HENA03886U English - Free topic: Stylistics – the language of literature

Stylistics is an academic discipline that studies texts systematically with the aid of concepts, theories and methodologies borrowed from linguistics. The main focus of this course will be on literary texts, but it should be noted that many of the techniques that we shall avail ourselves of can just as easily be applied to non-literary texts. Indeed, whereas a central concern of stylistics traditionally has been to delimit literary language from and against non-literary uses of language, more recent approaches to stylistics tend to problematize such neat dichotomies. Thus, any text exhibits patterns of linguistic choices that contribute to its over-all meaning and effects, and it is these patterns and their potential significance that stylistics aims to detect, describe and evaluate. Accordingly, stylistic analysis can be a powerful tool for supporting and informing (but occasionally also rejecting) intuitively-based claims about specific texts, authors, genres or periods.

The reading for this course will be a combination of theoretical/linguistic texts and literary texts, so course participants are expected to have an interest in both areas.