This volume presents the state of the art in terms of stylistic research and application, including EFL and ESL language classroom situations. Some of the most prominent scholars from a variety of backgrounds in the field of pedagogical stylistics show how theory, empirical studies and new technology, including corpus analysis, can be integrated into the classroom. This volume is suitable for all those interested in keeping abreast of the most recent developments in literature and language education.

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Literature and Stylistics for Language Learners

Writing up qualitative research requires researchers to consider many issues, including the representation of participants, academic standards for scholarship and researcher subjectivity or agency. In this article I refer to Žižek's notion of the ideal love relationship to examine some of the messy processes involved in constructing the written texts of such research. Principally, I describe the loss of authorial voice that occurred in my doctoral thesis following my appropriation of Žižek's post-Lacanian psychoanalytic approach as the methodological framework. In an attempt to untangle the tensions that plagued my use of Žižek's work and convey a sense of their disruptive implications, I adopt a writing style that is intermittently disordered, a voice that is inconsistently empowered and a reflexive engagement that is critically self-conscious. I argue that the negotiation of an academic writing style is an under-acknowledged site of ethical, political and personal struggle that, as such, represents an i...

An uncertain balance: Negotiating theory, politics and love in academic writing

From theory to praxis: Style, dualism, and the composition classroom

Introduction: mania as rhetoric Part I. Defiant Voice: 1. 'Howl, you great ones': enthusiastic subjectivity as class rhetoric 2. 'A huge loud voice': leveling and the gendered body politic 3. Strange acts and prophetic pranks: apocalypse as process in Abiezer Coppe Part II. Patrician Diagnosis: 4. Return to madness: mania as plebeian vapors in Swift Part III. Beautiful Liminality: 5. Scribe-evangelist: popular writing and enthusiasm in Smart's Jubilate Agno 6. Double jeopardy: the provenance and reception of Jubilate Agno 7. Smart's bawdy politic: misogyny and the second Age of Horn in Jubilate Agno 8. Smart's poetics of place: myth versus utopia in Jubilate Agno Epilogue: beyond pathology.

Mania and Literary Style: The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart

In a recent review, Stubbs (2004) raises important questions regarding the current state and practice of stylistics. Indeed, he believes that the problems he finds are ‘endemic to stylistics in general’ (2004: 128). More specifically, Stubbs is concerned that the definition of stylistics offered by Peter Verdonk is far too timid because it essentially reduces stylistics to a supportive and thus secondary role. For Verdonk (2002), the main (perhaps only) rationale for stylistics is its ability to provide greater linguistic precision to existing literary descriptions of individual texts or authors. That is to say, a stylistic analysis substantiates the various kinds of literary effects any given text may generate (Verdonk, 2002: xiii). When that substantiation is complete, the stylistic analysis has fulfilled its purpose.

From Syntax to Schema: Teaching Flannery O’Connor in the Persian Gulf

In the most basic way, writers are defined not by the stories they tell, or their politics, or their gender, or their race, but by the words they use. Writing begins with language, and it is in that initial choosing, as one sifts through the wayward lushness of our wonderful mongrel English, that choice of vocabulary and grammar and tone, the selection on the palette, that determines who's sitting at that desk. --Donald E. Westlake "Tell me, do you remember the first sentence of all?" "Indeed I do," Anna said. "'So lam with them, in London."' "With a comma after the 'them'?... The comma is good; that's style .... I should like to have seen it, I must say." --Elizabeth Bowen Difficult to define, you know it when you see it. Style identifies the writer. It frames sensibility. It compels the reader's interest, or it doesn't. It jars him or her to sudden recognition, or it doesn't. And the writer's style makes reading either a pleasure or a disagreeable task. Style also, according to several recent studies, is the essential element of language that shapes subjectivity and subcultures. Studies by Clement Hawes and Garrett Stewart analyze the styles of Christopher Smart and Virginia Woolf, and each, drawing on varied methods and sources, argues that the self-conscious stylization of language helps to express identity and group affiliations. This paper investigates the methods and claims of these studies of literary style and asks what these scholars' methods and findings suggest about the teaching of style in the writing classroom. Writing about style seems to encourage aphorisms. Compte de Buffon famously declared that "Style is the man," and Arthur Schopenhauer that "Style is the physiognomy of the mind." Fredric Jameson writes that "The end of the bourgeois ego.., means the end of style." And in The Importance of being Earnest, Oscar Wilde has Gwendolen say, not specifically about style in language but not excluding it either, that "In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity is the vital thing," suggesting that style performs a range of communicative tasks, including expressions of class affiliation and taste. Most importantly, the ironic qualities of the sentence show that style communicates with a nuance that is read only by an insider, and in this sense, that style shapes how one identifies oneself and to what communities one claims belonging. The degree to which one understands style as essential to subjectivity and subcultures depends in part on how one arranges the several pairs of oppositions that traditionally frame the study of style and on how one applies these oppositions to theories of the subject. Is style added to thought, or is style organic to thought? Is style a matter of following models? Or does style only become visible when a writer deviates from models? Does style consist strictly of linguistic features--of word choice, grammar, and syntax, of sound textures, phonemes, and lexemes? Or is style a matter of narratological or other metalinguistic features, such as the handling of motifs, point of view, and genre conventions? (1) Among the earliest language theorists, the sophists understood style as the studied choice of rhetorical figures, figures which were classified first by Greek and later by Roman rhetoricians. Aristotle divided rhetorical occasions into the categories of epideictic, forensic, and judicial, a division that Cicero mirrored with his enduring hierarchy of high, middle, and plain style, and both prescribed that the rhetorical subject and occasion, not the speaker's personal characteristics, should determine the choice of rhetorical figures (Lanham, Handlist 78-80, 174-78). Richard Puttenham extended the tripartite division of style into English with his 1589 The Arte of English Poesy, in which he argues that epic and tragedy require the elevated style, the concerns of "mean men, their life and business" the middle style, and satire and pastoral the plain (Lemer 814). …

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/style.37.1.86

Donald E. Westlake

Papers

Vagrant Sympathies: From Stylistic Analysis to a Pedagogy of Style