The Teaching of Stylistics

Introduction

The term ’style’, is used in Linguistics to describe the choices which language
makes available to a user, above and beyond the choices necessary for the
simple expression of a meaning. Linguistic form can be interpreted as a set of
possioilities for the production of texts, and thereby Linguistic form makes
possible Linguistic style.

The term ’style’ is used in linguistics to describe the choices which language
makes available to a user, above and beyond the choices necessary for the
simple expression of a meaning. Linguistic form can be interpreted as a set of
possibilities for tue production of texts, and thereby linguistic form makes
possible Linguistic style. Stylistics is the study of linguistic style, whereas
(theoretical) Linguistics is the study of Linguistic form. Linguistic form is
generated from the components of language (sounds, parts of words, and
words) and consists of the representations - phoaenc, phonological,
morphological, syntactic, semantic etc. - which together form a code by
which what we say or write has a specific meaning: thus for example the
sentence ’Toby chased Kes onto the television set’ encodes a specific
meaning, involving a specific kind of past event with two participants playing
specific roles relative to a location. The same event could be encoded in
other ways (such as ’Kes got chased by Toby and ended up on the television
set.’) and the choice of which way to encode it is a stylistic choice. Stylistic
choices are designed to have effects on the reader c. Listener, which are
generally understood as:

(a) Communicating meanings which go beyond the linguistically determined

meanings,

(b) Communicating attitude (as in persuasive effects of style), and

(c) Expressing or communicating emotion.

Some of the areas included in the teaching of Stylistics are:

1. Narrative structure

2. Point of view and focalization

3. Sound patterning

4. Syntactic and lexical parallelism and repetition

5. Metre and rhythm

6. Genre
7. Mimetic, representational, realist effects

8. Metarepresentation, representation of speech and thought, irony

9. Metaphor and other ways of indirect meaning

10. Utilization and representation of variation in dialect, accent, and

historically specific usages

11. Group-specific ways of speaking (real or imagined), as in gendered

Stylistics

12. Examination of inferential processes which readers engage in to

determine communicated

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A HANDBOOK OF STYLE AND STYLISTTCS

meanings From practical criticism to stylistics

The teaching of literature often requires the close reading of texts, with a
focus on the specific choices made by a specific text, and the effect of those
chokes (particularly on the meaning of the text). From its earliest major
manifestation in LA. Richards’s Practical Criticism (1929), this practice was
always seen as a corrective to otherwise unconstrained and undisciplined
reading of texts; close reading, sensitive to language, is thus seen by its
practitioners as having an ethical dimension. In earlier forms (including the
New Criticism movement; various radical decontextualizations such as
removing the author’s name were applied to ensure an unprejudiced focus on
the text. The university study of Practical Criticism was extended to the
school teaching of close reading (in Britain) by Cox and Dyson (1965).
Stylistics, emerging in the 1960s and in its initial stages often closely allied to
the new types of linguistics (e.g. in the work of Michael Halliday or J. P. Thome
or Roger Fowlei), inherits to some extent this sense of mission, and
stylisticians sometimes see themselves as in righteous opposition to
mainstream (e.g. poststructuralist) literary theory of the pact «~ ’ ;;ades. The
level-headedness of Stylistics thus risks losing out to the heady excitements
of literary theory, particularly for undergraduates who seek intellectual
excitement. On the other hand, the skills-orientation and democratic ethic of
Stylistics courses can sometimes be a refuge for undergraduates who feel
disempowered by literary theory in its perceived lack of method and reliance
on unchallengeable authority and personality cultism.

Stylistics has had another educational role, in the teaching of literature to

people learning English. Widdowson’s 1975 book Stylistics and the Teaching
of Literature was not only a major contribution to stylistic theory but also
partly responsible for the idea that ELT could be integrated with the teaching
of literature; literary texts were thought to provide real texts which gave
opportunities to explore subtle aspects of language in use, or by their marked
use of certain1 stylistic features could draw attention to the workings of
language. This carried a political advantage; departments of foreign
languages are often occupied by academics who have specializations in
literature, but who are faced with the practical need to devote much time to
the teaching of the language. The merger of Linguistics and literary study
provided by Stylistics gave them a way to put their expertise to use in
language teaching.

Stylistics has also underpinned the critical linguistic study of the mass media,
which in educational terms is the attempt to teach students how to peel back
the stylistic practices which conceal the illegitimate exercise of power. A set
of related propositions, some more schematic than others, can be expressed
by different stylistic choices; thus for example an action with an actor and
something acted upon can be expressed by a proposition which can be coded
more or less schematically by an active sentence, or a passive sentence, or a
noun phrase, with each of these stylistic choices placing greater or lesser
prominence on parts of the proposition (and hence giving a different
impression of the event itself). Stylistics seeks to understand what the
possibilities are in a given language, and asks why particular choices are
made - for example, in a newspaper report, where Tiias’ can simply be in the
stylistic choices themselves. It is sometimes felt that there is a need to equip
people with analytical tools which enable them to understand the stylistic
mechanisms by which ideologies are communicated.

Style Causes Effect

The basic idea of Stylistics is that a stylistic choice has an ’effect’ (on the
reader), and that it should be possible to understand the causal relation
between that stylistic choice and that effect.
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113

There is a discipline - Rhetoric - in which the relation between style and effect
is prescribed or asserted; this discipline has classical origins, and can still be
seen operating in self-help guides to writing and speaking. Stylistics is to
rhetoric as theoretical Linguistics is to traditional prescriptive grammar. An
important feature of Stylistics in terms of the extraction of meaning (and
other ’effects’) is that texts need to be examined as an integrated whole. In
this way, Stylistics can help bring out meanings which are inaccessible to
syntax or formal semantics, which largely focas on individual sentences.

Effects are assumed to be discovered bv introspection. (Effects are too

cognitively complex to be simply measured by for example laboratory
techniques.) They typically include meanings on the one hand, and on the
other hand persuasive effects, or emotional effects (including just pleasure or
aesthetic experience). We discover effects only by looking inside ourselves,
and formulating a description of what we see there, but in literary studies this
is often reinforced or checked by discussing with others our own
introspections, thus clarifying and correcting our own experience. The literary
studies seminar with its individual focus becomes the Stylistics ’workshop’
where collective discussion helps clarify the effects of a text, and also helps
strip away individual variations in response, in order better to establish the
precise function of stylistic choices. The introspective judgement of effects in
Stylistics is analogous to the judgement of grammaticality or wellformedness
in formal Linguistics; in both cases, it seems that people need to learn how to
make such judgements, and improve in the ability to do so, and one of the
goals of Stylistics education is to improve the students’ ability to look inside
themselves (in which Stylistics shares a general goal with all education in the
Humanities).

What Stylistic attempts to discover is how stylistic choices cause the effects.
Here the problem is to identify discrete stylistic choices. In a sense, a text is
all stylistic choice; linguistic form simply the material from which the text is
woven and all aspects of the weave are stylistic. Hence it could be difficult to
separate off a specific stylistic choice as a discrete part of the text which
causes f^me effect. The theoretical tradition helps us in this,*with the notion
of ’markedness’ and general notions of salience; though the text is a weave
of stylistic choices, some stylistic choices are isolated and prominent by
virtue of being particularly noticeable in a text. Stylistics as a practice has
often gravitated towards stylistic markedness, picking texts precisely for their
peculiarities which make it easy to see that specific stylistic choices have
been made; hence, for example, modernist (and postmodernist) texts are
particularly popular.

The identification of effects and of specific stylistic choices is tied to the

problem of identifying a causal relation between style and effect. Though this
is the most difficult problem among the three difficult problems identified in
this section, we as Stylistics teachers nevertheless generally expect students
to do this. A typical homework’ior exam question would be: ”Identify [some
particular stylistic feature] and describe its effects”. Though we ask this
question all the time, it is difficult to tell exactly what we are asking the
students to do here, in the sense of giving us verifiable answers. The risk we
run is of falling back into a prescriptive practice reminiscent of the discipline
of Rhetoric, by encouraging only stereotyped answers about style and effect,
such as claims for example that any passive sentence has a significant effect
of de-emphasising agency. This seems to me the biggest problem for the
teaching of Stylistics.

Stylistics and Student Creativity

Stylistics can stimulate creative activity in students. I once taught a

Linguistics class to creative writing and journalism students. In formulating
assessments for these students, I asked them to put theoretical notions into
practice, and then comment on what they had done. Different tasks required
them to consider metarepresentation (quotation, other ways of attributing
thoughts
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A HANDBOOK OF STYLE AND STYLISTICS

and utterances, transcription), narrative well-formedness, and facework.

Results included a story exemplifying ’facework’ (a metaphor for our need to
be respected and to respect others) which is taken literally as being about the
reader’s face, as well as texts which disappear into a receding set of
metarepresentations, and also interviews in which transcriptional choices
reshape the event being reported. Students’ commitment to understanding
the theory is greater because the quality of their own writing is at stake; they
are also able to find the complexities and metaphorical underpinnings of the
theory underpinning Stylistics by turning it into writing. In another long-
running class, Ways of Reading’, some of the most memorable work has
come from asking students to put stylistic notions into practice; I particularly
remember a CU.3S on juxtaposition, with a homework for which students
submitted a scythe with Marvell’s poem The Mower Against Gardens’
attached to it, and a Charlie Brown cartoon blown up to poster size with a
Charles Olson poem inserted into the speech bubbles. In another class, on
the book as an object, students are required to turn a book (bought cheaply
for the purpcse) into another object or set of objects. Stylistics has always
had a ludic, playful, side to it, which opens up possibilities not available from
more straight-faced literary criticism - and this combines with a ’workshop’ or
problem-solving ethic drawn from Linguistics (and -1/e educational ideas from
the 1960s). Students have fun doing these kinds of exercises, and the quality
of the products suggests that they are learning something; but here, too, we
fall back into the same problem of getting a clear and verifiable description of
how particular stylistic choices (here manifested as creative decisions) cause
particular effects.

The Relation Between Stylistics and linguistics

The teaching of Stylistics depends on a technical terminology with which

students can describe the stylistic choices. Much of this technical terminology
is in practice taken from traditional grammar or from some linguistic theory.
In addition, students will need to be able to construct diagrams of texts (such
as tree structures for sentences, or some equivalent for syllable structure, or
word structure or discourse structure), and again various linguistic theories
provide methods for doing this.

One of the puzzles for Stylistics - and acutely a problem in teaching Stylistics
- is the extent to which Stylistics depends on any particular linguistic theory,
and particularly on any particular syntactic theory or theory of grammar.
Ways of representing linguistic form we.e in the 60s and 70s drawn from the
new (and mutually incompatible) theories of Systemic Grammar,
Transformational Grammar, and Generative Semantics. Syntactic theory has
for the past few decades been much too difficult to simply introduce in
Stylistics teaching, and furthermore produces representations which are very
distinct from the surface forms seen in texts; and Stylistics classes can rarely
rely on students having a good understanding of Linguistics. This forces a
certain decoupling of syntactic theory and Stylistics teaching It is this
decoupling which enables Stylistics to be successful as a discipline even
though it may be out of step with (formal) linguistic theory, and successful as
a subject to teach to students even though they may have little
understanding of linguistic theory. (On the other hand, it means that Stylistics
is not necessarily a good introduction to linguistic theory, as is sometimes
suggested.)

In suggesting that Stylistics and Linguistics may be disconnected

theoretically, even though they both clearly relate to language, I assume
along chomskyan lines that ’language’ is not a theoretically unified domain.
Linguistic theory is concerned with rules which build representations, and
conditions which hold of those rules and representations; it is not - at least in
most of its theoretical manifestations - an account of actual utterances or
written sentences. While we can understand the construction of an utterance
or a written sentence as the result of making a set of
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115

choices (which words to choose, in what order, phase, tense, aspect; how to
relate subclauses, etc), those choices do not necessarily correspond to
elements of linguistic form. Thus for example ’passive’ is a way of
understanding a surface choice, but it need not be theorized linguistically as
a rule or set of rules of linguistic form (instead, ’passive’ is the post-linguistic
way of describing the a set of similar structures which emerge from a
combination of underlying processes which may have no specific relation to
one another within the system).

Conclusion

It is argued that in literary texts we are dealing with two quite different kinds
of form, which is called ’generated form’ (basically linguistic form and
possibly some aspects of metrical form) and ’communicated form’ (genre,
narrative form, and probably every other kind of literary form); this distinction
can be restated using the terms in this current article as the distinction
between ’form’ and ’style’. Generated form (now just called form) holds of the
text by virtue of constituting it: being a noun, or a preposition phrase, or a
specific phoneme are necessary formal aspects of the text which enable it to
exist. On the other hand communicated form (now just called style) holds of a
text by virtue of being the content of an assumption about the text which is
licensed by the text. Form is the stuff from which a text is made, while style is
what a text tells us about itself. (Goodman similarly focuses on the extent to
which otyle is ’exemplified’ by a text: the text is both denoted by a term such
as ’parallelism’ but in turn denotes that term - the text means parallelism, in
much the way that a tailor’s swatch of cloth means the colour or material
which comprises it.) Style is thus a kind of meaning, holding of a text only as
the content of a thought about the text. For example, parallelism holds within
a text to the extent that a reader is justified in formulating the thought
’parallelism holds within this text’, with the justifications drawn from various
stereotyped deductions (if the first and second lines have the same sequence
of word classes, then there is parallelism in the text’, etc). Or a text is in a
specific genre to the extent that we are justified by the text in formulating
that assumption about it. Linguistic form offers one of a number of different
and potentially competing sources of evidence from which the presence of a
style is inferred, and this is the relation - in this theoretical approach, much
weakened - between form and style. Style can thus be indeterminate,
ambiguous, metaphorical, ironic, strongly implied, weakly implied, and so on
having all the characteristics of a meaning, because style is a meaning. If this
is true, it has a consequence which helps us resolve some of the problems for
the teaching of Stylistics. The key problem in Stylistics is to work out the
causal relation between style and effect, where ’effect’ includes various
cognitive effects such as meanings, emotions, beliefs, etc. My proposal is that
style is itself an effect; hence rather than mediating between two quite
different kinds of thing (style vs. effect) we are really looking at the relation
between effects, with the distinction between style and effect no longer
clearly defined. This means that the theory of how style cav^es effect is now
a theory of how thoughts are connected, which comes under the theory of
Pragmatics. This suggests a route out of the problem of Stylistics which has
been chosen by a number of authors: to assume that Stylistics basically falls
under the theory of Pragmatics, and to start from here in the teaching of
Stylistics.

University Questions

1. Write a note on the teaching of Stylistics.

2. Discuss the relationship between Stylistics and practical criticism.

3. How can Stylistics be integrated into ELT (English Language Teaching)?

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