Stylistic design elements of literary texts (original) (raw)
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Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics
The aim of this essay is to illustrate the concept of reader-response criticism as presented by Stanley Fish in Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics. I shall define the main ideas that this type of interpretation has brought to literary criticism, point out the essential oppositions to new criticism and try to display its strong points as well as its weak points.
EMOTION TRIGGERS AS CONSTITUENTS OR NON-CONSTITUENTS: AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK OF COGNITIVE POETICS, 2021
The term "Cognitive Poetics" is a new field which was coined by Reuven Tsur in 1970s to mention his own research dealing with the perceptual effects of literary works. During recent decades, the term has been applied to the study of literary texts and readings through Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive Linguistics (Harrison and Stockwell, 2014: 218). In other words, it is an attempt to reveal how cognitive processes in mind and body become obvious in literary texts and how cognitive sciences can contribute to the analysis of literary texts (Kukkonen, 2017: ix). Thus, this study aims to detect the grammatical resources underlying the formation of emotions and attempts to answer the research question "Are the emotion triggers constituents or nonconstituents? " within the framework of Cognitive Poetics.
Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 2010
In this article it is argued that feelings are all important to the function of literature. In contradiction to music that is concerned with the inwardness of humankind, literature has, because of language, the capacity to create fictional worlds that in many respects are similar to and related to the life world within which we live. One of the most important reasons for our emotional engagement in literature is our empathy with others and our constant imagining and hypothesizing on possible developments in our interactions with them. Hence, we understand and engage ourselves in fictional worlds. It is further claimed and exemplified, how poetic texts are very good at rhetorically engage and manipulate our feelings. Finally, with reference to the important work of Ellen Dissanayake, it is pointed out that the first kind of communication in which we engage, that between mother and infant, is a kind of speech that positively engages the infant in a dialogue with the mother by means of poetic devices.
10 years of BAWLing into affective and aesthetic processes in reading: what are the echoes?
Frontiers in Psychology, 2015
Reading is not only "cold" information processing, but involves affective and aesthetic processes that go far beyond what current models of word recognition, sentence processing, or text comprehension can explain. To investigate such "hot" reading processes, standardized instruments that quantify both psycholinguistic and emotional variables at the sublexical, lexical, inter-, and supralexical levels (e.g., phonological iconicity, word valence, arousal-span, or passage suspense) are necessary. One such instrument, the Berlin Affective Word List (BAWL) has been used in over 50 published studies demonstrating effects of lexical emotional variables on all relevant processing levels (experiential, behavioral, neuronal). In this paper, we first present new data from several BAWL studies. Together, these studies examine various views on affective effects in reading arising from dimensional (e.g., valence) and discrete emotion features (e.g., happiness), or embodied cognition features like smelling. Second, we extend our investigation of the complex issue of affective word processing to words characterized by a mixture of affects. These words entail positive and negative valence, and/or features making them beautiful or ugly. Finally, we discuss tentative neurocognitive models of affective word processing in the light of the present results, raising new issues for future studies.
The Role of Emotions in Reading Literary Texts : Fact or Fiction ?
2014
Considering the role of emotions while reading literary texts, the current research was designed to investigate first whether or not the participants’ emotional involvement can improve their comprehension of short stories and second, if emotional involvement while reading short stories assist students in recognizing literary elements, such as irony, symbol, theme and foreshadowing. To this end, 79 Persian speakers (30 males and 49 females) selected from the population of sophomores in one of Iranian Universities participated in the study. A questionnaire based on Miall and Kuiken’s (2002) categorization of feelings was designed to assist the students in involving their emotions while reading literary texts. There were two experimental groups and a control group. Initially, a pretest was assigned to these groups to ensure that they are homogeneous. The designed questionnaire was employed in teaching literary texts in experimental groups. At the end of the semester, a posttest was ass...
Literary Theory, Stylistics and Cognitive Poetics
Cankaya University Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2021
The desire to understand and interpret the underlying mechanisms involved in the creation and reception of literary texts, and the influence of these mechanisms on human cognition goes back at least to Aristotle's Poetics. However, the last century has witnessed a vast variety of approaches to the understanding of literature: a plethora of theories such as feminist, post colonialist, queer and reader response theories as well as some practical ways of analysis and interpretation such as formalism, new criticism, stylistics, cognitive poetics have shown themselves at the opposite end of the continuum. Stylistics and its evolved form, cognitive poetics have been significantly influential in the understanding of the processes involved in the creation and reception of literature. Although stylistics and cognitive poetics have usually been covered under the broad heading of literary theory, it has been observed that the divergence in the ways they operate makes such claims invalid because, unlike theory, empirical evidence is at the heart of stylistics and cognitive poetics. This paper aims to provide an overview of stylistics, and cognitive poetics and illustrate how they differ from literary theory.
What Literature Does to Our Emotions, and How Do We Know? Empirical Studies Will Tell
Synopsis: text, context, media, 2019
The general feeling of malaise, if not crisis, in Literary Studies forces us to urgently look for solutions that will bring the discipline forward. This article is a call for a concentration on fundamental issues in the study of literature, and at the same time for a more rigorous and accountable methodology in studying both the content and the form of literary texts as well as readers' reactions to them. Some illustrations of work in the area of Empirical Study of Literature are provided, showing how fiction is a powerful regulator of human emotion, especially by formal features of the text. Case 1 reports a study which looks at the influence of narrative perspective (internal focalization in the first place) on judgements of readers. Case 2 delves into the textual ingredients by which readers' absorption in a narrative world is enhanced. These ingredients are foremost of a kind that goes under the name of "foregrounding" devices in literary studies. The conclusion from the research is that texts that are rich in foregrounding are better able to elicit a more complex response , i.e., a more powerful impact, from readers. In its turn Case 3 looks at how readers react to literary pieces dealing with deep human suffering. The findings indicate that literature is able to evoke strong feelings of empathy through its formal make-up. The results also support the argument that one's exposure to literature is the main variable to have an impact on prosocial behaviour, irrespective of personality, gender, age or social situation. Thus we claim that literary texts exert a powerful influence on readers' value sharing, absorption and empathy, and the impact can only be studied empirically. The article shows a way out of the current crisis, not by just opening up a new fashion, in which literary texts are "inter-preted" in yet another way, mostly academically, but by taking literary texts seriously in their workings on the minds and hearts of readers-which is ultimately what texts are written for.
Evaluation and Reader Response Criticism: Values Implicit in Affective Stylistics
Style, 1976
This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the English at Digital Commons @ Loyola Marymount University and Loyola Law School. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons@Loyola Marymount University and Loyola Law School. For more information, please contact digitalcommons@lmu.edu. Repository Citation Mailloux, Steven J., "Evaluation and Reader Response Criticism: Values Implicit in Affective Stylistics" (1976). English Faculty Works. 34. https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/engl\_fac/34
Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 2015
In works of fictions emotional states and emotions can be shown with the help of different expressive means. This article focuses on graphic means of the emotivity expression in the works of fiction of modern French, English and German authors. It covers the following issues: the use of an exclamation mark in motive and emphatic sentences; emotional pauses communicated with the help of a dash or periods of ellipsis; a stylistic function of a full stop; italics as an important method of marking-out; the use of a hyphen; musical imagery (assonance and alliteration) and sound symbolism (onomatopoeia). This work touches upon a variety of emotions that can be communicated with the help of these means, it also analyses the use frequency of these means in the given languages. The conclusion can be drawn that more often the data of the English and German languages was different from the data of the French language, which allowed us to emphasize the influence of a language group on its emotivity expression. It is important to note, that phonetic and graphic means of emotivity do not always express emotions directly, but more often transmit special imagery and picturesqueness, reveal emotive coloration, create the general tone of a work of fiction, which helps the reader to understand better the emotional states of characters.
JNTNU: Linguistics and Literature, 2010
The primary purpose of this paper is to introduce a stylistic analytical approach to the study of literary texts. Stylistics is generally considered as the study of literary discourse from a linguistic orientation (e.g. lexis, syntax, sound patterns, semantics, etc). It explores how readers interact with the language of texts, i.e. how we understand and are affected by texts when we read them. As Wales (2001: 373) states more precisely, stylistics is a discipline principally concerned with describing the linguistic features of texts and the functional significance of these features in relation to our interpretation of the text. Edgar Allan Poe's short story ”The Tell-Tale Heart” - a tale of terror and a perfect manifestation of Poe's ”single effect” theory - is used to exemplify and demonstrate how the sense of ”terror” is conveyed through the language and how readers are affected accordingly.