De la langue au style (review)

In his contribution to this volume, Éric Bordas deplores the current state of stylistic literary analysis at CAPES and agrégation level, which, he claims, merely offers a diluted study of rhetoric assessed in a single commentaire composé. He argues instead for a stylistics which begins with linguistics before moving towards style, and taking that methodology as its title, Jean-Michel Gouvard's volume provides several stimulating examples of how literary analysis might be informed by a linguistic approach encompassing syntax, grammar, semantics, phonology or semiotics. In his introduction, Gouvard emphasizes the remarkable resurgence of interest, among French and francophone scholars, in the field of stylistics, and presents an overview of two key texts, Charles Bally's Traité de stylistique française (1909), which launched stylistics as a linguistic discipline devoted to systems shared by a whole speech community, and Leo Spitzer's Études de style (1970), which introduced the term to the literary sphere and the study of individual writers. The volume's seventeen essays respond to four challenges: exploring the relationship between an author's distinct voice and the general literary or discursive forms available; offering various methodologies to gauge how an author exploits the expressive properties of French; proposing a linguistic definition of literary language based on specific formal properties distinct from those of speech; and integrating stylistic analysis into wider perspectives — semiotic, poetic, historical. The essays, all of an excellent standard, display a welcome variety, ranging from highly theoretical discussions of linguistic and stylistic terminology to extended textual analysis across a wide variety of prose, poetry and drama. Examples include a comparative study of apposition in Hugo, Éluard, Sarraute and Simon (Agnès Fontvieille); the different uses of pronouns and proper nouns in Zola, Flaubert and Duras (Francis Corblin); two essays on demonstratives — ce/cette/ces in Baudelaire, Proust and Aragon (Marie-Noëlle Gary-Prieur) and celui-là in a passage of Tournier (Georges Kleiber); Saint-John Perse's restricted but telling use of the adjective étrange and its cognates (Michèle Aquien); liaison and enchaînement in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century verse (Yves Charles Morin); and an especially interesting study of the ways in which the formal markers of the popular song as genre were adapted when imported into poetry during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and later mistakenly taken for authentic by the Romantics, such as Hugo and Nerval, who adopted them for their own chansons (Brigitte Buffard-Moret). Many of these analyses provide stimulating new ideas for classroom activities in close reading; Jean-Michel Adam, for example, shows how, in a short passage from La Bruyère's Les Caractères, style works on eight different levels simultaneously, from the semantic and rhythmic to the generic and socio-discursive. The contributors' passion for a linguistics-led stylistics is, at times, provocative, with Joëlle Gardes-Tamine declaring, 'tout est grammaire' or 'le style, c'est la grammaire'. The volume's methodological eclecticism, though, effectively reinvigorates stylistic analysis, and with a detailed bibliography of monographs and articles published on stylistics since 1990, it marks a valuable contribution to the field, offering both a wide-reaching état présent and avenues for future work.