Download sty lec1

NEELUM ALMAS
• Assistant Professor
• Teaching experience: 8 years at post graduate
level.
• Qualification: MA English, MS English, PhD in
progress.
• Area of specialization: English Literature.
Literary theories, Modern Fiction.
STYLISTICS
Lecture # 1
Stylistics
Objectives:
This course aims to enable the learners to:
• understand the importance and function of
Style and language in literary works.
• analyze literary texts on the basis of style.
Objectives
• perform detailed analysis of texts to see how
they are constructed and which features
distinguish literary expression form non
literary expressions.
• Apply the understanding of stylistics to other
non-literary expressions such as news,
advertisements, politics, religion.
The Concept of Style
• A person’s distinctive language habits or the
set of individual characteristics of language
use.
e.g. Milton’s grand style, Swift’s satirical style,
Pope’s mock heroic style, Bacon’s
epigrammatic style
Style
• Some or all the language habits shared by
people in a group or writers belonging to a
particular era/age.
e.g Elizabethan dramatists style
Romantic poets’ style
The style of news reporting
Official documents style
What is Stylistics?
• Stylistics is the study of style used in literary
and verbal language and the effects the
writer/speaker wishes to communicate to the
reader/listener.
• Stylistics applies linguistics to literature in the
hope of arriving at analysis which are more
broad, rigorous and objective.
Stylistics
• Instead of focusing on What the work is
about, stylistics focuses on How the work is
composed.
What
How
Theme/Message
Style/Form
Stylistics
Style
Literature
istics
Linguistics
Stylistics
Stylistics is a critical method that analyzes
literary works on the basis of style. Its
practitioners focus on analyzing a writer’s
stylistic choices with regard to
Diction/ Vocabulary
Syntax
Phonology
Figurative language.
Stylistics
• "The goal of stylistics is not simply to describe
the formal features of texts for their own sake,
but in order to show their functional
significance for the interpretation of the
text…“Katie Wales A Dictionary of Stylistics,
2nd ed. (Pearson, 2001),
Stylistics
• As a discipline, it links literary criticism to
linguistics. It does not function as an
autonomous domain on its own, but it can be
applied to an understanding of literature.
• It relies on literary criticism to comment on
the quality and meaning of a text for
interpretation and understanding.
Stylistics
• 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.
• 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.
Stylistics and Style: A Historical
Perspective and Development
Classical Age
• Rhetoric: The art of creating speech. Taught in
ancient Greece to train speakers to create
effective speeches.
• Poetics: The creation of poetic/literary works.
Aristotle’s “Poetics” a pioneer publication.
Distinguishing epic, drama, lyrics.
• Dialectics: The study of creating and guiding
dialogue, talk or discussion. The Dialogical or
Socrates method.
Classical Age
• The further development of stylistics was
based on the three above mentioned sources.
Poetics led to the development of Literary
Criticism and Rhetoric and Dialectics
developed into Stylistics.
Practical Criticism & New Criticism
19th Century Development
• 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, rejected that
approach in order to concentrate on the
literary texts themselves, and how readers
were affected by those texts. This approach is
often called Practical Criticism.
19th Century Development
• It is matched by a similar critical movement in
the USA, associated with Cleanth Brooks,
called New Criticism. New Criticism was based
almost exclusively on the description of
literary works as independent aesthetic
objects.
19th Century Development
• These two critical movements shared two
important features: (i) an emphasis on the
language of the text rather than its author and
(ii) paying 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.
20th Century Development
• Modern stylistics has its roots in Russian
Formalism and the related Prague School of
the early twentieth century.
• Stylistics can trace its roots to the formalist
tradition that developed in Russian literary
Criticism at the turn of the 20th century.
Roman Jakobson’s work focused on poetic
language and the study of its formal qualities.