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English Studies
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Language in Literature: Style and

Foregrounding
a
Ebbe Klitgård
a
University of Roskilde,
Version of record first published: 28 Apr 2010.

To cite this article: Ebbe Klitgård (2010): Language in Literature: Style and Foregrounding, English
Studies, 91:3, 355-356

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 Reviews 355

methodological and empirical contribution to the understanding of such ‘‘outpost’’

English varieties and their historical conditions.

ANNE FABRICIUS
Ó 2010 Anne Fabricius University of Roskilde, Denmark

Language in Literature: Style and Foregrounding

GEOFFREY LEECH
Harlow, Pearson/Longman Education, 2008
xii þ 240 pp., ISBN: 978-0-5820-5109-6, £19.99 pb

Geoffrey Leech, now Emeritus Professor of English Linguistics at Lancaster

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University, is in my estimate one of only a few scholars to have successfully bridged

the gap between linguistics and literary studies, most notably in his seminal study A
Linguistic Guide to English Poetry from 1969. This volume provides a valuable
supplement to this and other studies by Leech in collecting eight slightly revised
articles published between 1965 and 1992 and adding four previously unpublished
chapters.
In many of the chapters Leech addresses the crucial questions of literariness and
what linguistics can contribute to the analysis of literature, treating among other
theorists his perhaps most important predecessor in this discussion, Roman
Jakobson. The sharpness of Leech’s argument is clear already in his first article,
chapter 2 in the collection, in which he concludes that
the most interesting and illuminating aspect of communication in literature is
beyond the scope of linguistics. The literary writer’s object, after all, is to transcend
the limitations of ordinary language, and this is the real sense in which he can be
said to use language creatively. But meaning in literature cannot be studied without
reference to the observable patterns of language. (p. 26)

It follows that the observable patterns of language must be scrutinized closely to

determine what is foregrounded in a work of literature. Leech is aligned with the
tradition from New Criticism of close reading being at the heart of literary
analysis, but in actual fact he moves far beyond the new critics, as exemplified in
chapter 4, ‘‘Literary Criticism and Linguistic Description’’, in which he takes up F.
R. Leavis’s analysis of Keats’s ‘‘Ode to a Nightingale’’ and demonstrates what a
thorough consideration of phonetic and syntactic features in the poem can add to
Leavis’s more intuitive reading. Also to be singled out is chapter 5, ‘‘Stylistics’’, in
which Leech turns his attention to Shelley’s ‘‘Ode to the West Wind’’ and shows
its various stylistic features in an exemplary exhaustive analysis that students first
approaching this notoriously difficult poem would do well to read.
At one point in one of the new chapters in the volume, Leech suggests a label for
his own approach, ‘‘functional formalism’’ (chapter 12, p. 180), and this appears to
 356 Reviews
be a reasonable label if any is needed for such diverse and important work as Leech
offers us. Chapter 12, ‘‘Closing Statement: Text, Interpretation, History and
Education’’, furthermore provides a good dig at theorists such as Derrida, suggesting
that ‘‘those who have appeared to become enchanted with the subtlety and novelty of
this thinking [deconstruction] have lost touch with basic realities . . . these tendencies
appear to have led theorists to lose sight of the existence of texts in a very obvious and
concrete form’’ (pp. 185–6). This leads to an enlightening discussion of the notion of
text, and although the sceptical reader may think that this discussion is by now so
well-trodden ground that it should be effectively over, Leech manages to convince at
least this reviewer that it is indeed necessary to spell it out once again in order to
contradict certain fanciful directions of modern theory. In recommending this book
heartily to scholars and students alike, let me end by letting Leech himself have the
last word, summing up:
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the term text refers to a punctuated, lineated word string in a particular language.
The fact that a text is ‘‘in a particular language’’ invests it not only with formal but
also with semantic characteristics, including ambiguities and semantic gaps. The
term interpretation refers to the readers’ contribution, which may be sought
collectively or individually, as the making-sense or significance of the text,
including resolving ambiguities. (p. 194)

EBBE KLITGÅRD
Ó 2010 Ebbe Klitgård University of Roskilde

The State of the Novel, Britain and Beyond

DOMINIC HEAD
Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell, 2008
175 pp., ISBN: 978-1-4051-7011-6, £14.99 pb

Dominic Head is the author of a compendious survey of late twentieth-century

British fiction and books on Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee; two writers
with strikingly different attitudes to political commitment. He now reflects on the
task of the critic in a multi-cultural, post-colonial, post-9/11, and perhaps post-
theory, world. He assesses the political insight of recent novels while deprecating
ideological or theoretical agenda which override their literary specificity. This gives
him an elusive relation to the question of value. He shares the thematically
defined interest of ‘‘cultural studies’’ in which little distinction is made between
serious and trivial forms. Yet literary discrimination is essential to his concerns.
And so he starts by examining the institutionalised construction of these
distinctions as focused especially by the Booker prize which explicitly honours
‘‘serious literary fiction’’.