The Year's Work in Stylistics 2016
Lugea, J. (2017). The Year's Work in Stylistics 2016.
Language and Literature
,
26
(4), 340-360.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947017732199
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Language and Literature
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Download date:10. Aug. 2022
1
The Year’s Work in Stylistics 2016
‘We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps
between the stories.’ Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (1986/2016: 89)
1 Foundations for change
2016 was imbued with a sense of shifting sands in global politics, characterised by
very little security in the old or - perhaps more accurately - a sense that tradition can
take surprising new forms. In a way, browsing through the titles published in stylistics
in 2016 gives the same sense, albeit with altogether more positive developments. I
will try to explain what I mean, first looking at the solid foundations on which these
changes are wrought. With the recent publication of two discipline-defining handbooks
(Burke 2014; Stockwell and Whiteley 2014) and a comprehensive compendium
(Sotirova 2015) the contemporary field of stylistics has been very clearly set out. There
is general agreement in the remit of research in stylistics, as well as in the eclecticism
that it embodies. Sorlin’s cross-referencing review of these three volumes, published
in Language and Literature last year (Issue 3), makes this harmonious agreement
clear, leading her to conclude that stylistics has matured and is indeed in ‘good shape’.
Reflecting on an outdated suggestion that stylistics lacks an ‘autonomous domain of
its own’ (Widdowson 1975: 3) and that it is a method of analysis rather than a
discipline, Sorlin asserts that in the intervening decades stylisticians have succeeded
in creating a domain of their own, as evidenced by the publication of these
comprehensive volumes.
It is against that background of disciplinary health and energy that I undertake to
review subsequent publications in the field, which both contribute to and develop the
lay of the land. However, I would venture to surmise that as a result of the sense of
confidence in ‘our domain’, stylisticians are engaging more fully in the interdisciplinary
work that has always been at the core of this eclectic field. In the opening lines of her
monograph which straddles several sub-disciplines (see Section 5) Sorlin remarks on
the ability of stylistics to ‘hyphenate’ with other areas of language study and the
resulting the ‘aggregating capacity of the field’ (2016: vii). Although referring to
discourse analysis more generally, the editors of Exploring Discourse Strategies in
Social and Cognitive Interaction (Romano and Porto 2016), introduce their volume by
charting merging interests in discourse, society, and cognition which are coming to the
fore in language studies that are also cross-linguistic and multimodal. In my view,
these interdisciplinary threads are also evident in recent research in stylistics
summarised here. Furthermore, not only are stylisticians engaging more fully with
other disciplines, but also the long-standing foci of stylistics (e.g. text, cognition,
foregrounding, narrative) continue to be issues of interest to scholars in other fields
with which we have ongoing fruitful exchanges.
You will notice that the headings I use reflect some of these long-standing concerns
of stylistics which have continued into this year (literary stylistics, narrative, corpus
stylistics) as well as some more recent approaches that are presently flourishing
(worlds-based and empirical approaches). If a sub-discipline of stylistics does not have
a heading, it may indeed be subsumed under another heading. Please forgive the
categorisations which are not a pigeon-holing exercise, but serve for purposes of
readability, a unique challenge for a review article such as this. As always, in order to
avoid the problem of self-citation, articles published in this journal are not fully
referenced, but I do direct readers to the relevant issue. As I undertake this gargantuan
2
task, like the Reviews Editors before me, I am reminded of and also overwhelmed by
the scope and variety of research in stylistics. I hope the narrative that follows
impresses upon you, as it has done me, the health of our domain which provides us
with the necessary confidence to explore beyond it.
2 Historical Literary Stylistics
Literature has an enduring fascination for stylisticians, as literary language is where
language’s most creative users bend and flex linguistic norms for aesthetic and
meaningful effects. Many titles outlined under other headings in this review article
address literary language, although they do so in specific ways; for example, by
considering narrativity, fictional worlds or literary reading practices. The work in literary
stylistics summarised here has a historical dimension, focusing, for example, on the
stylistics of literature from a certain period, which can either tell us more about the
culture of that period, or inform our understanding of contemporary culture, language
and descriptive tools. Two key monographs published in 2016 explore a textual
phenomenon against the backdrop of the period, from Old English (Louviot 2016) to
the Romantic period (Bray 2016a). Both these researchers work towards meeting the
objectives of ‘historical stylistics’ as set out by Auer et al (2016: 1), who propose that
in order to uncover how a historical literary text might have been processed by
contemporaneous readers, we need to investigate its literary, cultural and linguistic
contexts of production and reception. Their edited volume Linguistics and Literary
History: In Honour of Sylvia Adamson (Auer et al 2016) celebrates the pioneering
research in this field by Sylvia Adamson, whose body of work has brought a diachronic
dimension to the study of language and literature. The volume features an impressive
catalogue of contributors: Short (2016) analyses a Yeats poem using traditional and
cognitive stylistic models, Bray (2016b discusses the French Revolution’s influence on
first-person representations of consciousness, and two contributions explore the
function of parentheticals in the work of Shakespeare (Chen and Duan 2016) and Jane
Austen (González-Díaz 2016). Just as stylistics is not limited to literary texts neither is
historical stylistics, as evidenced in Evans’ (2016) chapter which provides a stylistic
analysis of the early letters of Queen Elizabeth I, accounting for her emergent
rhetorical powers (for those interested in more heretical Elizabethan texts, see
Chaemsaithong’s analysis of prefaces to witchcraft pamphlets in Issue 4 of Language
and Literature 2016). While all of the contributions to Auer et al’s (2016) volume offer
comprehensive qualitative analyses of the texts and their historical contexts, they also
engage variously with the cognitive and corpus approaches popular in the field at
large, lending this volume a broad appeal.
As the ‘cognitive turn’ shows no sign of abating, stylisticians working in this area may
be inspired by Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature (Jaén and
Simon 2016). In this volume, the fields of literary criticism and the cognitive sciences
combine, generally bypassing the middle ground that cognitive stylistics occupies. The
result is that most chapters overlook the linguistic features of the texts in question, but
the volume has significant merit for stylisticians nonetheless. Simon’s (2016)
introduction contextualises the various cognitive approaches to Golden Age Spanish
literature, where literary culture was very much alive and publicly enacted. The
chapters that follow consider these rich literary texts and performative contexts using
familiar concepts, such as Theory of Mind (Schmitz 2016), embodiment (Mancing
2016; Reed 2016; Cruz Petersen 2016) and empathy (Reed 2016; Simerka 2016).
3
The editors describe the volume’s research as employing a ‘contemporaneous-
contemporary methodology’ (Jaén and Simon 2016, 5), which in its application of
cognitive theories from now and then, aims to uncover the relationship between the
mind and the arts of the period. In this way, their efforts tally with the aims of historical
stylistics as outlined by Auer et al (2016), albeit with a more cognitive and less textual
focus. The editors have compiled a volume that appeals to Early Modern scholars
beyond Spanish studies and has particular relevance to stylisticians interested in the
cognitive processes behind reading, performance, and spectatorship.
Although stylisticians are increasingly interested in the visual and verbal modes, visual
art in literary writing, or ekphrasis, is a classic concept in the study of rhetoric. Bray’s
(2016a) monograph is an account of the intersection of two art forms, fiction and
portraiture, during the Romantic period. Bray claims that while critics have remarked
on parallel developments undergone by these art forms during the Romantic period,
no previous study has investigated the relationship between the two. Beginning by
exploring the relationship between the portrait and the novel in general, he then goes
on to examine miniature portraits and the Gothic genre, visual and verbal caricature,
the idea of ‘likeness’ in Jane Austen’s work, and the Gothic portrait in Sir Walter Scott’s
fiction. The result is a sensitive and erudite appraisal of the interplay between the two
modes, with illuminating insights into subjectivity, the fictional characters and their
relationships. Ekphrasis is also the subject of Panagioutidou’s article in Language and
Literature (2016, Issue 2), where she carries out a cognitive stylistic analysis of the
experience of reading a more contemporary literary work: a WD Snodgrass poem
depicting a Matisse painting. In describing the correlation between form and effect,
Panagioutidou is explicit about her dual role as analyst and reader, a position we could
perhaps recognise and problematise more often in stylistics. As we increasingly
discuss the cognitive processes involved in literary reading, it stands to reason that
we should be more precise about the identity and experience of ‘the reader’ (and
indeed, the reader response research summarised in Section 6 addresses this issue
directly).
Louviot (2016) analyses the proliferation of Direct Speech in Beowulf and Other Old
English Narrative Poems, the characteristics of which pose interesting challenges to
our understandings of viewpoint, characterisation and irony which - as she points out
- are largely based on (post)modern literary practices and analyses. Her research
demonstrates that including older texts in our analyses can test and challenge
contemporary language categories and models. Several articles published in
Language and Literature in 2016 took a historical approach to poetry (Vande Wiele,
Issue 1 and Weiskott, Issue 4). Beowulf and Middle English verse were used by
Weiskott as case studies to explore asystematic metrical patterns. Vande Wiele’s
article tracks the diachronic loss of poetic effect, charting the move of several French
literary expressions from creation to cliché. Her hypothesis that poetic effects diminish
over time draws on Relevance Theory (Pilkington 2000; Sperber and Wilson 1995
[1989]) and she consults an impressive array of source material to inform her study,
including literary criticism, newspaper corpora, Google Ngram graphs and dictionary
entries, which no doubt contributed to this article being awarded the PALA prize.
3 Narrative
4
Literary narrative has provided stylisticians with infinite analytical possibilities and we
continue to investigate its structure (e.g. Klauk et al 2016), as well as the multiplicity
of perspectives and voices it evokes and the resultant readerly experience. However,
narrative is also a fundamental discourse type which transcends literary and non-
literary uses, as well as spoken, written and (audio)visual modes, and world cultures
and languages. Many disciplines operating beyond the boundaries of language and
literature have been influenced by a ‘narrative turn’ in the last few decades, and some
scholars (e.g. Beach et al 2016; Beach 2010) would go so far as to propose that
narrative thinking underscores most of our thought processes. Although the
pervasiveness of narrative thought is debatable, other research points to the potential
of narrative to impact on the real world. Naweed (2016), for instance, demonstrates
how packaging an unpopular message in a playful Sherlock Holmes style narrative
has brought about social acceptance and policy changes in Australia’s locomotive
industry.
One of several recent titles published in De Gruyter’s series ‘Narratologia:
Contributions to Narrative Theory’ pushes the boundaries of narratology as the series
editors promise; in Facing Loss and Death: Narrative and Eventfulness in Lyric Poetry
(Hühn 2016) the contributors dedicate individual chapters to one or two lyric poems at
a time, exploring a great range. The chapters are grouped into sections, sensitively
introduced and summarised by the editor: ‘Mourning the Death of a Beloved Person’,
‘Coping with Loss in Love’, ‘Confronting One’s Own Death’, ‘Lamenting the Death of
Poets’ and even ‘Thematizing the Loss of an Old Order’. Hühn proposes that the lyric
poem can be considered a narrative, a view echoed by Eva Zettelmann in her plenary
lecture at the International Association of Literary Semantics conference (Zettelmann
2017). As the lyric poems collected in this volume deal with the mental processing of
a traumatic event, the strategies the poets use ‘usually take a narrative form with the
intention of achieving some kind of positive event overcoming and superseding the
disruptive effects of the initial negative event (Hühn 2016: 321). Thus, the theme of
the poems analysed in this volume is a defining factor in forging what is traditionally
recognised as the basis of narrative structure, a sequence of events. Bringing us full
circle, an article by Klauk et al (2016) advances a theory of narrative closure that
describes how narratives comes to an end, and whether that ending is ascribed by
plot, narrator or reader.
If a narrative is most simply defined as a sequence of events, then it stands to reason
that texts that use visual means to order events are also ripe for narratological
analyses. Developments in our understanding of visual narratives are clearly
elucidated in The Visual Narrative Reader (Cohn 2016). With an introductory chapter
on ‘Interdisciplinary approaches to visual narrative’ from Cohn and contributions from
other leading scholars on the subject, this book is a vast and instructive account of
visual narrative, with three main parts, ‘Theoretical Approaches to Sequential Images’,
‘Psychology and Development of Visual Narrative’ and ‘Visual Narratives across
Cultures’. Every chapter is clearly organised, and those in the first part of the book are
most relevant to stylisticians in general, and multimodal researchers specifically; the
contributions cover topics such as visual style, coherence, metaphor and cognition.
Throughout the Reader, rare objects of study such as Aboriginal sand-drawings and
Mayan pottery provide data alongside more typical texts such as cartoons and manga
(for the latter genre, see also Cohn and Ely 2016). A detailed exploration of a particular
kind of comic book is provided in the monograph Reading Graphic Novels: Genre and