Peter Stockwell: We are so used to thinking of stylistics as an interdiscipline and as interdisciplinarity as an inherently good thing that I think we have missed the fact that – some time since the 1990s – stylistics has matured into a single coherent discipline. This Handbook is partly evidence of that. It strikes me as odd now that we used to think of stylistics as the application of the discipline of linguistics to the separate field of literary studies: since literature is fundamentally a matter of language in its broadest conception, essentially literary studies should primarily be regarded as a special form of applied linguistics! In fact, it is the range of practices in literary scholarship in the institutional mainstream that is interdisciplinary: literary studies draws on history, or sociology, or economics, or politics, or philosophy, or creative art. Only stylistics directly faces the literary work in its own terms. I am often in discussions around questions such as ‘what can stylistics offer to cognitive linguistics?’, or ‘what can stylistics bring to literary criticism?’, whereas in fact I am increasingly insistent that the only question should be a simple ‘what can stylistics do?’ The payoffs for those other disciplines are of secondary importance.

Sara Whiteley: I agree that stylistics is now best thought of as a discipline. I think I realise this most in my teaching and in the fact that there are now undergraduate degrees in stylistics. Students are quick to realise that stylistic methods and approaches are not simply quirky or innovative combinations of language and literature – they are much more than that, sophisticated and productive in their own right. That said, I think stylistics as a discipline is also uniquely outward-looking. Practitioners are generally not content to simply ‘do’ stylistics, and are also attentive to current developments in a range of related fields such as linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, education and beyond. As a stylistician, you are still highly likely to find yourself flitting between library shelves to reach many sections of the Dewey-decimal system! And I think that some of the most fascinating and challenging stylistic work is still that which tests the boundaries and crossing-points between stylistics and other fields.

SW: In stylistics’ transition from an interdiscipline to a discipline, I think a sense of division from mainstream literary scholarship has been an important identity-forming force. Many stylisticians, myself included, came into stylistics through a sense of dissatisfaction with other less rigorous approaches to literary analysis. Indeed, inherent within the stylistic commitment to systematicity in analysis and clarity in argument is a critique of some of the more impressionistic and pretentious forms of mainstream literary criticism. At present, I get the impression that stylistics is seen as a strange offshoot of literary scholarship by those who do not practise it. Stylistics is often unrepresented in university English departments, and where it is present, it is regarded as a minority interest. Now that it is a recognisable, coherent discipline, in the future I would like to see stylistics taking a central place in mainstream literary study. As we stated in the introduction to this volume, stylistics is the proper study of literature. And as this Handbook demonstrates, it excels at addressing issues central to literary scholarship such as composition, representation, meaning, effect, the style and craft of the author, and literature’s significance for readers. Like other modes of literary scholarship, stylistic investigation stems from a researcher’s intuitive responses to a text, and stylistic methods enable the systematic and rigorous examination of that text. As such, stylistics can both strengthen literary-critical arguments and shed new light on the way texts work. It is difficult to conceive of a form of literary scholarship which does not involve some analysis of texts (novels, poems, plays, letters, diary entries, manuscripts and so on), and which therefore would not benefit from stylistics. Making this change happen at an institutional level is where the challenge lies, however. Foundational modules in stylistics as the norm for all undergraduate literature degrees would be a big step forward, for instance.

PS: It’s not that the various current practices of literary scholarship are pointless or valueless – there is a great deal of richness and value in this large body of work. I simply believe that every single example of literary scholarship would be better than it is if it included a greater stylistic sensibility. In a sense, the true measure of the success of stylistics would be when it was regarded as an inherent part of the basic training of a literary scholar. It’s probably also true to say that stylistics – or at least a form of detailed and systematic attention to textuality – is more an implicit norm in the second-language literature classroom: if you are studying a literature in a foreign language, then you necessarily have to be a stylistician. And of course we’re talking about something more systematic and, well, disciplined than an amateurish close-reading, however sensitive it is.

Essentially, stylistics is work. You have to have some training in what you’re doing, and you have to go through the actual difficult process of sketching the analysis with a pencil or keyboard, or running a concordance or database search, or pursuing a great deal of empirical research publications in other fields before you can then do the hard intellectual work of adapting this material for literary analysis. A stylistic analysis is not simply something that you can have an opinion about – there is a basic level at which you simply have to do it right. Of course, there is a lot more ideology, argument and interpretation built on top of that. It’s also important to recognise, though, that some of the brilliant textbooks and courses in stylistics around the world mean that the journey from being a new student to being able to do some really quite smart stylistics is very short. This is enormously empowering.

PS: I think in the early days of stylistics there was a temptation to explore texts that were strikingly deviant or odd in some way. So writers such as e. e. cummings, Hemingway, Joyce or Hopkins were disproportionately popular. This was perhaps because the linguistic tools of the day naturally lent themselves to these sorts of texts. I think stylistics now is much more expansive, and I can’t imagine any literary work that would be of no interest to the stylistician. I think the question is more about the literature than the stylistic selection: some literary texts offer more to say than others. Without getting into questions of canon and better and worse literature (on which stylistics has a great deal to contribute, of course), it’s obvious that some literary works are rich and others are less so.

It strikes me that stylistics at heart is doing something rather old-fashioned but still valuable: appreciation. Mick Short has made this point several times – we are able to account for how some literary works are valued, prized and loved, and (in the other sense of ‘appreciate’) the value of the text increases as we gain a better understanding of how complex or clever it is. On a related theme, Paul Simpson has said that the test of a good stylistics talk is that it should make you want to go and read the literary text that has been discussed. Certainly most stylisticians choose to analyse texts that are significant either for themselves or more broadly socially, and so the analysis is properly motivated. The analysis itself is the thing, not the aggrandisement of the stylistician. In general, it seems to me that stylisticians are relatively non-egotistical. Perhaps with one or two (nameless!) exceptions, there is in general a loose ethos that we are engaged in a collective enterprise aimed at improving our understanding of how literature works. So stylistics does not usually aim for an eccentric but pyrotechnic innovation in interpretation – newness for its own sake – but is often concerned more with explaining existing or mainstream readings. Occasionally, of course, the practice of stylistics brings you to a revelatory moment in a reading that is an exciting new insight, but that moment is not the primary objective as it might be in traditional literary criticism.

SW: I agree that all literary works (indeed, all texts!) should hold some interest for a stylistician, though some offer richer pickings than others. In order to examine a text stylistically, you have to have some personal experience of its meaning or effects. Like other forms of literary scholarship, your choice of the text you analyse (or the period or genre you specialise in) is often motivated by your own personal preferences and interests. Because textual choice is so central to stylistic practice as it currently stands, I do think it would be interesting to disrupt this convention a little and see what consequences it had for the stylistic method. Discovering and analysing unfamiliar texts could be a good way for stylisticians to further test and refresh their stylistic tool-kits.

PS: I agree with this, though I also think stylistics offers a way of gaining access to and appreciation of the reading responses, feelings and interpretations of other analysts too. This is where stylistics is particularly intersubjective. I have read literary texts and not really known what to make of them, but have then been led by the hand by a stylistic account that has brought the literary work to life. Again, the test of good stylistics is the extent to which the literary text in focus appreciates in value as a result.

PS: I’m not sure this is as radical or new as we like to think. Text is still text whether accessed by codex or screen, and the sorts of things that people do with literature are the same as we have always done, but perhaps quicker and shared with a greater range of people. Stylistics has always had such close contact with semiotics, discourse analysis and media studies that rich multimodal literary works have not been a particularly difficult problem. In fact, I think the best work on multimodal literature has been done within a stylistics tradition. In the past, the performative and experiential aspects of literary consumption have been the challenge for stylistics. For the most part, stylistics has had most success with poetry and prose and has had problems with theatre and drama. This is to do with the nature of the performed object as an experience rather than the fixed playtext. However, I think much of the work on embodiment, experientialism and situatedness coming out of cognitive poetics offers us a chance of making great advances even here.

SW: The shift from print to screen in the reading and sharing of literature is more a shift in context than text – the text is the same but presented differently (on paper or monitors or e-readers). Cognitive poetic approaches do have the most potential for describing the effect of context on literary reading, but I think there is still much more work to be done in this area. Regardless of recent shifts in technology, I would say that the discussion of context – things like location, attention and motivation (which are often tied up in debates about the differences between print and screen, or print and audio before this) – are still ‘a problem’ in cognitive poetics. Deeper understanding of how these phenomena work and how they might relate to cognitive poetic frameworks is needed. So, I think the contemporary shift from print to screen (or the more familiar shift from print to audio) is only a problem for stylistics in so far as it highlights gaps in our current understanding of context and its impact on literary reading which need filling with further research.

SW: In university teaching, I think stylistics has an important role to play in providing students with a ‘way in’ to texts which may at first seem challenging, and encouraging greater awareness of and confidence in their own intuitions. Stylistics also provides a method for developing systematic, well-evidenced and clearly expressed arguments, which is an essential skill, as well as a greater sense of the way literary study intersects with other disciplines.

PS: I can’t see how the study of a foreign literature can be anything other than stylistic, though of course I know that there is an awful lot of rather uninspiring and dull teaching of literature as culture. We have had many academic visitors from around the world pass through Nottingham, who have taken their training in stylistics back to their own countries, adapting it for their own purposes and revivifying their language classrooms. The relationship between stylistics and applied linguistics has been very close, as Ron Carter points out in this Handbook (Chapter 6). A student encountering a foreign literature in a foreign language such as English, for the first time, often feels daunted by their lack of cultural and contextual knowledge, and too often this is the cue for their teachers to embark on a long and tedious tour of British or American culture, and the literary work gets lost in a different sort of activity. However, that student has probably a very recent and highly foregrounded sense of the language patterns in English, and will often notice key stylistic features of a piece of English literature that a native English speaker might well miss or overlook. A teacher who shows such students that they are in an advantageous position and can go a long way with some very modest linguistic knowledge will be an inspirational classroom presence, and that teacher is likely to be a stylistician.

PS: Though there is still probably a European centre of gravity, stylistics can be found everywhere in the world. I have seen enough work on the stylistics of translation and by scholars around the world applying the stylistic method to their own literature to be convinced that stylistics can profitably be used to understand any world literature better. There is, of course, a preponderance of stylistic analyses of British, Irish and American literature, but this is largely a historical consequence of the institutional success of stylistics in these parts of the world. Whenever I have had the privilege of taking stylistics to colleagues in South America, China or south-east Asia, there has been extraordinary interest and a desire to adapt stylistics for local purposes. It seems to me there is as much dissatisfaction in many parts of the world with the stuffy and inward-looking field of literary studies as I have felt over the years.

SW: The global reach of stylistics is also demonstrated by the international and ever-growing membership of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA). At their conferences and through their website there is a clear sense of an international community engaged in stylistics.

PS: Yes, and I think it is important not to be proprietorial about it. Stylistics does not belong to any one nationality or school of thought. It’s clear that the sorts of things our colleagues in Japan, or in America, for example, do with stylistics is often rather different from what might happen in Britain. One thing that has been apparent from PALA events over the decades is the fact that stylistics is a very broad church, not only in the incredibly rich range of literatures that have appeared but also in terms of the different linguistic approaches adapted for stylistic analysis. This said, if you were to create a database of stylistic analyses of different literary texts, you would find an overwhelming preponderance of English literature from the British Isles (including Irish literature), with some north American texts, but a relative neglect even of other English literatures, let alone world literatures in other languages. This is a situation that is being remedied by our colleagues around the world right now, but it remains an unrepresentative body of work at the moment.

SW: Because of its focus on textuality, stylistics should be a core feature of literary scholarship. As it can usefully underpin much literary research, and is also a progressive discipline whose capabilities are continually being expanded and improved, I wouldn’t want to say that there are areas which stylistics can’t or shouldn’t enter into. That said, I think it is also important not to apply stylistics’ text-grounded focus too reductively in our conception of literary study. In some areas of what I would like to think of as ‘literary study’ it is important to be able to conceive of literature beyond or outside of the text. For example, I think literary study should involve the study of readers and reading, but not all the things which readers do with literature are necessarily text-focused or interpretative. Reading groups engage in ‘off-book’ discussion around a text, and individual readers use internet sites to list, rank, rate and share their reading history. These extra-textual and evaluative practices are areas which I believe currently stretch the boundaries of stylistic understanding because they are not text-grounded in the usual stylistic sense of the word. Yet I still see them as relevant for the study of literature. Similarly, an understanding of authorial biography or the wider contexts of literary production are obviously important in literary study, but cannot always be grounded in a text in a stylistic sense. An approach that claimed it was wholly able to address everything currently encompassed by ‘literary study’ would only do so at the expense of rigour and principles. As the proper way to study literature, stylistics does many things very well, but it still needs to exist in symbiotic dialogue with the areas of literary study that necessarily segue into other disciplines such as history, cultural studies and sociology.

PS: I think all of these areas can be better understood with some stylistic input. Joe Bray and Violeta Sotirova have shown how really sharp stylistic analysis can shed light on authorial choices. Similarly I have always thought there is a natural affinity with creative writing as a university practice: both of us are concerned with the effects of careful stylistic choices. In my view, the best creative writing course would be one co-taught by writers and stylisticians. I also think stylisticians should not shy away from deploying their analyses in order to advance their own evaluations – it’s better to be explicit about this, and recognise that stylisticians are not robots but readers of literature as well.

I agree that nothing should be off-limits, but there are of course boundaries to the discipline otherwise it would not be a discipline but a cult! I have had several researchers wanting to explore a possible integration between the approach to language offered by stylistics and the ideas about language offered by poststructuralist deconstruction. I think this is simply impossible, because both traditions are founded on radically opposed basic principles; both could offer critiques of the other, but that would be a different thing. I think in this area, you simply have to take a side and there is – for good theoretical reasons – no possibility of an accommodation. Moreover, I don’t see much value in making one. I’m aware that some of the finest stylisticians in the world (Derek Attridge and Geoff Hall, to take two leading examples) don’t agree with me, and in fact I would be delighted to be proven wrong on this.

SW: The organisation of this handbook reflects the general bias towards literary stylistics in the field as it stands – arguably because literary language often contains particularly interesting or playful linguistic features. But essentially all texts – spoken and written – are valid sites of stylistic analysis – and I think that literary stylistics has a lot to learn from the application of its tool-kit beyond the realm of literature. So I think, in the future, study of the ‘non-literary’ should play a greater role in stylistics. The mark of a stylistician should be their ability to turn their hand to analysing any text, however it is classified.

PS: The history of the discipline has seen the consensus swing from the search for a literary language or key to literariness, right across to the notion that the language of literature is in a seamless continuum with everyday examples of language use – and then all the way back again to argue for the special status of literary textuality, and back again to suggest that literature is composed of everyday language but deploys it and frames it in a special way. As someone who has spent time drawing on cognitivist linguistic principles, I’m inclined towards the view that language is language, but the particular situation conditions its use and effects. So literature is special, but the specialness is not exclusive. That means that a stylistician has to be of the world not apart from it. Fortunately, many of the best stylisticans of literature also have another history in different areas of applied linguistics, discourse analysis, text linguistics, educational linguistics, or as grammarians, creative writers, or as cinema, theatre or art critics. As a stylistician, you have licence to roam across any literature from any period of history and from any culture – I sometimes feel claustrophobic sympathy for literary critics cribbed in by their periodisation. The danger – they might retort – is that the stylistician can look like a jack-of-all-trades, but if you are genuinely a master of one (stylistics itself), then I have found that it is a relatively simple matter of hard work to catch up with the literary criticism in a particular area. I am also fortunate in having understanding literary colleagues who are happy to share their expertise so that I hope I avoid making simplistic or outdated assertions. Just as it is important to be in communication with literary scholars, it is also important to talk to those who work in media studies, language acquisition, sociology, economics and so on.

SW: The scope and reach of both these revolutions is far from over, and many exciting directions in stylistics are still emerging from within these general areas. I think one interesting methodological direction is towards the greater reliance on formal reader response data and the way it is being used to support and direct stylistic analyses. It is becoming more common to refer to data such as questionnaires, interviews, discussions and online postings in the framing of stylistic analyses. Through collaboration with researchers in other disciplines, there are also even greater connections being made between non-verbal data (such as response times and eye movements) and traditional stylistic concerns. Stylisticians are becoming more proficient in the collection and analysis of this kind of extra-textual data, which is a notable future direction in the field. Greater attention to aesthetics and phenomenological or experiential aspects of reading is another notable new direction that has evolved from the cognitive revolution.

PS: Yes, these are all the things you are interested in! But of course they are all areas of great potential right now. As I’ve said before, it strikes me increasingly that there is much common cause between stylistics and the way creative writing is (or could be) taught in universities. I have learnt a lot from practising professional writers who talk about their work in terms of detailed textural choices, and such people are almost without exception interested in the sorts of things stylisticians do. It is especially awkward and insightful to produce a stylistic analysis of a colleague’s own writing and discuss its effects.

My sense of the future is that stylistics will continue to move towards the centre of the institution of literary scholarship. There is some resistance from the middle of this institution, of course, but in fact the driver for change is not coming from there but from below and from above. The demand from below lies in the way that ‘English language’ has been promoted and taught in schools, and indirectly promoted by governments who see it as more easily testable than literary cultural knowledge. Students arrive at university, as it were, already primed and ready for a focus on literary texture. From above, there are more job opportunities for trained stylisticians than for periodised literary scholars. This is because the stylistician is usually highly adaptable and can teach both literature and language. When I got my first university job 25 years ago, there was barely any such thing as a lectureship in stylistics (I was employed as a sociolinguist!): nowadays an appointment in one of the many diverse areas of stylistic-related work is regarded as normal.

Undoubtedly there will be another revolution in the study of language after the cognitivist turn. Perhaps the increase in computational power and methods will accelerate corpus stylistics into a form unimaginable today. I hope I will still be adaptable enough and enthusiastic enough to embrace whatever comes along next, not simply for the sake of intellectual fashion but because there will be new opportunities to move towards better descriptions and understanding of literary works, creativity, readers and reading.