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Showing papers in "Style in 2003"


Journal Article
22 Dec 2003-Style
TL;DR: Contrastive Rhetoric: Contrastive rhetoric as discussed by the authors is the cross-cultural study of rhetorical traditions as they exist or have existed in different societies around the world, which aims to reach and cultivate what may be called a "creative understanding" with another rhetorical tradition and with its new aspects and new semantic depths.
Abstract: Comparative rhetoric, according to George Kennedy, is "the cross-cultural study of rhetorical traditions as they exist or have existed in different societies around the world" (1). A young but promising enterprise, comparative rhetoric aims to reach and cultivate what may be called a "creative understanding" with another rhetorical tradition and with "its new aspects and new semantic depths" (Bakhtin 7). Like any other comparative undertakings, however, comparative rhetoric faces at least two major challenges. One can be characterized as a perennial temptation to resort, in varying degrees of explicitness, to a "deficiency" model--where one particular culture (read as non-Western) is determined to be lacking a concept of rhetoric or, worse still, a rhetorical tradition. And related to this temptation is a desire, largely based on one dominant (read as Western) rhetorical system, to identify some "rhetorical universals" across discourse and across culture in spite of the multifaceted, contextually diverse nature of rhetoric. (1) The other challenge has to do with what Mary Garrett calls "a methodological paradox" ("Some" 54): to study another rhetorical tradition for purposes of comparison, one must start somewhere, most frequently with a set of principles or concepts external to the culture (but familiar to the researcher). On the other hand, there always remains the danger of imposing these principles or concepts, however inadvertently, on that other tradition and creating a forced fit or dissonance as a result of such imposition. In this essay, I will construct a brief history of this young discipline of "comparative rhetoric" and of its divergent responses to these two challenges. While developing this narrative, I will focus on representative works that have appeared over the past forty-some years. I will discuss the advances that have so far been made, and tease out, whenever appropriate, the logic of Orientalism that has also stifled many comparative undertakings. I will close this essay by exploring an "etic/emic" approach--one that will better meet these two challenges and that will yield what I call "reflective encounters" where different rhetorical traditions can truly converse with and learn from each other. (2) In 1966, Robert Kaplan, in "Cultural Thought Patterns in Intercultural Education," analyzed the organization of individual paragraphs in approximately six hundred compositions by ESL (English as Second Language) students and sought to identify rhetorical differences in their writings to contrast with rhetorical characteristics in English paragraph development. His essay thus pioneered an area of study that is now known as "contrastive rhetoric." Altogether he identified five types of paragraph development for five cultural groups, and each type reflects a corresponding culture's thought patterns. For example, paragraph development in Anglo-European expository writing follows a linear path, whereas speakers of Semitic languages construct paragraphs based on a complex series of parallel constructions. Oriental writing, on the other hand, can be characterized by an indirect approach as its paragraphs are "turning and turning in a widening gyre" (10). In Romance languages and in Russian, paragraphs allow for a degree of digressiveness--one that could be overbearing to a writer of English. Since the publication of this seminal essay, many studies have appeared that focus on discourse patterns across cultures--patterns that may intrude upon ESL students' effort to write in English. As expected, these studies have also criticized Kaplan's essay because it privileges the native English speakers (Matalene); because it lumps Chinese, Thai, and Korean speakers in one "Oriental" group (Hinds); and because it conflates rhetorical patterns with thought patterns (Severino). And Kaplan himself has since modified some of the claims made in the 1966 essay ("Cultural Thought Patterns Revisited," "Foreword"). …

49 citations


Journal Article
22 Dec 2003-Style
TL;DR: Genette coined the term "metalepsis" in the fifth chapter (on "Voice") of his Discours du recit as mentioned in this paper, and defined it as "any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe (or by diegetic characters into a metadiegetic universe, etc.), or the inverse (as in Cortazar) [...]" (Narrative Discourse 234-35; Figures IH 244).
Abstract: When Gerard Genette coined the term "metalepsis" in the fifth chapter (on "Voice") of his Discours du recit, he defined it as "any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe (or by diegetic characters into a metadiegetic universe, etc.), or the inverse (as in Cortazar) [...]" (Narrative Discourse 234-35; Figures IH 244). Genette had already given an example of metalepsis in the second chapter ("Duration") when he refers to a typically Balzacian narrative pause in La Vieille Fille in which narrator and reader together "enter" the Cormon townhouse in order to gain a view of the scene: But we know that the Balzacian novel, on the contrary, established a typically extratemporal descriptive canon [...], a canon where the narrator, forsaking the cause of the story [...], makes it his business, in his own name and solely for the information of his reader, to describe a scene that at this point in the story no one, strictly speaking, is looking at. For example, as the sentence in the Vieille Fille that opens the scene at the Cormon townhouse certainly indicates: "Now, however, it will be necessary to enter the household of that elderly spinster toward whom so many interests converge, and within whose walls the actors in this Scene are to meet this very evening." This "entering" is obviously the doing of the narrator and reader alone, who are going to wander over the house and the garden while the real "actors in this Scene" continue to attend to their business elsewhere, or rather wait to go back to their business until the narrative agrees to return to them and restore them to life.(100-01; 134-35) In this passage the narrator accompanied by the "reader" seemingly moves into the world of the fiction, pointing out to the narratee the setting of events to be described in the following pages. This technique is very similar to one common in Fielding's novels, first pointed out in his doctoral dissertation by Wilhelm Fuger, one of the doyens of German narratology: "But we will be more courteous to our reader than he [the coachman] was to Mrs Slipslop, and leaving the coach and its company to pursue their journey, we will carry our reader on after Parson Adams [...]" (Joseph Andrews 2.7). In these examples, two characteristic features are to be noted. First, the discourse level and story level in an authorial narrative (heterodiegetic narrative with zero focalization) seem to merge ontologically or existentially (the narrator and narratee seem to have entered the story world at least in imagination if not in real fact). Second, this curious imaginative transgression of narrative levels occurs in a pause of the story, as a narratorial insertion corresponding to no action on the plot level. The term "transgression," actually, is quite inadequate to the effect of these passages since they tend to enhance the realistic illusion of storyworld representation, aiding the narratee's (as well as the reader's) imaginative immersion into the story rather than foregrounding the metafictional and transgressive (nonrealistic) properties of such an imaginative stepping into the story world. In the footnote attached to the paragraph in chapter 2 of Narrative Discourse from which I began by quoting, Genette in fact compares the device to a metaphoric Gygean ring--a figure that Genette borrows from Theophile Gautier--that allows narrator and narratee to be present but invisible on the scene: Gautier will use this technique to the point of a flippancy that "bares" it, as the Formalists would say: "The Marquise inhabited a separate suite, which the Marquis did not enter unless he was announced. We will commit this impropriety that authors of all times have allowed themselves, and without saying a word to the buttons who would have forwarned the lodger, we will penetrate into the bedroom, sure of disturbing no one. …

47 citations


Journal Article
22 Jun 2003-Style
TL;DR: Second-person narration has been studied extensively in the literature as discussed by the authors, with a focus on how it relates to first-person and third-person narratives, as well as to homo-and heterodiegetic narratives.
Abstract: Exactly how does second-person narration relate to the more commonly employed and more frequently discussed modes of first- and third-person narrations? The very term second-person suggests a distinct and exclusive narrative category from both first- and third-person narrations. Yet even a cursory analysis of second-person narration exposes a very different relationship between it and the traditional modes of first- and third-person: we encounter an inevitable overlap of second-person with either first- or third-person because second-person is always also either first- or third-person. This overlap occurs because these modes are defined along different axes: whereas first- and third-person narrations (as well as Genette's categories of homo- and heterodiegesis) are defined along the axis of narrator, second-person narration is defined along the axis of narratee--more precisely, by the coincidence of narratee and protagonist. However, second-person narration deserves its own place in typologies of narration because of its particular rhetorical effects. This problem of categorization is actually a problem with reigning models of narration, which are based solely on the status of voice. (1) Second-person narration, which is defined not by who is speaking but by who is listening (the narratee), does not adequately fit into a model of narration that centers on voice or narrator. In the present essay, I use an analysis of second-person narration to expose the inadequacy of voice-based models of narration, and then I propose a new model that utilizes multiple variables of narrative transmission--namely, the relationships formed by the triad of narrator, protagonist, and narratee. Not only does this new model account for second-person narration, it also enhances our understanding of texts currently defined as first- and third-person (as well as homo- and heterodiegetic). Before I go into detail of the problem, I want to suggest why this problem exists. Despite Booth's historically-dated claims in The Rhetoric of Fiction that "efforts to use the second person have never been very successful [... and that] it is astonishing how little real difference even this choice makes" (150n3), (2) second-person narration produces very distinctive rhetorical effects. Even with its limitations, Bruce Morrissette's early analysis of second-person ("Narrative 'You' in Contemporary Literature") distinguishes the potential effects of second-person from those available to first- and third-person: Far from constituting a technical "trick" (though it may denigrate into exactly that, as certain recent examples would indicate), narrative "you," although of comparatively late development, appears as a mode of curiously varied psychological resonances, capable, in the proper hands, of producing effects in the fictional field that are unobtainable by other modes of persons. (2) Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, for instance, uses second-person narration to underscore thematic concerns. McInerney's story of a man jaded from his job, failed marriage, and life in general uses the you address to its protagonist to emphasize an existence dictated from the outside, an appropriate and effective narrative mode considering the novel's critique of the consumer culture of the 1980s. At one point, the narrator (in voice) and protagonist (in focalization) recognize the extent to which the protagonist (and, more generally, all who inhabit this society) is a product of his culture: "[Y]ou are the stuff of which consumer profiles--the American Dream: Educated Middle-Class Model--are made. When you're staying at the Plaza with your beautiful wife, doesn't it make sense to order the best Scotch that money can buy before you go to the theatre in your private limousine?" (151, italics original). For inhabitants of the "educated middle-class," the experience of the 80s is one imposed from the outside, an ambiguous presence of media/culture prescribing your desires and expectations; the novel exposes that in the 80s free choice was illusory. …

39 citations


Journal Article
01 Jan 2003-Style
TL;DR: The authors suggest that effective and memorable lectures can be produced by deviating from the supposed prototypical lecture format, and that it is the resultant foregrounding effect that helps to give the lecture its memorable qualities.
Abstract: In this article I suggest that foregrounding theory, arguably the cornerstone of stylistics, might be employed not only in the analysis of texts, but also as a methodology in teaching stylistic analysis. I propose that effective and memorable lectures can be produced by deviating from the supposed prototypical lecture format, and that it is the resultant foregrounding effect that helps to give the lecture its memorable qualities. In order to demonstrate how this might work I draw upon my own experiences of lecturing on a first year undergraduate course in stylistics (LING 131 Language and Style). I discuss the reasoning behind the teaching methods used on the course as a means of showing how foregrounding elements of a lecture might result in a more effective learning experience for students. I also explain how the effectiveness of LING 131 is due to its unique presentation of foregrounding via foregrounding.

25 citations


Journal Article
22 Sep 2003-Style
TL;DR: The authors define mind style as the linguistic style that reflects a cognitive state, which is a linguistic style characterized by distinctive and striking textual patterns, and define it as a representation of an individual mental self.
Abstract: 1. Choice, Style, and Mind Style Many different approaches to style share the view that the style of a text or utterance is the result of a set of choices made by the writer or speaker (Fowler, Linguistic Criticism 185-86; Wales 436). If style is indeed the result of choice, then in order to understand both how style arises and how it is interpreted, it is necessary to consider how such choices come about. One possible way of viewing choices made by an author is that they are a result of his or her cognitive state, which will in turn be the result of a vast array of interacting factors. These factors will include knowledge (conscious and unconscious) of linguistic and stylistic forms and constraints, of literary convention, cultural background, and intended audience. Some of this knowledge will be universal: that languages encode notions such as agent, patient, or action, that situations and entities can be described metaphorically, that texts can be structured by patterns of repetition. Some of it will be specific to a particular language or culture or to a particular period or literary form: that articles express gender, that alcoholic drinks are masculine, that sonnets have fourteen lines, that poetry-reading audiences dislike inversion. Other influences upon choice will be the personal world view of the author, which can be characterized as the narrative the author constructs to make sense of the world (Bockting 158), something which tends to be relatively stable, as well as other, more momentary considerations, such as a particular view or attitude the author intends to convey. The view that style results from a set of choices is linked to the notion of what is sometimes called mind style. This term was first used by Roger Fowler in Linguistics and the Novel to designate a "distinctive linguistic presentation of an individual mental self" (103). Later writers, such as Elena Semino and Kate Swindlehurst, define mind style as a projection of world view (143). However, neither Fowler's "mental self" nor Semino and Swindlehurst's "world view" seems entirely adequate as a description of what is reflected in mind style. "Mental self" in particular suggests something fairly permanent, but in fact a mind style may reflect the more transitory considerations and attitudes that an author wishes to convey, as mentioned above. And a world view is in general seen as a "pattern of beliefs and cultural assumptions" (Wales 410) and thus does not necessarily include the various types of knowledge (as opposed to belief and assumption) suggested above as influences on choice. The term cognitive state thus seems to me preferable, and I define mind style as the linguistic style that reflects a cognitive state. In particular, it is a linguistic style characterized by distinctive and striking textual patterns. Two further distinctions are important here. The first is between conscious and unconscious aspects of mind style, and of the cognitive state to which it provides clues. Early work on mind style and world view, such as the two books by Fowler already cited, tended perhaps to emphasize the unconscious aspect more: the "potential significances," says Fowler, of what we say are "only partly under our control" (Linguistics and the Novel 70). Style must therefore be expected to manifest elements that lead a careful reader to unconscious views as well as to conscious attempts to convey meaning. And even the notion of choice does not, as might at first seem to be the case, necessarily focus more on conscious mental structures: choices can also be affected by unconscious thoughts, views, influences, and information. More recent work (for example by Adrian Pilkington) that considers cognitive aspects of style tends to focus on the intentional, conscious elements of choice. In such views it is common to suggest that the author will portray a particular cognitive state that he or she can reasonably assume the reader will be able to reconstruct from evidence in the text. …

22 citations


Journal Article
22 Sep 2003-Style
TL;DR: Todorov's Devoirs et delices as mentioned in this paper is an intellectual autobiography, in which, both as subject and object of study, Todorov puts himself at the center of his preoccupations, a fact with which he is not totally comfortable.
Abstract: Tzvetan Todorov. Devoirs et delices: une vie de passeur. Entretiens avec Catherine Portevin. Paris: Seuil, 2002. 395 pp. This latest book by a scholar who has chosen the path of the lone researcher is unusual in several respects. Firstly, it is an intellectual autobiography, in which, both as subject and object of study, Todorov puts himself at the center of his preoccupations, a fact with which he is not totally comfortable (383). In it he explores the motivations behind his wide-ranging choice of objects of study and examines the impact of his experience of totalitarianism on the development of his thought. Thus personal accounts of his childhood and early youth in Bulgaria, or of the first few years after his arrival in France, for example, mingle with summaries of his main ideas at various times, with memories of encounters with books and, sometimes, the men or women who wrote them; they also provide a background to works which, when taken in isolation, can appear to the reader somewhat removed from everyday life. As the book progresses, events from the author's life and his personal recollections give way to exposition of his thought and his philosophical position. The main strength of this chronological presentation is that it emphasizes the sense of continuity underlying the diversity in Todorov's thought; but it may also give the impression that Todorov is retreating ever more into a world of ideas, even though he constantly relates his humanist position to contemporary issues, such as racism (197-200), the pitfalls of "moral correctness" (328), the problems of international justice (339) and the terrorist attacks on New York (371 -72), to name a few. But another striking feature of Devoirs et delices is its genre: composed in the form of a scries of well-structured interviews with a journalist, Catherine Portcvin, who respectfully and efficiently probes Todorov's remarkably diverse thought, the book exemplifies a different form of dialogic criticism from the one Todorov has engaged with since the moment of his "ethical turn" in the early 1980s. he reflects on the book's hybrid genre in his epilogue, stating that life and work present themselves as two expressions of the same intention, and that the book puts biography into dialogue with the exposition of theses, without reading the former as the cause or explanation for the latter (383). This statement not only illustrates the distance Todorov has put between himself and his early works, but also the continuity or equilibrium between thought and life, which for him must remain in harmony. This striving to maintain a connection between abstract thought and everyday life finds expression in his writing style too: developing ideas remains meaningless if they are not communicated clearly to the reader, in accordance with his "principles of democratic humanism" (360; my translation). And indeed not least among the book's merits is that it is highly readable. Understandably, readers already familiar with Todorov's other works will benefit the most, but this reflection on his intellectual life, on the source of some of his ideas, on his affinities (from Raymond Aron and Louis Dumont to Germaine Tillion, an anthropologist who was active in the Resistance before being deported to Ravensbruck and later denounced the existence of the gulags and combated violence in Algeria) and on his abhorrences (including Jean-Paul Sartre, all forms of monism, Manicheism, moralism, relativism, etc.) helps give shape to a thought which, despite its author's prominence, remains somewhat overlooked. Portevin reminds us in her preface that Todorov is one of the most translated authors in the world. There is a contrast, however, between the breadth of his readership and the paucity of commentary on his thought. Todorov occupies an ambivalent position, it is true, at the intersection of various disciplines and at the margins of dominant theoretical movements, such as poststructuralism and postmodernism. …

15 citations


Journal Article
22 Mar 2003-Style
TL;DR: This paper investigated how a sample of Brazilian undergraduates view literature and found that novices emphasize aspects of the literary experience that differ from those most valued by their tutors or in their textbooks.
Abstract: 1. Introduction It is a truth universally known that literary education aims at "promoting an environment in which students acquire tools which help them articulate emotional responses, make moral or ethical evaluations and discuss the aesthetic quality of any text under study," as pointed out by Rothery and Stenglin (225). From the perspective of educators of literature, students are encouraged to become involved in their reading experience, and, as a consequence, what they say about literature should encode, among other things, emotional, ethical, and moral responses to texts. The reality of first-year university students, however, is substantially different. In the particular case of Brazilian undergraduates, although formal teaching of literature played a part in their secondary school curriculum until the writing of this article, students may have developed frames which shape different views. (1) Thus, one of the many problems in literary study in Brazil--and perhaps elsewhere--is the assumption that students and teache rs share common attitudes. Taking an empirical perspective, this article investigates how a sample of Brazilian undergraduates view literature. Our central hypothesis is that novices emphasize aspects of the literary experience that differ from those most valued by their tutors or in their textbooks. Our aim is to find out precisely what aspects students emphasize in order to provide a profile of novices' attitudes to literature. Questions of literary value are deliberately avoided here because, for many obvious reasons, academics and students have different perceptions of textual quality. Studies on students' interpretations have been widely known, since, for instance, I. A. Richards published Practical Criticism and Louise Rosenblatt advanced the need to develop the fruition of individual literary experience. Thus far, however, there have been no studies to our knowledge that focus on what students actually say about what literature is or what it does. 2. The Study of Attitude in Text Assuming that research involving a large number of students might be feasible, in a previous study, we carried out a preliminary investigation of the written language used by a sample population of seventy-four first-year Brazilian undergraduates (see Appendix). Our objective was to chart the students' conceptions and general attitudes towards literature. This earlier study discovered two major conceptual patterns, namely, literature is X and literature does Y. By far the most frequent pattern was that of literature is X. Each instance was subsequently analyzed in terms of the Hallidayan transitivity model, a decision based on the central tenet of a systemic functional approach to language, i.e., that individuals express their reality from the various linguistic options their language system makes available. One of the problems of the previous study was the fact that the system of analysis collapsed instances such as "literature is important to our study of the English language" (Sample 41) and "literature was a particular organization of language" (Sample 160) as parts of the same analytical category. (2) From the perspective of a transitivity model [literature is X], both instances were classified as relational processes of the intensive type. However, if the writer's attitude is taken into consideration, then a subtler semantic categorization is needed. In Sample 41, the writer assesses the social significance of literature rather than expresses an aesthetic appreciation. In Sample 160, the student assesses literature as something concrete and evaluates the way it is constructed. In this study, we therefore decided to adopt a more specific analytical model for categorizing attitudinal patterns in students' texts. An obvious candidate was the framework developed by James Martin ("Beyond Exchange: APPRAISAL Systems in English") and Peter White (http://www.grammatics. …

13 citations


Journal Article
22 Jun 2003-Style
TL;DR: This paper used Beowulf as a tutor-text to explore the cognition-enabling role of narrative in the Old English poem, and found that stories provide crucial representational tools facilitating humans' efforts to organize multiple knowledge domains, each with its attendant sets of beliefs and procedures.
Abstract: This essay explores ways in which narrative functions as a "cognitive artifact," i.e., something used by humans for the purpose of supporting or enabling cognition. The essay grows out of our ongoing attempt to blend insights from several fields, including narrative theory, discourse analysis, cognitive science, anthropology, and literary studies. Synthesizing ideas developed in these disciplines, and using Beowulf as our tutor-text, we argue that stories provide crucial representational tools facilitating humans' efforts to organize multiple knowledge domains, each with its attendant sets of beliefs and procedures. (1) Relevant domains include not only those associated with social cognition, the mode of thinking that both enables and is shaped by social experience (see Fiske and Taylor), but also a variety of problem-solving activities extending beyond those connected with social life. More specifically, our essay uses Beowulf to show how stories afford resources for thinking in five broad problem domains, to be characterized below. We focus on the cognition-enabling role of narrative in the Old English poem Beowulf for several reasons. For one thing, the text bridges Anglo-Saxon traditions of oral narration with early medieval English literature, revealing how narrative--from before the start of literate culture--has served as a support for the formulation, systematization, and transmission of communal as well as personal experiences and values. (2) Beowulf, in other words, testifies to the longlastingness of narrative as a tool for thinking. Further, with its inclusion of multiple embedded narratives; its representation of stories as a means of making promises, saving face, and navigating other aspects of social existence; its shifts between homodiegetic (or "first-person") and heterodiegetic (or "third-person") accounts of one and the same set of events; and its use of nearly parallel life-stories for the Danish king Hrothgar and for Beowulf as king of the Geats, the poem itself represents and thus helps illuminate the cognitive functions of storytelling). (3) What is more, we believe that our approach provides a framework for the comparative study of narrative texts belonging to different periods, cultures, and genres, nonliterary as well as literary. Our thesis is that everywhere and always stories have functioned to make the world more understandable and manageable; but in addition to having core features that make it a cognitive and communicative universal, narrative has over time supported thought in culture-, genre-, and situation-specific ways. Consequently, although a continuum stretches between modes of narrative thinking found in an early medieval epic and those at work in a police interrogation or a ludic postmodern novel, it is important to establish the location of a given story artifact on the continuum at issue. In short, while sketching general and basic principles by virtue of which narrative organizes human understanding, our essay also suggests that those principles are implemented differently in different kinds of narrative texts. A task for future research is to explore how such variation might be correlated more exactly with historical, cultural, and generic factors bearing on the design and interpretation of stories. The first part of the essay reviews recent work on cognitive artifacts and situates the study of narrative in this research context. Then, anchoring our discussion in Beowulf, we survey tire (overlapping) problem-solving activities--"chunking" experience into workable segments, imputing causal relations between events, managing problems with the "typification" of phenomena, sequencing behaviors, and distributing intelligence across groups--for which the representational tools bound up with narrative can be argued to furnish crucial support. These activities encompass but are not limited to problems entailed by social cognition. Further, the five modes of problem-solving are pertinent to narrative viewed both as product and as process; they reveal ways in which particular narratives like Beowulf can be exploited as a tool for thinking about specific situations, as well as ways in which narrative in general constitutes a fundamental resource for building, recognizing, and using cognitive artifacts across highly variable circumstances. …

12 citations


Journal Article
22 Sep 2003-Style
TL;DR: In this paper, a corpus-based study of negation as a stylistic feature of Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22 is carried out by means of comparing it with the frequency and functions of negations in two other corpora, the sections of general fiction in the LOB corpus of British English and the Brown corpus of American English.
Abstract: Although the logical, grammatical, and semantic features of negation have been the object of discussion for decades, little attention has been paid to the pragmatic functions of negation in fictional discourse. Thus, few studies have been carried out on negation as a feature of variation, and virtually none on negation as a stylistic feature in fictional discourse. However, the enormous influence of quantitative studies in discourse analysis and pragmatics as fields of research has also had its effects on studies in stylistics. Thus, studies on variation in English text types standardly include references to fictional discourse (see, for example Biber), and some monographs have been devoted to the quantification of linguistic information in literary texts (see for example Thomas and Short). Unfortunately, quantitative studies on negation in English are not numerous, and among the few that can be pointed to, (1) Gunnel Tottie's Negation in English Speech and Writing clearly stands out; consequently, I will make reference to this study throughout the article. (2) The present article is a corpus-based study of negation as a stylistic feature of Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22. The analysis of negation in this novel is carried out by means of comparing it with the frequency and functions of negation in two other corpora, the sections of general fiction in the LOB corpus of British English and the Brown corpus of American English. (I will henceforward refer to the sections of general fiction in these two corpora as LOB-K and Brown-K respectively.) The motivation for this comparison is, as Michael Stubbs points out, "the need for the stylistic analysis of individual texts to be based on comparisons with other texts" (5). Thus, the analysis of negation in the novel Catch-22 will benefit from the comparison with the frequency and function of negation in electronic corpora of comparable texts, as this comparison will shed light on the idiosyncratic properties of negation in Catch-22 The objective of this article is thus to explore the nature of negation in Catch22 by observing similarities and differences with the frequency and functions of negation types in the two corpora of fiction, in particular with Brown, the corpus of American fiction. At the same time, the adequacy of the categories proposed by Tottie is discussed with regard to their relevance for the analysis of fictional discourse. In section 1 a brief review is offered of the concept of negation as a feature of language variation in speech, writing, and in fictional discourse; the concept of negation as a marked option in discourse is also introduced briefly. In section 2, the method, procedure, and data are described. In section 3, Tottie's categories of negation are presented and discussed with regard to their adequacy for the analysis of fictional discourse, and a subclassification of her category of denials is proposed. In section 4 the results of the analysis of the corpora are presented and discussed, followed by conclusions in section 5. Catch-22 is a political satire set on an imaginary island off the Italian coast in which the protagonists are members of an American bomber squadron during World War II. "Catch 22" refers to a catch in the military regulations that prevents the bombardiers from ever being grounded and sent home. Catch 22 is characterized by a circular logic that is a metaphor of the trap in which the bombardiers find themselves, since most of them will not be able to leave the island alive. The novel is characterized by black humor that becomes progressively bleaker as the novel progresses. The protagonist is Yossarian, a typical antihero, whose only concern is to get through the war without being killed. 1. Negation as a Feature of Variation in English The differences in frequency and distribution of negation and of negation types across different text types have been discussed by authors such as Tottie and Douglas Biber. …

10 citations


Journal Article
22 Mar 2003-Style
TL;DR: In this paper, an interactive, "all singing and dancing" web-based version of an introductory stylistics course under development at Lancaster University, UK, as well as an educational experiment in which it will be used.
Abstract: This article describes an interactive, “all singing and dancing” web-based version of an introductory stylistics course under development at Lancaster University, UK, as well as an educational experiment in which it will be used. The web-based course is an electronic version of an existing lecture-seminar course that is designed to be interactive and fun, and also contains an innovative self-assessment mechanism which enables first-year students to practise stylistic analysis before submitting their coursework assessment at the end of the course. The educational experiment involves using the two different teaching modes to deliver the course to parallel student groups, and comparing student reactions. Colleagues in other universities are invited to join in the experiment, using students in their own departments.

7 citations


Journal Article
22 Mar 2003-Style
TL;DR: The authors 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, and concludes that style is a matter of narratological or other metalinguistic features such as the handling of motifs, point of view, and genre conventions.
Abstract: 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). …

Journal Article
01 Jul 2003-Style
TL;DR: This article explored the relationship between stanzas and comic or romance narratives and also investigated how different stanza forms develop different types of narrative. But their focus was on the structure of the stanza and not the content of the narrative itself.
Abstract: This article deals with the effects of stanza form on the discourse of narrative poetry. It starts by exploring the antagonistic relationship between stanzas and epic. Milton, writing in an age of rhyme, eschews stanzas in Paradise Lost. Dante invents a stanza, terza rima, that is not self-contained, but allows forward extension. Tasso remains dissatisfied with his ottava rima Gerusalemme liberata and eventually writes an unrhyming epic, Il mondo creato. The article goes on to examine the more harmonious relationship between stanzas and comic or romance narrative and also investigates how different stanzas develop different types of narrative. Ottava rima lends itself to medley poems such as Orlando furioso and Don Juan, which delight in antithesis. Both rhyme-royal and the Spenserian stanza avoid the blatant contrasts inherent in ottava rima and are hence suited to less directly ironic types of narrative voice. A recent handful of books suggests that a renewed interest in formalism may be becoming a trend in literary studies. Formalism-or the aesthetic-in general is defended in Michael P. Clark's Revenge of the Aesthetic, George Levine's Aesthetics and Ideology, and Susan J. Wolfson's Formal Charges, while a prosodic-grammatical approach to poetry is advocated by Donald Wesling in The Scissors of Meter. Even Steven Knapp, in Literary Interest: The Limits of Anti-Formalism, who sets out to deconstruct formalism, finds it finally irreducible, because "formalism is built into our conception of ourselves as agents" (138). Of course some branches of formalist criticism and theory have continued unabated all through the years of post-colonialism and cultural studies, if not in the forefront of prestige and influence. The study of narrative structure, for example, has never decreased in popularity, in contrast to literary prosody, whose star has waned somewhat since the first half of the twentieth century. Narratologists have generally confined their investigations to prose narratives of various kinds, perhaps because literary academics tend to specialize as to genre-and poetry and narrative are usually categorized as separate genres. Consequently, even though many poems are narrative, the relationship between poetic form and narrative has never been a popular area of research. This paper attempts to redress that neglect, though it makes only a beginning. It deals with only certain aspects of narrative, including the minute particulars of narrator's tone and attitude and the grammatical and pragmatic units of utterance into which narrative discourse divides itself. The structure of verse is discussed in more detail, with the sharpest focus trained on the capacity of rhyme to concentrate and enclose spaces of discourse, a capacity that lends itself to certain kinds of narration-and, hence, genre-rather than others. Although considerable attention is paid to some texts that are composed in non-rhyming or continuous poetic forms, the main study concentrates on the longer rhymed narrative stanzas, most of which originated during the late Middle Ages and the early Modern period. The word stanza means "room." A poem divided into stanzas is a house of many rooms, as opposed to a hall or pavilion whose inner spaces are not formally separated by walls and doors. Writing a narrative in stanzas instead of prose or a continuous poetic form such as blank verse has one very obvious effect: to divide the narrative up. When the little boxes, or rooms, into which it is divided are standard forms, such as ottava rima or rhyme-royal, another effect is also evident: the divisions all have the same size and shape. This effect comprises an additional stylization of language over and above the basic markers of poetry, for example metre, rhyme, and showy or frequent use of devices such as motif, metaphor, or onomatopoeia. Making the formalist's assumption that style and meaning are inextricably connected, we shall investigate the effects that this additional stylization has on narrative discourse. …

Journal Article
22 Sep 2003-Style
TL;DR: In Toni Cade Bambara's short story, "The Lesson" (1972), the narrator, Sylvia, speaks and narrates in African American Vernacular English (AAVE), which is an appropriate dialect for Sylvia, who lives in a New York ghetto, is a working class black child about twelve years old, and has a strong feminist attitude as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: In Toni Cade Bambara's short story, "The Lesson" (1972), the narrator, Sylvia, speaks and narrates in African American Vernacular English (AAVE). This is an appropriate dialect for Sylvia, who lives in a New York ghetto, is a working-class black child about twelve years old, and has a strong feminist attitude. AAVE is also a dialect that Bambara herself would have learned growing up during the 1940s and 1950s in New York City's Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant communities. AAVE adds realism and humor to Sylvia's narrative. The dialect also reflects Bambara's pride in her ethnic heritage. Finally, AAVE fits the story's themes, one of which is that the black children in the story need to learn about the world outside their ghetto and another that wealth is unequally and unfairly distributed in American society. In "The Lesson," most of the have-not children in need of education speak AAVE. This dialect emphasizes the children's distance from mainstream white bourgeois culture and economic power. However, Bambara also celebrates AAVE as a vehicle for conveying black experience: Sylvia uses AAVE to express her self-confidence, assertiveness, and creativity as a young black woman. Gavin Jones points out that, by the late nineteenth century, ethnic dialects provided American writers with "a voice for social commentary and political satire" (5). Dialect literature questions "sociolinguistic wholeness" (51). Writers like Paul Laurence Dunbar valued dialect for its realism as well as "its power to structure a political response to larger social, cultural, and racial issues" (Jones 20). Such writing implies resistance to the dominant culture, destabilizes the privileged dialect/discourse, and portrays "subversive voices" that present "alternative versions of reality" (11, 13, 46). Bambara's fiction reflects the perspective of her black contemporaries. Sylvia Wallace Holton explains that, by the 1960s, many African Americans were alienated from aspects of lire in the United States. Especially traumatic for blacks were "White resistance to Civil Rights legislation, the loss of a number of important leaders," and the Vietnam War, which blacks considered racist. African Americans became interested in the movements that emphasized Black Power, Black Pride, and black nationalism (144-45). Holton analyzes the work of black writers like Amiri Baraka who experimented with AAVE in fiction. "Committed to writing for a black rather than a white audience, Baraka [...] refuses to be bound by the rules of 'white' literature and language. Instead, he expresses himself [...] in a normative but distinctive black speech" (180). Bambara carries on this tradition of cultural nationalism in her fiction and essays. Barbara Hill Hudson's research indicates that in literature by African-American women writers, "the Standard speakers display conformist behavior, while the Vernacular speakers use more creative, individualistic behavior." Colorful, striking language is part of this individualism (120, 161, 185, 192). Denise Troutman argues that black women often use an assertive, outspoken style of speech (219). In general, the African-American community values sophisticated verbal skills and associates such ability with intelligence (223, 234). Furthermore, Richard O. Lewis has pointed out that African-American writers use AAVE to emphasize their political and social commentary. AAVE can effectively convey the characters' "strong emotion. The language of these characters marks impropriety; it signals commission of some taboo act that transgresses society's limits. These challenge phrases indicate conflict between authority figures and subordinate figures" (27). Lewis's analysis applies to Sylvia: she is a rebellious youngster who dislikes having to learn summer lessons from Miss Moore, an older woman and the authority figure in the story. Sylvia's language, which includes cursing, expresses her self-confidence, nonconformity, anger, frustration, and inventiveness. …

Journal Article
01 Jul 2003-Style
TL;DR: Learning with Corpora as discussed by the authors is a pedagogy of meaning-focused, learner-centered, communicative language teaching with a focus on the role of the learner.
Abstract: Guy Aston, ed Learning with Corpora Houston: Athelstan, 2001 276 pp $2495 paper The relationship between academic research and actual classroom teaching, between what Graeme Kennedy has called the "scientifically interesting" and the "pedagogically useful" (qtd in Aston 1), can be problematic In Learning with Corpora, Guy Aston and his contributors attempt to clarify the often confusing distinction between research and teaching More specifically, they are concerned with the questions of how to apply research to classroom situations effectively, how to shift from a corpus-based descriptive linguistics towards a corpus-based pedagogy for language teaching and learning Aston is aware that a move of this kind is still somewhat undefined, but, as he says, one should clearly "not expect descriptive and pedagogic approaches to corpora to share the same methods and concerns, since language learners are not trained linguists, and are generally not concerned to analyze the language for its own sake, but only insofar as this helps them to use it" (2) It is precisely those different "methods and concerns" that constitute both the principal subject matter of Learning with Corpora and the newer, more original pedagogy that it offers Concurrently, and as a corollary to those differing preoccupations, the book seeks to position such a pedagogy within the prevailing paradigm of meaning-focused, learner-centered, communicative language teaching Given that the major approaches to language teaching typically focus on the learner and the learning process, while ignoring, or at least deemphasizing, linguistic facts per se, efforts to develop more empirical approaches, what Tim Johns refers to as "data-driven learning" (qtd in Aston 19), have traditionally been resisted by many teachers and education theorists As Aston points out, however, an interest in form, an interest in what is being learned in the classroom, is not automatically antithetical to the task-based negotiation of meaning characteristic of communicative teaching methodologies (23) Indeed a central argument of Learning with Corpora, is that corpora arc learning and teaching resources capable of both "improv[ing] competence, increasing learner's knowledge of the language and culture" and "engag[ing] capacity, helping learners develop their ability to use the language as a means of communication, both in reception and production" (5) They can be employed to assist learners in the discovery and checking of linguistic facts and for the generation of situated textual meanings (4) Corpora can, in short, be utilized to teach learners about the language as well as provide them opportunities to use the language-a focus on form and description can quite easily and naturally lead to a focus on meaning and communication Furthermore, and also in line with current pedagogical theory, corpora-based teaching affords numerous opportunities for encouraging and strengthening learner autonomy, "providing learners with learning instruments which they can exploit independently, and developing their ability to do so" (5) In the final chapter of Learning with Corpora, Silvia Bernardini offers an example of what she calls a "pedagogy of discovery" (228), one based on her own personal exploration of the British National Corpus Starting with an analysis of the adjective spoiled/spoilt, Bernardini describes how she first concentrated on the "pampered" sense of the term and the ideological connotations it appears to convey (interestingly, spoiled/ spoilt are used almost exclusively to describe children and women, but never men) She then changed directions slightly, going on to analyze the textual behavior and lexico-syntactic variation of the phrase spoiltled for choice At that point, two parallel paths of investigation emerged; one involving other phrases in which "spoil" appeared (to the victor the spoils, too many cooks spoil the broth), and from there to spoil and spoils as nouns; the other leading into an intratextual analysis of a fairly lengthy section of text from a tourism brochure in which the word choice and its inflections were quite frequent …

Journal Article
22 Sep 2003-Style
TL;DR: Goldberg: Variations as discussed by the authors is a novel by a British author of fiction with a focus on the condition of music and its relationship to the subject of the novel, and it is one of the most famous works in the literature.
Abstract: Introduction: Goldberg: Variations and The Tradition of Art "Aspir[ing] towards The Condition of Music" "All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music"--like many sweeping aesthetic statements this famous dictum of Walter Pater's (45) constitutes more an instance of a particular aesthetic program than a characterization of art in general. Yet, at least as far as verbal art and in particular the history of the novel after Modernism is concerned, a development can be observed that justifies Pater's statement to a certain extent: as opposed to previous periods there is in fact an increasing number of authors of fiction who purport to approach "the condition of music" in their writings in some way or other: Thomas Mann (with "Tonio Kroger" and Der Zauberberg), James Joyce (with the "Sirens" chapter of Ulysses), Virginia Woolf (with "The String Quartet" and The Waves), Aldous Huxley (with Point Counter Point), Anthony Burgess (with Napoleon Symphony), and Robert Pinget (with Passacaille), to name but a few. (1) This development is embedded in a more general tendency of avant-garde fiction written since the 1920s and notably affects the fiction published over the past few decades, which has been said to testify to an "intermedial turn": a marked trend to transgress the boundaries of fiction's own verbal and narrative medium by referring to other media in various ways (Lagerroth and Hedling 8, 13; cf. also Nunning 177-80). One of the most recent corroborations of this general trend and also one of the most remarkable additions to the field in which fiction attempts to meet music is the recent novel by Gabriel Josipovici, who has justly been hailed as belonging to the "leading British authors of fiction" of out rime (Fludernik, preface) and whose writings have repeatedly been inspired by the other arts. (2) In Goldberg: Variations (2002), Josipovici not only discusses music, as countless other authors before him have done, mostly on the basis of fictional biographies of musicians and composers (recently, e.g., Rose Tremain in Music and Silence [1999], Vikram Seth in An Equal Music [1999], and Salman Rushdie in The Ground Beneath Her Feet [1999]), but he also aspires to the condition of music in his fiction in a much subtler way and moves beyond a merely plot-related concentration on music. In the following I propose to explore to what extent he does so and above all what role music plays in his novel. Manifestations of Music in Goldberg: Variations Music appears mainly in three different forms in Goldberg: Variations: in the indirect form of references to a composer's biography, in direct discussions of musical aesthetics and musical forms, and in structural analogies between textual and musical form. (3) On reading the first chapter of the novel, entitled "Goldberg" (previously published as a short story (4)), the most immediate and obvious reference to music is an indirect, biographical one. This is at least true for anyone familiar with a famous episode in Johann Sebastian Bach's life, reported by his biographer Johann Nikolaus Forkel. According to Forkel, Bach's Goldberg Variationen (composed presumably in the second half of the 1730s) were commissioned by the Russian ambassador in Saxonia, Count Kaiserling, who suffered from insomnia and wanted his harpsichordist, Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, a pupil of Bach' s, to play some of the master's compositions to help him through his periods of sleeplessness. (5) In Josipovici's novel the whole scene is clearly recognizable, albeit transposed from the Saxonia of the 1730s to an English country house around 1800. The insomniac is Tobias Westfield, a member of the landed gentry, and there is also a harpsichord player, although he has already been dismissed for having failed in his attempt to send Westfield to sleep. To replace him the eponymous character Goldberg arrives. However, he does not represent music, but rather literature, as he is a well-known Jewish novelist like Josipovici himself. …

Journal Article
22 Mar 2003-Style
TL;DR: This article pointed out that the difference between a merely good and a truly great piece of fiction is not solely in the nature and structure of the story conveyed, or in the themes or characterization, or the success with which the writer puts him or herself within particular literary conventions (genres); it is mostly in the style and other components (such as themes and characterization) are complementary.
Abstract: My interest in Melville as stylist evolved while directing a fourth-year English course on Hawthorne and Melville in 1994-95. To my surprise and dismay, my students' first-term essays on Hawthorne demonstrated their competence in writing about those old critical standbys, theme and characterization, but they displayed no real sensitivity to linguistic matters and their relation to theme and characterization. For example, they were not able to say impressive-sounding things like this: "Hawthorne's use of theologically weighted antithetic doublets in 'Young Goodman Brown,' 'Alice Doane's Appeal,' and The Scarlet Letter ('good and evil,' 'angels or devils,' 'Heaven and Hell,' 'sinners and saints') enables him to duplicate the Calvinistic Manichean tendency to see the world in terms of moral polarities--to recreate the Puritans' zeitgeist." Sure, my students could write about and discuss symbols and imagery, and their other instructors had trained them in various hip critical approaches to literature, but these s enior English majors had no real understanding of style: grammar, punctuation, lexis, typography, phonology, linguistics, syntax, and the tropes and schemes of classical rhetoric. (1) Thus, they were not equipped to analyze, attack, or defend a writer in terms of his or her literary style (or styles), or to say why one writer is superior to another in those terms. In the course on Hawthorne and Melville, I wanted to impress upon my students that style as well as theme is important in any given literary work--that not only is what a writer says significant but so is how a writer says what it is he or she is communicating. After all (at the risk of sounding too magisterial), I feel that the difference between a merely good and a truly great piece of fiction is not solely in the nature and structure of the story conveyed, or in the themes or characterization, or in the success with which the writer puts him- or herself within particular literary conventions (genres); it is mostly in the style--or, at any rate, in the way style and other components (such as themes and characterization) are complementary. The greatness lies not at the "global" but at the sentence level. That is why we can celebrate the stylistic genius of Melville--Kemp insists quite correctly that Melville's "manipulation of style emphasizes his ideas" (53)--and hold in contempt the stylistic mediocrity of Stephen King (a student favorite). To allow our English majors to graduate without being able to differentiate between the linguistic qualities of a masterpiece such as Moby-Dick and a piece of hackwork would be akin to allowing Fine Arts students to graduate without the ability to recognize the artistic merits of Michelangelo's David as compared with the failings of a botched effort such as Bandinelli's Hercules and Cacus (a work ridiculed mercilessly by Cellini in his Autobiography). Both sculptors showed their humanistic training in choosing biblical or classical subjects, both employed classical nudity, both intended their statues to be emblematic, but an art critic has to know and be able to defend the judgment that the first statue is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, ever produced while the other is an embarrassment. The difference is not a matter of subject, theme, character, or genre; it is those more "microcosmic" somethings that one artist can do so much more successfully than the other (f acial expression, musculature, sculpted veins, anatomical proportion). In literature, those "microcosmic somethings" are manifested at the sentence level. With Hawthorne finished and the second term beginning, I had less than four months to train my mostly fourth-year English majors to appreciate matters of literary style--and the fiction of Herman Melville would be our case study (what luck!). Even before I took a graduate course on stylistics (well, it was Robert Adolph's course on the English Renaissance, which took a predominantly stylistic approach), I had an intuitive sense of Melville's linguistic brilliance and versatility. …

Journal Article
22 Jun 2003-Style
TL;DR: In this paper, a study of the criminal mind as portrayed in contemporary American crime fiction by Patricia Cornwell, Michael Connelly, and James Patterson is presented, and the authors of these works are compared in an attempt to provide answers to the question, "Are contemporary American criminals presented as having been born evil of are their actions justified, for instance by means of their childhood traumatic experiences?"
Abstract: This paper is part of a study to explore the stylistics of contemporary American crime fiction. In the paper I conduct an investigation into the criminal mind as portrayed in contemporary works by Patricia Cornwell, Michael Connelly and James Patterson, and I address the issue of how the criminals' actions are evaluated and justified. The extracts under analysis convey the criminals' viewpoints, and are analysed in terms of various connected stylistic models, including that of mind style, point of view, the type of narration employed, and the scale of interference that narration allows. The different criminals are contrasted in an attempt to provide answers to the question, "Are contemporary American criminals presented as having been born evil of are their actions justified, for instance by means of their childhood traumatic experiences?" I finally draw on the implications that the study has as to the notion of mind style in particular. ********** 1. Introduction Much has been written about crime fiction, from a range of approaches. While some writers view the genre as mete entertainment, crime fiction has been elsewhere treated seriously. Critics such as Ball, Winks, Roth, Messent, and others have described both the history of the genre and changing attitudes to it. According to Knight (1), less evaluative approaches have tried to establish why crime fiction is so compelling; psychoanalysts found the basis of the form's patterns in the psychic anxieties of writers and readers, while another type of analysis has seen the social attitudes and pressures of the modern environment as the basic drive in crime fiction. Overall, though the development of the genre has been traced by literary critics, psychoanalysts, and sociologists, little linguistic work has been undertaken in the area. This article is part of a study that aims to explore the stylistic forms involved in the production of contemporary American crime novels and therefore aims to contribute to both the discipline of literary criticism and that of cognitive stylistics. The study focuses on the portrayal of the criminal mind as figured in contemporary works by James Patterson, Michael Connelly, and Patricia Cornwell, and this paper directly addresses the issue of how this mind comes to be morally situated. These three have been chosen not only because they are best-selling authors, but also to illustrate three different criminal types. Extracts are taken from Patterson's Cat And Mouse, Connelly's The Poet, and Cornwell's Southern Cross. Whereas Patterson's portrayed criminal is indeed a serial killer, that of Connelly is a pedophile, and that of Cornwell a thief. In addition, whereas the first two excerpts allow access to the criminal's consciousness correspondingly in the form of third person internal and first person narration, the third excerpt is in the form of a third person external narration, and hence the selection would cover various forms of the criminal portrayal in the field. Though the excerpt from the Cornwell novel is not one from her best-known series (featuring Chief Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta) and is not an excerpt from the criminal's viewpoint, it does however implicitly deal with the matter at hand: the issue of how the criminal's actions are evaluated and justified. Altogether, the selection will allow me to contrast me different criminals in an attempt to provide answers to the question, "Are contemporary American crime fiction criminals presented as having been born evil or are their actions justified for instance by means of their childhood traumatic experiences?" The stylistic models I will be using to analyze the extracts, namely those of type of narration, point of view, and mind style, are introduced in section 3. I will apply the frameworks to the three extracts and discuss the extent to which such forms of stylistic analysis would explain the different justifications of the actions of the portrayed criminals. …

Journal Article
01 Dec 2003-Style
TL;DR: Halliday's Continuum of Prose Styles as mentioned in this paper describes the tools that M A K Halliday commonly uses to analyze prose styles, review a study that applies these tools to scientific texts, and describe some stylistic investigations that research based on Halliday's tools of analysis can open up.
Abstract: In this article, I describe the tools that M A K Halliday commonly uses to analyze prose styles, review a study that applies these tools to scientific texts, and describe some stylistic investigations that research based on Halliday's tools of analysis can open up Going through these processes should lead to useful insights about all of the following: the general study of style, the ways in which particular styles represent the world and perhaps correspond to modes of cognition, the nature of much scientific prose, the social and epistemological contexts that such prose depends on and fosters, and the history of endeavor in at least one specific field of science Halliday's Continuum of Prose Styles When Halliday analyzes prose styles, he usually works with a continuum (For related work, see Wells on nominal and verbal styles) At one pole of this continuum is a style that he calls attic or synoptic As represented in this style, "the world is a world of things, rather than of happenings; of product, rather than of process; of being rather than becoming" (Halliday, "Language" 146-47) With the synoptic style, people can freeze what they write about and "take it in as a whole" (Spoken 97) The synoptic style is usually associated with carefully planned, formal writing, but it can sometimes be found in speech A written text is a thing or a product Thus, as Halliday would say, when a text pervasively displays the synoptic style, it makes the world look like itself The chief characteristic of the synoptic style is lexical density, which is "the proportion of lexical [content] words to the total discourse" (Halliday, "Spoken" 60) I calculate lexical density as Halliday commonly does: in terms of the number of lexical words per unembedded clauses If you do not proceed in terms of unembedded clauses, you have to count some words twice, once for the overarching or matrix clause and once for the embedded clause Halliday takes one example of prose with a fairly high degree of lexical density from Scientific American: Private civil actions at law have a special significance in that they provide an outlet for efforts by independent citizens Such actions offer a means whereby the multiple initiatives of private citizens, individually or in groups, can be brought to bear on technology assessment, the internalization of costs and environmental protection They constitute a channel through which the diverse interests, outlooks and moods of the general public can be given expression The current popular concern over the environment has stimulated private civil actions of two main types (61) Halliday calculates the lexical density for this extract at 96 (lexical words) to 1 (unembedded clause) At the other end of Halliday's continuum is a style that he calls done or dynamic This style, which is often associated with spontaneous and unselfconscious speech but which can sometimes be found in writing, represents the world in terms of happenings, processes, and becomings Speech is an action or a process Thus, as Halliday would say, when speech pervasively manifests the dynamic style, it makes the world look like itself The chief characteristic of the dynamic style is grammatical or clausal intricacy Sentences in the dynamic style typically include many clauses, some hypotactically and some paratactically related to others In Halliday's terms, hypotaxis "is the relation between a dependent element and its dominant," and parataxis "is the relation between two like elements of equal status" (Introduction 218) Sentences in the dynamic style can include so many clauses that sometimes those who utter them, on hearing them replayed, refuse to acknowledge that they did say them or even could have said them Here is an example that Halliday gives of a sentence in the dynamic style; this one was recorded in the conversation of a dog-breeder: I had to wait, I had to wait till it was born and till it got to about eight or ten weeks of age, then I bought my first dachshund, a black-and-tan bitch puppy, as they told me I should have bought a bitch puppy to start off with, because if she wasn't a hundred percent good I could choose a top champion dog to mate her to, and then produce something that was good, which would be in my own kennel prefix …

Journal Article
22 Sep 2003-Style
TL;DR: Fisher as discussed by the authors argued that food was part of life that remained in face of loss, and that eating sensibly was a sign of life as measured by her desire, but they were not allconsuming.
Abstract: M. F. K. Fisher once said, "I do not consider myself a food writer" (qtd. in Lopate 545). Notwithstanding her view, she remains known for her copious body of writing on gastronomy and her English translation of Brillat-Savarin's famous 1825 treatise on eating, The Physiology of Taste, though she also wrote poetry, novels, a screenplay, essays, and stories, all on topics other than food. How do we reconcile Fisher's self-perception with her reputation? Phillip Lopate suggests that we consider food to be Fisher's defining metaphor. He writes, "Certainly food was her primary subject matter, and her achievement was to use this seemingly mundane concern as a metaphor for the analysis of human appetite, disappointment, and rapture" (545). According to Lopate, Fisher's knowledge of food and her interest in it served as the medium through which she expressed a wider scope of thought. In what follows I will suggest that Fisher's power to transform food into a metaphoric language came from what she knew about her own hunger and what she believed to be true of hunger in general: that it was its own kind of metaphor; that it was the expression of desires that no food could ever satisfy In an interview Fisher commented, "One has to live, you know. You can't just die from grief or anything. You don't die. You might as well eat well, have a good glass of wine, a good tomato" (qtd. in Lopate 545). This remark seems to imply that, for Fisher, food was part of life that remained in face of loss. Fisher herself was on intimate terms with loss, having survived the deaths of her second husband, Dwillyn Parish, and, shortly thereafter, her brother, David. About these losses she said, "Death left me crippled. Timmy's death preceded David's death by several months. Part of me didn't survive it" (qtd. in Lazar 530). These were life-defining losses, but they were not all-consuming. Fisher could not "die from grief or anything." She faced grief, and when she did, food lined up with all other facets of her continued existence. It was a concern, no more or less weighty than any other. At the same time, it was part of a greater impulse to lire that held steady in her, even when she was confronted with devastating loss. Decades after the deaths of her husband and brother, Fisher's vital impulse was evident in one of her lifelong practices and pleasures: room arrangement. Jeannette Ferrary describes how the eighty-year-old Fisher used to move furniture around: "In small ways she was always rearranging just about everything in the house [...]. Once her mobility started to become curtailed, she could no longer pick up everything and move on or plan an impromptu trip to Aix" (205). Moving furniture, not just physically but also mentally, was something Fisher wrote about in 1933: "I shift everything in a room, as some people strip the clothes from a desirable body, without moving more than the eyeballs," she stated (Stay 14). The comparison Fisher draws between moving furniture and undressing a body reveals what grief could not extinguish: her desire. Fisher might have felt her survival threatened by the loss of two people whom she dearly loved--"part of me didn't survive"--but she did not disparage the desire that remained. She survived because she desired; she desired, so she ate. Eating sensibly was a sign of life as measured by her desire. And because she respected both life and desire, she upheld that "you might as well eat well, have a good glass of wine, a good tomato." The desire manifest in Fisher's imaginary rearranging of rooms "without moving more than the eyeballs" brings to mind another mental activity, namely reading. Like Fisher's mental regrouping of furniture, reading is an activity of interpretation that consists of recognizing the connections between the elements of a text, of seeing their interrelationships. It is noteworthy that Fisher gave the final place she lived the same name as the final text she worked on: Last House. …

Journal Article
22 Jun 2003-Style
TL;DR: The first sense of style in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) dates back to the early sixteenth century as mentioned in this paper, when style was defined as a mode of expressing dates (e.g., old style) relative to calendar reform.
Abstract: When I began this study, I wondered what a linguist might have to say that would be appropriate and interesting to readers of a journal with a name like Style. In this context, it quickly became obvious to me that my own ordinary understanding of what was meant by style was deficient--deficient enough, anyway, that I decided to perform an act of linguistic research: I looked up style in the dictionary. And thereby I found my topic--or rather my topics, because there are several senses to which I was led, piecemeal and seriatim. Looking at the very first sense of style in the OED immediately reminded me of a story, which on investigation turned out to be a missing piece of the Conduit Metaphor, pointing to the symbolic nature of writing. Then I noticed that the etymology for style was ambivalent, and I investigated that, opening an evolutionary path from the prehistory of Indo-European to the present, once again discovering surprising correlations with writing and poetics, and a convergence with metaphor and with the story I'd just looked at. In this essay I propose to tell this story and take a stroll along this path, with my readers looking over my shoulder and, I hope, enjoying the scenery. At the end I will review some of what was observed and discovered on the journey, discuss the ways the observations and discoveries converge, and point to a moral of sorts, about how to equip ourselves on such journeys and what we should not be surprised to find standing just outside our ordinary field of vision. Introduction: How Many Senses of Style? Gloucester Know'st thou the way to Douer? Edgar Both style, and gato; Horseway, and foot-path. --King Lear, 4.1 (2) Let us begin by displaying the senses given by the OED for the noun style. There are twenty-eight of them, grouped into tire largo classes, of which the first two, I. Stylus, pin, stalk (11 entries) II. Writing; manner of writing (hence also of speaking) (7 entries), were already developed in Latin, and came along when the word style (or stile--we discuss below the etymological problems that these variants represent) was borrowed into English. The third sense, III. Manner, fashion in general (8 entries), is the most general, and therefore common, in modern English, the one most frequently associated with cultural and artistic matters generally. The final two minor senses have only one entry each, with specialized (though familiar enough) meanings: IV. A mode of expressing dates (e.g, old style) relative to calendar reform. V. Combined, as style manual, style sheet; style analysis--analysis of the characteristic style of an artist, writer, composer, etc. Of course, these groupings are not definitive, merely convenient; the 28 entries under style in the OED are numbered sequentially, instead of being subcategorized under I through V. But they can serve us as signposts, at least, on the path, and occasionally we may pause to look more closely at the fine print on some roadside attraction. The very first entry for style is the most familiar one to the scholar: An instrument made of metal, bone, etc., having one end sharp-pointed for incising letters on a wax tablet, and the other flat and broad for smoothing the tablet and erasing what is written: = stylus 1. Also applied to similar instruments in later use. This is the traditional etymological source of style in its literary sense: metonymy from a writing instrument, not unlike the later use of pen. But pens, however archaic they may seem in the twenty-first century, have not yet been as many millennia on the path as have styles. The metonymy of using the instrument of writing to refer to the thing written, and thence to the manner of writing of even the character of the writer, was already well established in Late Latin; but the use of wax tablets (and therefore stiles sensu stricto) for writing was left behind when style arrived in English. …

Journal Article
22 Jun 2003-Style
TL;DR: In this article, the authors trace connections between language and being and between Lawrence's philosophy of creative imagination and his own discursive and fictional styles, examining the technique of divination or prophecy in Apocalypse, revealing the dynamics that underlie his own expressive style.
Abstract: Heidegger, in "The Origin of the Work of Art," says that "[the] work's createdness [...] can obviously be grasped only in the process of creation" and that "we must [...] go into the activity of the artist in order to arrive at the origin of the work of art" (58). To fully appreciate a writer's style one needs to know something of his or her compositional process. Mikel Dufrenne claims that "'operational' theories of art, which have today supplanted 'psychologistic' ones [...] emphasize the result of the creative process and are wary of an analysis of feeling [...]." He concedes that "the study of the creative process does lead us quite readily to aesthetics," and therefore to style, but objects that, "by restricting aesthetic experience to that of the artist, the study of the creative process tends to emphasize certain features of this experience--exalting, for instance, a sort of will to power at the expense of the receptive meditation which aesthetic contemplation calls forth" (xlv-xlvi). Contrary to this operational objectivity, D. H. Lawrence examines the creator's subjectivity in relation to the prophetic or poetic object (or text) in Apocalypse, emphasizing receptive, as well as productive meditation in religious thinker or artist. Facing the duality of absent artist and present work, Dufrenne finds that, while "limiting ourselves to the experience of the spectator, we shall all the same need to evoke the creator. But the creator then in question is the one whom the work reveals, not the one who historically created the work" (xlvi). That is surely a sound principle: style metonymically replaces the man, so that the writer, in effect, becomes his works. But what Lawrence seeks, and what I want to pursue in this essay, is how "genius" operates, i.e., how the prophetic of poetic mind shapes texts, by translating "promptings of desire" (Lawrence, "Foreword" 485), into concrete language that has the power to sway, arouse, of convince a reader. Lawrence is concerned both with vision--patterns of creative thought or meditation leading to resolution or enlightenment--and expression--rhythmic phrasing and use of interacting images that invite the reader's participation. In examining the technique of divination or prophecy in Apocalypse, he obliquely grasps and reveals the dynamics that underlie his own expressive style. (1) For the writer, ontology and language are dual aspects of the creative process. In his critique of Revelation, Lawrence observes that "the kind of mind that worships divine power always tends to think in symbols" (Apocalypse 84). While the logocentric mind follows a linear causeway, the creative mind flows circuitously, but spontaneously, through images. Despite Dufrenne's caution, the work of art cannot be separated from "the nature of the creative process" (Heidegger 58) that produces it. Lawrence's view of this process is linked with his meditation, in "Morality and the Novel," on the artwork's genesis, visionary power, and mode of being. In the present essay, I relate ontology to stylistics, tracing connections between language and being and between Lawrence's philosophy of creative imagination and his own discursive and fictional styles. Drawing on the phenomenology of David Michael Levin and Merleau-Ponty, who dismantle the barriers between poetic and philosophical discourse, I pay particular attention to the way Lawrence's expressive language enacts the process he describes. Creative Dynamics: Style with Power Lawrence sees intuitive, precognitive thinking as a vortex of motion and emotion, spiralling out of the unconscious towards clarification and resolution: a thought was a completed state of feeling-awareness, a cumulative thing, a deepening thing, in which feeling deepened into feeling in consciousness till there was a sense of fullness. A completed thought was the plumbing of a depth, like a whirlpool, of emotional awareness, and at the depth of this whirlpool of emotion the resolve formed. …

Journal Article
01 Dec 2003-Style
TL;DR: In the first years of the 20th century, a pronounced and continually growing interest has been perceptible in Russia in the aesthetic appreciation of literary works as discussed by the authors. But the critical and historical essays inspired by this new interest remained scattered for quite some time, until the advent of a group of writers who formed a school that devoted its efforts to the systematic application of the new tendencies.
Abstract: [1. Emergence] Since the first years of the twentieth century, a pronounced and continually growing interest has been perceptible in Russia in the aesthetic appreciation of literary works. Jouranlists' criticism has given way to that of literary critics properly speaking. But the critical and historical essays inspired by this new interest remained scattered for quite some time--until the advent of a group of writers who formed a school that devoted its efforts to the systematic application of the new tendencies. (1) Russian poetry, in 1916, underwent a crisis. Symbolism was in its decline, and the younger generation turned away from it in search of other sources [of inspiration] than a wavering philosophy expressing itself in vague creations and diffuse utterances. New schools arose, full of bluster if the truth be told, breaking a path for themselves by noisy demonstrations, employed to epater le bourgeois. Yet beneath the exuberant exterior that was so sharply criticized in these young writers, behind the extravagances and occasionally the mere mystifications, there was a steady effort toward the discovery of masculine inspiration, and the creation of a "tangible" art opposed to the effeminate art of the Symbolists, and their cult of the imprecise. Among the creators of the Russian Futurist school (which has nothing more than the name in common with its homonyms in Western Europe) a slogan was current: "The word itself!" [la parole comme telle]; attention was turned to the means of expression, to the linguistic basis of poetry. Some members of the younger generation, poetry enthusiasts, came together to construct a new theory, which, at first, addressed practical aims alone: it was technique that interested them rather than doctrine. Mostly students of Badouin de Courtenay, they were eager to find new pathways in the domain of art as well as that of science. Thus from the alliance of criticism, science, and poetry was born the first fasicules of the Collected Articles on the Theory of Poetic Language, and shortly thereafter a group was formed, the first members of which were Viktor Shklovskii, Osip Brik, Lev Iakubinskii, Boris Kushner, and Evgenii Polivanov; this group organized itself, around 1918, into the Society for the Study of Poetic Language (or, conforming to the fashion for military, revolutionary abbreviations, OPOIAZ). (2) Some young historians of literature, dissatisfied with the current state of philology and preoccupied with finding in the Collected Articles the elements of a new conception of the literary work, rallied around the proclaimed movement. It was during the years 1919-1921 that OPOIAZ was liveliest. It was also then that the Moscow Linguistic Circle was founded, where young representatives of F. F. Fortunatov's school, chaired by Roman Jakobson, oriented themselves in the same direction. Three years of polemics followed. Lectures, and essays in slender periodicals posted on walls (for lack of paper, journals had disappeared) assaulted the citadels of the old academic learning, and the "formalists" little by little established themselves in its strongholds. The creation of a Division of Verbal Arts, thanks to Viktor Zhirmunskii, at the Institute for the History of the Arts in Leningrad, made possible the attendance of the young auditor who was not intimidated by the cold, or sometimes the lack of lighting. This was the period of "militant formalism." Victory, attained in 1920, led to some dissidence within the school: debates began over questions of method; there was talk of a crisis, of the need for a synthesis, of revision, etc. But the time was not propitious for these quarrels--abstract questions about method no longer attracted the workers. One set about one's task without lingering over disputes. And the polemic with the sociological (Marxist) school, occurring a little later, likewise collapsed of its own accord, for the same reasons, without having aroused any great passions. …

Journal Article
22 Mar 2003-Style
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors report an experiment in teaching at Huddersfield University (UK) in the context of the first year of a single honors English Language degree program, where analogical experimentation using exploratory methods with non-linguistic modes of representation may be able to help students in understanding and learning complex theoretical concepts.
Abstract: This article reports on an experiment in teaching at Huddersfield University (UK) in the context of the first year of a single honors English Language degree program. It took as its basic premise the idea that some kinds of learning of theory would be aided by the use of analogy explored by multi-modal means rather than the purely textual or discoursal. This article combines the insights of research into analogical thinking and into multimodal cognition to suggest that analogical experimentation using exploratory methods with non-linguistic modes of representation may be able to help students in understanding and learning complex theoretical concepts.

Journal Article
01 Apr 2003-Style
TL;DR: Culpeper as discussed by the authors has made a significant contribution to the study of literary character in drama by blending some basic characterological assumptions with what has come to be known as cognitive stylistics.
Abstract: Talking the Walk in Cognitive Stylistics Jonathan Culpeper, Language and Characterisation: People in Plays and Other Texts London: Longman/Pearson Education, 2001 328 pp No price Jonathan Culpeper has made a significant contribution to the study of literary character in drama by blending some basic characterological assumptions with what has come to be known as cognitive stylistics Although three of the six chapters have already seen the light of day in other venues, this work, taken as a whole, comprises a useful introduction to the ongoing relationships between language study and the holistic understanding of character conversations in dramatic texts My only quibble with Culpeper's approach is his general reluctance to discuss "non-verbal features-the features that constitute a performance," because they "are specified, to a degree, within the text" In this, he agrees with his former mentor, Mick Short ("Discourse," "From Dramatic Text") that "we should study the text rather than the performance" because "variability is a particular problem in studying performance" (41 ) Well, yes it is, in the same way that losing one's keys in the dark would thus require looking in the light by the street-lamp, whether that's where they were dropped or not, since searching in the dark remains "a particular problem" Culpeper does soften this claim briefly by noting the potential differences in "perceptual salience" between readers and playgoing spectators, but states that it is "not an area [he has] the space to develop within this book" although he will look to "eye-dialect" as suggested by "non-standard writing" (42) Hence, little mention is made of the nonverbal elements such as physical movement in drama, perhaps one of the key differences between a completely verbal medium like the novel and a mixed mode like the theater Of course, Culpeper would, I am sure, counter by arguing that his focus was deliberately aimed at the uses of written language in the theater and at the reader's or spectator's processes of understanding characters; if any reviewer wants a different sort of book, let him/her write his/her own damn book! Fair enough However, that does not change the fact that theatrical performances (and the texts they are based upon) include, among many things, the actors' movements in time and in three-dimensional space as such physical actions help stage-goers directly (and readers imaginatively) create their impressions of the characters they are viewing/reading Nonetheless, although Culpeper's book may not include all that I wish it had, what it does deliver is well worth the attention of the readers of Style Each chapter is usefully subdivided into at least three levels of analysis In chapter one, Culpeper begins by asking three large questions: "1) How does the reader's prior knowledge contribute to characterization? 2) How does the reader infer characteristics from the text? 3) What are the textual cues in characterization?" He goes on to say that the "dialogue of plays is the primary focus of this book," and then surveys earlier analyzes of literary character, mentioning among other works the special issues on character in Poetics Today (Theory of Character), and of course the one edited by this reviewer in Style (Literary Character), but correctly laments that in both issues, "only one article addressed the issue of character in drama" (1) Indeed, one could say that much postmodern theorizing has had difficulties in transforming purely textual analyzes into studies of the collaborative medium of the drama (Knapp 2), and it is within this lacunae that Culpeper makes a large contribution-albeit by focusing primarily on written verbal elements But, half a linguistic loaf is better than no theater loaf at all, so he and I will have to agree to disagree; I therefore turn now to his arguments In the initial chapter, Culpeper's major interest is in what he calls the process of character formation-"how we form impressions of characters in our minds-not just characters themselves or their personalities …

Journal Article
22 Sep 2003-Style
TL;DR: The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative as discussed by the authors provides a comprehensive overview of the history of narrative and its relationship to real-life events, as well as a discussion of the boundaries between narrative and non-fiction.
Abstract: H. Porter Abbott. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xiv + 203 pp. $55.00 cloth; $20.00 paper. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative wastes no time in laying out its goal. The first sentence of the preface reads: The purpose of this book is to help readers understand what narrative is, how it is constructed, how it acts upon us, how it is transmitted, how it changes when the medium or the cultural context changes, and how it is found not just in the arts but everywhere in the ordinary course of people's lives, many times a day. (xi) It is an ambitious goal for a book of just over two hundred pages, but the quick start suggests the possibility of achieving it. Author H. Porter Abbott reinforces that suggestion by noting his discussion will move from simplicity to complexity and will introduce only the most indispensable ideas and terms. When combined with the book's title, which carries the imprimatur of a distinguished university press, these announcements prefigure a crisp, perhaps even elegant overview of narrative and its cultural significance. This book does not satisfy that expectation. Having pledged parsimony in the terminology department, Abbott devotes page after page to the rectification of names. Chapter 2, "Defining Narrative," considers earlier nomenclatures (especially those of Roland Barthes and Seymour Chatman) without demonstrating how the corresponding ideas illuminate narrative structure or technique. Moreover, Abbott's own usage is inconsistent. For example, he distinguishes between story ("the event or sequence of events"), narrative discourse ("how the story is conveyed"), and narrative ("the representation of an event or a series of events"); but these distinctions blur when he writes, "We get into the habit of assuming that the narrative is identical with the story we read or see" (27). By his definition, we cannot actually read stories, which "are always mediated (constructed) by narrative discourse" (19). Other terms are mysterious from the outset. Narrativity, which Abbott associates with "the feeling that we are now reading a story," is a "a vexed issue" as well as "a matter of degree that docs not correlate to the number of devices, qualities or, for that matter, words that are employed in the narrative" (22). Does this feeling arise only in connection with written narratives? (And again, doesn't he mean narrative instead of story?) Instead of clarifying this concept and its possible uses, Abbott promises more mystification. "I bring up the subject [of narrativity] first to acknowledge an objection you may have had while reading how narrative is defined," he notes cryptically. "But I also bring it up to show that there are, and always will be, gray areas in a field like narrative that has so much to do with subjective human response. I'll be producing more gray areas for you in the next chapter." He keeps that promise. Chapter 3, "The Borders of Narrative," continues the nominalism and takes the discussion even further away from basic narrative concepts. The chapter features "paratexts" (book jackets, blurbs, program notes, and so on) and "the outer limits of narrative," including postmodern experimental fiction, hypertext narrative, and role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons, which Abbott eventually concedes are neither narrative nor story. Having inspected the margins of narrative, Abbott returns to its relationship to real life. "There are true stories," he reports. A limb falls from a tree and knocks a love-letter from a lover's hand. The letter blows across a field. Later it is discovered by a young woman who secretly adores this man whom (.vie) she now learns loves another. In despair, she throws herself into the millracc and drowns. These things happen every day. Life is jammed with events. (33) Until these events are narrated, however, they do not constitute narratives. …

Journal Article
01 Dec 2003-Style
TL;DR: Jakobson's theory of aphasia as mentioned in this paper is based on the metaphoric and metonymic processes that govern all verbal activity and indeed human behavior in general, and it can be seen as a form of paraphrasing.
Abstract: In his well-known essay "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances" Roman Jakobson presents a theory of language based on certain empirical observations and discoveries. Jakobson examines aphasia, a disorder of language use, which he characterizes as consisting of two more fundamental types of disorder. These coincide with what he considers to be the bases and underlying processes of languages as such. These are the metaphoric and metonymic processes that govern all verbal activity and indeed even human behavior in general. Every case of aphasia involves an impairment of the metaphoric or metonymic activities, and every case exhibits at least one of these traits. Normally these two processes occur continuously and interactively in language, though the individual speaker places greater emphasis on one or the other in accord with his or her preferences and predilections. Metaphor and metonymy are the defining poles of language: all linguistic expression lies somewhere between these extremes. Having identified these essential components of language Jakobson begins looking for further evidence to confirm his claim. He graduates his arguments to facilitate comprehension of the increasingly complex uses to which language is put. He considers, for instance, a normal but controlled use of language in a psychology experiment performed with children. When a group of children were presented with the noun "hut," their verbal responses invariably exhibited metaphoric or metonymic preferences. There was, in other words, no response other than in terms of metaphor or metonymy. This consequence bolsters the findings based on aphasia: the defining poles of language are metaphor and metonymy, and the individual preference (or predilection) determines the priority of one over the other. Jakobson's theory is brief and concise, and is very much in accord with the concept of a definition prevalent in the natural sciences. But he is not content with these two pieces of evidence; he goes on to consider an uncontrolled use of language. One can gauge the depth of Jakobson's conviction when one notices that in focusing on an uncontrolled use of language he selects an exceptionally creative form--literature. If the theory can handle literature, then unquestionably it must be acceptable. Jakobson considers the literary schools of Romanticism, Realism, and Symbolism and shows how they relate to the metaphoric and metonymic poles. Citing examples of literary products of these schools he shows that they exhibit the same pattern as the aphasia patients and the children in the psychology experiment. From literature it is an easy step to other artistic forms like the cinema; and again one finds the same evidence of metaphoric and metonymic processes at work. Jakobson then makes the larger claim that the same is true of other semiotic systems and suggests that collaborative, interdisciplinary research be undertaken to explore the implications of his discovery fully. (1) Such research could be carried out, he suggests, by experts from the disciplines of linguistics, psychology, psychopathology, poetics, and semiotics (93). The depth of Jakobson's conviction is perhaps best stated in a remark he made in 1980: "A linguistic study of aphasia closely linked to the study of language in general and to poetic language in particular not only contributes to the classification of aphasic disorders, but also to the comprehension of the structure of language and even to the improvement of the methods of poetics" (Jakobson and Pomorska 134). As an example of what might result from such research and as further evidence for the metaphoric and metonymic poles of language, Jakobson discusses the case of Gleb Ivanovic Uspenskij, a Russian novelist with a strong metonymic bent. Jakobson contends that Uspenskij's writings constitute a case in point of the predominance of metonymy in Realist literature. Uspenskij suffered in his later life from a mental illness that involved a verbal disorder. …