people
perceive the world from new and different perspectives. In short,
he believed that poetic language has the power to de-automatise; to
shake us out of our everyday visual and cognitive lethargy. He
thought that the employment of style figures (both schemes and
tropes) that foreground at the levels of meaning and syntax would
help achieve this effect. These he saw as linguistic devices.
 Task:

• Read closely and reflect on theoretical material reviewed in the

slides and study by heart the passage from Romeo and Juliet provided
on the previous slide.
• Think about the importance of name/title. Research an example of
some interesting name or a title of literary work and be prepared to
discuss it at the lecture.