The Merits of Stylistics

The Merits of Stylistics
As the study of style, stylistics plays an essential role in literature:
1). It is the integral part of meaning. Some utterances or sentences in literary texts are difficult
to understand and readers need the knowledge of style t understand them. Think of
Shakespeare’s , “O anything of nothing first create!/ O heavy lightness, serious vanity,” (36) in
Romeo and Juliet. Without the knowledge that these are features of semantic absurdity,
Oxymoron, a collocation of two opposite words that describe contradicting situations. Without
the knowledge of allegory, it would be impossible for readers to understand the meaning of
George Orwell’s Animal Farm or Robert Frost’s The Road not Taken.
2. It lays the foundation of discussion by enabling scholars to come up with different

interpretations. Allegory for instance gives a work of art a deeper meaning besides the surface
meaning that is assigned to a work of art. Some readers, especially, young readers will give
Animal Farm a surface interpretation and will learn about the animal world. Mature readers will
however delve into the history of communist USSR and the intrigues of politics.
3. It helps literary studies to progress. Literature expresses messages in style. Readers acquire
ideas and attain aesthetic satisfaction. This cannot be possible if the readers fail to interpret the
texts. Stylistics enables critical readers to unravel the message by their knowledge of style. The
knowledge that the funny shape of Jared Angira’s The Street signifies the persona’s
subconscious thoughts about her journey through a street gives aesthetic pleasure besides
expressing the subject.
4. It describes and evaluates style distinctly. Stylistics enables critical readers to evaluate
aesthetic value of a work art and appreciate the literariness of a text. Charles Dickens is credited
for his careful manipulation of features of conformity, for instance of the loose paratactic
sentence, periodic sentence and antithesis. Look at this sentence in Dickens’ A Tale of Two
Cities, “Such masters were not at that time easily found; princes that had been, and kings that
were to be, were not yet of the teacher’s class and no ruined nobility had dropped out of
Tellson’s ledgers, to turn cooks and carpenters.” The main clause of the sentence comes at the
beginning followed by subordinate clauses to express a sad feeling. The veteran Somali writer,
Nuruddin Farah also uses long features of conformity. In Close Sesame, he writes, “ He was not
there, he was not there when they graduated from high school, he was not there when Zeinab’s
children were born; he was not there when he was married,”( 12).
5. It shows the relationship between form and content. Stylistics emphasizes the role of style
in expression of themes, feelings, attitude and subject. The use of the flywhisk in John
Ruganda’s “The Flywhisk” symbolically expresses manipulation of political power by leaders in
the society. Charles Owour’s use of punctuation in the poem “The Negro” depicts the
depersonification of the slaves. The poet uses the lower case “i” instead of capital “I” as the
personal pronoun.
6). It expands knowledge and awareness of language in general. Stylistics exposes young
scholars to a wide range of styles and new ideas about language for example, feautures of
semantic redundancy: tautology, pleonasm, periphrasis; features of semantic absurdity: paradox,
oxymoron etc
7). It enables scholars to engage constructively with literary works. Students of literature
cannot discuss literary texts constructively without understanding the texts. Students can only
discuss Antonio Jacinto’s “A letter From a Contract Worker” constructively after interpreting its
grammatical deviation to understand the demerits of illiteracy on the African population in
Angola. Those students who do not notice grammatical deviation and see the poem primarily as a
love poem will miss the point.
By
Mr. Andrew Nyongesa
Amazon.com/author/andrewnyongesa

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The Merits of Stylistics

As the study of style, stylistics plays an essential role in literature:

2. It lays the foundation of discussion by enabling scholars to come up with different

Mr. Andrew Nyongesa

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