Lectures and methodological recommendations the lecture course study

Lecture 1. Stylistics and Style: A Historical Perspective and Recent Trends

Aim: to improve students’ skills in getting general knowledge of Stylistics and Styles, its history

Plan:

1. Ancient Times

1. The Middle Ages
2. The New Age
3. The 20^th Century: Linguistic Schools and Conceptions before Ferdinand de Saussure
4. Recent Development: Stylistics in the United Kingdom

Recommendations:

1. Scrutinize the lecture and pay attention to the terms given in the lecture.
2. Pay attention to the reference literature.
3. Speculate on the implications which might arise upon the reading of the lecture.

Presentation

1In ancient Greece the use of language can be seen mainly as an effort to create speeches. Thus we may recognize a practical function of language in political and judicial speeches, and an aesthetic function in ceremonial ones. The art of creating speech was called Rhetoric (from Greek techne rhetorike) and was taught as one of attractive speeches. Another language activity was the creation of poetic works.

The process of artistic creation was called Poetics. Its aim was to study a piece of art, and, unlike rhetoric, it focused on the problems of expressing the ideas before the actual moment of utterance. The work of Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) entitled Poetics is considered to be a pioneer publication in this field. His distinction of epics, drama and lyrics within artistic works is still applicable.

The third field of language use was the art of creating a dialogue. The study of creating and guiding a dialogue, talk or discussion, as well as the study of methods of persuasion, was called Dialects. The “dialogue technique” as one of the most convenient and efficient form of exchanging experiences and presenting research results was introduced and supported by Socrates. This method is still known in pedagogy as the “dialogical” or “Socrates method”.

The further development of Stylistics was based on the three above mentioned sources from which Poetics went its own way and created the field of study known at present as Literary Criticism. Rhetoric and Dialectics developed into Stylistics.

The development of Stylistics in ancient Rome, that is about 300 years later, brought the distinction of two different styles in speech represented by Caesar and Cicero. Their main characteristics are summarized in the following table:

Caesar and the Analogists	Cicero and the Anomalists
Stressed regularity and system rules	Aimed at the creation and development of “Ornate Dicere” that is flowery language
Focused on facts and data	Used unnatural syntactic patterns, sought for innovative often artificial sentence structure
Their aim was to create simple, clear and straightforward speeches	Due to their approach, where the true message and communicated content were secondary to the form of presentation, Rhetoric was called “the mother of lies”
Other representatives were Seneca and Tacitus	Cicero built his theory of Rhetoric on the distinction between three styles: high, middle and low

2. Latin was exclusively used as the language of science, art and administration and no attempts were made to deal with problems of speech. This period shows no progress in the development of Stylistics. An anomalistic rhetoric of Cicero became a model way of public speaking, which means that aesthetically attractive speeches were popular. They enabled speakers to develop their individual styles. However, the influence of ancient India brought about a tendency to make speeches brief in the case of a sufficient amount of data and facts being available to a speaker. This tendency to economize the speech intentionally enhanced the distinction between the Form and Content.

The language of science, culture and administration was very different from the language of common people. However, it would be inappropriate to speak about styles at this stage. It was the same language (and the same style) but, of course, different phrases, clichés and stereotyped bookish Latin formulas were used in each sphere. The most apparent discrepancies occurred in terminology.

3. On the one hand there were the traditions of Cicero and Aristotle, on the other, new theories of style have developed: individualist, emotionalist, formalist, functionalist, etc.

In the era of Romanticism the notion and term “style” referred exclusively to the written form of language 9from Gr. Stylos=a carver, an instrument for writing0. Spoken language was the main subject of rhetoric.

The most impressive work from this period is the book L’Art (1674) written by Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux, which became the bible of French poets of the 17^th and 18^th century. This book includes explanations of prose, poetry and drama, and is considered as an unusual guidebook for poets and other artists. T the same time it is not limited to poetics, several definitions are of stylistic character or even more general. In general the book is based on the poetics of Aristotle and Horatio. The three different styles are mentioned, their distinction being based on the opposition of language and parole first mentioned by Cicero.

At the beginning of 19^th century a German linguist and philosopher, Wilhelm von Humboldt described functional styles in his book “Uber die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss…” and treated poetry and prose as opposites: poetry and prosediffer in the selection of expressive means, i.e. words and expressions, use of grammatical forms, syntactic structures, emotional tones, etc.

Some literary schools have also contributed towards the development of stylistics. The French school Explication de texte developed a method of text analysis and interpretation which is known as close reading. This method was based on a correlation of historical and linguistic information and on seeking connections between aesthetic responses and specific stimuli in the text. The method became quite popular and was used by many other schools and movements.

4. At the beginning of the 20^th century a group of German linguists, B.Croce, K.Vossler and L.Spitzer, represented the school of the new Idealists. Their approach is known as individualistic or psychoanalytical because its main aim was to search for individual peculiarities of language as elements of expressing a psychological state of mind. B. Crose regarded language as a creation and thus suggested viewing linguists as the sub-department of aesthetics. Karl Vossler was known for looking for clues to national cultures behind linguistic details and Leo Spitzer for tracing parallels between culture and expression. His working method became famous as the Spitzerian circle. However the German school of individualists and psychoanalysts belongs to the past and there no any followers anymore.

He origin of the new era of linguistic stylistics is represented by the linguistic emotionalistic conception of the French school of Charles Bally. He worked under the supervision of Ferdinand de Saussure in Geneva. Bally’s own concept of stylistics is classified as emotionally expressive because of his strong belief that each particular component of linguistic information combines a part of language and a part of a man who interprets or announces the information.

While at the beginning of the 20^th century the Romance countries were mainly influenced by Bally’s expressive stylistics and Germany by Groce’s individual stylistics, a new linguistic and literary movement was developed in Russia and became known as formalism. The Russian Formalists introduced a new, highly focused and solid method of literary and linguistic analysis.

The crucial question of the movement known as Structuralism is What is language and what is its organization like? The main ideas of structuralism are presented in its fundamental work “Cours de linguistique generale” written by F.de Saussure (1856-1913) and published posthumously by his student Ch.Bally in 1916.

5.British stylistics is influenced by M. Halliday (1960’s) and his structuralist approach to the linguistic analysis of literary texts. British tradition has always been the semiotics of text context relationships and structural analysis of text: locating literature into a broader social context and to other texts. British stylistics and linguistic criticism reached its most influential point at the end of the 70s.

Control questions:

1. What is the historical perspective?
2. What are the trends of Stylistics?
3. What is the impact of the historical development of Stylistics?

Literature:

1. Л.Л. Нелюбин. Лингвостилистика современного английского языка. М., 2007г

2.Арнольд И.В. Стилистика современного английского языка. М., 1990
3. Кухаренко В.П. Семинары по стилистике. М., 1985
4. Galperin I. R. Stylistics. М., 1981
5. Кухаренко В.П. Интерпретация текста. М., 1984.
6. Разинкина Н.М, Функциональная стилистика. М., 1989.
7. Телия В.Н. Теория метафоры. М., Наука, 1990.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-04