Language of Literature

By: Rashid Mahmood

 Literary Stylistics
• Stylistics as a meeting ground between language and
literature
• The job of a stylistician is to demystify the intuition
of the literary critic.
• Stylistics has the goal of explaining the relation
between language and artistic function.
• Its goal is to relate the critic’s concern of aesthetic
appreciation ( comprehends both critical evaluation
and interpretation) with the linguist’s concern of
linguistic description
• Linguistic angle: “Why does the author here choose
to express himself in this particular way?”
• Critical angle: “How is such-and-such an aesthetic
effect achieved through language?”
 Language of Literature
• We can easily decide whether it is literary, or
commercial, or scientific, or officialese text etc.
• What are the qualities that make us recognize a text
as belonging to literature and distinguish it from an
ordinary text?
• Interesting framework which literary texts appear in--
the forms of poetry, novels, dramas, etc which
writers use and which critics have labeled as
Genres.
• Imaginative quality of the linguistic utterance
• Literary texts go beyond the use of words to convey
referential meaning.
 Language of Literature
• There is no such thing as a homogeneous
variety of literature, as parallel to legal,
news reporting, public speaking, or
conversational varieties.
• Like other registers, literary genres are
describable in terms of the categories of
the language: phonology, graphology,
grammar, lexis, and semantics.
 Language of Literature
• There is no such thing as a homogeneous
variety of literature, as parallel to legal,
news reporting, public speaking, or
conversational varieties.
• Like other registers, literary genres are
describable in terms of the categories of
the language: phonology, graphology,
grammar, lexis, and semantics.
 Language of Literature
• The special use of patterning in literary texts
that heightens the effect of linguistic utterances
• literary language has the same general
functions as non-literary language--to define
things, to exchange ideas, to express emotions
and to transmit messages but, the language of
literature is not simply used for communication
or even expression.
• It is also used as an artistic medium, to create
images, to bring out the rich multi-level
meaning and thematic significance of a literary
work. This special artistic trait of literary
language appeals to the reader aesthetically.
 Language of Literature
• If we say that everyday language tends to
perform an informative function, then literary
language tends to perform an affective
function-- appealing'; more to the emotions of
the reader.
• Literary language is chosen and manipulated
with greater care and complexity than the
average language user either can or wishes to
exercise: it contains a higher occurrence of
special or deviant features than nonliterary
varieties.
• Literary language is not unintelligible to the
members of that community.
 Language of Literature
• Modern linguistics places literary uses of language
against the background of more 'ordinary' uses of it,
so that we see the poet or novelist or playwright
making use of the same code, the same set of
communicative resources, as the journalist, the
scientist, or the garden wall gossip.
• Literary expression is an enhancement, or a creative
emancipation of the resources of language which we
use from day to day.
• The novelist and the playwright aim at a vivid
reproduction of everyday language, whether polite or
familiar, elegant or rude, formal or informal/colloquial,
so as to depict the socio-economic status and
disposition of his/her characters.
 Language of Literature
• Sometimes literary language, especially the
language of poetry can appear sharply
different from ordinary language.
• Because the writer, especially the poet,
consciously endeavors to be creative in
using the language.
• 'creative', here means the original use of the
established possibilities of the language, and
the creation of new communicative
possibilities which are not in the language.
 Language of Fiction
• The language of fiction is used to convey the
'mock reality' of a novel.
• A novel incorporates the author's desire to
touch the emotions of the readers, to cause
shock to them and to persuade them into
action
• 'facts' in the novel are selected and arranged
in a way that does not totally reproduce a
verifiable situation. Here the quality of
'imagination', one of the distinguishing
marks of literary texts comes into service.