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 istics Literature 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.