A FAMILY HISTORY AND ORIGINS OF STYLISTICS:
- Several forebears, cousins, and relatives, since its interdisciplinary means it draws upon many fields: literally
criticism, critical theory, theoretical and applied linguistics, psychology, and sociology, etc.
- Ancient origins: rhetoric, “the art of speech”, an art concerned with the use of public speaking as a means of
persuasion.
- Rhetoric: a discipline concerned with the effective use of language, to persuade, give pleasure, etc. Used
in particular in politics and advertisement. Many topics once claimed for it are now claimed for branches
of linguistics, especially for parts of syntax (rule of sentences, Gramm. structure) and pragmatics (when
through language we want to refer to a context, not to a specific object). “The door” = Open the door to
our guest), stylistic and sociolinguistics.
- Aristotele’s Rhetoric (330 B.C.) = An art, a necessary condition of philosophical debate.
STYLISTICS:
- The study of style in language. Traditionally, the study of variations in usage among literary and other texts
VS Now, the study of any systematic variation, in either writing or speech, which relates to the Type of
discourse or its content.
- A sub-discipline of linguistics.
- Roots: Russian formalist school of literary criticism (early 20th century); Roman Jakeobson, Victor Shlovskii,
Boris Tomashevskii.
- Contemporary stylistics. = A cognitive turn. Lecture notes pp. 2-4.
2 CENTRAL NOTIONS:
-Defamiliarization: to make something strange; negative connotation given by “DE”. In art and literature:
defamiliarize the familiar to generate a new prospective and attract attention to the reader. Something
unusual which catches attention.
-Foregrounding: The features of the text which in some way ‘stand out’ (si distinguono/spiccano) from the
rest. It mainly operates via linguistic DEVIATION or linguistic PARALLELISM.
LITERARY AND NON – LITERARY TEXTS:
- Between literary and non-literary there are differences, but also many similarities.
- Literariness: a point on a cline; not a quality of a text but a notion applying to a specific genre.
- Different labels : literary linguistics, critical linguistics, literary semantics (it is about a meaning of a word in a
specific content), literary pragmatics, poetics, literary linguistics, linguistic stylistics, cognitive stylistics,
cognitive poetics, etc.
- Text can also include spoken conversations, advertisements, humour, political discourse, cinema, etc.
VARIETIES OF THEORIES BEHIND STYLISTICS:
- Descriptive apparatus. = Grammatical and lexical terminology and categories, e.g. a morpheme, a clause, a
phrase (sintagma), a fricative, etc.
- Contextual factors for pragmatics and discourse analysis.
- Contributions from other fields (different of linguistics). Cognitive science, psychology, philosophy, social
sciences, etc.
DATA:
- We need data (language used in a text), necessary for stylistic analysis.
- Literary and non-literary texts.
- Literary genres.
- Linguistic devices in any type of text. E.g., conceptual metaphor as tool to understand the world around
us. = LIFE IS A JOURNEY.
- Same basic tools for different types of text. E.g. critical discourse analysis applied to the language of
persuasion in political speeches, newspaper reports or advertisements.
EMPIRICAL DATA:
- You must specify what type of data (language in the text) you intend to use and why (you intend to use that
type in particular).
- Quantitative / Qualitative analysis.
- Logical and consistent criteria for choosing particular data.
- Research questions on a particular author or genre (overall aim + more specific questions).
⤷ In trying to be objective one tries to be:
1. Clear, detailed, and open (unambiguity).
