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Stylistics. (M H Abrams)Since the 1950s the term stylistics has been applied to critical procedures which undertake to replace what is said to be the subjectivity and impressionism of standard analyses with an "objective" or "scientific" analysis of the style of literary texts. Much of the impetus toward these analytic methods, as well as models for their practical application, were provided by the writings of Roman Jakobson and other Russian formalists, as well as by European structuralists.We can distinguish two main modes of stylistics, which differ both in conception and in the scope of their application: (1) In the narrower mode of formal stylistics, style is identified, in the traditional way, by the distinction between what is said and how it is said, or between the content and the form of a text. (See style.) The content is now often denoted, however, by terms such as "information," "message," or "propositional meaning," while the style is defined as variations in the presentation of this information that serve to alter its "aesthetic quality" or the reader's emotional response. The concepts of modern linguistics are used to identify the stylistic features, or "formal properties," which are held to be distinctive of a particular work, or else of an author, or a literary tradition, or an era. These stylistic features may be phonological (patterns of speech sounds, meter, or rhyme), or syntactic (types of sentence structure), or lexical (abstract vs. concrete words, the relative frequency of nouns,verbs, adjectives), or rhetorical (the characteristic use of figurative language, imagery, and so on). A basic problem, acknowledged by a number of stylisticians, is to distinguish between the innumerable features and patterns of a text which can be isolated by linguistic analysis, and those features which are functionally stylistic—that is, features which make an actual difference in the aesthetic and other effects on a competent reader. See, for example, Michael Riffaterre's objection to the elaborate stylistic analysis of Charles Baudelaire's sonnet "Les Chats" (The Cats) by Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss, in Structuralism, ed. Jacques Ehrmann (1966).Stylisticians who aim either to replace or supplement the qualitative judgments of literary scholars by objectively determinable methods of research exploit the ever-increasing technological resources of computers in the service of what has come to be called stylometry: the quantitative measurement of the features of an individual writer's style. Literary and Linguistic Computing is a journal devoted to the use of computers in literary studies, and the "Voice of the Shuttle" web site at ttp://humanitas.ucsb.edu provides up-to-date information on the general use of computers and other electronic media in literary studies. See also B. H. Rudall and T. N. Corns, Computers and Literature: A Practical Guide (1987). Other analysts of style who use nonquantitative methods make use of concepts derived from language theory, such as the distinction between paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations, or the distinction between surface structure and deep structure in transformational linguistics, or the distinction between the propositional content and the illocutionary force of an utterance in speech-act theory. For a stylistic analysis of the ways a character's speech and thought are represented in narratives, refer to free indirect discourse, under point of view.Sometimes the stylistic enterprise stops with the qualitative or quantitative determination, or "fingerprinting," of the style of a single text or class of texts. Often, however, the analyst tries also to relate distinctive stylistic features to traits in an author's psyche; or to an author's characteristic ways of perceiving the world and organizing experience (see Leo Spitzer, Linguistics and Literary History, 1948); or to the typical conceptual frame and the attitude to reality in an historical era (Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, 1953); or else to semantic, aesthetic, and emotional functions and effects in a particular literary text (Michael Riff aterre and others). Stanley Fish wrote a sharp critique of the scientific pretensions of formal stylistics; he proposed that since, in his view, the meaning of a text consists of a reader's total response to it, there is no valid way to make a distinction in this spectrum of response between style and content ("What Is Stylistics and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things About It?" in Is There a Text in This Class? 1980; see also reader-response criticism). For extended critiques of traditional analyses of style, as well as of modern stylistics, based on the thesis that style is not a separable feature of language, see Bennison Gray, Style: The Problem and Its Solution (1969), and "Stylistics: The End of a Tradition," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 31 (1973). In Clear and Simple as the Truth (1994), Francis-N?el Thomas and Mark Turner claim that standard stylistic analyses concern merely the surface features of writing, and propose a set of more basic features by which to define styles of writing; see under style. On the other side, the validity of distinguishing between style and propositional meaning—not absolutely, but on an appropriate level of analysis—is defended by E. D. Hirsch, "Stylistics and Synonymity," in The Aims of Interpretation (1976).(2) In the second mode of stylistics, which has been prominent since the mid-1960s, proponents greatly expand the conception and scope of their inquiry by defining stylistics as, in the words of one theorist, "the study of the use of language in literature," involving the entire range of the "general characteristics of language . . . as a medium of literary expression." (Geoffrey N. Leech, A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry, 1969; see also Mick Short, "Literature and Language," in Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism, ed. Martin Coyle and others, 1990.) By this definition, stylistics is expanded so as to incorporate most of the concerns of both traditional literary criticism and traditional rhetoric; its distinction from these earlier pursuits is that it insists on the need to be objective by focusing sharply on the text itself and by setting out to discover the "rules" governing the process by which linguistic elements and patterns in a text accomplish their meanings and literary effects. The historian of criticism René Wellek has described this tendency of stylistic analysis to enlarge its territorial domain as "the imperialism of modern stylistics." A comprehensive anthology is The Stylistics Reader from Roman Jakobson to the Present, ed. Jean Jacques Weber (1996). On formal stylistics see Thomas A. Sebeok, ed., Style in Language (1960); Seymour Chatman, ed., Literary Style: A Symposium (1971); Howard S. Babb, ed., Essays in Stylistic Analysis (1972); Richard Bradford, Stylistics (1997).For an exhaustive stylistic analysis of a twelve-line poem, see Roman Jakobson and Stephen Rudy, Yeats's "Sonow of Love" Through the Years (1977). In the practice of some critics, stylistics includes the area of study known as discourse analysis, which is treated in a separate entry in this Glossary. For inclusive views of the realm of stylistics, see M. A. K. Halliday, Explorations in the Functions of Language (1973); G. N. Leech and M. H. Short, Style in Fiction (1981); Roger Fowler, Linguistic Criticism (1986); Ronald Carter and Paul Simpson, eds., Language, Discourse and Literature: An Introductory Reader in Discourse Stylistics (1989 ................
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