Stylistics
S.6

Rachid Acim

Academic Year: 2020-2021

Chapter 2: A Short History of Stylistics
The academic discipline of stylistics is a twentieth century
invention. It has a strong relationship with its most notable
predecessor – rhetoric. The term is derived from the Greek
techne rhetorike, the art of speech, an art concerned with the
use of public speaking as a means of persuasion.
 Historically, stylistics seems to date back to the style of oral
expression, which was cultivated in rhetoric following the
tradition of Aristotle’s RHETORIC.
 Stylistics functioning and flourishing, however, was seen in
particular in Britain and the U.S in the 1960s, and was largely
spurred by work done in the field by proponents of Russian
formalism such as R. Jackbson and V. Shkovsky.
The Russian formalists wished to make literary inquiry more
‘scientific’ by basing it firmly on explicit observations about the
linguistic features of the texts under scrutiny.
The Russian formlists were interested in literariness and
devoted their stylistic study to phonological, lexical, and
grammatical forms and structures such as parallelism and
linguistic deviation, which would make a text poetic.
So, the formalists focused their stylistic investigations almost
solely on poetry. However, they were criticized for their
overriding focus on linguistic form at the expense of function.
They were also criticized as they ignored the significance of
contextual factors such as the pragmatic, social and
historical contexts of texts.
In the 1970s onward, stylistics started to concentrate on
function and context, and this led to a functional turn in
stylistics. Halliday’s functional model of language, focussing on
language as ‘social semiotics’, in which language is regarded
as a social phenomenon has given importance to context.
 With Halliday, every linguistic choice came to be seem
functional, and the analyst, whether linguist or stylistician,
would consequently, investigate the (experiential,
interpersonal, textual) functions of language as it is used in a
specific context.
The Functionalist Approach entailed an interest in longer
stretches of text, paving the ground for stylisticians who want to
work on longer texts such as narrative fiction and play texts.
Hallidayan linguistics has therefore focused on contextual factors
such as register, genre, and ideology. Later, there comes
Feminist Stylistics, which concerned itself with the realization and
maintenance of (unequal) gender relations in literary as well
as other types of texts.
Feminist Stylistics can be seen as a variant of critical stylistics,
whose focus lies on the linguistic embodiment of social
inequality, power structures and ideology more generally.
In the 1980s and 1990s, there emerged Pragmatic Stylistics,
which is concerned with language in use and the contextual
factors such as for example, the linguistic, social, cultural and
authorial contexts of the production and reception of texts.
 At the crux of Pragmatic Stylistics is the focus on
conversation as exchange to linguistic, or ‘interpersonal
meaning’, and a devotion to linguistic features such as speech
acts, discourse markers, politeness strategies, etc.,
which makes it a useful approach to drama and other texts
characterized by dialogue.
Another major turn in stylistics is that spurred by the recent rise
of cognitive linguistics. Of central interest to cognitive
linguists and stylisticians alike is the role played by human
cognition in the creation of meaning.
Cognitive Stylistics or Cognitive Poetics, fuses cognitive
science, linguistics and literary studies in analyses where
meaning is seen as a product of the text and the human
conceptualization of it, meaning that equal importance is
ascribed to the text and reader.
Another recent trend has developed. This concerns Corpus
Stylistics. CS applies the methods of modern Corpus Linguistics
to the analysis of large amounts of literary texts and other
linguistic data and fuse it with other major tenets of stylistics.
Computers and some softwares help stylisticians in retrieving and
searching for data. CL methods are now increasingly
acknowledged in stylistics as a practical tool for handling
large amounts of data – a tool which can qualify the analyst
intuitions about the text and even make them aware of lexical
and grammatical features and patterns which may not otherwise
have come to their attention.
Another new actor in the stylistic scene is that of Multimodal
Stylistics. The proponents of this branch of stylistics are not
only interested in wording but other semiotic modes involved
in literary as well as other types of text.
Multimodal Stylistics aims to develop and apply ‘grammars’
for all the different semiotic modes, which may be involved in a
literary work of art, that is modes such as typography, layout,
and visual images, in order to be able to deal systematically with
all these modes and their interaction as more traditional stylistic
branches have previously dealt with wording.
The last branch of stylistics which combine many elements from
the above branches is historical stylistics, whose aim is to
explore the historical texts from a stylistic perspective, or
of examining linguistic aspects of style as they either
change or remain stable over time; so historical stylisticians
draw on concepts, methodologies and models from corpus
stylistics, cognitive stylistics and pragmatic stylistics.
A blurb is a text that publishers print on the jacket or cover of
a book to give the potential reader an idea of what it is about,
though obviously its primary purpose is to stimulate sales
(Verdonk, 2002, p. 8).
Stylistic Features of Blurbs

Poem in Your Pocket enables you to select a poem you love,

tear it out neatly from this book, and carry it with you all day to
read, be inspired by, and share with others – or keep to
yourself. This innovative format features 200 classic and
contemporary poems by more than 100 poets, from
Shakespeare to Sylvia Plath, cleverly organized by theme. If
you’re feeling wistful, if you want to romance your lover, if
you’re celebrating the seasons, or if you just need a poem to
get you through the day, this wonderful selection will help you
spread the power of poetry or treasure it in private.
 Poem in Your Pocket enables (1) you to select a poem (2)
you love, tear it out neatly from this book, and carry it with
you all day to read, be inspired by, and share with others – or
keep to (3) yourself. This innovative format features 200
classic and contemporary poems by more than 100 poets, from
Shakespeare to Sylvia Plath, cleverly organized by theme. (1)
If (4) you’re feeling wistful, (2) if you want to romance your
lover, (3) if (5) you’re celebrating the seasons, or (4) if (6)
you just need a poem to get (7) you through the day, this
wonderful selection will help (8) you spread the power of
poetry or treasure it in private.
 No single book has captured the range of Edward Said’s
knowledge like Power, Politics and Culture. In these twenty-
nine interviews collected over the last three decades, Said
addresses everything from Palestine to Pavarotti, from his
nomadic upbringing under colonial rule to his politically active
and often controversial life in America. Said’s passion for
literature, music, history and politics is everywhere apparent,
confirming his status as one of the most though-provoking and
engaging thinkers of our time.
 No single book has captured the range of Edward Said’s
knowledge like Power, Politics and Culture. In these twenty-
nine interviews collected over the last three decades, Said
addresses everything from Palestine to Pavarotti, from
his nomadic upbringing under colonial rule to his
politically active and often controversial life in America. Said’s
passion for literature, music, history and politics is everywhere
apparent, confirming his status as one of the most though-
provoking and engaging thinkers of our time.
 The text is brief, concise, with catchy phrases, a high
proportion of complimentary words and phrases. Other words
and images are rather emotive. These loaded vocabulary
choices reveal the writer’s motive, which is to persuade the
reader of the book’s excellence. This persuasive technique is
supported by the rhetorical structure of the text as a whole.
As a result, there is no sentence linkers like « therefore »,
«because», or «seeing that», which normally structure an
argument.
 The blurb becomes a mere list of assertive statements
without any reasoning. At the structural level, sentences
contain a list of items, either linked by commas or by the
coordinating conjunction ‘and’ and ‘or’. Indeed the
persuasion works by dramatic effect rather than rational
argument.
Thank you for your attention