Lecture

LITTERARY Stylistics And

LITEARRARY Criticism
Lecture
 A person’s specific language practices, or the set of
different characteristics of language use is called style.
 Hemingway’s style
 Mark Twain’s style
 Henry James’ style
 Some language practices are shared by a group of people
at one time or over a period of time e.g.
 Elizabethan style
 Legal document style
 News reporting style
 Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Such study has
three aspects:
 Language form
 Language meaning
 Language in context (Linguistic/language context refers to the
linguistic environment in which a word is used within a text)
 Linguistics is the system of communication used by a
particular community or country.
 Speech, writing, communication, conversation, speaking,
talking, discourse or talk all are synonyms for the word
“language”.
 All writings with ideas of universal interest such as
poetry, novels, history, biography and essays are called
literature.
 Any kind of printed material such as circulars,
pamphlets, brochures are also literature.
 Literature is the communication of thoughts, ideas, and
feelings through the written word.
 Literary criticism is the evaluation, analysis or
interpretation of a literary work. Critics examine a
particular literary work or a writer’s writings as a whole.
 Stylistics is the study of the distinctive styles
found in particular literary genres and in the
works of individual writers.
  Ancient time: Rhetoric - the art of creating speeches and
Poetics(the study of linguistic techniques in poetry and
literature or the art of writing poetry)
 Aristotle “Poetics” 320 B.C. – epic drama and lyrics,
 Socrates - Dialectics ( the art of creating a dialogue)
 Poetics developed into Literary Criticism; Rhetoric and
Dialectics – into Stylistics
In ancient
CAESAR Rome:
and analogists CICERO and anomalists
•Stressed regularity and system •Aimed at creation of flowery language
rules •Used unnatural syntactic patterns,
•Focused on facts and data artificial sentence structures
•Their aim was to create simple •Created anomalies on all language
clear and straightforward levels
speeches •Their true message was secondary to
 The term Stylistics is the combination of style+istics. Istics is a
suffix which means “of, relating to, or characteristics of a
specified quality. Istics is taken from Greek word “Istiqos” and
Latin word “Isticus”. The word “stylistics” is first attested in
English dictionary in 1882, meaning the science of literary style
or the study of stylistic features.
 Stylistics is a branch of linguistics which studies style in a
scientific and systematic way concerning the manners and
linguistic features of different varieties of language at different
levels.
 A branch of applied linguistics concerned with the study of
style in texts, especially (but not exclusively) in literary
works.
 According to Katie Wales in A Dictionary of Stylistics, 2nd
ed. (Pearson, 2001), "The goal of most stylistics is not
simply to describe the formal features of texts for their own
sake. They also show their functional significance for the
interpretation of the text; or in order to relate literary
effects to linguistic 'causes' where these are felt to be
relevant."
 Various equivalent sub-disciplines of stylistics, include
literary stylistics, interpretive stylistics, evaluative stylistics,
corpus stylistics, discourse stylistics, feminist stylistics,
computational stylistics, and cognitive stylistics.
 In the words of Halliday: “We can define linguistic stylistics
as the description of literary texts by using methods derived
from general linguistic theory, using the categories of the
description of language as a whole”.
 Stylistics means a comparison of each text by the same or by
different authors in the same and in different genres.
Stylistics, more commonly, is the scientific study of style.
 The term ‘style’ here has to do with those components or
features of a literary composition which give to it individual
stamp, marking it as the work of particular author and
producing a certain effect upon the readers.
 Stylistics is not something opposed to literary criticism,
because between true literature and linguistics there is no
conflict. The real linguist is at least half a litterateur and the
real litterateur is at least half a linguist. Stylistics is an attempt
to make literary criticism much more scientific.
 Stylistics is the study and interpretation of a text from a
linguistic perspective. Stylistics is an attempt to make literary
criticism objective and precise. It stresses the need to form a
literary grammar of language, a literary transformation and
satisfactory definitions of various literary terms, such as
‘style’, ‘poem’, ‘image’, etc.
 Saumya Sharma, (2013) in “Language Wise” from
The Times of India, states that "Stylistics, traditionally
known as the study of literary texts using formal
linguistic tools, can also be done via refined computer-
based applications. Some stylisticians quantitatively
analyze large amounts of data and texts, not possible
otherwise, and thus can provide answers to questions.
 Paul Simpson, (2004), in “Stylistics: A Resource Book
for Students” mentions that "The preferred object of
study in stylistics is literature, whether that be
institutionally sanctioned ‘Literature’ as high art or more
popular 'non-canonical' or traditional forms of writing.
 Many forms of discourse (advertising, journalism,
popular music--even casual conversation) often display a
high degree of stylistic dexterity, such that it would be
wrong to view dexterity in language use as exclusive to
recognized literature.
 The purpose of linguistic stylistics is to recognize and
categorize the ingredients of language in a certain text.

 The purpose of literary stylistics is typically to analyze

certain literary texts (basically fiction).
 Stylistics is a branch of linguistics concerned with the study of
specific choices in use of language, as regards sound, form, or
vocabulary, made by different individuals or social groups in
different situations of use.
 Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of
literature. Stylistics is the study and interpretation of texts in
regard to their linguistic and tonal style. It links literary criticism
to linguistics.
 Stylistics search for visible regularity, harmony, consistency in
structures of a text in the form of stylistic devices such as graphological
details (commas, full stops, apostrophe), phonological details
(alliteration, assonance, consonance, rhyme scheme), monosyllabic
words (as cat), disyllabic words (as is-sue, Bi-ble), trisyllabic words (as
Beau-ti-ful, met-a-phor, po-e-try), personification, imagery, similes,
diction, rhetorical question, personifications, tone and mood and
parallelism in the structure or the meaning as in the example bellow.
 Comparison of normal and abnormal paradigms
 Normal Paradigm Abnormal Paradigm
 A minute ago a pain ago
 An hour ago a severing ago
 A day ago a sadness ago
 A week ago an enjoyment ago
 A year ago a sickness ago
 The only difference between stylistic analysis and literary criticism, is
that literary criticism goes directly to its text evaluation subjectively
and is impressionistically independent from the linguistic form of
the text. The difference between stylistics and literary criticism was
explained by Ayeomoni (2003), who has discussed that literary
criticism focuses on subjective interpretation of texts, whereas
stylistics focuses on the ‘linguistic frameworks functioning in the
text’.
 Literary criticism tries to clarify the importance of a text by
explaining the text independent from the form of the text or the
linguistic aspects of a text. A critic may seek the help from textual
factors such as the background, socio-politics and geography, but
leaves out the linguistic aspects of the text.
 A parallelism observed in the following line of poetry from Alexander
Pope’s ‘The Rape of the Lock’:
 “Puffs, powders, patches, bibles, billets-doux.”
 The poet juxtaposed these nouns that are not similar in respect of
meaning but grammatically all plural nouns make the reader believe
that they are similar. These words are initially alliterated at the level of
phonetics. The writer wants to show that the elements that are similar
in form, are also similar in meaning for Lady Belinda. As the Bible,
which is a holy book, is placed beside items of make-up, it is clear that
Lady Belinda holds the Bible at the same level of respect as puffs and
powders. But for this reason stylisticians analyze language to justify
their interpretation. The goals of stylistics are to demonstrate the
oddity, irregularity, abnormality of a text. In this way he/she inspires
our attention to different uses of text.
The magnificence, elevated glamorous linguistic style has
supreme importance for literary criticism but language system
is not important for it but stylistics studies the linguistic features
of a text.
The use of language and its effects in a text is an initial stage for
explaining the meaning of a text stylistically but literary
criticisms will response to the text emotionally.
Both literary criticism and stylistics attempt to praise and
expose a work of art. The only difference between the two
approaches is that in the former, a critic expresses his own
opinion of what the text means, whereas, a stylistician offers
structural evidence to support his interpretation of the
meaning.
 The difference between the stylistician and the critic is that the former
arrive at the evaluative judgments through linguistic analysis but the
later immediately jumps to give value judgments impressionistically and
subjectively.
 A stylistician gives description of the physical appearance of a literary
text, through the graphological, syntactic features and lexicon-semantic
features but a critic’s concern is the underlying massage and not the
way the signals are combined. So the stylistician is not concerned with
the formal analysis of language.
 When a critic analyzes a literary work, he will focus on presenting the
themes; he will not talk about issues such as tone and mood,
graphological and phonological details.
Peter Barry, (2002), in “Beginning Theory, 2nd
ed.” from Manchester Univ. Press, says that
"Stylistics is, in a sense, the modern version of the
ancient discipline known as 'rhetoric,' which
taught its students how to structure an argument,
how to make effective use of figures of speech,
and generally how to pattern and vary a speech or
a piece of writing so as to produce the maximum
impact.
• The specific differences between conventional close
reading and stylistics are as follows:
• Close reading emphasizes differences between
literary language and that of the general speech
community . Stylistics, by contrast, emphasizes
connections between literary language and everyday
language.
"Stylistic analysis, unlike more traditional forms of
practical criticism, is not interested in new and startling
interpretations of the texts it examines. Rather, its
main aim is to explicate how our understanding of a
text is achieved, by examining in detail the linguistic
organization of the text and how a reader needs to
interact with that linguistic organization to make sense
of it. Technically speaking, stylistics is the study of the
linguistic features of a literary text - which directly
affect the meaning of an utterance.
 1. Style as an embellishment
Some definitions mislead us about style. The
definitions which regard ‘style’ as an embellishment or
addition to central core of thought or expression
mislead one to think that plain English has no style,
and that some utterances have style while others don’t.
They separate an outer halo of style from the inner
core of thought. They, thus, suggest the existence of
pre-linguistic thought or pre-stylistic expression.
 In fact, a writer’s original thought cannot be
separated from its final dress – what is said
cannot be separated from the way it is said.
 It is difficult to distinguish between utterances
that have a style and that which don’t have a
style.
 Essentially speaking, no sentence is without
style.
 2. Style as choice between alternate expression
 It is difficult to determine why a writer chooses one
expression and not the other.
 Speaker would choose only one style in conversation
depending on the situation – such a choice is non-stylistic.
 Another type of selection could be the choice between
‘fine woman’ and ‘nice lady’ or between ‘my father’ and
‘my old man’. Both are grammatically possible and both
have certain range of frames and reference in common.
 This type of choice may be labeled as stylistic.
 So, stylistic choice exists not only in lexis but also
in phonetic features (special voice quality, speech,
frequency etc.), Phonemes (singing/singin’),
morphemes (sings/singeth), words, phrases,
clauses, sentences and larger units.
 Hence, the definitions which treat style as choice
are inadequate.
 Stylistics is a bridge between linguistics and literature. It is the
linguistic study of style applying techniques and concepts of
modern linguistics to the study of literature. Linguistic
features and techniques help in the interpretation of a text.
Take for example:
 Woman without her man is nothing.
 Woman, without her, man is nothing.
 Woman, without her man, is nothing.
 I saw a saw which could not saw.
 First: the greater our detailed knowledge of the working
of the language system will be, the greater our capacity
for insightful awareness of the effects produced by the
literary texts will be.
 Second: a righteous analysis of language can be used to
make our commentary on the effects produced in a
literary work less subjective.
 Third: because it will be rooted in a systematic
awareness of language, so analysis of one linguistic
pattern requires checking against its related patterns
across the text.
 Stylistic analysis attempts to provide a commentary which is
objective and scientific, based on concrete countable data,
and applied in a systematic way. Stylistics analysis of a text
involves the description of a writer’s/speaker’s verbal choices.
 Stylistics does not reflect the views of the individual critic but
an impersonal and reproducible “truth”.
 Stylistic study helps to cultivate a sense of appropriateness
e.g. Who speak what language to whom and when because
according to Swift “Proper words in proper places make the
true definition of style.
 First, a certain style is determined by the characteristics of the
user of language such as the age, sex, education, socio-regional
or ethnic background.
 Second it is related to the characteristics of the use of language
in situation:
 Degree of intimacy b/w addresser and addressee
 Medium of communication (speech or writing)
 Setting (private or public)
 Purpose for which language is used (to inform, persuade)
 Stylistics analysis of a text involves the description of a
writer’s/speaker’s verbal choices.
 Stylistics does not reflect the views of the individual critic but an
impersonal, reproducible ‘truth’.
 Stylistic study sharpens the understanding and appreciation of a
literary work.
 Stylistic study helps to achieve adaptation in translation.
 For example:
 Whoever tries to twist you up.
 May the end of his nose take a twist.
 Literary Stylistics Analysis
 “The Past” by Micha-Chu
 Should i stop?
 Should i drop?
 My heart's gonna pop,
 I mess, i thought i was on top.
 I hoped this could last
 But i know i'm only in love with the past
 The past, that was once a blast
 A blast that for a second only last.
 You moved on
 I'm left with a scar to learn on
 I was wrong to say goodbye
 It was hopeless, to have you i lied.
 Poem Analyzation:
 1.If this poem is written in the 1st or 3rd person point of view. 2.
Who is the speaker? 3. What is the basic situation? 4. What is the
poem’s setting? 5. Are there conflicts in the poem? If so, what are
they? 6. What kind of imagery do you see most often in the
poem? Give some examples. 7. Does the poem have meter? If so,
what is it? 8. Does this poem have a rhyme scheme? If so, what is
it? 9. What other sound devices (alliteration, assonance,
onomatopoeia) have been included by the poet? Give examples of
each. 10. What figures of speech are included ( metaphor, simile,
personification, hyperbole)? Include examples 11. What is the
mood of this poem? 12. Explain the significance of the poem’s
title. 13. What do you think is the author’s purpose in writing this
poem? 14. What universal truth does the poet want to share with
readers? 15. What is the author’s tone.