USE IN ENGLISH STUDIES
Why employ stylistics at all in the study of English? Because form is important in poetry and language, and stylistics has the largest armory of analytical weapons. At this point, the study of language moves into either 'stylistics' or 'literary studies'.
• Stylistic analysis is a normal part of literary studies. It is practised as a part of understanding the possible meanings in a text.
• It is also generally assumed that the process of analysis will reveal the good qualities of the writing.
• Take the opening lines of Shakespeare's Richard III
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
• A stylistic analysis might reveal the following points:
- the play is written in poetic blank verse
- that is - unrhymed, iambic pentameters
- the stresses fall as follows
-
Now is the winter of our discontent
- [notice that the stress falls on vowel sounds]
- the first line is built on a metaphor
- the condition of England is described in terms of the season 'winter'
- the term 'our' is a form of the royal "we"
In a complete analysis, the significance of these stylistic details would be related to the events of the play itself, and to Shakespeare's presentation of them.
In some forms of stylistic analysis, the numerical recurrence of certain stylistic features is used to make judgements about the nature and the quality of the writing. Moreover, stylistics need not be reductive and simplistic. There is no need to embrace Jacobson's theory that poetry is characterized by the projection of the paradigmatic axis onto the syntagmatic one. Nor accept Bradford's theory of a double spiral: literature has too richly varied a history to be fitted into such a straitjacket. Stylistics suggests why certain devices are effective, but does not offer recipes, any more than theories of musical harmony explains away the gifts of individual composers.
Some stylistic analysis is to be found in most types of literary criticism, and differences between the Traditional, New Criticism and Stylistics approaches are often matters of emphasis. Style is a term of approbation in everyday use ("that woman has style", etc.), and may be so for Traditional and New Criticism. But where the first would judge a poem by reference to typical work of the period (Jacobean, Romantic, Modernist, etc.), or according to genre, the New Criticism would probably simply note the conventions, explain what was unclear to a modern audience, and then pass on to a detailed analysis in terms of verbal density, complexity, ambiguity, etc. To the Stylistic critic, however, style means simply how something is expressed, which can be studied in all language, aesthetic and non-aesthetic.
In linguistics the purpose of close analysis is to identify and classify the elements of language being used. In furtherance to literary stylistics exercise, an attempt on sociolinguistics will be explained. Language is not a neutral medium but comes with the contexts, ideologies and social intentions of its speakers written in. Words are living entities — things which are constantly being employed and only half taken over — i.e. carrying opinions, assertions, beliefs, information, emotions and intentions of others, which we partially accept and modify. In literary studies the purpose is usually an adjunct to understanding and interpretation.
However, it is important to recognise that the concept of style is much broader than just the 'good style' of literary prose. For instance, even casual communication such as a manner of speaking or a personal letter might have an individual style. However, to give a detailed account of this style requires the same degree of linguistic analysis as literary texts. Stylistic analysis of a non-literary text for instance means studying in detail the features of a passage from such genres as:
The method of analysis can be seen as looking at the text in great detail, observing what the parts are, and saying what function they perform in the context of the passage. It is rather like taking a car-engine to pieces, looking at each component in detail, then observing its function as the whole engine starts working. These are features, which are likely to occur in a text whose function is to instruct:
Features are dealt with in three stages, as follows:
identify - describe - explain
The features chosen from any text will be those which characterise the piece as to its function. They will be used by the analyst to prove the initial statement, which is made about the linguistic nature of the text as a whole.
This method purports to be fairly scientific. A hypothesis is stated and then proved. It is a useful discipline, which encourages logical thought and can be transferred to many other areas of academic study. This is one reason why the discipline of stylistic analysis is so useful: it can be applied to a variety of subjects.
CONCLUSION
Stylistics continues to face its status as a discipline operating among all other disciplines, from which it historically has drawn both its goals and its methods. Work being done in the last quarter of the century on historical and contextual readings of literary and nonliterary texts suggests that stylistic models can be expanded sufficiently to allow the discipline to continue to draw upon all related fields adequately for its own purposes while maintaining its own autonomy.