 |
|
A brief history of Stylistics
Are you sitting comfortably?
Then we'll tell you the story of how Stylistics began...
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.
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 which 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 which 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 together
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 in
order 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 analyse 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 analyse the text
in detail and take careful account of what we know about how people read
when arguing for particular views of texts. But 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 favour of an approach
which favoured
the analysis of the language of the text in relation to psychological
effects of that linguistic structure. The group contained linguists,
literary
critics and psychologists, and they (and the Prague Structuralists: see
the paragraph below) 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. But 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 favour 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 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.
The introduction and chapter 2 of J. Douthwaite (2000) Towards
a Linguistic Theory of Foregrounding (Edizioni dell'Orso: Turin)
has a more detailed history of stylistics and the concept of foregrounding,
a concept which is a cornerstone of stylistic analysis.
We've included two additional links for you.
The first, gives you a little background as to why Stylistics is called Stylistics. The second
link invites you to think about whether Stylistics is 'Formalist'
|
