Monday, May 11, 2020

The Elements of Style Stylistics in Literature

Stylistics is a branch of applied linguistics concerned with the study of style in texts, especially, but not exclusively, in literary works. Also called  literary linguistics, stylistics focuses on the figures, tropes, and other rhetorical devices used to provide variety and a distinctness to someones writing. It is linguistic analysis plus literary criticism. According to Katie Wales in A Dictionary of Stylistics, the goal of most 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; or in order to relate literary effects to linguistic causes where these are felt to be relevant. Studying a text closely helps to unearth layers of meaning that run deeper than just the basic plot, which happens on the surface level. Elements of Style in Literature Elements of style studied in literary works are what is up for discussion in any literature or writing class, such as: Big-Picture Elements Character development: How a character changes throughout the story  Dialogue: Lines spoken or internal thoughtsForeshadowing: Hints dropped about whats going to happen later  Form: Whether something is poetry, prose, drama, a short story, a sonnet, etc.Imagery: Scenes set or items shown with descriptive words  Irony: An occurrence thats the opposite of whats expected  Juxtaposition: Putting two elements together to compare or contrast them  Mood: The atmosphere of a work, the attitude of the narrator  Pacing: How quickly the narration unfolds  Point of view: The narrators perspective; first person (I) or third person (he or she)  Structure: How a story is told (beginning, action, climax, denouement) or how a piece is organized (introduction, main body, conclusion vs. reverse-pyramid journalistic style)  Symbolism: Using an element of the story to represent something else  Theme: A message delivered by or shown in a work; its central topic or big ideaTone: The wri ters attitude toward the subject or manner with choosing vocabulary and presenting information, such as informal or formal Line-by-Line Elements Alliteration: Close repetition of consonants, used for effectAssonance: Close repetition of vowels, used for effectColloquialisms: Informal words, such as slang and regional termsDiction: The correctness of the overall grammar (big picture) or how characters speak, such as with an accent or with poor grammarJargon: Terms specific to a certain fieldMetaphor: A means to compare two elements (Can also be big-picture if an entire story or scene is laid out to show a parallel with something else)  Repetition: Using the same words or phrases in a short amount of time for emphasis  Rhyme: When the same sounds appear in two or more wordsRhythm: having a musicality to the writing such as by using stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of poetry or sentence variety or repetition in a paragraphSentence variety: Variation in the structure and length of consecutive sentences  Syntax: The arrangement of words in a sentence Elements of style are the characteristics of the language used in the written work, and stylistics is their study. How an author uses them is what makes one writers work distinct from another, from Henry James to Mark Twain to Virginia Woolf. An authors way of using the elements creates their distinct writing voice. Why Studying Literature Is Useful Just as a baseball pitcher studies how to properly grip and throw a type of pitch a certain way, to make the ball go in a certain location, and to create a game plan based on a lineup of specific hitters, studying writing and literature helps people to learn how to improve their writing (and thus communication skills) as well as to learn empathy and the human condition. By becoming wrapped up in a characters thoughts and actions in a book, story, or poem, people experience that narrators point of view and can draw on that knowledge and those feelings when interacting with others in real life who might have similar thought processes or actions. Stylisticians In many ways, stylistics is an interdisciplinarity study of textual interpretations, using both language comprehension and an understanding of social dynamics. A stylisticians textual analysis is influenced by rhetoric reasoning and history. Michael Burke describes the field in The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics as an empirical or forensic discourse critique, wherein the stylistician is a person who with his/her detailed knowledge of the workings of morphology,  phonology, lexis, syntax, semantics, and various discourse and pragmatic models, goes in search of language-based evidence in order to support or indeed challenge the subjective interpretations and evaluations of various critics and cultural commentators. Burke paints stylisticians, then, as a kind of Sherlock Holmes character who has expertise in grammar and rhetoric and a love of literature and other creative texts, picking apart the details on how they operate piece by piece—observing style as it informs meaning, as it informs comprehension. There are various overlapping subdisciplines of stylistics,  and a person who studies any of these is known as a  stylistician: Literary stylistics: Studying forms, such as poetry, drama, and proseInterpretive stylistics: How the linguistic elements work to create meaningful artEvaluative stylistics: How an authors style works—or doesnt—in the workCorpus stylistics: Studying the frequency of various elements in a text, such as to determine the authenticity of a manuscriptDiscourse stylistics: How language in use creates meaning, such as studying parallelism, assonance, alliteration, and rhymeFeminist stylistics: Commonalities among womens writing, how writing is engendered, and how womens writing is read differently than mensComputational stylistics: Using computers to analyze a text and determine a writers styleCognitive stylistics: The study of what happens in the mind when it encounters language Modern Understanding of Rhetoric As far back as ancient Greece and philosophers like Aristotle, the study of rhetoric has been an important part of human communication and evolution as a result. Its no wonder, then, that author Peter Barry uses rhetoric to define stylistics as the modern version of the ancient discipline known as rhetoric, in his book Beginning Theory. Barry goes on to say that rhetoric teaches 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 maximum impact. He says that stylistics analysis of these similar qualities—or rather how they are utilized—would, therefore, entail that stylistics is a modern interpretation of the ancient study. However, he also notes that stylistics differs from simple close reading in the following ways: 1. 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. 2. Stylistics uses specialized technical terms and concepts which derive from the science of linguistics, terms like transitivity, under-lexicalisation, collocation, and cohesion. 3. Stylistics makes greater claims to scientific objectivity than does close reading, stressing that its methods and procedures can be learned and applied by all. Hence, its aim is partly the demystification of both literature and criticism. Stylistics is arguing for the universality of language usage while close reading hinges upon an observation of how this particular style and usage may vary from and thereby make an  error relating to the norm. Stylistics, then, is the pursuit of understanding key elements of style that affect a given audiences interpretation of a text. Sources Wales, Katie. A Dictionary of Stylistics. Routledge,1990, New York.Burke, Michael, editor. The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics. Routledge, 2014, New York.Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. Manchester University Press, Manchester, New York, 1995.

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