The Routledge handbook of stylistics 9781138297838, 1138297836

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The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics

The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics provides a comprehensive introduction and reference point to key areas in the field of stylistics. The four sections of the volume encompass a wide range of approaches from classical rhetoric to cognitive neuroscience, covering core issues that include: • •

• •

historical perspectives centring on rhetoric, formalism and functionalism the elements of stylistic analysis, including the linguistic levels of foregrounding, relevance theory, conversation analysis, narrative, metaphor, speech acts, speech and thought presentation and point of view current areas of ‘hot topic’ research such as cognitive poetics, corpus stylistics and feminist/critical stylistics emerging and future trends including the stylistics of multimodality, creative writing, hypertext fiction and neuroscience

Each of the thirty-two chapters is written by a specialist in the field and provides an introduction to the subject, an overview of the history of the topic, an analysis of the main current and critical issues, a section with recommendations for practice, and a discussion of the possible future trajectory of the subject. The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics is essential reading for researchers, postgraduates and undergraduate students working in this area. Michael Burke is Professor of Rhetoric at Utrecht University and author of Literary Reading Cognition and Emotion: An Exploration of the Oceanic Mind (Routledge 2011).

Routledge Handbooks in English Language Studies

Routledge Handbooks in English Language Studies provide comprehensive surveys of the key topics in English language studies. Each Handbook focuses on one area in detail, explaining why the issue is important and then critically discussing the leading views in the field. All the chapters have been specially commissioned and are written by prominent scholars. Coherent, accessible and carefully compiled, Routledge Handbooks in English Language Studies are the perfect resources for both advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students. The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics Edited by Michael Burke

The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics

Edited by Michael Burke

Routledge

Tavlor Francis Grouo LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2014 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2014 Selection and editorial matter, Michael Burke; individual chapters, the contributors. The right of the editor to be identified to be identified as the author of the editorial matter, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested. ISBN: 978-0-415-52790-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-79533-1 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Saxon Graphics Ltd, Derby

Contents

List of tables and figures List of contributors Acknowledgements Introduction Stylistics: From classical rhetoric to cognitive neuroscience Michael Burke

ix xi xvii 1

PART I

Historical perspectives in stylistics

9

1 Rhetoric and poetics: The classical heritage of stylistics Michael Burke

11

2 Formalist stylistics Michael Burke and Kristy Evers

31

3 Functionalist stylistics Patricia Canning

45

4 Reader response criticism and stylistics Jennifer Riddle Harding

68

PART II

Core issues in stylistics 5 The linguistic levels of foregrounding in stylistics Christiana Gregoriou 6 (New) historical stylistics Beatrix Busse

85 87

101

v

Contents

7 Stylistics, speech acts and im/politeness theory Derek Bousfield

118

8 Stylistics, conversation analysis and the cooperative principle Marina Lambrou

136

9 Stylistics and relevance theory Billy Clark

155

10 Stylistics, point of view and modality Clara Neary

175

11 Stylistics and narratology Dan Shen

191

12 Metaphor and stylistics Szilvia Csábi

206

13 Speech and thought presentation in stylistics Joe Bray

222

PART III

Contemporary topics in stylistics

237

14 Pedagogical stylistics Geoff Hall

239

15 Stylistics, drama and performance Andrea Macrae

253

16 Schema theory in stylistics Catherine Emmott, Marc Alexander, and Agnes Marszalek

268

17 Stylistics and text world theory Ernestine Lahey

284

18 Stylistics and blending Barbara Dancygier

297

19 Cognitive poetics Margaret H. Freeman

313

20 Quantitative methodological approaches to stylistics Olivia Fialho and Sonia Zyngier

329

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Contents

21 Feminist stylistics Rocío Montoro

346

22 Literary pragmatics and stylistics Chantelle Warner

362

23 Corpus stylistics Michaela Mahlberg

378

24 Stylistics and translation Jean Boase-Beier

393

25 Critical stylistics Lesley Jeffries

408

PART IV

Emerging and future trends in stylistics

421

26 Creative writing and stylistics Jeremy Scott

423

27 Stylistics and real readers David Peplow and Ronald Carter

440

28 Stylistics and film Michael Toolan

455

29 Multimodality and stylistics Nina Nørgaard

471

30 Stylistics and comics Charles Forceville, Elisabeth El Refaie, and Gert Meesters

485

31 Stylistics and hypertext fiction Paola Trimarco

500

32 Stylistics, emotion and neuroscience Patrick Colm Hogan

516

Index

531

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Tables and figures

Tables 1.1 1.2 2.1 2.2 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 8.1 8.2 9.1 13.1 13.2 30.1

The five canons of rhetoric A six-part composition plan from the Rhetorica ad Herennium Propp’s functions of dramatis personae Propp’s distribution of functions among dramatis personae Reference chain from ‘The Attack’ Material processes Mental processes Summary of British action (Material processes) Summary of Zulu action (Material Processes) Summary of modal categories and narrative distribution Non-cooperation in Hamlet Transcription key Some inferences involved in understanding an utterance of ‘I was tired’ Leech and Short’s original categories of speech and thought presentation Leech and Short’s revised model of speech and thought presentation categories Stylised examples of pictorial runes used in Tintin and the Picaros (adapted from: Forceville 2011, p. 877); the popped-up vein was identified in manga by Shinohara and Matsunaka (2009)

21 23 38 40 49 51 53 55 58 62 149 154 160 223 224

493

Figures 2.1 2.2 2.3 3.1 3.2 7.1 18.1 18.2 18.3 20.1

Bühler’s tripartite model of communication Jakobson’s six basic functions of any communicative act Jakobson’s six associative functions of language Relational processes Summary of process types and constituents Culpeper’s control system for audience reading of dramatic character (2001, p. 35) Generic space Blend 1 Final blend Percentage of quantitative and qualitative articles compared (L&L 2007–2011)

33 33 34 53 55 131 304 306 308 332 ix

Tables and figures

23.1 23.2 26.1 31.1 31.2 31.3

x

Concordance sample for shoulder retrieved with WebCorp Live All forty occurrences of shoulder in Nicholas Nickleby (e-text from Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org) Representing speech and thought A screen image of a lexia from afternoon, a story by M. Joyce The first interactive screen of ‘These Waves of Girls’ An image from ‘These Waves of Girls’

381 382 434 501 502 512

Contributors

Marc Alexander is a Lecturer in English Language at the University of Glasgow. His work primarily focuses on cognitive and corpus stylistics, digital humanities, and the semantic development of English. He is the Director of Glasgow’s STELLA Digital Humanities lab, and an Associate Director of the Historical Thesaurus of English. Jean Boase-Beier is a Professor of Literature and Translation at the University of East Anglia. Her research focuses mainly on literary translation and stylistics. She is also a translator from German, and the editor of Arc Publications’ Visible Poets, a series of bilingual poetry books. Derek Bousfield is the Head of Languages, Information and Communications at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. He has published on linguistic impoliteness, banter, and aggression in interaction and drama. He is a co-editor of the Journal of Politeness Research: Language, Behaviour, Culture. Joe Bray is a Reader in Language and Literature at the University of Sheffield. He is the author of The Epistolary Novel: Representations of Consciousness (2003) and The Female Reader in the English Novel (2009), and editor of, among others, Mark Z. Danielewski (2011) and The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature (2012). Michael Burke is a Professor of Rhetoric at University College Roosevelt (Utrecht University). His books include Literary Reading Cognition and Emotion (2011) and Pedagogical Stylistics (Burke et al. 2012). He is a Routledge monographs series editor in linguistics (stylistics and rhetoric) and a former Chair of the International Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA). Beatrix Busse holds a Chair of English Linguistics at the English Department of the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Germany. She is a Visiting Fellow of the British Academy. Her scholarly interests include the history of English, (historical) pragmatics, stylistics, and corpus linguistics. Among her recent projects are speech, writing and thought presentation in the history of English, language and urban place, and language and medicine in Medieval and early modern texts. Patricia Canning has taught undergraduate and postgraduate modules in linguistics as well as early modern literature at Queen’s University, Belfast. Her published work reflects her interdisciplinary approach, synthesising functional stylistics, literary theory and phenomenology. She is the founder of the website read.live.learn, which promotes reading for wellbeing across Northern Ireland (www.readlivelearn.com). xi

Contributors

Ronald Carter is a Research Professor of Modern English Language at the University of Nottingham. He has written, co-written, edited and co-edited more than fifty books and has published over one hundred academic papers in the fields of literary linguistics, language and education, applied linguistics and the teaching of English. Billy Clark is a Senior Lecturer in English Language at Middlesex University. His most recent research has focused on pragmatic stylistics, the semantics and pragmatics of prosody, and the inferential processes involved in writing. His book on relevance theory was published by Cambridge University Press in 2013. Szilvia Csábi received her doctorate in cognitive linguistics at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary. Her interests include textual analyses, especially from a cognitive linguistic perspective. She has co-authored three edited volumes and published several articles in these fields. She currently works at the Publisher of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Wolters Kluwer as managing editor of dictionaries. Barbara Dancygier is a Professor in the English Department at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Her main research interests lie in the areas of cognitive linguistics and cognitive approaches to literary texts (theories of conceptual metaphor, mental spaces, and conceptual integration). Her recent book The Language of Stories (2012) proposes a blending analysis of narrative structure. Catherine Emmott is a Reader in English Language at the University of Glasgow. Her publications include Narrative Comprehension: A Discourse Perspective(1997) and Mind, Brain and Narrative (2012, with Anthony J. Sanford). She is an Assistant Editor of the journal Language and Literature. Kristy Evers is a graduate student at the University of Oxford where she is pursuing a graduate degree in English Language Studies. She is a former undergraduate student of Utrecht University (University College Roosevelt in Middelburg), where she majored in linguists, literature and rhetoric and where she was also editor-in-chief of the student literary magazine RAW. She is also the recipient of the 2013 UCR College Student Leadership Award. Elisabeth El Refaie is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Language and Communication Research, Cardiff University. The focus of her research is on visual/multimodal forms of metaphor and narrative. She is the author of Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures Olivia Fialho is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric at University College Roosevelt (Utrecht University). She wrote an interdisciplinary doctoral dissertation on self-modifying reading experiences (2012). She has published in the areas of the empirical study of literature, pedagogical stylistics and literary awareness, and recently on evidence-based learning (Fialho et al. 2011, 2012). She coordinates the PALA SIG on Pedagogical Stylistics. Charles Forceville is an associate professor in the Media Studies Department at Universiteit van Amsterdam. His teaching and research focus on pictorial and multimodal metaphor and discourse. He aims to make humanities research and cognition studies mutually productive (see http://muldisc.wordpress.com). xii

Contributors

Margaret H. Freeman is Emeritus Professor of English at Los Angeles Valley College and a co-director of Myrifield Institute for Cognition and the Arts (www.myrifield.org). Her many publications in cognitive poetics mark the expansion of her research from studies in cognitive linguistics to include phenomenology, cognitive science, and aesthetics. Christiana Gregoriou is a stylistics lecturer at Leeds University’s School of English. Her most recent publications include articles, books and edited collections on criminal stylistics. Her most recent critical stylistics monograph is on Language, Ideology and Identity in Serial Killer Narratives (2011). Geoff Hall is a Professor of Sociolinguistics and the Head of the School of English at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC), and editor of the journal Language and Literature. He has used stylistic approaches in teaching English in many differing countries and contexts. A revised second edition of his book Literature in Language Education (2005) is in preparation. Patrick Colm Hogan is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Connecticut, where he is also on the faculties of the programmes in Cognitive Science, India Studies, and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies. He is the author of sixteen books including What Literature Teaches Us About Emotion (2011), How Authors’ Minds Make Stories (2013), and Ulysses and the Poetics of Cognition (2013). He was also the editor of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences (2011). Lesley Jeffries is a Professor of English Language and the Chair of the Stylistics Research Centre at the University of Huddersfield. She is the author of a number of books and articles on textual opposition, critical stylistics and the stylistics of contemporary poetry. She is a coeditor of Babel: the Language Magazine. Ernestine Lahey (BA St. Francis Xavier University, Canada; MA, PhD University of Nottingham, UK) is an Assistant Professor in Linguistics and Stylistics at University College Roosevelt, Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Her research interests lie mainly in the fields of (cognitive) stylistics and Canadian literature/culture. Marina Lambrou is a Principal Lecturer in English Language and Communication at Kingston University, UK. Her research interests include stylistics with a focus on personal narratives, including trauma narratives, narratology and ethnography. Marina is a co-author of Language and Media (2009) and a joint-editor of Contemporary Stylistics (2007). She is the Guest Editor of the Language and Literature Special Issue: ‘Narrative’ (2014). Michaela Mahlberg is a Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Nottingham, UK. She is the editor of the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics and a co-editor of the book series Corpus and Discourse (Bloomsbury). Her most recent publications include the book Corpus Stylistics and Dickens’s Fiction (2013). Agnes Marszalek is a PhD research student in English Language at the University of Glasgow, funded by a scholarship from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland. Her interests include humour, cognitive stylistics and psychological approaches to text analysis. Her current research focuses primarily on the reader’s/viewer’s experiences of narrative humour. xiii

Contributors

Andrea Macrae is a Senior Lecturer in Stylistics at Oxford Brookes University. She teaches stylistics, narratology and cognitive poetics. Her primary areas of research and publication include literary deixis, stylistics of performance, and metafiction. Gert Meesters is an Associate Professor of Dutch Language and Culture at the University of Lille 3 – Charles de Gaulle. He co-founded Acme, the interdisciplinary group for comics research at the University of Liège, and publishes about comics and linguistic subjects. Rocío Montoro is a Senior Lecturer in English Language at the University of Granada, Spain. She is the author of Chick Lit: The Stylistics of Cappuccino Fiction and Key Terms in Stylistics (with Beatrix Busse and Nina Nørgaard). She is currently working (with Dan McIntyre) on a new project on the Language of Popular Fiction. Clara Neary is a Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Chester. Specialising in literary and cognitive stylistics, she is particularly interested in the study of narrative empathy and the expansion of stylistic enquiry into genres such as autobiography. Nina Nørgaard is an Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics in the Department of Language and Communication, University of Southern Denmark. She has published various articles on stylistics and multimodality, a monograph entitled Systemic Functional Linguistics and Literary Analysis (2003) and a reference book entitled Key Terms in Stylistics (2010). She is currently working on a second monograph entitled Multimodal Stylistics. David Peplow is a Lecturer in English Language at Sheffield Hallam University. His research focuses on book clubs as sites of non-academic reading. He is currently considering how group identity affects literary interpretation in book clubs and how social reading may benefit vulnerable people. Jennifer Riddle Harding is an Associate Professor of English at Washington and Jefferson College, Pennsylvania, USA. She has published in the Poetics and Linguistics Association Journal, Style, the Hemingway Review, and the Journal of Narrative Theory, as well as contributing to Conceptual Blending and the Study of Narrative. Jeremy Scott writes, teaches and researches on the border between literature and language studies at the University of Kent. As well as his own fiction, he has published on narrative technique, literary representations of dialect, the relationship between narratives and identity, and portrayals of Englishness in fiction. Dan Shen is the Changjiang Professor of English Language and Literature at Peking University, China. She is on the editorial or advisory boards of the British Language and Literature, the American Style and Narrative, and the European JLS: Journal of Literary Semantics. Apart from publishing five books in China, she has published Style and Rhetoric of Short Narrative Fiction with Routledge. Michael Toolan has been Professor of English Language at the University of Birmingham since 1996, where he is currently the Head of the School of English, Drama and American and Canadian Studies. His research interests include literary stylistics and narrative.

xiv

Contributors

Paola Trimarco is a Senior Lecturer at University Campus Suffolk, where she teaches Language Analysis, Critical Language Studies and Digital Textuality. Her publications include The Discourse of Reading Groups: sociocultural and cognitive approaches with J. Swann, D. Peplow and S. Whiteley (forthcoming), Digital Textuality (forthcoming), chapters in Pedagogical Stylistics: current trends in language, literature and ELT edited by M. Burke, S. Csábi, L. Week and J. Zerkowitz (2012) and in Teaching the Short Story edited by A. Cox (2011), as well as authoring three books for Penguin Readers. Chantelle Warner is an Assistant Professor of German and Second Language Acquisition at the University of Arizona. Her research focuses on linguistic practices, and especially literary language and use as social sites of struggle over meanings, subjectivities, and aesthetics. She has published in the fields of German studies, stylistics, literary pragmatics, applied linguistics, and language pedagogy. Sonia Zyngier has authored numerous papers on literary awareness, stylistics, and empirical research in literary education. She wrote an article on pedagogical stylistics for the Elsevier Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2005) and is a co-editor of the Linguistic Approaches to Literature Series (John Benjamins). She has also co-authored Scientific Methods for the Humanities (2012).

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Acknowledgements

Producing a handbook of this size and scope is no simple matter. Such a task must invariably draw substantially on the time, commitment and fortitude of many individuals. The timely production of this handbook therefore involved much hard work and cooperation across several institutions, groups of people and individuals. I am deeply indebted first to all of the contributors to this handbook who submitted on time, took heed of my suggestions for improvements and always remained agreeable. I would especially like to thank my former research assistant, Kristy Evers, for her attentive support in helping me to prepare the chapters for publication and for conducting a number of essential administrative tasks. At Routledge, I am grateful to commissioning editor Nadia Seemungal who initially approached me to edit this Handbook of Stylistics and allowed me free rein to come up with my own section heads, the chapter content in those sections and the authors to produce those chapters. I would also like to thank Sophie Jaques, senior editorial assistant, with whom I worked closely during the first half of this project, and editorial assistant Rachel Daw, who took over this project from Sophie and saw it through to its completion. I am also indebted to their colleagues in production and copyediting, in particular Louise Maskill, Geraldine Martin and Rob Brown, for doing such a wonderful job making this book. The publisher is indebted to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., for permission to reproduce an excerpt from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, copyright ©1967 by Tom Stoppard. Further, the publisher is also grateful to the Trustees of Amherst College for permission to reprint the poetry of Emily Dickenson from The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickenson: A Facsimile Edition, R. W. Franklin, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, copyright © 1981 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College (copyright © 1951, 1955, 1978, 1979, 1980, by the President and Fellows of Harvard College; copyright © 1914, 1924, 1929, 1932, 1942, by Martha Dickinson Bianchi). The Wilfred Owen poem ‘The parable of the old man and the young’ appears in the form found in Wilfred Owen: The war poems (Chatto and Windus, 1994, p. 61). We are grateful to the book’s publisher and its editor Jon Stallworthy for permission to reproduce it here. While every effort has been made to contact copyright holders, we would be pleased to hear of any that have been inadvertently omitted. I am also indebted to University College Roosevelt in Middelburg and the Humanities Faculty of Utrecht University, for encouraging and facilitating the production of both high quality research and valuable learning materials. My final thanks go to my wife Helle and my two children Louisa and Oscar for their patience, and for putting up with my long days of absenteeism (especially at weekends) while I was ensconced in my upstairs study at home editing and commenting on the thirty-two chapters that make up this handbook. This book is dedicated to my stylistics students – xvii

Acknowledgements

past, present and future − for their inspiration, their motivation and their constructive criticism. For without them, there would be no book and no conceivable reason to have ever considered writing one. Michael Burke Middelburg, The Netherlands September 2013

xviii

Introduction Stylistics: From classical rhetoric to cognitive neuroscience Michael Burke

This handbook is a reference work covering key topics in stylistics. It can also function as a textbook. Each of the thirty-two chapters provides an accessible, introductory overview to an area of the field. The book is intended for a broad audience: anyone, in fact, with an interest in language, literature or culture. However, the work is directed at beginners in the field, whether they are undergraduate students, graduate students or researchers and academics who work in other disciplines.

Stylistics Stylistics, or ‘literary linguistics’ as it is sometimes called, is the study and analysis of texts; it is in particular, although not exclusively, the study and analysis of literary texts. The origins of stylistics go back to the poetics, and especially to the rhetoric, of the ancient classical world. In ancient rhetoric it is principally the third of the five canons which is of importance to stylistics. The ancient Greeks called this third canon ‘lexis’, and the Romans referred to it as ‘elocutio’. We know it today as style (see Wales 2011, p. 372 for more on this). First of all, textual ‘material’/‘data’ was generated and/or discovered. Arguments were then formed from this material based on one of the three Aristotelian proofs: logos, ethos and pathos. This constituted the first canon of rhetoric. That material was then ordered for optimal effect in a given situation. This is the second canon. Thereafter, the textual material was stylised (the third canon). Finally, it was memorised (if it was a speech) and then delivered. These constitute the fourth and fifth canons respectively. The stylisation of the text in the third canon of rhetoric essentially took two forms. The first kind of stylisation was based on the clarity, preciseness and appropriateness of the language to be used. The second kind was based on style figures. These were either schemes (which deviate at the syntactic level of language) or tropes (which deviate at the semantic level). In addition to this, and linked to the category of appropriateness, there were three kinds of style which were thought to be appropriate in almost all speaking situations; these were the high style, the middle style and the low style. The high, florid style was often reserved for literature and poetry. It was also very persuasive, drawing as it did on pathos (one of Aristotle’s three proofs) to influence thinking patterns. The low, plain style was mostly used for more mundane acts of discourse 1

Michael Burke

communication – for example, instruction in the classroom. The middle style was invariably a blend of both, to be used in intermediate situations. There can be no doubt that the fundamental core of stylistics lies in the rhetoric of the classical world. The modern type of stylistics that we know today did not emerge until the beginning of the twentieth century. It was the Russian formalists, and especially Roman Jakobson, Viktor Shklovsky and Vladimir Propp, who were instrumental at the source of this development. What these scholars had in common was a desire to make literary scholarship more scientific and to find out what makes poetic texts poetic. To achieve this they put forward their structuralist ideas. Jakobson focused on the poetic function of language, Propp on the parts that make up stories and the repetitive/universal elements that occur within those stories, and Shklovsky on how literature and art defamiliarise or ‘make strange’. It is clear that much of this work is a recycling of ideas from the ancient world of rhetoric and poetics. For example, Shklovsky’s ‘defamiliarisation’ theory, which is the aesthetic idea that words that are ordered and presented in a fresh way can make a reader see a particular word, and the world to which it refers, in a fresh light, is simply a rhetorical style figure. Russian formalism petered out in the early 1930s, but it continued in Prague under the heading of structuralism. Slowly but surely the Prague School turned away from formalism towards functionalism. It is this inclusion of context in textual meaning making that paved the way for much of the stylistics that occurs today. The text, the context and the reader are all now at the heart of stylistic scholarship. Stylistics nowadays is a field of study that confidently has one foot in language studies and the other in literary studies. Contemporary stylistics goes far beyond the rhetoric, poetics, formalism, structuralism and functionalism of the past to embrace corpus, critical, cognitive, pedagogical, pragmatic, gender, multimodal and, most recently, neuroscientific approaches. This diversity might have the initial appearance of fragmenting the field. However, nothing could be further from the truth, because at many levels, interdisciplinarity study is what stylistics is designed to do. As stylistician Paul Simpson writes, ‘stylistics is a method of textual interpretation in which primacy of place is assigned to language’ (2004, p. 2). Stylistics thus still carries the methodological genes that it has inherited from its forebear, rhetoric. Its very purpose is its application to textual data, and its strength lies in its potential for such application. (For more on the ‘many branches of stylistics’, see Nørgaard, Busse and Montoro 2011, pp. 7–48). Stylistic methodologies, both qualitative and quantitative, have become increasingly polished and honed over the years. Stylistician Ron Carter has said that stylistics should strive to be ‘open, evidenced and retrievable’ (2010, p. 68). This statement supports the falsifiability expectations that science expects, and in this sense it is relevant for stylistics. However, it is also true that stylistics in its more ‘hands on’, humanities-based, analytic sense is every bit as valuable. Another stylistician, Mick Short, writes that a good, stylistic foregrounding analysis should bring solid linguistic description to bear on autonomous critical statements from the world of literary studies of interpretation and evaluation (1996, p. 3). What a robust stylistic analysis can do here is point to the physical evidence in the text that can either support or falsify the disembodied verbal enunciation of the aforementioned literary critic/scholar. Let us look at this point in more detail. A stylistician can arguably be viewed as a kind of empirical or forensic discourse critic: a person who with his/her detailed knowledge of the workings of morphology, phonology, lexis, syntax, semantics, and various discourse and pragmatic models, goes in search of language-based evidence in order to support or indeed challenge the subjective interpretations and evaluations of various critics and cultural commentators. Imagine a kind of Sherlock Holmes character, who is an expert grammarian 2

Introduction

and rhetorician and has a love of literature and other creative texts. Now imagine further that this linguistic sleuth reads a review of a novel on an internet blog, written by a cultural expert who is praising the story he has just read by using what you and I might call inflated language. That cultural expert might have written something along the lines of the following: ‘the story succeeds in asphyxiating the waning reader in a hopeless series of disappearing alleys of claustrophobia’. Nice diction, our linguistic detective might think, but extremely vague, and perhaps even somewhat pretentious. Our sleuth then sets out to discover whether there is any linguistic evidence to support this claim, and/or to find counter-evidence in order to deny or falsify it. First, our stylistician-linguist reads the story, and in doing so she might, for example, indeed recognise the essence of what the cultural expert or critic meant with his vague words. This recognition would then confirm the interpretation and the subsequent evaluation of the critic. But what about the description? Where is the linguistic evidence to back up this claim? What role does the actual language use play in this story, and might it in some way be responsible from this essentially ‘claustrophobic’ interpretation that has been put forward by the cultural commentator? Armed with her stylistic toolkit, our ‘Sherlocke Stylistica’ sets out to see whether there might be, for example, an over-representation of such linguistic phenomena as closed vowels, mono-syllabic words, abstract nouns or minimalist syntax in the text, because if there is, the combination of such ‘restrictive’ or ‘plain’ linguistic features might be adding to, or even helping to create, the overall effect of perceived ‘claustrophobia’ in the reader. The stylistic detective can then present the linguistic data acquired by her systematic investigation to other stylisticians, and can offer a plausible and relatively objective interpretation for her fellow linguists to evaluate or corroborate by repeating her analysis. In this way, stylistics encourages literary criticism to be about more than just opinions. This is essentially what stylistics is all about. It is a kind of linguistic-forensic, literary discourse criticism.

The scope of this volume This book is called The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics. Just as the name suggests, a handbook (or ‘manual’) is essentially a ‘how-to-do’ book. It is not a collection of academic article-like chapters based on current research. Once you have read this volume you should be able to confidently conduct your own stylistic analyses. This handbook is therefore both a reference work and a textbook for students and teachers alike. Teachers can use it as a textbook for a full course/module of study on stylistics, going through it sequentially, perhaps taking one or even two chapters per session. Alternatively, they can allow students to use it as a reference work, dipping in and out of it and reading specific chapters in support of an alternative textbook that they may be working from. Most chapters, and certainly those in Parts 2, 3 and 4 of the book, have a distinct structure to them. First, you are given a detailed historical overview of the theory under discussion. This ‘historical perspectives’ section is then followed by a clear outline of the method involved, together with examples to aid your understanding of the concept under discussion. Thereafter you are given a number of ‘recommendations for practice’. This is an important section. The author who has written the chapter has come up with a number of fruitful small-scale research topics for you to have a go at. You should try at least one of these from every chapter. Preferably you will try more than one, because these will not only allow you to conduct a rewarding stylistic analysis, they will also give you the inspiration and confidence you may need to go in search of your own material for analysis. Writing a stylistics paper can be a fraught and sometimes daunting endeavour. Thankfully, there are some additional guidelines available to take you through the process step by step (see, 3

Michael Burke

for example, Burke 2010). After the ‘recommendation for practice’ section in each chapter there is a section on ‘future directions’. This will point you to where the stylistic research of the near future will be taking place in the area you are reading about. This is the research that you might very well be doing if you choose to stay in the field and write a PhD thesis or do research on a post-doctoral project. In a way, these sections are a kind of ‘heads up’ for newer and younger scholars in the field to show them the kind of cutting-edge research they should be producing. The chapters end with some essential suggestions for further reading. There is also a list of topics closely related to the one you have just been reading about that are covered elsewhere in this handbook, so if you find you are really interested in a particular topic, you will know what else to read in the handbook in order to enhance your knowledge of that topic. This book covers thirty-two key stylistic topics that will take you from the very beginnings of stylistics, namely the classical world of ancient rhetoric, to its prospective future, the cognitive domain of neuroscience. All chapters have been written by handpicked stylistics experts from all over the world: from China, the USA, Canada, Brazil, the UK and mainland Europe, including Germany, France, Spain, Denmark, Hungary and the Netherlands. Many of these writers are in their prime and will still be teaching stylistics for the next twenty to thirty years. This publication is truly an international book, with international examples that are geared towards an international student audience. All the expert authors in this book actively teach stylistics in their universities, and it is this everyday pedagogical knowledge of how to guide students through the process of conducting a stylistic analysis that they bring to bear in their individual chapters, thereby helping you to take ownership of your own learning. As a result the chapters come to life, almost allowing students to hear the individual voices of each teacher as they are guided and stimulated to learn for themselves − after all, learning is not listening, or even reading, but rather ‘doing’, and this is why the ‘recommendations for practice’ sections in the chapters are so important for your own learning. It is also the reason why this section has not been tagged onto the end of each chapter as an afterthought, as is the case all too often in other handbooks and textbooks. Instead it is firmly embedded within the chapters, appearing as it does before the ‘future directions’ section. The book is set out in four parts. We will now look in a little more detail at each part.

Part I

Historical perspectives in stylistics

Part I of this handbook, which consists of just four chapters, does not entirely follow the internal structure that most of the other chapters have, as described above. There is a lot of historical background to impart to you in these chapters, and as a result the focus lies here. What this opening section does do, however, is set the scene for you; it gives you all the background knowledge you will need to tackle the remaining twenty-eight chapters. These four chapters, and especially the first two, will continually point forward to the theories and methods that will come up in the rest of the book. This is to help you to draw comparisons, make links and understand just how the seemingly different parts of stylistic scholarship fit together. In the opening chapter in this first section Michael Burke takes us back to where it all began: the classical world of rhetoric and poetics. Aristotle is our main starting point, and you will be amazed at the things he was saying about style and narrative. That sense of wonder will be grounded in the realisation that things have not changed an awful lot in more than two thousand years. Reviewing the rhetorical work of figures like Cicero and Quintilian may very well give you pointers to future research in emerging domains. In Chapter 2, Michael Burke and Kristy Evers bring us into the early twentieth century to look at what we might call the beginnings of modern stylistics, namely formalism and later structuralism. You 4

Introduction

will be introduced to some of the key theories of the Russian formalists – people like Jakobson, Shklovsky and Propp – and you will see just how heavily these scholars drew on the ideas of the rhetorical and poetic ancient past to inform the development of theories on what makes language poetic. In Chapter 3 Patricia Canning takes us from formalism into the domain of functionalism. She applies the Hallidayan systemic functional grammar approach to stylistic analysis. In Chapter 4 Jennifer Riddle Harding examines the reader response theories that emerged as a result of earlier ideas on formalism, structuralism and functionalism. With these four building blocks – (1) ancient rhetoric and poetics, (2) formalism and structuralism, (3) functionalism, and (4) reader response theories – the scene is set to take on the second part of this handbook.

Part II

Core issues in stylistics

The second section of the volume, entitled ‘Core issues in stylistics’, runs from Chapter 5 to Chapter 13. As the title suggests, it is here that you will be introduced to the main aspects of stylistics. If Part I was the basement of a house built of stylistic knowledge, then Part II is the ground floor (or the first floor, if you are from North America). In Chapter 5 Christiana Gregoriou leads you through what is seen by many as ‘the core of core issues’ in stylistics – namely, foregrounding. In this chapter she puts into practice the theories that started to ferment in Chapters 1 to 4. In Chapter 6 Beatrix Busse sets out the basics of ‘new historical stylistics’, reminding us that stylistic study can be just as fruitful when analysing texts diachronically as the more standard synchronic mode of investigation. There then follow three chapters which are closely related: Chapter 7 on speech acts and (im)politeness theory, written by Derek Bousfield, Chapter 8 on conversation analysis and the cooperative principle by Marina Lambrou, and Chapter 9 on relevance theory by Billy Clark. Here the philosophical, discoursal and pragmatic elements of stylistic analysis are examined in depth. It is also here that you will see just how grounded in classical rhetoric many aspects of modern pragmatics are. In Chapter 10 Clara Neary shows us the subtleties of point of view and modality, and this narrative flavour is expanded in Chapter 11 with Dan Shen’s clear exposition of narratological issues in stylistics. This section then ends with two chapters which deal with popular core principals in stylistics: these are stylistic studies into metaphor and metonymy, in Chapter 12 by Szilvia Csábi, and speech and thought presentation in Chapter 13 by Joe Bray. These chapters make an appropriate link to Part III of the handbook.

Part III

Contemporary topics in stylistics

Part III of the book contains Chapters 14 to 25. This section deals with the modern stylistics that is primarily taking place in the undergraduate university classrooms of today. The topics fall under the umbrella terms of the cognitive, the critical and the pedagogical. For this reason, the section is entitled ‘Contemporary topics in stylistics’. If we proceed with our metaphor of ‘stylistics as a house’, we are now on the first floor (or the second floor, for North American readers). ‘Pedagogical stylistics’ is the title of Chapter 14, where the author Geoff Hall sets out a number of methods and approaches that show just why it is that pedagogical stylistics is at the very heart of stylistic scholarship. In Chapter 15 Andrea Macrae takes us through one of the most popular areas of stylistics at this moment in time: the stylistics of drama and performance. Next come four chapters which all have a distinct cognitive flavour to them. Influences from cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics have made cognitive approaches to 5

Michael Burke

stylistics extremely popular at the moment. In Chapter 16 Cathy Emmott, Marc Alexander and Agnes Marszalek look at the possibilities that schema, frame and script theory offer stylistics. We then have two very closely related chapters that theorise, from a stylistic perspective, how text processing and mental representations operate. These are Chapter 17 on text world theory, written by Ernestine Lahey, and Chapter 18 on blending, written by Barbara Dancygier. The fourth chapter in this short cognitive series, Chapter 19, acts as a kind of macro-level chapter, drawing together the topics discussed in the previous three chapters and much more. It is entitled ‘Cognitive poetics’ and is written by Margaret Freeman. We then move to an empirical methods chapter (Chapter 20) written by Olivia Fialho and Sonia Zyngier, with a focus on the increasing significance of both qualitative and quantitative methods which have come to us from the social sciences. Part III ends with five chapters, all different in their approaches, but all at the cutting edge of practical stylistic scholarship today. The first of these is Chapter 21 on feminist approaches to stylistics, written by Rocio Montoro, and the second is Chapter 22 written by Chantelle Warner and dealing with literary pragmatics. The third of this five-chapter cluster is Chapter 23 on corpus approaches to stylistics, written by Michaela Mahlberg. Chapter 24 is on stylistics and translation and is written by Jean Boase-Beier. Finally, Chapter 25, written by Lesley Jeffries, is on the very popular topic of critical stylistics. Much research work is currently being done in all these five areas by students and scholars alike.

Part IV

Emerging and future trends in stylistics

If Part IV was the first floor of our ‘house of stylistics’, then Part IV is the newly renovated loft or attic apartment. In this final part of the handbook, entitled ‘Emerging and future trends in stylistics’, we encounter seven exciting developments in stylistic scholarship – modern trends that may very well make up the core of the field in ten years’ time. In Chapter 26 Jeremy Scott introduces us to a ‘productive’ kind of stylistics in the form of creative writing. In Chapter 27 David Peplow and Ron Carter bring to our attention the importance of having real readers and reading groups in your experiments in order for you to be able to draw valid conclusions in stylistic and reader response studies. Chapter 28, written by Michael Toolan, takes us to the burgeoning world of stylistics and film, while Nina Nørgaard builds on this in Chapter 29 to show us the expanding visual domain of multimodality. Chapter 30, written by Charles Forceville, Elisabeth El Refaie and Gert Meesters, takes us into the relatively unexplored world of stylistics and comics, while Chapter 31 by Paola Trimarco introduces us to stylistics in the online world of hypertext fiction. The final chapter in the handbook is perhaps the most futuristic of all, but at the same time it is the most enticing. Written by Patrick Colm Hogan, this chapter on ‘Stylistics, emotion and neuroscience’ will point you firmly towards where stylistics is headed, and shed light on where it might very well be twenty years from now.

Concluding remarks This handbook is set up to help you understand the basic principles and methods of the field, and to guide you through the process of doing stylistic analysis. The way the chapters are arranged means that ideally they should be read sequentially from 1 to 32 in a semester-long course on stylistics. However, they are written in such a way that you can, should you so wish, dip in and out of sections and chapters, making your own narrative and crafting stylistic pathways that fit your own interests. In this sense the book can act as a support to another 6

Introduction

textbook, filling in any gaps that remain open and making meaningful additions to the knowledge it imparts. There is also an innate interdisciplinary character to many of the chapters. For example, the final chapter on neuroscience includes parts that could quite easily have been placed in the very first chapter of the book, on classical rhetoric and poetics. The life of stylistics is a linear journey, from a source, through a path, to a goal, but at one and the same time it is also a loop, where the end can be the beginning, and the beginning the end. Stylistics is a subject to be enjoyed. You should not lose sight of this fact when you are reading the chapters in this volume and writing your own analyses based on the many ‘recommendations for practice’ sections. Stylistics is going places, and now is the time for you to get on board. It is a welcome guest in many intellectual homes in many locations across disciplines such as communication studies, rhetoric, pragmatics, discourse analysis, applied linguistics, literary studies, film, television and theatre studies, museum studies and so on. Stylistics also has its own home, though, and that is the ‘International Poetics and Linguistics Association’ (PALA) which has seen more than thirty international conferences on stylistics come and go over the years (in locations from Malta to Middelburg, Budapest to Birmingham, and Huddersfield to Heidelberg). Its membership is now around seven hundred, and more than half of those scholars are under thirty. As the twenty-first century blossoms into its second decade, stylistics is moving out of young adulthood and into its prime. Notwithstanding the immense richness of its past and present – which you will read about in depth in the pages of this handbook − it is a certainty that the best years of stylistics still lie ahead.

References Burke, M., 2010. Rhetorical pedagogy: Teaching students how to write a stylistics paper. Language and Literature, 19 (1), 77–98. Carter, R., 2010. Methodologies for stylistic analysis: Practices and pedagogies. In: D. McIntyre and B. Busse, eds. Language and style. London: Palgrave, 55–68. Nørgaard, N., Busse, B., and Montoro, R., 2010. Key terms in stylistics. London: Continuum. Short, M., 1996. Exploring the language of poems, plays and prose, London: Longman. Simpson, P., 2004. Stylistics: A resource book for students. London: Routledge. Wales, K., 2011. A dictionary of stylistics. 3rd ed. London: Longman.

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Part I

Historical perspectives in stylistics

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1 Rhetoric and poetics The classical heritage of stylistics Michael Burke

Introduction Without classical rhetoric and poetics there would be no stylistics as we know it today. This opening chapter introduces you to the fields of rhetoric and poetics, the classical forebears of contemporary stylistics. In doing so, it encourages you to go beyond this chapter and seek them out, to become better acquainted with them and to make them your allies, because a solid understanding of such past discourse and communication structures and models will both augment and enrich your current level of stylistic knowledge. Almost every overview of stylistics in the past thirty years or so begins in the twentieth century, with Roman Jakobson and Russian formalism. This is understandable and in many ways it is appropriate and correct. However, choosing to start approximately one hundred years ago risks missing out on something that is of central importance to stylistics today, and to its continuing development into the multimodal and neuroscientific world of the twentyfirst century. What this chapter seeks to accomplish is to offer you an indispensable contextual background to the field of stylistics, which many of the stylistics students of recent years have unfortunately been deprived of. Jakobson’s critical poetic work did not come into being spontaneously; it did not emerge out a void of nothingness. If you read his works you will see that he had a profound knowledge of both poetics and rhetoric, upon which he drew heavily. For example, in his famous ‘Closing statement: Linguistics and poetics’ essay he conducts a detailed stylistic analysis of Mark Anthony’s famous monologue from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (Jakobson 1960, pp. 375–376). In this analysis he observes levels of foregrounding that include paronomasia, polyptoton, apostrophe, exordium, modus obliquus and modus rectus, which are all key terms from the field of classical rhetoric. In this chapter we will survey the main principles of both poetics and rhetoric. There will be a focus on history, theory and methodology. We will see how these ancient disciplines continue to affect and influence modern-day stylistics. The chapter will close with some pointers towards future directions in the field.

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Historical overview The great classical period of rhetoric and poetics began roughly in the fifth century BC with the beginnings of democracy in Athens. It continued right up to the fall of the Roman empire in the West, although the Roman tradition of rhetoric schools and their progymnasmata programme of learning (about which you will learn more later) continued in the Eastern Roman world right up until the fall of the Byz