Chapter Overview

• • stylistics

• • why stylistics emerged

• • turns and trends in the story of stylistics

• • future directions

Introduction

In Part I of the book, we introduced key terms in the study of style in language, such as register, and key stylistic techniques, such as foregrounding, that create textual patterns encoding (ideological) meaning and creating (literary) effects. In Part II, we introduced stylistic frameworks and applied them to the analysis of meaning and effect in different text types. This part of the book offers a brief overview of the development of stylistics through the twentieth century. The chapter aims at extending your knowledge in the area by relating the concepts and frameworks introduced earlier to the relevant trends in stylistics, and positioning the stylistics frameworks along a timeline that tells the story of stylistics. The chapter also suggests a list of key publications to further your knowledge of the theory and practice of stylistics.

Beginning of the story

The story begins with the school of literary criticism and literary theory known as Russian formalism in the early years of the twentieth century. Russian formalists, such as Roman Jakobson, and Prague school structuralists, such as Jan Mukařovský, Boris Eichenbaum, and Viktor Shklovsky, believed that art defamiliarises reality, that is, it presents familiar concepts and objects from a strange, unfamiliar perspective. It challenges automatised perception of the world. Everyday language, as we agreed in Chapter 1, is referential and its expressive potential is somewhat consumed. It does not help much as a medium for defamiliarising reality. To achieve the effect of defamiliarisation, creative writers use unconventional language (see the poetry of e. e. cummings in Chapter 1) that has the effect of slowing down the reading and reorienting the reader's world-view. Shklovsky, in ‘Art as Technique’, contends that:

Because of the centrality of language to defamiliarisation, Russian formalists and Prague school structuralists focused primarily on the ‘formal’ features of literary texts.