Stylistics, Linguistics, Literature

Reviews Stylistics, Linguistics, Literature EUGENE GREEN and ELEANOR WIKBORG Elizabeth C. Traugott and Mary L. Pratt. Linguistics for Students of Literature New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1980. 444. $12.95 paper Geoffrey N. Leech and Michael H. Short. Style in Fiction London: Longman 1981. 384. $32.00 cloth, $16.95 paper As a discipline strongly influenced by the practices of New Criticism, especially in the close reading of texts, contemporary stylistics has brought to light a wealth of insights hidden in the truism that literature is made of words. A successful introduction to the discipline has the merit ofenablinga beginner to appreciate the rewards to be gleaned from careful analyses of literary language. It can show how Jane Austen's remarkable ironyI for example, turns in someinstanceson her subtle use of the word seem, how she counts on it to undermine the certainty of what is asserted, as in 'Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence' (Leech and Short, p 275). Or it may draw attention to how much significance attaches itself to such an apparently unpromising feature of grammar as the article. One sees how in narrative openings, for example, the interplayof the (which assumes information known and shared by the reader) with a (which presents information as new) serves to orient the reader in the fictional world (Traugott and Pratt, pp 281-95; Leech and Short, pp 96- 7). Further, a book of this kind is able to make us notice how in Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion, for instance, the river, which the reader assumes he knows, suddenly becomes ariver new to experience- a 'move from familiarity to estrangement' (Traugott and Pratt, p 295). In effect, such a book has the power to alert beginning students to a range of stylistic diversity far greater than they may have ever before recognized. In addition to showing how linguistic discovery enhances one's responses to literature, an introductory textbook in stylistics should include techniques for engaging students. The presentation needs a spirited practicality that will encourage students to read closelyI to raise questions on matters of stylistic effect, and to draw upon those methods that will make the analysis of literary language enlightening. Unfortunately, neither book under review wholly succeeds in UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 53, NUMBER 2 , WINTER lC)8Y4 STYLISTICS, LINGUISTICS, LITERATURE 205 meeting this challenge, and this is because both assume that the methods of linguistics are directly relevant to the practice of stylistics. Traugott and Pratt repeatedly make this claim, and the nine chapters of Linguistics for Students of Literature have, therefore, the framework of a conventionallinguistics textbook: the first five begin with an introduction to the study of language and the discipline of linguistics and then continue with an analysis of English phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics; the last four consider speech acts, discourse analysis, varieties ofEnglish and bilingualism. What is new is a section at the conclusion of each chapter (usually the last quarter) that applies the linguistic principles and features just introduced to a detailed analysis of literature. Style in Fiction is more strictly centred on matters of style. (As the sequel to Leech's A Linguistic Guide toEnglish Poetry [1969J, it limits itself to the properties of fiction.) Part I of the book defines style, reviews the uses and value of statistics in stylistic analysis, provides a checklist of linguistic and stylistic categories, and demonstrates several ways to put this checklist to work. Part II defines fiction as a register of its own by discussing the novelist's creation in the light of an assumed everyday reality and everyday sensibility. Moreover, the second part investigates the properties of the fictional register - the rhetorical effects of sentences, the interplay between novelists and readers, the interplay, too, among the characters in a fictional work, and finally the techniques available so far for rendering speech and thought. But this book also emphasizes formal and functional aspects of language before applying them to the analysis of literature. True to its characterization of the 'new stylistics' as the application of 'techniques and concepts of modern linguistics to...