Revisiting stylistics

The journey of stylistics since the turn of the previous century has not been without criticism or controversy. In its early days, stylistics was particularly interested in literary texts. The application of linguistic methods to the study of literature invited fierce criticism from prominent literary critics. The dispute was sparked off by a review by Helen Vendler of Roger Fowler's book Essays on Style and Language (1966). Vendler described stylisticians as linguistics who are ‘simply under-educated in the reading of poetry’ and who lack the ‘sense and value’ necessary to appreciate literature (Vendler 1966: 460). Vendler's review came out with an editorial postscript by the prominent literary critic F. W. Bateson. Thereafter, Bateson and Fowler exchanged accusations and refutations, which were subsequently gathered and published in Fowler's The Languages of Literature (1971). The debate has been ‘immortalised in stylistic folklore as the “Fowler– Bateson controversy”’ (Simpson [2004] 2014: 148).

In response to Vendler, Fowler affirmed that linguistics is not a machine that puts out interpretive analyses of literary texts. He argued that literature is quintessentially language and as such it is open to formal linguistic analysis. Bateson replied that the proposed ‘academic alliance between post-Saussure linguistics and post-I. A. Richards criticism’ is not possible because the grammarian ‘will divide and subdivide the verbal material’ and the literary critic ‘will synthesise and amalgamate it’ (Bateson 1966, cited in Simpson [2004] 2014: 151). For Bateson, grammar and literary criticism are mutually exclusive as the former is analytic and the latter is synthetic. Fowler rejected the grounds on which linguistics was disqualified and described Bateson's argument as misleading and as emanating from ignorance about the nature and potential of linguistics. Bateson insisted that linguistics is not useful to the appreciation of literary texts and Fowler lined up arguments in defence of the relevance of linguistics to the study of literature. The Fowler–Bateson debate is reprinted in Simpson's Stylistics: A Resource Book for Students ([2004] 2014: 148–57).

More than a decade later, the American critic Stanley Fish levelled another attack on stylistics. It was triggered by Halliday's (1971) stylistic analysis of William Golding's novel The Inheritors. Halliday carried out an analysis of transitivity choices in the narrative and described the way these patterns encode the mind-styles of the characters.