WHAT IS STYLISTICS?

DEFINITION:

Stylistics is a branch of applied linguistics concerned with the study of style in texts, especially (but not
exclusively) in literary works. Also called literary linguistics. A person who specializes in stylistic analysis
is called a stylistician.

According to Katie Wales in A Dictionary of Stylistics, 2nd ed. (Pearson, 2001), "The goal of most stylistics
is not simply to describe the formal features of texts for their own sake, but in order to show their
functional significance for the interpretation of the text; or in order to relate literary effects to linguistic
'causes' where these are felt to be relevant."

There are various overlapping subdisciplines of stylistics, including literary stylistics, interpretive
stylistics, evaluative stylistics, corpus stylistics, discourse stylistics, feminist stylistics, computational
stylistics, and cognitive stylistics.

Stylistics and Stylisticians

"[A]t 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 forbear,
rhetoric. Its very purpose is its application to textual data, and its strength lies in its potential for such
application. . . .

"A stylistician can arguably be viewed as 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 and rhetorician and has a love of literature and other
creative texts."
(Michael Burke, The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics. Routledge, 2014)

Computer-Based Stylistics
"Stylistics, traditionally known as the study of literary texts using formal linguistic tools, can also be done
via sophisticated computer-based applications. Some stylisticians quantitatively analyse large amounts
of data and texts, not possible otherwise, and thus can provide answers to questions such as what is
Dickens' writing style in his novels or how can one state, solely on the basis of textual evidence, that
Milton or Shakespeare's works are historically arranged?"
(Saumya Sharma, “Language Wise.” The Times of India, July 8, 2013)

Objects of Study in Stylistics

"The preferred object of study in stylistics is literature, whether that be institutionally sanctioned
"Literature' as high art or more popular 'noncanonical' forms of writing. The traditional connection
between stylistics and literature brings with it two important caveats, though. The first is that creativity
and innovation in language use should not be seen as the exclusive preserve of literary writing. Many
forms of discourse (advertising, journalism, popular music—even casual conversation) often display a
high degree of stylistic dexterity, such that it would be wrong to view dexterity in language use as
exclusive to canonical literature. The second caveat is that the techniques of stylistic analysis are as
much about deriving insights about linguistic structure and function as they are about understanding
literary texts."
(Paul Simpson, Stylistics: A Resource Book for Students. Routledge, 2004)

Rhetoric, Close Reading, and Stylistics

"Stylistics is, in a sense, the modern version of the ancient discipline known as 'rhetoric,' which taught its
students how to structure an argument, how to make effective use of figures of speech, and generally
how to pattern and vary a speech or a piece of writing so as to produce the maximum impact. . . .

"Stylistic analysis attempts to provide a commentary which is objective and scientific, based on concrete
quantifiable data, and applied in a systematic way. . . . The specific differences between conventional
close reading and stylistics include the following:

Close reading emphasizes differences between literary language and that of the general speech
community . . .. Stylistics, by contrast, emphasizes connections between literary language and everyday
language. . . .
Stylistics uses specialized technical terms and concepts which derive from the science of linguistics,
terms like 'transitivity,' 'under-lexicalisation,' 'collocation,' and 'cohesion' . . ..
Stylistics makes greater claims to scientific objectivity than does close reading, stressing that its methods
and procedures can be learned and applied by all. Hence, its aim is partly the 'demystification' of both
literature and criticism."
(Peter Barry, Beginning Theory, 2nd ed. Manchester University Press, 2002)

Aims of Stylistic Analysis

"Stylistic analysis, unlike more traditional forms of practical criticism, is not interested primarily in
coming up with new and startling interpretations of the texts it examines. Rather, its main aim is to
explicate how our understanding of a text is achieved, by examining in detail the linguistic organization
of the text and how a reader needs to interact with that linguistic organization to make sense of it.
Often, such a detailed examination of a text does reveal new aspects of interpretation or help us to see
more clearly how a text achieves what it does. But the main purpose of stylistics is to show how
interpretation is achieved, and hence provide support for a particular view of the work under discussion.
. . . [T]he 'news' comes from knowing explicitly something that you had only understood intuitively, and
from understanding in detail how the author has constructed the text so that it works on us in the way
that it does."
(Mick Short, "Understanding Conversational Undercurrents in The Ebony Tower by John Fowles."
Twentieth-Century Fiction: From Text to Context, edited by Peter Verdonk and Jean Jacques Weber.
Routledge, 1995)

Cognitive Stylistics
"Cognitive stylistics combines the kind of explicit, rigorous and detailed linguistic analysis of literary texts
that is typical of the stylistics tradition with a systematic and theoretically informed consideration of the
cognitive structures and processes that underlie the production and reception of language. . . .

"What is new about cognitive stylistics is the way in which linguistic analysis is systematically based on
theories that relate linguistic choices to cognitive structures and processes. This provides more
systematic and explicit accounts of the relationship between texts on the one hand and responses and
interpretations on the other."
(Elena Semino and Jonathan Culpeper, Foreword to Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text
Analysis. John Benjamins, 2002)