Hacia una aproximación cultural a la estilística

TOWARDS A CULTURAL APPROACH TO STYLISTICS SONIA ZYNGIER* Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil ABSTRACT This paper discusses the different approaches to stylistics, here regarded as the cutting edge in literary-linguistic enquiry, and presents the possible benefits of a contextualized stylistics to the teaching of literature. Starting from the assumption that stylistics is a very troubled and slippery concept, it points out how the different linguistic approaches to the literary text have moved from universals and microlinguistic observations to the study of context and its influence in the way people behave, speak and communicate. The main objective of this paper is to argue that stylistics can sit very comfortably between language and literature, contribute to the understanding of the text as cultural praxis, and thus work as a bridge between cultural, literary and linguistic studies. To support this argument, some of the different lights under which stylistics has been seen are discussed. The paper concludes by offering a theoretical model which may help describe a contextualized pedagogical stylistics. KEY WORDS Stylistics, cultural studies, literary awareness, pedagogy. RESUMEN El presente trabajo discute los diferentes enfoques de la estilística –aquí considerada como interface entre el estudio literario y el lingüístico– al presentar los posibles beneficios de una estilística contextualizada en la enseñanza de literatura. A partir del presupuesto que la estilística es un concepto problemático y escurridizo, se señala cómo los diferentes abordajes lingüísticos al texto literario se han desplazado de los universales y observaciones microlingüísticas al estudio del contexto y su influencia sobre la forma en que las personas se comportan, hablan y se comunican. El principal objetivo de este trabajo es argumentar que la estilística puede situarse confortablemente entre la lingüística y la literatura, contribuye a la comprensión del texto como práctiCAUCE, Revista de Filología y su Didáctica, nº 24, 2001 / págs. 365-380 365 * Sonia Zyngier is Associate Professor of English and Associate Director of Cultural Affairs at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. At present, she is also Secretary of the Poetics and Linguistics Association. She holds an MA in English Literature from the University of Liverpool and a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from the University of Birmingham. Specific research interests include discourse analysis and pedagogical stylistics. SONIA ZYNGIER 366 ca cultural, y funciona como puente entre los estudios culturales, literarios y lingüísticos. Para fundamentar este argumento se discuten algunas de las diferentes visiones bajo las cuales se ha visto la estilística. El trabajo concluye ofreciendo un modelo teórico que puede ayudar a describir una pedagogía estilística contextualizada. PALABRAS CLAVE Estilística, estudios culturales, percepción literaria, pedagogía. RÉSUMÉ Cet article discute différentes approches de la stylistique, vue ici comme le plus haut stade de la recherche en linguistique littéraire, et présente les avantages possibles de la linguistique contextualisée pour l’enseignement de la littérature. Partant de la supposition que la stylistique est un concept problématique de difficile appréhension, il montre à quel point les différentes approches linguistiques du texte littéraire sont passées des observations générales et microlinguistiques à l’étude du contexte et de ses influences sur la façon dont les gens se comportent, parlent et communiquent. Le premier objectif de cet article est d’affirmer que la linguistique peut se trouver bien à l’aise entre le langage et la littérature, contribuer à la compréhension du texte comme une praxis culturelle, et par là fonctionner comme un pont entre les études culturelles, littéraires et linguistiques. Pour soutenir cet argument nous discutons quelques aspects sous lesquels la linguistique a été en général vue. L’article propose, en conclusion, un modèle théorique qui peut aider à décrire la stylistique pédagogique contextualisée. MOTS-CLÉ Linguistique, études culturelles, conscience littéraire, pédagogie. 1. INTRODUCTION Defining stylistics is almost an impossible task. Its area is hard to limit: is it a linguistic discipline or a method for literary criticism and text appreciation? Can it ever overcome discussions of objectivity or subjectivity in interpretations? Does it have pedagogical value? If so, how? From its inception, the history of stylistics has been shaped by debate and lack of consensus. If, on the one hand, Meyer-Lübke in 1899 had avoided stylistics claiming it was the study of language as art (in Ullmann, 1966, p. 99), in 1909, Bally excluded literary works from his investigation and studied expressive elements only in everyday speech. And yet, stylistics has not disappeared from the map of language and literature studies. To use Compagnon’s (1998, p. 179) metaphor, “le TOWARDS A CULTURAL APPROACH TO STYLISTICS 367 style, aujourd’hui, renaît de ces cendres et porte beau”. In fact, one hundred years later, stylistics is still alive, despite Roy Harris’s (2000) more recent attempt to describe it as a project which failed, a “forlorn attempt to validate metalanguage”. These attacks have been part of the history of stylistics, the overall picture being one of successive crises and myriad definitions. If the problems begin at definitions, they continue through determining its scope and affiliation. Does stylistics belong to linguistics or to literary criticism? As Toolan (1996, p. 117) puts it, “in the last fifteen years or so a new polyphony of contending approaches, subdisciplines, and agendas… has emerged. So many formerly cast-iron and irrefutable distinctions, in both linguistic and literary criticism, are now acknowledged to be disconcertingly vulnerable to challenge”. Perhaps it would be easier to accept the fact that the area is too fuzzy to be dealt with but that we just cannot do without it because stylistics offers a method of systematising what has been called the “elusive” (Widdowson, 1992) element in literature. It provides guidelines and the hook students need to make their way into the text. In fact, stylistics has been shown to be a very potent tool for the teaching of texts which are treasured by certain communities as valuable (Carter & Long, 1987; Zyngier, 1994; Carter & McRae, 1996; Carter, 1997, among others). To support my argument, I will describe some of the different lights under which stylistics has been seen, discuss some of its major opposing voices, and provide a theoretical model which may help describe a contextualized pedagogical stylistics (see also Bex, Burke & Stockwell, 2000). 2. INITIAL PREMISES, MAJOR OPPOSITIONS In order to clear the ground, we can start from two premises that seem to be shared by all stylisticians: a. Stylistics can sit comfortably between language and literature. It can contribute to the understanding of the text as cultural practice; it can work as a bridge between cultural, literary and linguistic studies. b. Its key-concepts, from Bally through Halliday’s sociosemiotic approach, have remained the same: to investigate the effects of linguistic choices. Here is how Crystal (1989, p. 66) defines the area: SONIA ZYNGIER 368 Style is seen as the (conscious or unconscious) selection of a set of linguistic features from all the possibilities in a language. The effects these features convey can be understood only by intuitively sensing the choices that have been made … and it is usually enough simply to respond to the effect in this way. But there are often occasions when we have to develop a more analytical approach… Here … our intuition needs to be supplemented by a more objective account of style. It is this approach which is known as stylistics. So, if choice and effect are alternative ways of interacting with and responding to meaning, and if meaning is culturally-based, then stylistics is cultural. Firth (1958, p. 184), whose work inspired the functional turn of linguistics, had defined stylistics as a field of research which investigates the way a speaker fuses “the elements of habit, custom, tradition, the element of the past, and the element of innovation, of the moment, in which the future is being born” “in verbal creation”. So, if stylistics hasn’t changed as regards its basic tenets, what has? I believe it is the glasses stylisticians wear. What follows are some of the arguments against stylistics Carter & Walker (1989, p. 3) collected: •Stylistics is only concerned with the words on the page, as if meaning were confined to the language of the text (see also Harris 2000). •Stylistics disregards the fact that the reader starts from an ideological position and cannot escape it. •Stylistics is a-historical. •Stylistics does not question the institutionalization of literature and literary language. Statements such as these suffer from anachronism because they do not take into consideration new developments in the area. So, in order to explain what I call contextualized stylistics, a term proposed by Weber (1996), who suggested the name but did not define it, I would like to trace the history of some of these ways of dealing with the text, all of which, in a certain way, have contributed to the picture we are able to draw today. I would like to point out that this categorisation is a simplified overview of the developments of the field in the last 40 years. I start from Jakobson’s seminal “Closing statement” of 1958 which, according to Fowler, inaugurated what he called New Stylistics (in Verdonk, 1986). My strategy here is to join the approaches into roughly two main groups. Table 1 below offers a summary: TOWARDS A CULTURAL APPROACH TO STYLISTICS 369 Table 1. Main approaches to stylistics. TEXT-ORIENTED CONTEXT-ORIENTED FORMALIST PRAGMATIC MENTALIST RADICAL TEXTLINGUISTIC EMPIRICAL 3. TEXT-ORIENTED STYLISTICS a. Formalist I prefer the term formalist stylistics to what is generally called “linguistic stylistics” because if, as Halliday (1967) points out, stylistics is the linguistic study of literary texts, then calling it “linguistic” would be a tautology. A grandchild of Russian Formalism and an offspring of Structuralism at the peak of its maturity, this approach became more radical as a number of analysts from the tradition of Practical Criticism resorted to aspects of linguistics in search of a rigour Practical Criticism did not offer. Their strategy was to concentrate on the text as an object and their main interests remained on the formalistic and mechanical description of patterns in phonology, lexis, and syntax at sentence level. In his early years, Sinclair (1963, pp. 98-99) wrote what we can call a “declaration of principles” of this approach: Literature is not a living organism, it is stone dead; it is marks on paper, or particular frequencies of the sound wave, or the visual and aural phenomena at a dramatic performance… poetry is the lines, and nothing else. It is this way of dealing with texts which is always criticised whenever stylistics is under attack. More recently, Mackay (1996) (1999) has resumed Fish’s (1973) criticism on this particular point. It is true that a formalist orientation may turn out interesting lists of features and work for statistical accounts, but it disregards the way literature functions in context. b. Mentalist Also mostly descriptive, this approach follows transformational-generative grammar and the Chomskyan model which influenced the sixties. Toolan (1990, p. 2) criticises it for being too narrow. In his words, SONIA ZYNGIER 370 it follows the “microlinguistic turn of generativism”. Mentalist stylisticians value the relation of language to mind. A representative example of a mentalist stylistic approach is Thorne’s article “Generative Grammar and Stylistic Analysis” (1981, p. 44). Here Thorne is concerned, like the early Chomsky, with grammaticality and acceptability of forms. He equates the definition of stylistics with judgements on manifestations of linguistic competence. Thorne proposes that a grammatical model be developed for each poem. He also suggests an investigation on how the surface structure reflects the deep structure in a specific poem. According to him, … the basic postulates of both studies (generative grammar explicitly, traditional stylistics implicitly) are mentalistic. In both cases, the most important data are responses relating to what is intuitively known about language structure. These notions imply a pre-existing norm. Thorne criticises Saussurean linguistics, and consequently linguistics stylistics, for being concerned only with what is observable, that is, with “surface structure”. He holds that stylistic judgements belong to the area defined as “deep structure”. Cook (1992, p. 71) points out that the metaphor deep/surface is somewhat pejorative. Surface is associated to “trivial, false and empty-headed”, whereas deep is “serious, genuine and thoughtful”. In this sense, mentalist stylisticians believed they were engaging in more complex and meaningful analyses. To those interested in this approach, Freeman (1970) has collected many essays which investigate texts from a generative-transformational perspective. c. Textlinguistic With the development of textlinguistics in the seventies, a new wave of analysts began working on suprasentential level. Also concerned with form, they differed from formalist linguists, as now they saw the text as a unit, not as a string of sentences. For instance, textlinguists may apply narrative organisation to the study of literary texts. They may also investigate intersentential cohesion, look for patterns such as problem-solution (Hoey, 1983) to point out textual macrostructures (van Dijk, 1977). It is here that the term discourse also comes into the picture. I want to make clear that when I refer to discourse, I am only referring to the written form and leaving out all instances of spoken language. Textlin- TOWARDS A CULTURAL APPROACH TO STYLISTICS 371 guists place their work on the level of discourse. In this case, the term discourse is equivalent to text and can be defined as “a continuous stretch of language larger than a sentence…” (Nunan, 1993, p. 5). However, to other linguists, discourse means language in use and as such implies “… the interpretation of the communicative event in context” (Nunan, 1993, pp. 6-7). Based on Leech’s arguments, Table 2 may help clarify the main differences between formalist and functionalist approaches: Table 2. Formalism vs. Functionalism. Formalists Functionalists language as a mental phenomenon language as a social phenomenon linguistic universals derive from linguistic universals derive from a common linguistic inheritance universal uses to which language is of the human species (nature) put in human societies (nurture) language acquisition explained language acquisition results from in terms of a built-in human the development of communicative capacity to learn needs and abilities in society language is an autonomous system language is related to its social function As Table 2 indicates, context to functionalists is not only the language that surrounds a piece of text, but involves non-linguistic or experiential situations. This perspective has led to context-oriented forms of stylistics. Contextualized stylistics is then an abstraction. It is an umbrella term which refers to all those approaches which consider literature as an event within a specific situation. 4. CONTEXT-ORIENTED STYLISTICS a. Pragmatic Here, communicative behaviour begins to be privileged. Pragmatic-oriented stylisticians look at everyday conversation as a means to understand literary discourse. According to Leech (1983), it is the tendency to consider the text from an interactive point of view. Fowler (1979, p. 15) explains: “At a more ‘superficial’ end of linguistics, illocutionary or pragmatic theory leads us to study explicitly manipulative constructions such as imperatives, interrogatives, responses, etc. At a more abstract level, implicature, presupposition, and other assumptions SONIA ZYNGIER 372 … are highly promising for literary theory and analysis”. Carter & Simpson (1989) offer a collection of articles which stand as examples of this approach. b. Radical It was Burton in 1982 who coined the term radical stylistics. The distinctive element of this approach is the critics’ search for the ideological imprint of the text. Like pragmatic stylisticians, ideologically-oriented analysts go beyond text level into the social and historical forces which influence its production and reception. Burton’s arguments are that if texts depend on sociocultural and political determinants, they are subject to value-judgement (Eagleton, 1983; Graff, 1990) and these value judgements should be discussed in clear terms. A text is a social construct, a part of a socio-economic, political and literary tradition (Durant & Fabb, 1990; Montgomery et al., 1992). Pratt (1989, p. 21) argues that “… an understanding of the social, historical and ideological dimensions of discourse can contribute a great deal to the interests of aesthetics”. Van Peer (1991, p. 130) adds that “textuality is partly a linguistic characteristic and partly the result of socio-cultural forces which provide the text its place and function within society as a whole”. Birch (1989, p. 167) shows where cultural studies ties in neatly with literature when he states that stylistics is “a study not just of structures of language and texts, but of the people and institutions that shape the various ways language means”. c. Empirical What I here call empirical stylistics is the approach that I believe best accommodates developments in linguistic, literary and cultural theory. It results from advances in what has been known as the Empirical Study of Literature (ESL). As a movement, ESL began in Germany in 1973 with the NIKOL research group at Bielefeld University (S. J. Schmidt, P. Finke, W. Kindt, J. Wirrer, R. Zobel). In 1980, research continued with a new NIKOL group at Siegen University (S. J. Schmidt, A. Barsh. H. Hautmeier, D. Meutsch, G. Rusch, and R. Viehoff). In 1987, the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature (IGEL) was founded. One of their main tenets was that text-meaning is not an intrinsic property of the physical text and that meaning is created in the process of response. They propose a shift of interest from text to TOWARDS A CULTURAL APPROACH TO STYLISTICS 373 text-focusing activities; from structures to functions and processes; from the literary object to the literary system. Hence, LITERATURE is more than a collection of texts. It is an event requiring participation of several elements involved in the process. Differing from radical stylisticians, they specify these elements. ESL proposes a “new” paradigm where the literary work is seen in the entire field of social interactions. Deriving its framework from a constructivist theory of cognition, ESL involves epistemological, methodological, ethical, and applicational aspects which may provide theoretical support for contextualized stylistics. ESL promotes an interdisciplinary clustering of various theories. It is a metatheoretical description combining structuralism, constructivism, and reader-response theory with cognitive psychology, biology, sociology, and anthropology, among other disciplines, and maintains a strong inclination towards application. The ESL paradigm for the theory of literature derives from a pragmatic perspective. ESL values the function of the text in the social system. Schmidt (1983c, p. 248) holds that: …texts are no longer regarded as autonomous entities but always in relation to those actions which are necessarily performed by agents within the system of literature. As a result of this general orientation toward action, we obtain a model of literature as a social action system, which can be structurally defined through the causal and temporal relations between four primary action roles: the roles of producing, mediating, receiving, and post-processing those actions, objects, or events which are considered literary by agents according to the norms of poetics internalized by the agents. The system of aesthetic communication then comprehends the following acts and roles: Acts Roles production ➔authors, etc. mediation ➔books, publishers, etc reception ➔readers, etc. post-processing ➔critics, etc. Schmidt does not limit himself to the written text. He describes aesthetic communication in general, but for the sake of economy and focus, I am concentrating only on the written text. If we take the four functions and the four roles Schmidt proposes, we may come up with the following diagram: SONIA ZYNGIER 380 JAKOBSON, R. 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