Stylistics: Retrospect and Prospect (original) (raw)

Stylistics: Recent Trends and Tendencies

Conference proceedings, 4th International Conference of Language, Literature and Linu, 2015

Stylistics, at its early stage of development, had gone through a number of controversies. The arguments as to whether it was a linguistic or literary phenomenon provided the platform for these controversies. Literary critics were sceptical about the utility of linguistic methods to literary interpretation and criticised the so called ‘objective’ and ‘scientific’ approach employed by linguists in their analysis of literary texts. The linguists, on the other hand, had accused the literary critics of being too vague and subjective in their interpretation and analysis; an issue which has since been seriously debated by both the stylisticians and literary critics. Efforts to bring such a dispute to terms had culminated into the convergence of different theories and approaches, which also marked the development of modern stylistics as an interdisciplinary field. This paper attempts to review the various developments that have taken place in the field of stylistics, as well as the sub-disciplines that have evolved as a result of its eclecticism, and argues that stylistics is indeed an essential tool for literary analysis.

13-17 Stylistics in language and literature.pdf

VEDA PUBLICATIONS, 2018

Language as we all know is an important or should I say an indispensable tool for human communication as it is through language that knowledge is transferred, meaning is created and understood ensuring social as well as scientific development of human society. It’s true not only for speech but also in writing, both being two of the most potential uses of language. After becoming a university subject in 1960s English language has being the target of literary critics. They have accused the linguists for being too dry when it comes to analysis of a piece of writing. And the linguists have accused the literary scholars for being to subjective, imaginative unambiguous for the same task. To bridge the differences or the gap between the two, stylistics a branch of applied linguistics functions to analyse the use of language literary texts. However it's not limited to the study of literature alone but is also stretched to varieties of writings like texts related to media and journalism, the advertisements etc. This paper is an attempt to explore the link between language and its most creative use that is Literature. Through this paper I aim to show the features of language and creative uses under which these forms are put to appeal to human senses and make a piece of literature alive whether it's romance, tragedy or comedy.

Three major handbooks in three years: Stylistics as a mature discipline

Language and Literature

This review article brings to the fore what the publication of three handbooks in major publishing houses in the past three years ( The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics, The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics and The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics) can reveal about the state of stylistics in 2016. After depicting the specific character of each volume, the article highlights the way old theoretical models in stylistics are re-exploited in innovative ways and gives prominence to new theories and perspectives that have developed rigorous methodologies and proper purposes. It also makes apparent how the volumes both explicitly and implicitly perceive the field of stylistics as regards its scope and frontiers, the extent of its corpora and its relation with other close disciplines. If it inherently welcomes interdisciplinary collaborations, it yet seems to do so without adulterating its primary concern for language. The three handbooks show that stylistics has entered its prime as a di...

Introduction: The State of Contemporary Stylistics

Contemporary Stylistics presents the current state of the integrated study of language and literature. From its emergence as an interdisciplinary blend of literary criticism, linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, social studies and philosophy, stylistics is now a mature and vibrant single discipline, with a confident new generation of researchers engaged in the proper study of literature. This book collects some of these new voices together for the first time, and presents their latest work in a form that is accessible and placed into context. The book includes specific introductions to each piece of work by an established figure in stylistics. Taken together, the book offers a comprehensive showcase for the range of approaches and practices which form modern stylistics: from cognitive poetics to corpus linguistics, from explorations of mind style and spoken discourse in narrative to the workings of viewpoint in lyric poetry, from word meanings to the meanings and emotions of literary worlds, and more.

STYLISTICS. Peter Verdonk. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. xiv + 124. $13.50 paper

Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 2003

Verdonk has written an engaging and highly accessible introduction to the field of stylistics. The book is organized along the lines of the Oxford introductions to language study series. Like the other volumes in the Oxford series, it contains four sections: a survey of the field, short readings extracted from the literature with study questions that address the issues presented in the survey section, a selection of annotated references, and a glossary of terms.

Stylistics and Linguistic Analyses of Literary Works

2019

A linguistic analysis of literature has caused debates among linguists and between linguists and literary critics. The debate among linguists occurs because they have different opinions regarding the nature of literary language, while the debate between linguists and literary scholars arises as literary scholars question the authority of linguistics to study literary writings. Therefore, in this paper I argue that the language of literature is similar to that of non-literary texts, and I also believe that because the centrality of language in literary writings, linguistics, as the study of language, has the authority to study literature. One linguistic approach to literature is stylistics, which studies the forms, functions, and meanings of literary language in a detailed and systematic way.