Stylistic design elements of literary texts (original) (raw)

Based on current research on the triad of language, literature, and emotion in cognitive linguistics, (neuro-)psychology, and cognitive poetics and stylistics, the present chapter sheds light on specific stylistic strategies and their potential emotive qualities. The chapter focuses on how stylistic devices such as patterns of rhythm and sound in literature are functionalized to evoke emotional responses in readers. It thus deals only indirectly with questions of (mimetic) representations of emotion and emotionality in literature. The chapter outlines the theoretical discussion and current state of debate in the interdisciplinary field of emotion research and stylistics and argues for a stronger consideration of mood as an emotive reader response in its own right. As point of departure for an analytical framework, it takes up a gestalt theoretical framework of poetic rhythm. Drawing on a conceptualization of rhythm as a perceptional category rather than a property of a text as well as an embodied cognition model of reader engagement in literature, the chapter proposes a phonostylistic approach. This means to understand a written text as a potential phonotext whose stylistic features of rhythm, accentuation, sound and tone can be seen as crucial with regard to the textual evocation of emotive reader responses.