Stylistics

Essays and Exercises

Some General Guidelines

The following page  contains some very general suggestions for exercises and essays in stylistics. The best approach of course is simply to apply your knowledge of the frameworks of stylistics to the literary (or non-literary) texts you read, because that is where the greatest freshness and originality lies in terms of both analysis and interpretation. One of the advantages of writing an essay in stylistics is its relative imperviousness to charges of plagiarism – it is, after all, you who picks the text, chooses the stylistic model(s), adopts a particular approach and method, and offers an imaginative interpretation based on the analysis. It is very unlikely then that anyone out there will have done quite the same thing.
If there has to be an axiom for good practice, then it is this: to write stylistics, read stylistics! In other words, make your use of background reading obvious in your writing about literary style. While the concepts, terms and frameworks may be (by now) very familiar to you, this may not be true for your reader, so it is essential (as I argued across strand 1) that you ground the terms clearly and make retrievable your framework of reference. With regard to organising an essay in stylistics, I suggest that a good approach is to let the analysis be driven by the model of stylistics. The alternative approach, a line-by-line commentary on the text, often becomes confusing because it can read like an ‘everything but the kitchen sink’ commentary on local or narrower features of individual lines or sentences. Remember also to highlight what your analysis offers that a traditional literary critical account cannot. If you agree with a critic writing on same text/writer, say why (in stylistic terms). If not, then the critical reading forms a platform for your own alternative reading. It helps to pick texts for analysis that are of manageable proportion, but do not forget that corpus approaches offer a method for handling very large amounts of text. Although I cannot, for copyright reasons, reproduce texts for analysis below (nor can I  direct you to a website which houses such material), the Internet now offers instant access to almost all published literary texts ( see the further  hints offered in unit C12 about accessing texts online).

Topics

Here now are some general topics beginning with an interesting debate that probes the broader rationale for stylistics.

1. In a paper devoted to exposing the ‘futility’ of stylistics as an academic discipline, Ray Mackay argues along the following lines:

   Two basic myths underlie the position defined by Carter and held by many of his fellow stylisticians, including Simpson, Short and Leech, among others. The first of these may be called the “myth of objectivity” and manifests itself in the basic assumptions that a practical stylistic approach is more objective than any other approach and that it is possible to approach the stylistic analysis of a text in a “scientific” manner. The second myth may be called “the common-sense myth of language” and is responsible for the assumption that all speakers of a language such as English share a common core of knowledge that can be appealed to such that a procedure can be evolved that will demystify literary texts.

   Write an essay detailing the aims, theory and practice of modern stylistics. In the context of your essay, assess how accurate is Mackay’s description of stylistics. And is Mackay’s criticism justified?

   Note: This debate was played out across two journals and in various installments. Mackay’s initial broadside is: Mackay, R. (1996) ‘Mything the point: A critique of objective stylistics.’ Language and Communication, 16, (1), 81-93, to which a reply is offered by: Short, M., Freeman, D. van Peer, W. and Simpson, P. (1998) ‘Stylistics, criticism and mythrepresentation again: squaring the circle with Ray Mackay’s subjective solution to all problems.’ Language and Literature, 7, (1), 39-50.

2. A short poem much favoured in stylistic analysis is William Carlos Williams’s ‘This Is Just to Say’. With reference to the issues raised across strands 1 and 2, use this text as a basis for exploring the idea of ‘literary language’. What genre of discourse is reflected or echoed by this poem? And what inflection is given to this genre in Williams’s handling of language?

3. Another interesting poem for stylistic analysis is Adrian Mitchell’s ‘24 Orders with (Optional) Adjectives’. A stylistic model which is particularly appropriate here is the model of grammar developed across strand 4 of the book, alongside the discussion of collocation at the end of reading D.1. Mitchell sets up a repeated grammatical structure throughout the poem, beginning with the sequence ‘fetch my (happy) screwdriver’. A corpus investigation would offer numerous insights into Mitchell’s technique. Look for instance for collocates in or around the phrase ‘my screwdriver’.

4. Ted Hughes’s poem ‘Wind’ makes for a fascinating study of metaphor, especially in its display of novelty and elaboration in metaphor composition. Throughout the poem, striking patterns of metaphor are relayed through marked grammatical structures, as in a sequence like ‘[t]hrough the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes’.  With respect to this particular pattern, why might corpus evidence underscore the oddity of the phrase ‘balls of my eyes’?

5. Some reference was made in the print version of Stylistics to David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, which, in terms of its dexterity in composition, is a remarkable and at times astonishing novel. (And this is a case where a film version comes nowhere near capturing what in the novel is a formidable multi-layered embedded narrative pattern.) In her review of this novel, A.S Byatt writes:

   [David] Mitchell is indeed both doing what has been done a hundred thousand times before and doing it differently. He plays delicious games with other people’s voices, ideas and characters.

   If you have read this novel, a good essay topic would be to explore Byatt’s comments with reference to Mitchell’s use of interlocking patterns of characterisation, narrative voice and narrative genre.

6. Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time lends itself very well to an exploration of mind-style. Haddon himself describes his story as ‘a novel about difference, about being an outsider, about seeing the world in a surprising and revealing way’. A good topic for investigation is to think about what part Haddon’s striking narrative style plays in this conceptualization of his story.

   Note: check out Elena Semino’s article on Haddon’s story and follow therein the references to other similar stylistic work (Semino, E. (2013) ‘Language, mind and autism in Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time’ in Linguistics and Literary Studies. Fludernik, M. & Jacob, D. (eds.). De Gruyter).

7. Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road is another work of prose fiction that raises interesting issues to do with narrative style. The following remarks about this novel were posted as discussion points on an online Reading Group forum: Cormac McCarthy has an unmistakable prose style. What do you see as the most distinctive features of that style? How is the writing in The Road in some ways more like poetry than narrative prose? (http://www.readinggroupguides.com/guides3/road1.asp)

   You could use any suitable framework covered in Stylistics to explore the idea of the stylistic ‘distinctiveness’ of this novel. The discussion point also presupposes that McCarthy’s style is ‘in some ways more like poetry than prose’. In what ways, if any, could this observation be justified?