Second Semester

Theoretical Background of Stylistics

1.1. Historical Background of Stylistics

Stylistics mainly deals with the literary texts analyzing them from both sides: the
reader and the writer. It investigates how the text affects the readers and how the
readers understand it when they read it. Besides that, it investigates the used style
of the writer and the reasons behind this use. Generally speaking, it combines the
use of the linguistic devices with what we know about the psychological process
involved in reading, depending on the study of Linguistics.
Stylistics was influenced and guided by Russian Formalism and its scholars,
especially Roman Jakobson, Viktor Shklovsky, and Vladimir Propp. These scholars
wanted to make literary knowledge more scientific and to discover the things and
mechanism that make poetic texts poetic.
The three scholars used their structuralistic ideas to achieve their goal. Each one of
them concentrated on some specific areas. For example, Jakobson concentrated on
the poetic function of language, Propp on the elements that constitute stories and
the universal and repetitive elements that exist within stories, and Shklovsky on the
defamiliarization theory of literature and art. Russian formalism eventually faded
away in the 1930s but appeared in Prague under the name Structuralism .
Prague school shifted from formalism to functionalism. Jakobson worked with the
Prague school and became more interested in the idea of foregrounding. This idea
was developed by a Czech scholar, Jan Makarovsky who was one of the important
figures in the school. The word Markarovsky was employed for foregrounding and
was regarded as actualization. The term foregrounding was coined by Garvin when
he translated the works of the Prague school scholars. So foregrounding simply
spots the poetic functions of language. It is process that deviates the linguistic
norm and makes textual patterns that are based on parallelism, deviations, or
repetition.
Prague school included the context in the making of textual meaning which began
the era of modern stylistics. Thus, the heart of the modern stylistics now is the text,
the context, and the reader. The contributions of Prague school made stylistics
today concerned in both language and literary studies.
According to the American New Criticism, stylistics is an expansion of literary
criticism. It mainly deals with the writings not the writer. Nineteenth-century
literary criticism, on the other hand, focused on the writer, and in Britain the
content-based criticism of the two critics, I. A. Richards and his student William
Empson, dismissed that approach to focus on the texts themselves, and how
readers were influenced by them. This approach is frequently called Practical
Criticism, and it is matched by a similar critical movement in the USA, related
with Cleanth Brooks, René Wellek, Austin Warren and others, called New
Criticism.

Stylistics has gone through several stages of development across the centuries. A
linguistic school has adopted Stylistics and its techniques in analyzing the literary
texts. In this section, the researcher tries to give an introduction about the
development of style through history:
1. The New Critics and the Formalists
Style has its roots in the Formalist school that emerged in Russia in the early
years of the 20th century. The most important figures in this schools are
Roman Jakobson, Victor Shklovskii, and Boris Tomashevskii. Its main aim
was to investigate the properties and the characteristics of the literary
language. The scholars had insisted to move the concentration from the
language of the literary work starting analyzing the non-literary language
too. The Russian Formalists had rejected many nineteenth- century
assumptions of textual analysis, especially the belief that a work of literature
was the expression of the author’s world view and their dismissal of
psychological and biographical criticism as being irrelevant to interpretation.
They believed that literature should be investigated as its own discipline, not
merely as a platform for discussing religious, political, sociological or
philosophical ideas.
The formalist theory was based on the work of Ferdinand de Suassure, the
emphasis was basically the autonomous nature of literature. The formalists
claimed that to study literature is basically to study autos, which is an
analysis of a work’s constituent parts- its linguistic and structural features or
its form. They claimed that each literary work has its own internal
mechanics, devices, especially its poetic language. They believed that the
text would reveal its own meaning and the only way to interpret the text is
the text itself, the text has what is needed to discover its meaning. The only
needed things are mastering the technical vocabularies and the correct
techniques to unlock the meaning.
The Formalists’ main focus of literary analysis was the examination of a
text’s literariness, the language employed in the actual text. Literary
language is different from the everyday language in that literary language
forgrounds itself. Jeffries and Mclntyre (2010: 16) clarify the reason behind
the interest of the Formalists in the non-literary text, they say that many of
literary devices (such as metaphor) are present in other non-literary texts
such as advertisements, and any style of language could occur in literary
works, depending on the subject-matter. For example, cognitive metaphor
theory has shown how metaphor is present in all discourse types since
metaphor is one of the primary ways in which we conceptualize our
experience of the world around us.
The main contributions of the formalists’ analysis were the use of
forgrounding and defamiliarisation in the literary work.
The formalists stated that the purpose of all arts is to defamiliarize the
familiar in order to generate for the reader a new perspective on the topic of
the piece of work under consideration. They mentioned that the stylistic
techniques could be applied on the non-literary work as well as on the
literary ones. They put attention on the spoken conversation too.
Defamiliarisation is the process of making strange the familiar, of putting
the old in new light. It slows down the act of perception of everyday words
or object, forcing listener or reader to reexamine the image. It is used to
show the world in an unusual, abnormal or unexpected manner.
Defamiliarisation takes place by forgrounding which is mainly a poetic style
used mostly in poetry. Forgrounding was shown to occur only in the literary
work. It was first identified by Mukařovsky (1964) referring to features of
the text which in some sense stand out from their surroundings.
Forgrounding features of a text are often seen as both memorable and highly
interpretable. In any texts, there are some sounds, words, phrases or clauses
that are so different from the surrounding opponents or from perceived
norms in language generally.
Formalists brought a scientific approach to literary studies, they redefined a
text to mean a unified collection of various literary devices and conventions
that can be objectively analyzed. To study literature is to study a text's form
and only incidentally its content. Form is superior to content.