On

The History of Stylistics.

By

Ahmed M. Hashim

2017
 1. The Origins of Stylistics.

1.1 Ancient Greeks

The history of stylistics can be traced back to the era where the concentration was
made on the oral expressions. Style, as we know today, has its origins back to the
the ancient rhetoric which was called “lexis” by the Greeks and “elocutio” by the
Romans. The ancient rhetoric was divided into five laws. The first law was made
by generating and discovering textual material. This led to some arguments based
on one of the Aristotelian proofs, logos, ethos, and pathos. The second law was
made by the use of that material for ideal impact in any circumstances. This led to
the constitution of the third law which stylized the textual material. Last but not
least the forth and fifth laws were made by committing the material to memory
and delivering it , if it was in the form of speech.

The third law of rhetoric, which stylized the textual material, was based on two
forms: the first form investigated the clarity, accuracy, and appropriateness of the
language. The second form, on the other hand, investigated the figures of style in
the language. So, these forms were either schemes, that distorted from the
syntactic level of language, or tropes, which distorted from the semantic level.

Style was also divided into three types, high, middle, and low. The high style was
dedicated to literature and poetry. The low style was dedicated to more common
performances of discourse communication. The middle style was a mixture of both
styles and was dedicated to average situations. [Burke 2014. 1-2]

2. Russian Formalism, Prague School, and American New Criticism.

In the twentieth-century, Stylistics began in 1966 when Roger Fowler published a

book he edited, called Essays on Style and Language. Stylistics, at that time, was
viewed as a logical stretching of New Criticism focusing on the text, but actually it
was against the New Criticism school in that it desires precise and efficient
treatment of language in texts. However, Stylistics was also influenced by the
Russian Formalism and Czech Structuralism. They fulfilled magnificent works in
the linguistic analysis of poetry. So, it was guided by these two movements and
their works.
The stylistic work, at that time, was mostly dedicated to poetry, and stylisticians
focused on the phonetic and grammatical structures. The results of the works made
by the stylisticians at that time was applied to poetry easily. Stylistics was
formalistically orientated and still depends on the linguistic work. [Coyle et al
1990, 1085]

2.1 Russian Formalism.

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 structuralist 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
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.

2.2 Prague School

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. [Burke 2014. 41]

2.3 American New Criticism

Stylistics can be viewed as a legitimate expansion of moves within literary
Criticism in the twentieth century to focus on studying writings instead of writers.
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. New Criticism was constructed solely in light of the depiction of literary
works as an independent asethetic objects. However, Practical Criticism tended to
pay careful attention to the psychological facets associated with a reader who
interacts with the text. However, However, these two critical movements shared
two essential highlights:
1. an emphasis on the language of the text more that its writer
2. a supposition that what criticism required was accounts of important literary
works in view of the intuitional reading results of prepared and aesthetically
delicate critics.

These critics did not analyze the text language that much, but, rather, focused on
the language of the texts when they read them and afterward depicted how they
comprehended them and were influenced by them.

this approach is still exceptionally influential in schools and universities in the

western world, for almost a hundred years, and gives rise to the types of critical
essay where writers make a claim about the meaning of the text,or how it
influences them, and afterward quote and discuss a textual sample to clarify the
view of argument. This could maybe be known as the 'Claim and Quote' way to
deal with scholarly criticism.
[http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/projects/stylistics/introduction/history.htm]

3. Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis, and Cognitive Analysis and Critical

 Discourse Analysis.

3.1 Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis

Stylistics has a mutual relationship with pragmatics and discourse

analysis. These three fields have a common goal. Their common goal is
to investigate the structure of language in use naturally and formally. So,
the domains of these branches will interfere with each other. In other
words, the studies of these branch will participate in each other. [Leech
2008. 147]

3.2 Cognitive Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis.

Stylistics, cognitive analysis and critical discourse analysis match together as a

theoretical approach that analyzes texts. Critical discourse analysis is concerned
with the study of text and its style. [Abushihab 2015. 2] The same is true for
Cognitive analysis. These two fields and their studies overlap with stylistics. The
overlapping between these fields results new methods that combine discourse
analysis, and cognitive analysis with stylistics, and the result is Cognitive
Stylistics and Critical Stylistics.
References:
• Abushihab, Ibrahim. 2015. A Pragmatic Stylistic Framework for Text
Analysis. International Journal of Education V. 7 N. 1
• Burke, Michael. (Ed.) 2014. The Routledge Handbook of Stylistic.
Routledge.
• Coyle, M., Garside, P., Kelsall, M., and Peck, J. (Eds.). 2002 .Encyclopedia
of literature and criticism. Routledge
• Leech, G. N. 1983. Pragmatics, discourse analysis, stylistics and “the
celebrated letter”.