Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose

TL;DR: Short as discussed by the authors discusses the relationship between linguistics and literary studies and argues that a focus on linguistic mechanism paid no attention to literary considerations; and that stylistics involved the use of technical jargon, which was supposedly disagreeable to students.

Abstract: Mick Short. Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose. London: Longman, 1996. xvi + 399 pp. Stylistics has been a productive interdiscipline between linguistics and literary studies for around thirty years now. Controversial at first, attacked by the entrenched litcrit establishment, it became more theoretically sophisticated and diverse as it engaged with changes in the dominant models of linguistic theory: a brief liaison with transformational-generative grammar, a longer relationship with the functional grammar of M. A. K. Halliday and his associates, and a very fertile and developmental relationship with the increasingly powerful and insightful discipline of linguistic pragmatics. And as stylistics has responded to changes in linguistic theory, it has also been alert to the teachings of other intellectual movements: Russian Formalism, French Structuralism, Poststructuralism, etc. Original theorists such as Barthes, Bakhtin, Genette, and Foucault have become standard references in contemporary stylistics. An increasing range of topics and a growth of theoretical sophistication has been one aspect of the maturing of stylistics; another, the basic task of consolidating the practice of textual analysis. The original claim for of linguistic stylistics was that it provided a highly illuminating way of doing textual analysis. The original objections to this claim were (a) that a focus on linguistic mechanism paid no attention to literary considerations; and (b) that stylistics involved the use of technical jargon, which was supposedly disagreeable to students. Stylistics has effectively disposed of these criticisms. Most practitioners are happy for their investigations of texts to be framed by traditional literary categories such as point of view, metrical structure, and metaphor; and where the range of literary concepts has been extended by ideas from linguistics and related fields, e.g. foregrounding or the application of pragmatic analysis to dialogue, these extensions are now well established. As far as 'jargon' is concerned, it has long been realized that a little linguistic method goes a long way. Students do not need to learn an extensive technical terminology in order to say something meaningful about a poem or a prose extract. Certain very powerful linguistic-pragmatic concepts, once learned, provide critics and students with an analytic tool which gives rewarding results with simple application: I am thinking of concepts such as transitivity, modality, deixis, implicature, and register. And it is satisfying to record that such methodologies have now been comfortably absorbed into stylistic education for generations of students of literature. The book under review is an excellent instance of successful assimilation of linguistic method into literary studies via the stylistics interface. Its author, Mick Short, is an experienced teacher and writer in the pedagogics of stylistics; he and his colleague Geoffrey Leech at the University of Lancaster have produced a number of highly useful, very practical, books in literary stylistics, notably Leech's A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry (1969) and the coauthored Style in Fiction (1981). All three books are addressed to student readers; all are theoretically and methodologically eclectic (though there is a constant interest in foregrounding); all are rich in textual analysis and exemplification. The three books contribute strongly to the basic original aim of stylistics, to deploy linguistics in textual analysis, and they do so not as mechanical exercises, but always with a keen sense of literary relevance. Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose is an introduction, for newcomers to stylistics, to how "the language of literary texts acts as the basis for our understanding and responses when we read" (xi). It provides analytic tools which will allow the literature student to come to an understanding of literary processes in the activity of describing and discussing texts: describing texts is an exploration, not only of objective structures of language, but at the same time of our experiences in reading them. …