Zareen Gull | Bzu multan Pakistan (original) (raw)

Papers by Zareen Gull

Literary criticism in the past few years has come to realise the importance of studying the langu... more Literary criticism in the past few years has come to realise the importance of studying the language of literature which is one of the most complex and multifaceted phenomena. This has been done not with the help of rhetoric, but with the help of linguistics. In the history of English literary criticism, this initiative was made by I .A Richards (1929) and William Empson (1930). This new tendency in literary criticism did not receive any new label at that time. But the 'Why' and 'How1 of language teaching became the major questions of that time. Spitzer (1988) is a biographical introduction of the champions of the new criticism. He put forth a new method of studying the language of literature. His method is based on a minute statistical study of the technique of language combined with a judicious use of the theories of linguistics. This sort of study has come to be known as 'stylistics'. The world of literary criticism is full of theories which focus on different aspects of literature in attempts to investigate its function, nature and effect. Abrams made commendable efforts to summarise the overwhelming variety of critical theories from the classical to the modem times into four-fold categories of expressive, pragmatic, mimetic and objective theories (Abrams.1972, first published in 1953). With this comprehensive framework suggested by him, 1 -however, there still remains a vast residue of other categories of literary scholarship like the study of literary history, convention, genre and mythology. The universal appeal of literature can be traced as it is rightly pointed out by Ching et. al. (1980), the capacity and primacy of all human beings "to conceptualise, reshape and communicate the experiences of life through language "(p.5). Language is not merely an incidental medium of literature, it is an integral part of the whole creative process. In the modern times many scholars have attempted to investigate literature through the features of its language as well as the assumption regarding the inseparability of literature and its language. Chomsky (1957) describes these principles in terms of linguistic 'competence' and 'performance'. There were numerous efforts to apply the developing linguistic methodologies of Chomsky to literary analysis. Therefore, the language of literature became a centre point of both critical and linguistic investigations of literature which attempt to bridge the gap between the two disciplines of linguistic and criticism, this attempt is known as 'stylistics'. Stylistics in its course of development seems to deserve the status of fullfledged academic discipline in its own right in much the same way as biochemistry, which draws on biology and chemistry, can claim to be an independent discipline (Jaioru 1995). Stylistics as a new discipline faced some objections and there were some negative reactions from both the quarters of linguistics and criticism. Most of the negative criticism was from the conservative circles created by what is generally known as the 'language -literature problem'. In the next sections I intend to -2-provide a historical perspective on style and stylistics by making some major intellectual movement which led to its emergence and growth. 1.2 The Notion of Style Style is most often discussed in the context of literary studies. However the word 'style' in its most general sense of 'a way of doing things' is used in multiple contexts. The collocation range of this word enfolds almost every sphere of human activity. The Oxford English Dictionary has recorded as many as twenty-eight different entries under the term style. As a critical concept style has been the focus of attention for centuries and has been studied from various perspectives. Different schools of thought worked in explaining and understanding this term, which put a large number of definitions which some of them appear to be overlapping while others seem to be contradictory. As a literary critical term, 'style' denotes a characteristic use of language. Style has been variously defined according to its orientation in the writer's personality, the impressions of the reader, an individual text, and the collective features of a genre. The discussion of stylistics as a sensitive study of style should begin with a background knowledge of some of the major notion of style in terms of literacycriticism and linguistics. 1.2.1 Traditional Notion of Style The origin of the concept of style or the early attempt to study style can be traced back to the classical school of rhetoric, which regards style as a part of the -3 " technique of persuasion and discusses it under oratory. According to classical tradition, oratory is the art of discovering all possible means of persuasion. A branch of rhetoric in ancient Greece, 'eloetio' was specially related to the relation between form (vorba) and content (res) and the characteristic features of literary language. The discipline has originated the popular dualist approach to style based on the dichotomy between form and content. All the 'rhetorical' notions of style, which persisted through many succeeding centuries, hold this dualist view as against the monist one (Leech and Short, 1881). There are many figurative descriptions of this view of style during the history of Renaissance and Newclassical periods. Puttenham, a Renaissance scholar, compares style to flowers, jewels, embroidery. For Samuel Wesley, it is a 'dress of thought'. Pope describes stylistics as the equivalent of 'true wit', which consists in 'what oft was thought, but never so well expressed' and other definition as well. All these definitions or descriptions reflect an artificial and ornamental view of style. In all these centuries, style was the focus on the doctrine of 'decorum.' Three main types of style were learned grand, middle and plain. The traditional dualistic view later clashed with the monist organic view of style of the new critics. For them the underlying thought can never be separated from its final verbal form and that the only means of reading the writer's mind is the completed text, which is a product of the synthesis of thought and style. The traditional notion of style has other weaknesses of being prescriptive and not descriptive in its nature and scope. It is interested in providing only a 'set of maxims' which should be rigorously producing certain effects. It is full of words having fixed meaning and certain types of structures are invariably associated -4-