Stylistics

Texts as discourse

In Chapter 2 we considered the origins of stylistics in Russian formalism, and the progress made in the analysis of literary texts in response to the developments of descriptive linguistics in the first half of the twentieth century. Many of the insights of the theory of foregrounding, and its various realisations in the analysis of form, are still relevant to stylistic analysis and have been refined and added to as linguistics has increasingly considered context and function as part of its scope. This chapter will introduce some of the main ways in which the consideration of function in language study has affected the way in which stylistics approaches the study of literary and other texts, and will begin by tracing the debates and controversies that accompanied some of these developments.

Stylistics has, on occasion, been the target of attacks from literary critics for what has been seen as an excessive concern with the linguistic form of (literary) texts at the expense of social, historical and other contextual factors that also play a role in a text's meaning. (Similarly, stylisticians have found themselves accused of failing to take adequate account of the important relationship between writer and reader which is mediated by the text. Recent advances in cognitive stylistics have addressed this criticism directly; see Chapters 5 and 6.) While no stylistician would accept that an analysis can incorporate too much linguistic detail, there is perhaps some truth to the point that stylistics has sometimes neglected contextual factors involved in meaning-making.