Overview of a Diversified Landscape Exploring some conceptual

Overview of a Diversified Landscape: Exploring some conceptual strands of stylistic analysis-II

Overview I. Narrative Stylistics II. Critical Stylistics

Narrative Stylistics • In narrative stylistics an important distinction is often made between the narrative plot and the narrative discourse. • The plot refers to the “abstract storyline of a narrative”; that is, a sketch describing how the ‘inner core of the narrative’ is created through the sequence of events (Simpson, 2004: 20). • Narrative discourse, by contrast, “encompasses the manner or means by which that plot is narrated” (Simpson, 2004: 20). • Narrative discourse, for instance, “is often characterized by the use of stylistic devices such as flashback, prevision and repetition – all of which serve to disrupt the basic chronology of the narrative’s plot” (Simpson, 2004: 20 ). • In this sense, the narrative discourse is the text by means of which the plot is produced linguistically by a story-teller in a given interactive context.

Narrative Stylistics • This figure, adapted from (Simpson, 2004: 20), shows the main stylistic elements making up narrative discourse

Narrative Stylistics • Below are a description, summarized by (Simpson, 2004: 20 -21), of the main stylistic elements which make up narrative discourse: 1. Textual medium: refers to the physical channel of communication through which a story is narrated. 2. Sociolinguistic code: refers to the linguistic variety that expresses the historical, cultural and linguistic setting which frames a narrative. 3. Characterization 1 (actions and events): refers to the way the development of character precipitates and intersects with the actions and events of a story. This element accounts for the ways in which the narrative intermeshes with the process of ‘doing’, ‘thinking’ and ‘saying’, and for the ways in which these processes are attributed to characters and narrators.

Narrative Stylistics 3. Characterization 2 (point of view/focalization): refers to the relationship between mode of narration and a character’s or narrator’s ‘point of view’. Mode of narration stipulates whether the storytelling is done from the perspective of the first person, the third person or even the second person, whereas the point of view specifies “whether the events of story are viewed from the perspective of a particular character or from that of an omniscient narrator, or indeed from some mixture of the two”. 4. Textual structure: refers to the way individual narrative units are arranged and organized in a story. 5. Intertextuality: refers to the echoing of other texts in the narrative discourse. Narrative fiction does not exist in a social and historical vacuum (isolation from external influences), and it often echoes other texts and images either as ‘implicit’ intertextuality or as ‘manifest’ intertextuality.

Narrative Stylistics • For the study of the two elements of characterization in fictional discourse, i. e. character development and viewpoint, Culpeper’s (2001) model of characterization, and Leech and Short’s (2007) model for thought and speech representation seem very analytically fruitful (see Shen, 2014: 201). • Leech and Short (2007: 140) defines narrative viewpoint as “the telling of the story through the words or thoughts of a particular person”. • Simpson (2004: 30 -32) summarizes Leech and Short’s (1981/2007) analytical categories of speech representation as follows: 1. Direct Speech (e. g. She said “I’ll do it tomorrow”. ) 2. Indirect Speech (e. g. She said that she would do it the following day. ) 3. Free Direct Speech (This mode involved the reporting clause and the inverted commas from the direct speech, i. e. I’ll do it tomorrow) 4. Free Indirect Speech (This mode involved the reporting clause from the indirect speech, i. e. she would do it the tomorrow)

Narrative Stylistics • Simpson (2004: 32 -33) summarizes Leech and Short’s ([1981] 2007) analytical categories of speech representation as follows: 1. Free Direct Thought (e. g. Does he still love me? ) 2. Direct Thought e. g. He wondered “Does he still love me? ’. 3. Free Indirect Thought e. g. Did she still love me? 4. Indirect Thought e. g. He wondered if she still loved him.

Narrative Stylistics • Culpeper (2001: 164 -233) makes identified three types of characterization, i. e. building up the character’s personas, in fiction; these are: 1. Authorial characterization cues, which are communicated by the authorial narrator’s description of the character’s traits. 2. Explicit characterization cues, which are communicated by the character description of his or her traits in the absence of other characters, as in soliloquy. 3. Implicit characterization cues, which are inferred through the characters’ interaction with each other.

Critical Stylistics • Critical Stylistics is a strand of stylistic analysis with a critical perspective aiming to expose ideological biases in (literary) texts. • Thus, it seeks to highlight the aesthetic aspects of the (literary) texts and expose their ideological underpinnings (Jeffries, 2014: 408). • Critical Stylistics shares theoretical assumption of Critical Discourse Analysis which stipulates that language constructs, not only represents, reality. • The term ‘critical’ is, then, used in a socialist sense, to denote a critique aiming to expose how ideological biases can be naturalized in texts and discourses (Jeffries, 2014: 410). • Jeffries (2015: 159) defines Critical Stylistics as a “mainstream text-based stylistics with a particular (critical) purpose”.

Critical Stylistics • Critical stylistic analysis does not assume that the exposed ideological biases in (literary) texts are the result of authorial intention to influence the readers, these biases are perceived as potentially subconscious (Jeffries, 2015: 161). • Critical Stylistics gives more emphasis to the question as to how the ideological biases can influence the readers. • Critical Stylistics attempts to strike a balance between the description of linguistic meaning and its contextual interpretation in order to account for how the resources of the language can be used “to present a particular view of the world – or in the case of literature, of a fictional world” (Jeffries, 2014: 409). • Therefore, a critical stylistic analysis “needs to work out what the text is doing – how it is presenting the text world” (Jeffries, 2014: 409). • In this sense, Critical Stylistics aims “to describe texts in relation to their ‘textualconceptual functions’, which represent the different dimensions of the world as constructed by the text” (Jeffries, 2015: 163)

Critical Stylistics • These textual-conceptual functions represent the main toolkit of Critical Stylistics, which can describe what the text is doing and how it creates a worldview. • Critical Stylistics toolkit, according to Jeffries (2010; 2014 ): 1. Naming and describing, which deals with what animate, inanimate and abstract ‘things’ the projected world of the text contains and how they are presented in the text. 2. Representing actions, events and states in the projected text world, which can be captured by Halliday’s ‘transitivity, because transitivity has the power to make events, actions and states more or less connected to particular participants and create the impression of much (or little) activity. 3. Equating and contrasting, which help analyze how texts make use of synonyms and opposites to highlight contrast or similarity/connection. 4. Exemplifying and enumerating, which determine what is included and excluded in the text worldview.

Critical Stylistics 5. Prioritizing , which refers to the way information is packaged and prioritized in the sentence via theme and rheme. 6. Implying and assuming, which refer to the use of tendentious entailments presuppositions and implicatures in order to naturalize/conceal particular biological biases. 7. Negating, which has the effect of producing mental images of both the negated and the positive proposition, like in Litotes, negating is used to emphasize a point by stating a negative to further affirm a positive. 8. Hypothesizing, which is done though modality in order to allow the text producers to suggest things that are not certain without being accused of over-stating them. 9. Presenting other speech and thoughts, whose ideological potential lies in the fact that words and thoughts can be implicitly attributed to people without the risk of being sued for libel, particularly if modality is also introduced (see Leech and Short, 2007. 10. Presenting time, space and society, which refers to the way the spatiotemporal configuration of the context is represented in the text.

References • Culpeper, J. (2001) Language and Characterisation: People in Plays and Other Texts. Harlow: Longman. • Jeffries, L. (2010 a) Critical Stylistics. Basingstoke: Palgrave. • Jeffries, L. (2014) Critical stylistics. In M. Burke (Ed. ) The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics. London: Routledge. • Jeffries, L. (2015) Critical stylistics. In Sotirova, V. (Ed. ) The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics. London: Bloomsbury. • Leech, G. & Short, M. , ([1981] 2007). Style in Fiction. 2 nd Edn. Harlow: Pearson Education. • Shen, D. (2014) Stylistics and Narratology. In M. Burke (Ed. ) The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics. London: Routledge. • Simpson, P. (2004). Stylistics: A resource book for students. London: Routledge.