The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics

Michael Burke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317747192
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Sprachwissenschaft

The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics provides a comprehensive introduction and reference point to key areas in the field of stylistics. The four sections of the volume encompass a wide range of approaches from classical rhetoric to cognitive neuroscience and cover core issues that include:

• historical perspectives centring on rhetoric, formalism and functionalism

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• the elements of stylistic analysis that include the linguistic levels of foregrounding, relevance theory, conversation analysis, narrative, metaphor, speech acts, speech and thought presentation and point of view

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• current areas of 'hot topic' research, such as cognitive poetics, corpus stylistics and feminist/critical stylistics

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• emerging and future trends including the stylistics of multimodality, creative writing, hypertext fiction and neuroscience

Each of the thirty-two chapters provides: an introduction to the subject; an overview of the history of the topic; an analysis of the main current and critical issues; a section with recommendations for practice, and a discussion of possible future trajectory of the subject.

This handbook includes chapters written by some of the leading stylistics scholars in the world today, including Jean Boase-Beier, Joe Bray, Michael Burke, Beatrix Busse, Ronald Carter, Billy Clark, Barbara Dancygier, Catherine Emmott, Charles Forceville, Margaret Freeman, Christiana Gregoriou, Geoff Hall, Patrick Colm Hogan, Lesley Jeffries, Marina Lambrou, Michaela Mahlberg, Rocio Montoro, Nina Nørgaard, Dan Shen, Michael Toolan and Sonia Zyngier.

The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics is essential reading for researchers, postgraduates and undergraduate students working in this area.

Part I

Historical perspectives in stylistics

1

Rhetoric and poetics

The classical heritage of stylistics

Michael Burke

Introduction

Without classical rhetoric and poetics there would be no stylistics as we know it today. This opening chapter introduces you to the fields of rhetoric and poetics, the classical forebears of contemporary stylistics. In doing so, it encourages you to go beyond this chapter and seek them out, to become better acquainted with them and to make them your allies, because a solid understanding of such past discourse and communication structures and models will both augment and enrich your current level of stylistic knowledge.

Almost every overview of stylistics in the past thirty years or so begins in the twentieth century, with Roman Jakobson and Russian formalism. This is understandable and in many ways it is appropriate and correct. However, choosing to start approximately one hundred years ago risks missing out on something that is of central importance to stylistics today, and to its continuing development into the multimodal and neuroscientific world of the twenty-first century. What this chapter seeks to accomplish is to offer you an indispensable contextual background to the field of stylistics, which many of the stylistics students of recent years have unfortunately been deprived of.

Jakobson’s critical poetic work did not come into being spontaneously; it did not emerge out a void of nothingness. If you read his works you will see that he had a profound knowledge of both poetics and rhetoric, upon which he drew heavily. For example, in his famous ‘Closing statement: Linguistics and poetics’ essay he conducts a detailed stylistic analysis of Mark Anthony’s famous monologue from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (Jakobson 1960, pp. 375–376). In this analysis he observes levels of foregrounding that include paronomasia, polyptoton, apostrophe, exordium, modus obliquus and modus rectus, which are all key terms from the field of classical rhetoric.

In this chapter we will survey the main principles of both poetics and rhetoric. There will be a focus on history, theory and methodology. We will see how these ancient disciplines continue to affect and influence modern-day stylistics. The chapter will close with some pointers towards future directions in the field.

Historical overview

The great classical period of rhetoric and poetics began roughly in the fifth century BC with the beginnings of democracy in Athens. It continued right up to the fall of the Roman empire in the West, although the Roman tradition of rhetoric schools and their progymnasmata programme of learning (about which you will learn more later) continued in the Eastern Roman world right up until the fall of the Byzantine empire in the fifteenth century AD. After the fall of Constantinople, rhetoric continued to grow in status in the West and became part of the European trivium, which was the ‘academic core’, as it were, of schooling and learning, consisting of the three related disciplines of grammar, logic and rhetoric. This system lasted more or less in the same form through the Renaissance and Early Modern periods, only really disappearing in Europe in the early nineteenth century. However, rhetoric continued to be taught as a learning tool in the United States, and even today every US college worth its salt offers freshman courses in rhetoric, argumentation and composition.

It is perhaps fair to say that rhetoric, with its inherent link to style, is more important to modern day stylistics than poetics. It is for this reason that a relatively short overview of poetics will now be given, followed by a longer survey of classical rhetoric.

Classical poetics

The three main concepts that we will encounter in this section are: (i) mimesis (which is the opposite of diegesis); (ii) catharsis (which incorporates the emotions of pity and fear); and (iii) plot structure (including the key notions of hamartia, peripeteia and anagnorisis). These terms no doubt seem very strange to you in their ancient Greek form. However, they do all have straightforward English equivalents, which we will learn about in the course of this section and which you can use instead.

When the word ‘poetics’ is mentioned, there is really only one name that can follow: Aristotle. This fourth century BC homo universalis will be our starting point. From him, we will go on to consider the work of two Roman literary theorists, Horace and Longinus. Of course, there were many prolific Greek lyric poets and playwrights before Aristotle, including, Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, Sappho, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes. However, it is Aristotle who is thought to have written the first book-length work of critical literary theory in the ancient Hellenic world (of course, there may have been earlier ones, of which Aristotle makes no mention, which are now lost to us). The main theoretical points that Aristotle focuses on are, as listed above, mimesis (broadly translated as ‘imitation’, ‘copying’ or ‘representing’), catharsis (a kind of ‘cleansing’ or ‘clearing away’) and plot structure. We will look at all three of these, starting with mimesis.

Perhaps paradoxically, it was not Aristotle who first wrote on mimesis but his mentor and teacher Plato. If you recall, Plato was the man who, if he had had his way, would have banned all poets from his ideal state for being generally useless and also a threat to people’s perception of reality. As such, poets were surplus to requirements in his hypothetical utopian republic. Therefore, if we wish to know more about Aristotle’s mimesis, we will first have to briefly consider Plato’s views on this topic. Not surprisingly, Plato writes about poetry not in the context of praising its worth, but to critique it and demonstrate its dangers to society. He reflects on mimesis in different places in his magnum opus, The Republic. For example, in Book 3 (pp. 392–395) he deliberates on the kind of literature that the future citizens of his ideal state should study. He then distinguishes between two types of narration. The first is when an author speaks in the voice of his characters. This he defines as mimesis: the author is ‘imitating’ their voices. The second is when the author speaks in his own voice. This is ‘narration’, which Plato calls ‘diegesis’. You can see here the clear beginnings not just of narratology and narrative theory, but also the essential groundwork for speech and thought presentation, a key area in stylistics (see Chapters 11 and 13 in this volume for more on these topics).

Plato returns to the notion of mimesis in Book 10 of The Republic (2000, pp. 597–600) in a discussion of his famous ‘theory of forms’, where he relates mimesis to the negative idea of mere ‘copying’. This is somewhat different to the gloss mimesis is given in Book 3, where identification with character and character voice is central. In Book 10 poetic mimesis is presented as a superficial and essentially worthless practice, distracting people from seeing the true forms. As such it is a danger to the state, something that should be rooted out and banished.

Let us now turn to Aristotle and his views on mimesis. What makes Aristotle’s discussion different is that, unlike Plato, for him poetics is the object of study itself and not a side argument in a larger philosophical theory. In the Poetics, believed to be the first work of literary criticism in the Western tradition, Aristotle tackles the thorny issues of the nature of poetry and how its parts can be classified, categorised and understood. In this sense, Aristotle’s approach is very much a formalist one. However, the Poetics is not a prescriptive handbook. In fact, its concerns are aesthetic and psychological, because it seeks to understand how poetic discourse works on an audience, something with which current studies into ‘stylistics and real readers’ are also concerned (see Chapter 27 in this volume for more on this). Like rhetoric, Aristotle sees poetry as an art, in the sense of a skill/craft (technê), and this becomes clear in the course of his work. This differs to Plato, who mainly saw poets as slaves to the Muses – individuals who sat around waiting to be touched by the creative hand of inspiration. Where Aristotle thought that poets create things by means of their intellect and applied reason, Plato believed that they copy things with the help of their irrational mood swings and general ignorance.

Another significant difference is that where Plato saw poetry and drama as morally perilous and therefore a threat to society; Aristotle saw them as useful and practical and therefore helpful to society. Plato thought that emotions were best kept deep inside a person, but Aristotle wanted them expressed and out in the open, believing that this would be of benefit for both the individual concerned and for the community in general. Although Plato does give us a clear definition of mimesis in the Republic, Aristotle does not do so in his Poetics, so we can only assume that he is also referring to the imitative or representative power of both verbal and visual art forms.

Aristotle was also interested in why it is that human beings instinctively appear to delight and take great pleasure in artistic imitations. In this sense Aristotle takes mimesis to a new level, turning it into a kind of natural, basic instinct that exists alongside other social, cultural and individual phenomena. We do not only like to observe pleasurable things in art; we also like to observe things that are confrontational, such as acts of murder and human degradation, which we would not wish to encounter in real life.

The main bulk of the surviving chapters of the Poetics focus on the poetics of drama and on tragedy in particular. There was apparently a second book in the Poetics on the subject of comedy, but this is lost. There is also very little written in the Poetics about the third genre, ‘epic’. This leaves the Poetics as essentially a discourse on tragedy. Aristotle defines tragedy as

… a representation of action that is serious, complete and of some magnitude; in language that is pleasurably embellished, the different forms of embellishments occurring in separate parts; presented in the form of action, not narration, by means of pity and fear bringing about the catharsis of such emotions.

[1449b]

‘Catharsis’ is a major concept in Aristotle’s Poetics, even though nowhere in the book is it a given a solid definition. As a result, and in many ways similar to mimesis, views differ on its translation and on its semantic scope. The most general description involves the notion of a ‘clearing away’ or ‘cleansing’ of both body and mind. This is how catharsis is said to work.

Imagine that instead of hanging out in the pub with your friends you decide to go to the theatre. There you watch a tragedy. It could be something from ancient times, such as Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, something more recent like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, or something relatively modern like Kesey’s One flew over the cuckoo’s nest or Miller’s Death of a salesman. On stage you see the protagonist/hero suffering, not as a result of deliberate, immoral deeds but because of fate. As a result you start to empathise with him/her and to pity his/her situation. That pity then transforms into fear for yourself and your loved ones as you subconsciously trigger a kind of ‘I hope that kind of thing never happens to us’ scenario in your head. At any stage in this process you can be moved to tears both by what you have witnessed and by the fear and anxiety you have experienced. This experiencing of intense emotion at what might be called a benign artistic distance, rather than in real life, is what ‘cleanses’ your mind, body and perhaps even your soul, allowing you to function better in your everyday life for the benefit of yourself, your loved ones and your fellow citizens.

Let us now look at the third of Aristotle’s poetic theories, plot structur...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of tables and figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Stylistics From classical rhetoric to cognitive neuroscience
• Part I Historical perspectives in stylistics
• 1 Rhetoric and poetics The classical heritage of stylistics
• 2 Formalist stylistics
• 3 Functionalist stylistics
• 4 Reader response criticism and stylistics
• Part II Core issues in stylistics
• 5 The linguistic levels of foregrounding in stylistics
• 6(New) historical stylistics
• 7 Stylistics, speech acts and im/politeness theory
• 8 Stylistics, conversation analysis and the cooperative principle
• 9 Stylistics and relevance theory
• 10 Stylistics, point of view and modality
• 11 Stylistics and narratology
• 12 Metaphor and stylistics
• 13 Speech and thought presentation in stylistics
• Part III Contemporary topics in stylistics
• 14 Pedagogical stylistics
• 15 Stylistics, drama and performance
• 16 Schema theory in stylistics
• 17 Stylistics and text world theory
• 18 Stylistics and blending
• 19 Cognitive poetics
• 20 Quantitative methodological approaches to stylistics
• 21 Feminist stylistics
• 22 Literary pragmatics and stylistics
• 23 Corpus stylistics
• 24 Stylistics and translation
• 25 Critical stylistics
• Part IV Emerging and future trends in stylistics
• 26 Creative writing and stylistics
• 27 Stylistics and real readers
• 28 Stylistics and film
• 29 Multimodality and stylistics
• 30 Stylistics and comics
• 31 Stylistics and hypertext fiction
• 32 Stylistics, emotion and neuroscience
• Index