Literary Linguistics and Critical Appreciation - Stylistic analysis of a fragment from novel and an article - Defining style and stylistics

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Mihnea Simandan - MA ELL (2nd year)

Literary Linguistics and Critical Appreciation

Stylistic analysis of a fragment from novel and an article

Defining style and stylistics

Style is the author's careful choice of words and arrangement of words, sentences, and paragraphs to produce a specific effect on the reader.

Style allows the author to shape how the reader experiences the work. For example, one writer may use simple words and straightforward sentences, while another may use difficult vocabulary and elaborate sentence structures. Even if the themes of both works are similar, the differences in the authors' styles make the experiences of reading the two works distinct.

An author's style evolves out of the chosen point-of-view technique. The omniscient point of view produces a relatively complex style; the first-person point of view results in a simple style if it is recorded as "spoken," more complex if written; and third-person point of view generates a style that typically is slightly elevated above the intelligence level of the focal character.

Style can be broken down into three types: simple, complex, and mid-style. Sometimes authors carry a single style throughout an entire work. Other times, the style may vary within a novel. For example, if the novelist tells a story through the eyes of several different characters, the use of different styles may give each character a distinctive voice.

A simple style uses common words and simple sentences, even if the situation described is complex. The effect of the simple style can be to present facts to the reader without appealing to the reader's emotions directly. Instead, the writer relies on the facts themselves to affect the reader. American author Ernest Hemingway is widely known for a spare, economical style that nevertheless provokes an emotional reaction.

A complex style uses long, elaborate sentences that contain many ideas and descriptions. The writer uses lyrical passages to create the desired mood in the reader, whether it be one of joy, sadness, confusion, or any other emotion. American author Henry James uses a complex style to great effect in his novels.

A mid-style is a combination of the simple and complex styles. It can give a neutral tone to the book, or it can provide two different effects by contrast. Thai-American writer S.P. Somtow uses the mid-style in Jasmine Nights.

Some authors use more than one style within a novel. This approach allows the author flexibility in choosing which style is appropriate at different points in the work, depending on the situation and on the character or characters being portrayed. Novelists who have mixed styles include the American writer Herman Melville, in such work as Moby Dick, and the Irish writer James Joyce, in his Ulysses.

Style has been a subject of interest for a very long time, and in recent years has acquired its own field of study called stylistics.

Stylistic analysis in literary studies is usually made for the purpose of commenting on quality and meaning in a text. The purpose of a stylistics analysis is to understand and interpret a text. Thus, an extremely careful attention is paid to the text in its every detail. The process of the analysis will reveal the good (and/or bad) qualities of the writing.

Stylistic analysis of a non-literary text involves studying in detail the features of a piece of writing from such genres as: news reports, articles, opinions, editorials, etc. The method of analysis of a non-literary text is not different from the one used to analyze a literary text. The text is being looked at in great detail, observing what the parts are, and identifying the function they perform in the given context.

The method of analysis is fairly scientific. A hypothesis is stated and then proved using examples and explanations.

Aims, texts, hypothesis

The aims of the present paper are: (1) to attempt a stylistic analysis of two text, and (2) to demonstrate the fact that stylistics is an important discipline when trying to discover meanings in texts. The first text analyzed is a fragment from the novel Kokoro by the Japanese author Nastume Soseki, and the second text analyzed is the article Romania gains reputation as nexus of cybercrime, published in Bangkok Post on October 28, 2003. In the two analysis I will demonstrate using examples and explanations that the style of the two text is complex, although the texts are from two different genres with probably different kinds of readers. In order to understand the meanings and the allusions implied in the two texts the reader has to be equipped with knowledge of linguistics, and possess a special schema.

Stylistic analysis of a fragment from novel

Although the fragment from the novel Kokoro by Natsume Soseki is in English the original version was written in Japanese because the author is a Japanese national.

I did not choose the text at random. My background information about Japanese literature in general and this author in special made me have certain expectations when I started reading the book. Other novels that I had read by Nasume Soseki dealt with characters that lost their identity, who were alienated from society. This was due to the writer's own uncertainty about his place in society, having in mind that he was born in 1867, the year before the Meiji Restoration, when the traditional feudal order was dethroned by the Western powers. Thus, before even reading the novel I had a feeling of what the text will be like.

The title of the novel has a crucial meaning to the novel. An important factor in analyzing the title is the fact that I have read the book twice in two different languages, i.e. Romanian and English. The two versions had also two different titles, i.e. "Zbuciumul inimi" for the Romanian translation, and 'Kokoro', the original Japanese title, for the English translation. If we translate both titles in English we would come up with the following titles: "The fussiness of the heart" for the Romanian version, and "The heart" or "The soul" for the English version. There is obviously a striking connection between the two translations. The message that both titles convey makes us believe that the novel is a story about matters of heart. The words that build up the title are very important in the sense that they prepare the reader for a special kind of text. But without the background knowledge about the author we could not precisely guess before reading the novel that the story is about complications that arouse from love. We might think that it is a medical book that deals with the biological description of the human heart.
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All the elements that form the text are tightly connected. We cannot take words out of the text without altering the overall meaning. Taken out of the context the literal meaning of individual words is so different than the meaning conveyed in the text as part of a lexical item (e.g. phrase).

For example the following words have a different meaning if we take them out of the phrases they are found in the text, and we treat them as individual words. In all the following cases it is not the literary connection of meanings that forms ...

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