Passage to India Analysis

Stylistics (literature) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia | This article's  tone  or style may not reflect the encyclopedic tone used on Wikipedia. See Wikipedia's  guide to writing better articles  for suggestions. (October 2010)| Stylistics  is the study and interpretation of texts from a linguistic perspective. As a discipline it links  literary criticism  and  linguistics, but has no autonomous domain of its own. 1][2]  The preferred object of stylistic studies is  literature, but not exclusively â€Å"high literature† but also other forms of written texts such as text from the domains of  advertising,  pop culture,  politics  or  religion. [3] Stylistics also attempts to establish principles capable of explaining the particular choices made by individuals and social groups in their use of language, such as  socialisation, the production and reception of  meaning, critical  discourse analysis  and  literary criticism.Other featur es of stylistics include the use of  dialogue, including regional  accents  and people’s  dialects, descriptive language, the use of  grammar, such as the  active voice  or  passive voice, the distribution of  sentence  lengths, the use of particular  language registers, etc. In addition, stylistics is a distinctive term that may be used to determine the connections between the form and effects within a particular variety of language. Therefore, stylistics looks at what is ‘going on’ within the language; what the linguistic associations are that the style of language reveals.Contents  Ã‚  [hide]   * 1  Early twentieth century * 2  Late twentieth century * 3  Literary stylistics * 3. 1  Poetry * 3. 2  Implicature * 3. 3  Tense * 3. 4  The point of poetry * 4  See also * 5  Notes * 6  References and related reading * 7  External links| ——————————â⠂¬â€Ã¢â‚¬â€Ã¢â‚¬â€Ã¢â‚¬â€Ã¢â‚¬â€Ã¢â‚¬â€- [edit]Early twentieth century The analysis of literary style goes back to  Classical rhetoric, but modern stylistics has its roots in  Russian Formalism,[4]  and the related  Prague School, in the early twentieth century. In 1909,  Charles Bally's  Traite de tylistique francaise  had proposed stylistics as a distinct academic discipline to complementSaussurean  linguistics. For Bally, Saussure's linguistics by itself couldn't fully describe the language of personal expression. [5]  Bally's programme fitted well with the aims of the Prague School. [6] Building on the ideas of the Russian Formalists, the Prague School developed the concept of  foregrounding, whereby poetic language stands out from the background of non-literary language by means of  deviation  (from the norms of everyday language) or  parallelism. 7]  According to the Prague School, the background language isn't fixed, and the relationship betw een poetic and everyday language is always shifting. [8] ————————————————- [edit]Late twentieth century Roman Jakobson  had been an active member of the Russian Formalists and the Prague School, before emigrating to America in the 1940s. He brought together Russian Formalism and American  New Criticism  in his  Closing Statement  at a conference on stylistics at  Indiana University  in 1958. 9]  Published as  Linguistics and Poetics  in 1960, Jakobson's lecture is often credited with being the first coherent formulation of stylistics, and his argument was that the study of poetic language should be a sub-branch of linguistics. [10]  The  poetic function  was one of six general  functions of language  he described in the lecture. Michael Halliday  is an important figure in the development of British stylistics. [11]  His 1971 study  Lingu istic Function and Literary Style: An Inquiry into the Language of William Golding's ‘The Inheritors'  is a key essay. 12]  One of Halliday's contributions has been the use of the term  register  to explain the connections between language and its context. [13]For Halliday register is distinct from  dialect. Dialect refers to the habitual language of a particular user in a specific geographical or social context. Register describes the choices made by the user,[14]  choices which depend on three variables:  field  (â€Å"what the participants†¦ are actually engaged in doing†, for instance, discussing a specific subject or topic),[15]tenor  (who is taking part in the exchange) and  mode  (the use to which the language is being put).Fowler comments that different fields produce different language, most obviously at the level of  vocabulary  (Fowler. 1996, 192) The linguist  David Crystal  points out that Halliday’s ‘tenorâ⠂¬â„¢ stands as a roughly equivalent term for ‘style’, which is a more specific alternative used by linguists to avoid ambiguity. (Crystal. 1985, 292) Halliday’s third category,  mode, is what he refers to as the symbolic organisation of the situation. Downes recognises two distinct aspects within the category of mode and suggests that not only does it describe the relation to the medium: written, spoken, and so on, but also describes the  genre  of the text. Downes. 1998, 316) Halliday refers to genre as pre-coded language, language that has not simply been used before, but that predetermines the selection of textual meanings. The linguist  William Downes  makes the point that the principal characteristic of register, no matter how peculiar or diverse, is that it is obvious and immediately recognisable. (Downes. 1998, 309) ————————————————- [ edit]Literary stylistics In  The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, Crystal observes that, in practice, most stylistic analysis has attempted to deal with the complex and ‘valued’ language within literature, i. . ‘literary stylistics’. He goes on to say that in such examination the scope is sometimes narrowed to concentrate on the more striking features of literary language, for instance, its ‘deviant’ and abnormal features, rather than the broader structures that are found in whole texts or discourses. For example, the compact language of poetry is more likely to reveal the secrets of its construction to the  stylistician  than is the language of plays and novels. (Crystal. 1987, 71). [edit]PoetryAs well as conventional styles of language there are the unconventional – the most obvious of which is  poetry. In  Practical Stylistics,  HG Widdowson  examines the traditional form of the  epitaph, as found on headstones in a cemetery. For example: His memory is dear today As in the hour he passed away. (Ernest C. Draper ‘Ern’. Died 4. 1. 38) (Widdowson. 1992, 6) Widdowson makes the point that such sentiments are usually not very interesting and suggests that they may even be dismissed as ‘crude verbal carvings’ and crude verbal disturbance (Widdowson, 3).Nevertheless, Widdowson recognises that they are a very real attempt to convey feelings of human loss and preserve affectionate recollections of a beloved friend or family member. However, what may be seen as poetic in this language is not so much in the formulaic  phraseology  but in where it appears. The verse may be given undue reverence precisely because of the sombre situation in which it is placed. Widdowson suggests that, unlike words set in stone in a graveyard, poetry is unorthodox language that vibrates with inter-textual implications. Widdowson. 1992, 4) Two problems with a stylistic analysis of poetry are noted by  PM Wetherill  in  Literary Text: An Examination of Critical Methods. The first is that there may be an over-preoccupation with one particular feature that may well minimise the significance of others that are equally important. (Wetherill. 1974, 133) The second is that any attempt to see a text as simply a collection of stylistic elements will tend to ignore other ways whereby meaning is produced. (Wetherill. 1974, 133) [edit]ImplicatureIn ‘Poetic Effects’ from  Literary Pragmatics, the  linguist  Adrian Pilkington  analyses the idea of ‘implicature’, as instigated in the previous work of  Dan Sperber  and  Deirdre Wilson. Implicature may be divided into two categories: ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ implicature, yet between the two extremes there are a variety of other alternatives. The strongest implicature is what is emphatically implied by the speaker or writer, while weaker implicatures are the wider possibilitie s of meaning that the hearer or reader may conclude.Pilkington’s ‘poetic effects’, as he terms the concept, are those that achieve most relevance through a wide array of weak implicatures and not those meanings that are simply ‘read in’ by the hearer or reader. Yet the distinguishing instant at which weak implicatures and the hearer or reader’s conjecture of meaning diverge remains highly subjective. As Pilkington says: ‘there is no clear cut-off point between assumptions which the speaker certainly endorses and assumptions derived purely on the hearer’s responsibility. ’ (Pilkington. 991, 53) In addition, the stylistic qualities of poetry can be seen as an accompaniment to Pilkington’s poetic effects in understanding a poem's meaning. [edit]Tense Widdowson points out that in  Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem â€Å"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner† (1798), the mystery of the Mariner’s abrupt appea rance is sustained by an idiosyncratic use of tense. (Widdowson. 1992, 40) For instance, the Mariner ‘holds’ the wedding-guest with his ‘skinny hand’ in the  present tense, but releases it in the  past tense(‘†¦ his hands dropt he. ‘); only to hold him again, this time with his ‘glittering eye’, in the present. Widdowson. 1992, 41) [edit]The point of poetry Widdowson notices that when the content of poetry is summarised, it often refers to very general and unimpressive observations, such as ‘nature is beautiful; love is great; life is lonely; time passes’, and so on. (Widdowson. 1992, 9) But to say: Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, So do our minutes hasten to their end †¦ William Shakespeare, ‘60’. Or, indeed: Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime, Nor hours, days months, which are the rags of time †¦ John Donne, ‘The Sun Rising’,  Poems  (1633)This language gives us[who? ]  a new perspective on familiar themes and allows us to look at them without the personal or social conditioning that we unconsciously associate with them. (Widdowson. 1992, 9) So, although we[who? ]  may still use the same exhausted words and vague terms like ‘love’, ‘heart’ and ‘soul’ to refer to human experience, to place these words in a new and refreshing context allows the poet the ability to represent humanity and communicate honestly. This, in part, is stylistics, and this, according to Widdowson, is the point of poetry (Widdowson. 1992, 76).