1.1 Definition of Stylistics
A reasonable start for a book of this nature is to briefly examine how the field has been defined. Wales defines stylistics simply as "the study of style" (19: 437). This definition is clear and concise, but it does not tell us much about the field until we have had a good discussion of what style is. Widdowson provides a more informative definition: "By stylistics, I mean the study of literary discourse from a linguistic orientation and I shall take the view that what distinguishes stylistics from literary criticism on the one hand and linguistics on the other is that it is essentially a means of linking the two" (1975: 3). He further explains the definition from the morphological make-up of the word stylistics, pointing out that the 'styl' component relates stylistics to literary criticism, and the 'is-tics' component to linguistics. Leech holds a similar view. He defines stylistics as the "study of the use of language in literature" (1969: 1), and considers stylistics a "meeting-ground of linguistics and literary study" (1969: 2). From what Widdowson and Leech say, we can see that stylistics is an area of study which straddles two disciplines: literary criticism and linguistics. It takes literary discourse (text) as its object of study and uses linguistics as a means to that end. Thus defined, we may exclude two kinds of 'border line' studies, work which is in some ways linguistically oriented but not directly related to literary interpretation (e.g. computer-oriented study of authorship), and work which is claimed to deal with style but does not make use of linguistic facts and theory.
1.2 Emergence of Stylistics as an Interdisciplinary Field of Study
The date when stylistics became a field of academic inquiry is difficult to determine. However, it may be said that it was not until the late 1950's that stylistics began to advance with significant and measurable strides. In 1958, the first conference on stylistics was held at Indiana University, U.S.A. and eleven years later, another conference which attracted specialists from over ten countries was convened in Bellagio, Italy. The papers presented and discussed at both conferences were characterized by systematic and objective analysis of the language of literature and were later published. This greatly helped stylistics to gain popularity and led to a growing interest in the subject. Consequently, a number of more coherent and systematic works of both a theoretical and a practical nature were published in the field. Now, stylistics has developed into an interdisciplinary area of study with explicit aims and effective techniques, and promises to offer useful insights into literary criticism and the teaching of literature.
English stylistics has developed on the basis of traditional rhetoric which may be traced back to Aristotle's time. Nevertheless, it was the 'three revolutions' in social sciences (Lott, 1988) that brought it to the right track and brought about its present status.
One of the revolutions is the modernist movement in art and literature, lasting from 10 to the beginning of World War Ⅱ. To a great extent, the revolution was a break with tradition in the ways it influenced both the content and language of literature. From this movement onwards, creative writers exercise no restraints on the sort of language they use in their writings. In modernist literature, readers could find much to surprise them in respect of content as well as language.
Another revolution is the one in literary criticism which has had a profound and radical influence on stylistics. In the 1930's, the critical theorist, I. A. Richards, expressed his dissatisfaction with those critics of his age. In his opinion, they seemed to be too much preoccupied with literature's role in educating the readers morally and emotionally. He called for a more objective approach to literary texts. In his famous book: Practical Criticism (1929), he established an approach to poetry which depended on close reading of the text. He was joined by scholars such as William Empson whose work Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) had a wide influence and promoted the concept of ambiguity as a defining linguistic characteristic of poetry. Their insistence on close reading of the text and analysis of the language of the text coincides with the starting point of stylistics, thus greatly facilitating its development.
The third revolution took place in linguistic science starting in the late 1950's. It was initiated by the work of Noam Chomsky and Michael Halliday whose thoughts were directly or indirectly influenced by the linguistic theory of F. de Sassure, the founder of modern linguistics. Chomsky's transformational-generative grammar revealed a system of surface structure and deep structure in English syntax. It also brought about a new awareness of how the human mind is innately able to systematize reality by the use of language. Halliday's systemic grammar has offered many insights into the methods of text analysis, particularly in respect of cohesion between sentences in discourse. The work done in the field of linguistics in the last three decades has provided the stylisticians with effective and completely new tools for investigating language in use in both literature and other types of discourse.
The above-mentioned revolutions, in their own ways, have played a fundamental role in shaping stylistics into the important interdisciplinary field of academic study that it is today.
1.3 Two Important Assumptions of Stylistics
The first important assumption of stylistics is that literature is made of language. This point is most explicitly made by Halliday in the "Foreword" he writes for Cummings and Simmons' book Language and Literature (1983). He states: "Perhaps the first step towards becoming a stylistician ... will be to recognize that literature is made of language" (1983: vii). Halliday observes that the way literature is made of language is not analogous to the way that architecture is made of steel and concrete; steel and concrete are formless until the builder imposes some pattern on them. But language is already meaningfully structured and systematized. A close analogy to the way literature is made of language, according to Halliday, would be the way that dancing is made of the movements of the body. Dancing starts from everyday actions like leaping, balancing and reaching and these too are not formless. They are already highly orchestrated, 'meaningful' patterns of bodily movement. But out of these patterns, further patterns can be created; and it is when we become aware of these second order patterns that we come to realize something we call dancing or bodily art.
Since literature is made of language, linguistics which is the scientific study of language should in principle be most helpful to us in analyzing and interpreting literary texts.
The second assumption of stylistics is just as basic and important as the first one. That is the assumption that literature is a type of communicative discourse. Not many stylisticians have made the point explicitly, but Widdowson has given a clear statement: "a piece of language use, literary or otherwise, is not only an exemplification of linguistic categories ... but is also a piece of communication, a discourse of one kind or another" (1975: 29). This point is not difficult to see. A study of any literary text will reveal that stylistic features do not occur randomly in it but form patterns. In other words, they have cohesion. They are understood, therefore, not simply with reference to the linguistic system, but also with reference to the context in which they appear.
The assumption that literature is a type of discourse allows stylisticians to account for literary texts not just intra-sententially but also inter-sententially, not only in terms of linguistic facts and theory but also in terms of sociolinguistic facts and theory. Thus, it is possible to study literature from a wider dimension.
1.4 The Goals, Components and Procedure of Stylistic Inquiry
Halliday identifies two possible goals of stylistic inquiry. The first is "to show why and how the text means what it does" (1983: x). This goal, according to Halliday, is more immediate and unquestionably attainable. In attaining the goal it is necessary to describe and interpret the text, in the process of which we may find that we have done more than simply show why the text means what we knew it meant already. We may have discovered fresh meanings we had not previously been aware of, though we may have been reacting to them unconsciously. To attain this goal means that we should be able to say "I can demonstrate why this text means all that I say it means" (1983: x).
The second goal Halliday puts forward is much more difficult to attain. It is that of "showing why the text is valued as it is" (1983: x). This, Halliday says, might be taken as an aim that is characteristic of stylistics, as distinct from text analysis in general. To attain this goal means that one should be able to say why this text is good and that one is not, or why this text is better than that one, or why this text has been received into the canon of major literary works. This is indeed a challenging task, since at the moment we know very little of how value inherits in the text. This is perhaps why Leech and Short say that "it is with interpretation that stylistics is more directly concerned" (1981: 13).
Now let us consider the components and the procedure of stylistic analysis. In discussing the goals of stylistic inquiry, we might have observed that a stylistic analysis involves description, interpretation and evaluation. When discussing components of literary criticism, Short has pointed out: "the three parts are logically ordered: Description ← Interpretation ← Evaluation" (1984: 15). Description is logically prior to interpretation because a reasonably convincing interpretation of a literary text is only derived from a careful and systematic examination of its language. Interpretation is also logically prior to evaluation. As Short most humorously puts it, "it makes no sense to say 'I think X is good because I don't understand it'" (1984: 15). Short has a further observation: "Indeed, an evaluation of e.g. a poem is always relative to some interpretation. If, for example, someone comes up with a better interpretation for a poem in the sense that it explains the text more adequately than previous attempts, the aesthetic merit of the text increases too" (1985: 15).
In discussing the components and procedure of stylistic analysis, Halliday (1983) uses the term 'phase' instead of the term 'part' employed by Short. He mentions two phases, analytic phase (similar in meaning to what Short calls description) and interpretative phase. Evaluation phase is not explicitly mentioned, but is undoubtedly implied since Halliday sets evaluation as a goal of stylistic inquiry. He points out that these phases are conceptually distinct. "An analysis may be wrong, an interpretation is not right or wrong, but more or less convincing, more or less penetrating and deep" (1983: x). However, Halliday says: "It is not being suggested that analysis and interpretation are separate portions of the task, to be performed in sequence with one starting only when the other has ended. They may be interleaved one with the other, or they may not even be distinguished operationally at all. In some problems, they overlap - where there is more than one possible analysis, and it is necessary to adopt one or the other, or perhaps both" (1983: x).
Let us now sum up the points Short and Halliday make. Both of them suggest explicitly or implicitly three component parts of stylistic inquiry, and that these component parts be distinguished in some way. However, Halliday makes a further point, i.e. the proposed component parts of stylistics should not be taken as forming a rigid procedure of stylistic analysis. This last point of Halliday's is of great importance to student stylisticians, since they are apt to seek a hard-and-fast procedure or technology of stylistic analysis which simply does not exist and will be hardly possible to develop. The naive and mistaken conception that there is a fixed procedure of analysis is theoretically ruled out by Spitzer's image of 'philological circle' (1970: 30). Spitzer argues that the task of linguistic-literary explanation proceeds by the movement to and fro from linguistic details to the literary 'centre' of a work or a work's art. There is a cyclic motion whereby linguistic observation stimulates or modifies literary insight, and literary insight in turn stimulates further linguistic observation. Widdowson also rejects the idea of forming a fixed procedure of stylistic analysis. He says: "There is no rigid procedure; the technique is to pick on features in the text which appear to first impressions as unusual or striking in some way and then explore their ramifications" (1975: 210). Widdowson here has touched on a very controversial issue, i.e. the question of what style is. His remarks imply that only unusual or striking features are stylistically relevant. But some other stylisticians hold different views. This issue will be discussed in the next chapter. Now let us turn to an examination of the nature of stylistic analysis.
1.5 The Nature of Stylistic Analysis
Stylistic analysis is generally concerned with the uniqueness of a text; that is, what it is that is peculiar to the uses of language in a literary text for delivering the message. This naturally involves comparisons of the language of the text with that used in conventional types of discourse. For example, if we want to ascertain whether the use of the definite article 'the' in a literary text is unique and therefore expresses a special meaning, we need to know how the definite article is used in everyday communicative discourse.
Stylisticians may also wish to characterize the style of a literary text by systematically comparing the language uses in that text with those in another. Halliday points out, "The text may be seen as 'this' in contrast with 'that', with another poem or another novel; stylistic studies are essentially comparative in nature ..." (1971: 341). On this point, Widdowson is of the same opinion as Halliday. He says: "All literary appreciation is comparative, as indeed is a recognition of styles in general" (1975: 84). Thus, we may conclude that stylistic analysis is an activity which is highly comparative in nature.
Exercises
1. How do you define stylistics?
2. What factors contribute to the shaping of stylistics into an inter-disciplinary field of academic inquiry?
3. Name and explain the assumptions of stylistics.
4. Specify the goals of stylistic inquiry. Do you think that it is equally easy to attain the two goals put forward by Halliday? Why (or why not)?
5. Both Halliday and Short have mentioned three components of stylistic inquiry. What are these components? What are the possible relations between the three component parts?
6. Do you think it is possible to have a fixed procedure of stylistic analysis? Why (or why not)? What technique of stylistic analysis does Widdowson suggest in the text?
7. What is the nature of stylistic analysis?
