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Style in literary criticism and reviews of books
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The study of English Literature is principally concerned with evaluation, appreciation and personal response. The aims of the English Literature syllabus of one Examinations and Assessment Board are:
To present the subject as a discipline that is humane (concerned with values), historical (setting literary works within the context of their age) and communicative (concerned, that is, with the integrity of language as a means of enabling human beings to convey their thoughts and feelings one to another).
(Northern Examinations and Assessment Board syllabus for 1994)
In assessing the value of a piece of writing, whether it is good of its kind or not, it is essential that we produce some evidence for our judgment. Among other things, we evaluate its style. One common practice of reviewers and students of literature we can call subjective or impressionistic - an appeal to the impression that the writing makes on the reviewer by finding descriptive words and phrases which attempt to match or reproduce this impression. Let us look at a few examples of the way in which judgments on a variety of different texts are made within the academic study of English Literature and by literary reviewers of books.
1.2.1. “The common pursuit of true judgement”
F.R.Leavis (1895-1978) was a Cambridge academic and literary critic who had a great influence, from the 1930s onwards, on the way that English Literature has been taught in universities and schools. He believed that the business of students of literature and literary critics was “the common pursuit of true judgment”. This point of view has come down into classrooms, for example in lessons where pupils are asked to judge which of two poems or passages of prose is “the better”.
But though you will find plenty of positive judgments in F. R.Leavis's criticism, there is little analysis of the language of authors. For example, in D.H.Lawrence: Novelist (1955), chapter 3, on The Rainbow, he quotes two paragraphs from the beginning of the novel. Leavis is establishing his judgment that D.H.Lawrence (1885-1930) belongs to “the same tradition of art” as the nineteenth-century novelist George Eliot (1819-80) by first of all saying that “George Eliot doesn't write this kind of prose”. He continues: Lawrence is not indulging in descriptive “lyricism”, or writing poetically in order to generate atmosphere. Words here are used in the way, not of eloquence, but of creative poetry (a wholly different way, that is, from that of O may I join the choir invisible): they establish as an actual presence - create as part of the substance of the book - something that is essential to Lawrence's theme. The kind of intense apprehension of the unity of life that they evidence is as decidedly not in George Eliot's genius as it is of Lawrence's.
“O may I join the choir invisible” is a poem by George Eliot.
Students of literature are left to infer from the text what it is that produces an intense apprehension of the unity of life. A stylistic study of the text is an attempt to find out how this effect is produced.
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1.2.2. On Robert Browning's Dramatic Monologues
The following paragraph is partof a review of an edition of Browning's verse:
No reader of poetry could scan more than a few lines of any of them without knowing that they are by Robert Browning. The energetic rhythms and hectic vocabulary, as much as the finely calibrated moral scales in which each assertion is weighed, are unmistakeable; even the lapses - the occasional grisly rhyme and the jovial embellishments - give the game away.
(Robert Winder, 'Browning's “Dramatic Monologues'”, Folio Society quarterly magazine Summer, 1991, pp. 4, 8)
The phrases energetic rhythms, hectic vocabulary, grisly rhyme, jovial embellishments and, elsewhere, the capriciousness of Browning's grammar are used to describe Browning's style. But how do you recognise and agree on aspects of a writer’s work that are called energetic, hectic, grisly, jovial or capricious? What are the specific features of the language - vocabulary, syntax, phonology - by which energy or capriciousness can be recognized? Notice also that some of these features (grisly rhyme and jovial embellishments) are called lapses, that is, they fall short of some notional standards or verse writing.
1.3. Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style
Exercices de Style (1947) by the French author, Raymond Queneau, tells the same fragment of a story in 99 different styles. It was translated into English in 1958 as Exercises in Style. His first “exercise”, called Notation, is written like a set of notes for a story - an outline of what happens. Exercises in Style would seem to be an obvious choice for inclusion in a book on style, but the story is so banal (commonplace or trite) that it is hard for someone studying literary criticism to see how it can be “humane (concerned with values)”, or “ communicative (concerned, that is, with the integrity of language as a means of enabling human beings to convey their thoughts and feelings one to another)”.
Notation
In the S bus, in the rush hour a chap of about 26, felt hat with a cord instead of a ribbon, neck too long, as if someone's been having a tug-of-war with it. People getting off. The chap in question gets annoyed with one of the men standing next to him. He accuses him of jostling him every time anyone goes past. A sniveling tone which is meant to be aggressive. When he sees a vacant seat he throws himself on to it.
Two hours later, I meet him in the Cour de Rome, in front of the gare Saint-Lazare. He's with a friend who's saying: “You ought to get an extra button put on your overcoat”. He shows him where (at the lapels) and why.
The 99 versions of the story are probably best described as games with language.
The translator, Barbara Wright, has analysed the variations into roughly seven groups. Here are extracts from an example of each kind. The titles are an essential part of each “exercise”, and give a vital clue to how we should read them.
Explain how the texts of the exercises match their titles.
Activity 1.3.1. Samples from Exercises in Style
“Different types of speech” — Asides
The bus arrived bulging with passengers. Only hope I don't miss it, oh good, there's still just room for me. One of them queer sort of mug he's got with that enormous neck was wearing a soft felt hat with a sort of little plait round it instead of a ribbon just showing off that is and suddenly started hey what's got into him to vituperate his neighbour...
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“Different types of written prose” - Official letter
I beg to advise you of the following facts of which I happened to be the equally impartial and horrified witness.
Today, at roughly twelve noon, I was present on the platform of a bus which was proceeding up the rue de Courcelles in the direction of the Place Champerret. The aforementioned bus was fully laden —more than fully laden, I might even venture to say, since the conductor had accepted an overload of several candidates, without valid reason...
“Different styles of poetry” - Sonnet
Glabrous was his dial and plaited was his bonnet,
And he, a puny colt - (how sad the neck he bore,
And long) - was now intent on his quotidian chore-
The bus arriving full, of somehow getting on it...
“Character sketches through language” - Ignorance
Personally, I don't know what they want of me. Yes, I got on an S bus about midday. Were there a lot of people? Of course there were, at that hour. A young man with a felt hat? It's quite possible. Personally I don't give a damn. A kind of plaited cord? Round his hat? I'll agree that's a bit peculiar, but it doesn't strike me personally as anything else. A plaited cord...He had words with another man? There's nothing unusual about that.
“Experiments with grammatical and rhetorical forms” - Reported speech
Dr. Queneau said that it had happened at midday. Some passengers had got into the bus. They had been squashed tightly together. On his head a young man had been wearing a hat which had been encircled by a plait and not by a ribbon. He had had a long neck. He had complained to the man standing next to him about the continual jostling which the latter had been inflicting on him. As soon as he had noticed a vacant seat, said Dr. Queneau, the young man had rushed off towards it and sat down upon it.
“Jargon” - Botanical
Activity 1.3.2
List all the words that are part of the vocabulary of botany - the study of plants. Some are literal, some metaphorical, and others are puns, or slang and colloquial usages. (Remember that the narrative about the incident on the S bus underlies every exercise.)
After nearly taking root myself under a heliotrope, I managed to graft myself on to a vernal speedwell where hips and haws were squashed indiscriminately and where there was an overpowering axillary scent. There I ran to earth a young blade or garden pansy whose stalk had run to seed and whose nut, cabbage or pumpkin was surmounted by a capsule encircled by snakeweed. This corny, creeping sucker, transpiring at the palms, nettled a common elder who started to tread his daisies and give him the edge of his bristly ox-tongue, so the sensitive plant talked off and parked himself.
RECOMMENDED LITERATURE:
1. Арнольд И.В. Стилистика современного английского языка (Стилистика декодирования). – M., 2002. pp. 7 – 149.
2. Кухаренко В.А. A Book of Practice in Stylistics. pp. 5 -10.
3. Galperin I.R. Stylistics. - M., 1987. pp. 9 – 57.
4. Freeborn D. Style Text Analysis and Linguistic Criticism. London, 1996.
5. Gurevitch V.V. English Stylistics. Moscow, 2005.
6. Screbnev Y. N. Fundamentals of Stylistics, M. 1985.pp. 5-38.
7. Widdowson H.G. Stylistics and the Teaching of Literature. Longman, 1975.
8. http://www.lingvoda.ru/LingvoDict/Stylistics.zip
9. http://www.durov.com/study/STYLISTICS-175.doc
UNIT 2
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