Language in Literature:Style and Foregrounding

Description

Features

Written by a leading scholar who has contributed to English stylistics for over forty years, this book celebrates the close bond between linguistic and literary studies after a period when they hav drifted further apart.

• Explains and illustrates a method of text analysis important for students of language and literature.
• Chapters are built around practical textual analyses of passages of poetry, prose amd drama:- among them works by Dylan Thomas, Keats, Shelley, Hopkins, Woolf, and Shaw.
• Demonstrates the continuity in the methods of stylistics, in spite of revolutionary changes in thinking on both language and literature.
• Shows how new computational techniques are developing.
• Argues that a new balance has to be struck between linguistic analysis and literary interpretation, and between form and function.

Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

1.  Introduction: about this book, its content and its viewpoint

            1.1 Stylistics as an ‘interdiscipline’

            1.2  The chapter-by-chapter progression of this book.

            1.3  A digression on ‘literariness’

            1.4  A list of texts examined

            Notes

2.   Linguistics and the figures of rhetoric

            2.1  Introduction

            2.2  A linguistic perspective on literary language

            2.3  Figures of speech as deviant or foregrounded phenomena in language

            2.4  Classifying figures of speech

            2.5  Linguistic analysis and critical appreciation

            Notes

3.   ‘This Bread I Break’ – language and interpretation

            3.1  Cohesion in a text

            3.2  Foregrounding

            3.3  Cohesion of foregrounding

            3.4  Implications of context

            3.5  Conclusion: interpretation

            Notes

4. Literary criticism and linguistic description

            4.1  The nature of critical statements

            4.2  The nature of linguistic statements

            4.3  The relation between critical and linguistic statements

            4.4  Leavis on Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’

            4.5  Linguistic support for Leavis’s account

            4.6  Conclusion

            Notes

5. Stylistics

            5.1  Introduction

            5.2  The text: ‘Ode to the West Wind’ by Percy B. Shelley

            5.3  Stylistic analysis: deviation and foregrounding

            5.4  Secondary and tertiary deviation

            5.5  Coherence of foregrounding

            5.6  The poem’s interpretation

            5.7  Conclusion

            Notes

6.   Music and metre: ‘sprung rhythm’ in Victorian poetry

            6.1  Introduction

            6.2  A multi-levelled account of metre: four levels of metrical form

            6.3  Why we need an extra layer of musical scansion

            6.4  Sprung rhythm

            6.5  Conclusion

            Appendix: Further examples of musical scansion

            Notes

7.  Pragmatics, discourse analysis, stylistics and ‘The Celebrated Letter’

            7.1  The close affinity between pragmatics, discourse analysis and          stylistics: a                    goal-oriented framework

            7.2  Politeness and irony in a multi-goaled view of communication

            7.3  Samuel Johnson’s ‘Celebrated Letter’ as a demonstration text

            7.4  Conclusion: there is no dichotomy between literary and non-literary texts

            Notes

8.  Stylistics and functionalism

            8.1 Roman Jakobson: a formalistic functionalist

            8.2 A goal-oriented multifunctionalism

            8.3 Typologies of language function and kinds of meaning

            8.4 Functionalism in terms of a threefold hierarchy

            8.5 Applications to literature

            8.6 Jakobson’s poetic function revisited: autotelism

            8.7 Conclusion

            Notes

9.  Pragmatic principles in Shaw’s You Never Can Tell

            9.1  Introduction

            9.2  The plot of Shaw’s You Never Can Tell

            9.3  Pragmatic principles and pragmatic deviation

            9.4  (Un)cooperative and (im)polite behaviour in the play

            9.5  Quality and quantity: rights and obligations

            9.6  Pragmatic abnormalities of character

            9.7  A system of pragmatic contrasts

            9.8  ‘You never can tell’

            Notes

10.  Style in interior monologue: Virginia Woolf’s ‘The Mark on the Wall’

            10.1  Introduction

            10.2  The formal levels of phonology, lexigrammar and semantics

            10.3  A digression on the stream of consciousness

            10.4  The textual function

            10.5  The ideational function: representation of (mock) reality

            10.6  The interpersonal function

            10.7  Conclusion

            Notes

11.  Work in progress in corpus stylistics: a method of finding ‘deviant’ or ‘key’ features of texts, and its application to ‘The Mark on the Wall’

            11.1  A method in corpus stylistics: WMatrix

            11.2  The results

            11.3  Conclusion

            Notes

12.   Closing statement: text, interpretation, history and education

            12.1  The book’s relation to other work

            12.2  What is a text?

            12.3   Ambiguity and interpretation

            12.4  Historical and educational viewpoints

            12.5  Conclusion

            Notes

References

Index

Back Cover

“This book will no doubt become yet another of Geoff Leech’s classic works in stylistics. It demonstrates that what he was writing in the 1960s remains central to the study of literary language, and that he remains at the cutting edge of the subject nearly forty years later.”

Lesley Jeffries, Professor of English Language, University of Huddersfield

“I have been waiting expectantly for some years for this promised collection of Geoffrey Leech’s Stylistics papers to be published. We now have a convenient location for all those influential Leechian papers scattered through journals and book collections as well as some fascinating new work.”

Mick Short, Professor of English Language and Literature, Lancaster University

“This volume, by a founder of British stylistics, is long overdue. His articles, now usefully 'refreshed', mark the development of the discipline over forty years, from formalist functionalism to corpus stylistics.”

Katie Wales, Research Professor in English, University of Sheffield

Over a period of more than forty years, Geoffrey Leech has made notable contributions to the field of literary stylistics, using the interplay between linguistic form and literary function as a key to the ‘mystery’ of how a text comes to be invested with artistic potential. In this book, seven earlier papers and articles have been brought together with four new chapters, the whole volume showing a continuity of approach across a period when all too often literary and linguistic studies have appeared to drift further apart. Leech sets the concept of ‘foregrounding’ at the heart of the interplay between form and interpretation. Through practical and insightful examination of how poems, plays and prose works produce special meaning, he counteracts the ‘flight from the text’ that has characterized thinking about language and literature in the last thirty years, when the response of the reader, rather than the characteristics and meaning potential of the text itself, have been given undue prominence. The book provides an enlightening analysis of well-known (as well as less well-known) texts of great writers of the past, including Keats, Shelley, Samuel Johnson, Shaw, Dylan Thomas, and Virginia Woolf. 

Geoffrey Leech is Emeritus Professor of English Linguistics at Lancaster University. He has written, co-edited and co-authored over 25 books, including A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry, Style in Fiction (with Mick Short), and A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (with Sidney Greenbaum and Jan Svartvik). Professor Leech is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Member of Academia Europaea

Author

Professor Leech is Emeritus Professor of  English Linguistics at Lancaster University. He has written, co-edited and co-authored over 25 books and over 100 articles in the areas of linguistics and English language, especially in stylistics, English grammar, semantics, pragmatics and corpus linguistics.

He was co-author, with Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum and Jan Svartvik, of the monumental and authoritative A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language  (Longman 1985). In pragmatics, too, his Principles of Pragmatics (Longman 1983) has been a landmark text. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and a Member of Academia Europaea.