Key Terms in Stylistics Key Terms Series the Key Terms Series Offers Undergraduate Students Clear, Concise and Accessible Introductions to Core Topics

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 The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York, NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © 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 under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identiﬁ ed as Author 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 This page intentionally left blank 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, stylisticians 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, grammatical, 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 others 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 particular 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 functionalist 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 influenced by the context in which it occurs. With Halliday, every linguistic choice came to be seen as functional, and the analyst, whether linguist or stylistician, 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 interest 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

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