Pedagogical Stylistics: Current Trends in Language, Literature and ELT (Advances in Stylistics) [1 ed.] 9781441123121, 9781441140104, 9781441159878, 2011042156

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Acknowledgements
Contributors
Introduction
Teaching Stylistics
References
Part One: Analysis, Reading and Reception in Pedagogical Stylistics
Chapter 1: Paraphrase as a Way to a Contextualized Stylistic Analysis of Poetry: Tony Harrison’s ‘Marked with D’1
1.1 Paraphrase: An Ancient Pedagogical Device
1.2 A Students’ Paraphrase of Tony Harrison’s ‘Marked with D’
1.3 Text, Context and Discourse
1.4 Reference and Representation
1.5 Verbal Patterning and Representational Meaning in Harrison’s ‘Marked with D’
1.6 Linguistic Markers of Perspective and Positioning of the Reader
1.7 Deixis and Perspective in the Poem
1.8 Style and Meaning: The Verse Form of ‘Marked with D’
Notes
References
Chapter 2: Chicken and Egg Stylistics: From Lexical Semantics to Conceptual Integration Theory
2.1 Pedagogical Stylistics: Core or Periphery?
2.2 Conceptually Transgressing ‘Neat Boxes’: Design and Implementation
2.3 Interpretation: Pencils, Pedagogy and Conceptual Integration
2.4 Concluding Remarks: Chicken and Egg Stylistics
Notes
References
Appendix
Chapter 3: The Reader’s Paradox
References
Chapter 4: Experiencing or Interpreting Literature: Wording Instructions
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Traditions in Teaching
4.3 An Earlier Attempt: Literary Awareness
4.4 Experiencing and Interpreting: Defining the Terms
4.5 The Experiment
4.6 Research Design
4.7 Measurement
4.8 Treatment of Data
4.9 Analysis
4.10 Conclusion
Note
References
Part Two: Emerging Trends and Methods in Pedagogical Stylistics
Chapter 5: Systemic Stylistics: An Integrative, Rhetorical Method of Teaching and Learning in the Stylistics Classroom
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Background
5.3 Systemic Stylistics in Practice
5.4 Data
5.5 General Discussion and Graduate Developments
5.6 Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 6: Creative Writing: A Stylistics Approach
6.1 Introduction
6.2 Motivations: Theoretical Background
6.3 Methodologies: The Approach in Action
6.4 Results: Assessment and Subjectivity
6.5 Conclusions: Evaluation and Reflection
Notes
References
Appendix: The Self-assessment Questionnaire
Chapter 7: Corpus Stylistics in the Classroom
7.1 Introduction
7.2 Stylistics and Pedagogy
7.3 Why Teach Corpus Stylistics?
7.4 Corpus-Assisted Stylistics
7.5 Corpus-Based Stylistics and Corpus-Driven Stylistics
7.6 What is the Best Way to Teach Corpus Stylistics?
References
Chapter 8: Imagined Inference: Teaching Writers to Think Like Readers
8.1 Introduction
8.2 Inference and Writing
8.3 Teaching Inference
8.4 Conclusion
References
Chapter 9: Literary Pragmatics in the Advanced Foreign Language Literature Classroom: The Case of Young Werther
9.1 Introduction
9.2 Literary Pragmatics and the Development of Translingual Literacy in the Post-Secondary Foreign Language and Literature Classroom
9.3 Reading Werther in Arizona: Literary Pragmatics in Pedagogical Practice
9.4 Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 10: Stylistic Approaches to Teaching ­Hypertext Fiction
10.1 Introduction
10.2 Context of Study
10.3 Stylistics Hypertext Sessions
10.4 Discussion of Results
10.5 Conclusions
References
Part Three: EFL and Pedagogical Stylistics
Chapter 11: Revenons à Nos Moutons! Metaphor and Idiom in EFL and ESL Teaching and Learning
11.1 Introduction
11.2 Background: Advances in Cognitive Linguistics
11.3 Pedagogical Claims Inspired by a Cognitive Linguistic Approach
11.4 Four CL Principles of Motivation
11.5 Conclusion: Evaluating CL Claims for Metaphor Teaching
References
Chapter 12: Stylistics for Language Teachers
12.1 Introduction
12.2 From Text to Terms
12.3 Dr K.H.G. Top Down: From Interpretation to Description
12.4 Dr K.H.G. Bottom Up: From Description to Interpretation
12.5 Comparison with the Sollosy Translation
12.6 Terms as Vocabulary
12.7 Terms Translated for Language Learners as they Appear in the Lesson Plan
12.8 After Class Stylistic Analysis, Transcript Analysis and/or Action Research
12.9 Conclusion
References
Appendix
Index

Citation preview

Pedagogical Stylistics

Advances in Stylistics Series Editor: Dan McIntyre, University of Huddersfield, UK Editorial Board: Beatrix Busse, University of Berne, Switzerland Szilvia Csábi, Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary Monika Fludernik, University of Freiburg, Germany Lesley Jeffries, University of Huddersfield, UK Jean Boase-Beier, University of East Anglia, UK Peter Verdonk, University of Amsterdom (Emeritus), The Netherlands Geoffrey Leech, Lancaster University, UK Larry Stewart, College of Wooster, USA Manuel Jobert, Jean Moulin University, Lyon 3, France Titles in the Series: Oppositions and Ideology in News Discourse Matt Davies I. A. Richards and the Rise of Cognitive Stylistics David West Style in the Renaissance Patricia Canning Chick Lit Rocío Montoro Stylistics and Shakespeare’s Language Mireille Ravassat Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice Yufang Ho D. H. Lawrence and Narrative Viewpoint Violeta Sotirova Discourse of Italian Cinema and Beyond Roberta Piazza Opposition in Discourse Lesley Jeffries

Pedagogical Stylistics Current Trends in Language, Literature and ELT

Edited by

Michael Burke, Szilvia Csábi, Lara Week and Judit Zerkowitz

Advances in Stylistics

Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © Michael Burke, Szilvia Csábi, Lara Week, Judit Zerkowitz and Contributors 2012 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be r­ eproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-4010-4 e-ISBN: 978-1-4411-5987-8 Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Pedagogical stylistics: current trends in language, literature and ELT/ edited by Michael Burke...[et al.].   p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4411-4010-4 (alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4411-2312-1 (ebook epub: alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4411-5987-8 (ebook pdf: alk. paper) 1.  Language and languages–Study and teaching. 2.  Style, Literary–Study and teaching. I.  Burke, Michael, 1964– II.  Title. P53.P378 2012 808–dc23 2011042156

Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Contents

Acknowledgements

vii

Contributors

viii

Introduction: Teaching Stylistics Michael Burke, Szilvia Csábi, Lara Week and Judit Zerkowitz

1

Part One: Analysis, Reading and Reception in Pedagogical Stylistics Chapter 1: Paraphrase as a Way to a Contextualized Stylistic Analysis of Poetry: Tony Harrison’s ‘Marked with D’  Peter Verdonk

11

Chapter 2: Chicken and Egg Stylistics: From Lexical Semantics to Conceptual Integration Theory  Patricia Canning and Paul Simpson

24

Chapter 3: The Reader’s Paradox Peter Stockwell Chapter 4: Experiencing or Interpreting Literature: Wording Instructions  Olivia Fialho, David Miall and Sonia Zyngier

45

58

Part Two: Emerging Trends and Methods in Pedagogical Stylistics Chapter 5: Systemic Stylistics: An Integrative, Rhetorical Method of Teaching and Learning in the Stylistics Classroom  Michael Burke Chapter 6: Creative Writing: A Stylistics Approach Jeremy Scott

77 96

vi

Contents

Chapter 7: Corpus Stylistics in the Classroom Dan McIntyre

113

Chapter 8: Imagined Inference: Teaching Writers to Think Like Readers Billy Clark and Nicky Owtram

126

Chapter 9: Literary Pragmatics in the Advanced Foreign Language ­Literature Classroom: The Case of Young Werther Chantelle Warner

142

Chapter 10: Stylistic Approaches to Teaching Hypertext Fiction Paola Trimarco

158

Part Three: EFL and Pedagogical Stylistics Chapter 11: Revenons à Nos Moutons! Metaphor and Idiom in EFL and ESL Teaching and Learning  Geoff Hall

179

Chapter 12: Stylistics for Language Teachers Judit Zerkowitz

193

Index

211

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the publishers Random House for their permission to reproduce the poem ‘Dolour’, covering the USA and related rights. We are also greatly indebted to Tony Harrison for his permission to reproduce his poem ‘Marked with D’, which appears in Selected Poems and Collected Poems (Penguin  1987 & 2007). While every effort has been made to contact copyright holders, we would be pleased to hear of any that have been omitted. We would also like to show our appreciation to the ‘Advances in Stylistics’ series editor, Dan McIntyre, for his constructive feedback and excellent guidance during the production of this book. Furthermore, we would also like to thank Gurdeep Mattu at Continuum for commissioning and supporting the project in the first place. We are also grateful to the International Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA) for providing us with a forum where we can regularly exchange views and explore further projects within our special pedagogical stylistics interest group. Finally, we are greatly indebted to our students for their inspiration, motivation and willingness to partake in many of our in-class experiments. Without their readiness to help, it would be nigh impossible for us to develop strategies to improve their learning. They may all be anonymous in this book, but we, their teachers, the authors of these chapters, know exactly who they are. This book is dedicated to them and indeed all our past and current students. Middelburg and Budapest August 2011

Contributors

Michael Burke is associate professor of rhetoric and English at Roosevelt Academy, Middelburg (Utrecht University), where he is also head of department. He is the current chair of the International Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA) and is a Routledge Linguistics Series Editor (in rhetoric and stylistics). His publications include Contextualised Stylistics: In Honour of Peter Verdonk (ed. with Stockwell and Bex) 2000, Rodopi and Literary Reading Cognition and Emotion: An Exploration of the Oceanic Mind. 2011, Routledge. He has published many stylistics and pedagogy-related articles in diverse journals including Language and Literature, Style, The European Journal of English Studies and Foundations of Science. Patricia Canning teaches undergraduate and postgraduate modules in linguistics and early modern literature at Queen’s University, Belfast. Her published work reflects her interdisciplinary approach, which incorporates cognitive stylistics, literary theory and phenomenology. She has contributed to Language and Literature, and has just finished her monograph for Continuum’s ‘Advances in Stylistics’ series, Style in the Renaissance: Language and Ideology in Early Modern England. Contributions to Critical Survey and Early Modern Drama and the Politics of Biblical Reading, ed. Adrian Streete (Palgrave Macmillan) are forthcoming. She is currently developing a ‘reading for wellbeing’ project (Get Into Reading) across Northern Ireland on behalf of The Reader Organisation and runs a project with female prisoners in Hydebank Prison, Belfast. Billy Clark is senior lecturer in English Language at Middlesex Univer­ sity  (http://www.mdx.ac.uk/aboutus/staffdirectory/Billy_Clark.aspx) His research is focused mainly on linguistic meaning (semantics and pragmatics). His recent work has focused on intonational meaning, pragmatic ­stylistics and the inferential processes involved in writing. He was section



Contributors

ix

e­ ditor and contributor for the section on ‘Foundations of Linguistics’ in the Elsevier  Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, edited by Keith Brown in 2006. He has worked on a number of committees concerned with links between linguistics and education, including the committee for the United Kingdom Linguistics Olympiad (http://www.uklo.org/) and a group ­working towards the development of an A Level in Linguistics (http://www. phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/ec/langschool/langschool-top.htm). He is currently preparing a book on Relevance Theory for Cambridge University Press. Szilvia Csábi received her doctorate in cognitive linguistics at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary, where she focused on applying conceptual metaphor, metonymy and blend theory to cultural similarities and differences in conceptualization. Her interests also include textual analyses, especially from a cognitive linguistic point of view. She co-authored two edited volumes and published several articles in these fields. She currently works at the Publisher of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences & Wolters Kluwer as managing editor of mono- and bilingual dictionaries. Olívia Fialho is a PhD scholar in Comparative Literature (University of Alberta). She holds an M.A. with distinction in Applied Linguistics (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) and has contributed to empirical studies of literary reading and education (Language and Literature, 2007; 2010) and English in Education (2011). Her doctoral thesis is on self-modifying reading experiences, where she proposes a model for readers’ responses drawing from phenomenology, psychology, stylistics and neuroscience. Her work has educational implications as it offers alternative teaching methods with focus on literary experiencing. Currently she co-coordinates the PALA SIG on Pedagogical Stylistics. Geoff Hall is Professor of English and Head of Division at Nottingham Ningbo University, China. He has been teaching English since 1978 and  holds TEFL teaching qualifications as well as higher degrees from Birmingham and Sussex Universities. He has both international and UK experience in training and educating English teachers. A second edition of his book Literature in Language Education (Palgrave 2005) is in preparation. Other current research includes literary stylistics and uses of English in China. He is the current editor-in-chief of the journal Language and Literature (Sage).

x

Contributors

Dan McIntyre is reader in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Huddersfield, where he is also director of graduate education for the School of Music, Humanities and Media. He has published widely on pedagogical stylistics and is the co-editor of Teaching Stylistics (Palgrave, 2011). His other major publications include Stylistics (Cambridge University Press, 2010), Language and Style (Palgrave, 2010), History of English (Routledge, 2009) and Point of View in Plays (John Benjamins, 2006). He is series editor of Advances in Stylistics (Continuum) and reviews editor for the journal Language and Literature. David S. Miall is professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. He is the editor of Humanities and the Computer: New Directions (1990), Romanticism: The CD-ROM (1997), and author of Literary Reading: Empirical and Theoretical Studies (2006). He has also authored numerous papers on empirical studies of literary reading, Romanticism and computing and literature. Nicky Owtram is head of the Language Centre at the European University Institute in Florence (Italy), where she teaches English for Academic Purposes. She holds a PhD in Linguistics from University College, London. Her research interests lie in the fields of academic writing, comparative stylistics and cognitive pragmatics. Jeremy Scott works at the University of Kent, teaching and researching on the border between language and literary studies. His current research interests are in language and narrative, fictional technique, literary representations of dialect, the relationship between narratives and iden­ tity, stylistics-based approaches to creative writing and portrayals of Englishness in fiction. He has published on style and narrative technique in contemporary British and Irish fiction, and has also published his own fiction. Paul Simpson is a professor of English Language in the School of English at Queen’s University Belfast where he is also director of research in English Language and Linguistics. He teaches and researches in many areas of English language and linguistics and his publications have included, inter alia, studies of the sociolinguistic features of pop singing styles, the pragmatics of advertising discourse and the linguistic patterns of verbal humour. He is best known for his books and articles in stylistics and critical linguistics and his publications in this area include Language,



Contributors

xi

Ideology and Point of View, Language through Literature and Stylistics, all published by Routledge. He is the co-editor of Language, Discourse and Literature (Unwin Hyman) and has edited the PALA journal Language and Literature (2003–2009). His monograph on the discourse of satire was published by Benjamins in 2003, while his co-authored textbook Language and Power appeared in 2009. He is currently developing a monograph on the pragmatics of verbal humour. Peter Stockwell holds the chair in literary linguistics at the University of Nottingham, UK, where he teaches stylistics and cognitive poetics. He is the author and editor of over 15 books, translated into many languages, and 50 research articles. His most recent and well-known books are Texture: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading (EUP 2009), The Language and Literature Reader (with Ron Carter, Routledge 2008), Contemporary Stylistics (with Marina Lambrou, Continuum 2007) and Cognitive Poetics (Routledge 2002). Paola Trimarco completed her PhD in applied linguistics at The University of Edinburgh in 1990. Since then, she has taught and conducted research in linguistics, English education (ESOL and Adult Literacy) and literature. Her publications include three EFL Readers for Penguin Books and a chapter featuring stylistics approaches to teaching in Teaching Short Stories (2010, Palgrave MacMillan). Her articles and reviews in linguistics have appeared in The Journal of Literary Studies, Language and Literature, Teaching English and Dictionaries. She lectures at University Campus Suffolk while supervising an EdD student for The Open University. Peter Verdonk is emeritus professor of stylistics at the University of Amsterdam, where he started teaching in the early 1970s, after a career in maritime law. His main research topics are stylistics, rhetoric and art history. He published several books and widely contributed to journals. He is a member of several editorial boards and honorary member of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA). On his retirement, he was honoured with a festschrift entitled Contextualized Stylistics, edited by Tony Bex, Michael Burke and Peter Stockwell (Rodopi 2000). Chantelle Warner is assistant professor of German Studies and Second Language Acquisition and Teaching at the University of Arizona. Her interest in how meanings are trafficked, contested and legitimated through literary practices drives her research in the fields of German literature, stylistics and foreign language literacy. In some of her most recent work,

xii

Contributors

she  has developed a pedagogical framework for the foreign languageliterature classroom, which considers reading as a process of pragmatic positioning. Her current research project proposes a literary pragmatic approach to the authenticity effects of first-person testimony, with a focus on contemporary German autobiographical literature. Lara Week completed her B.A. in Arts & Humanities at Roosevelt Academy, Middelburg (Utrecht University). During her studies she was editor of the college’s undergraduate journal Ad Astra and assisted in organizing the 2009 conference of the International Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA) held in Middelburg. Lara has a special interest in the power and possibilities of representation, reflected in her undergraduate research (Ad Astra, 2008; 2011). She is currently a producer for theatre company Tribal Soul http://www.tribalsoularts.com/, which creates innovative and func­ tional arts for social change. Judit Zerkowitz teaches applied linguistics and stylistics in Budapest, at Eötvös University, School of English and American Studies, Department of English Applied Linguistics. Her main interests are English language teacher training and text analysis. She has published a book on the methodo­ logy of language teaching, in Hungarian, and has published a number of articles on stylistic analysis in English. She has designed a course for preservice teachers of English entitled stylistics for language teaching based on stylistics, methodology and language through literature. Sonia Zyngier holds a PhD in applied linguistics (University of Birmingham). She is adjunct professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, where she was also director of cultural affairs. She has been on the Board of both PALA and IGEL and has published widely on literary awareness. Among her publications, she contributed to the Elsevier Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics on pedagogical stylistics (2005). In collaboration, she published Directions in Empirical Literary Studies (2008) and Literary Education and Digital Learning: Methods and Technologies for Humanities Studies (2010). Currently, she co-edits the Linguistic Approaches to Literature Series (John Benjamins).

Introduction

Teaching Stylistics This volume is not a product, but part of a process: a process with a rich history; a process that seeks to foreground pedagogical stylistics within the wider framework of literary linguistics, putting teaching and teaching-driven research at the top of our professional agendas. It got underway with the relaunching of the pedagogical stylistics special interest group (Ped-Sig) at the annual Poetics and Linguistics Association conference (PALA) held at the University of Sheffield in 2008. Michael Burke set up a half-day workshop and together with a group of approximately twenty PALA colleagues from around the world – all of whom had a strong interest in their stylistics teaching – set out an agenda for the coming years. This led to a follow-up meeting at the PALA conference in Middelburg at the Roosevelt Academy (Utrecht University) in 2009, with papers, presentations and workshops. It also resulted in the publication of a special issue on pedagogical stylistics in the journal Language and Literature in 2010 (issue number 1). As the icing on the cake, a PALA mini conference/symposium was then planned for April 2010 to be organized in Budapest by Szilvia Csábi and Judit Zerkowitz and hosted at Eötvös Loránd University. That impressive line-up of workshops and speakers never happened due to a certain over-exuberant Icelandic volcano and a somewhat persistent ash cloud lingering above Central Europe. A symposium did eventually take place later that year, albeit in a somewhat diluted form, at the PALA annual conference in Genoa as a hurriedly rearranged pre-conference half-day workshop. This volume has thus evolved from this entire process going back to 2008. However, it did not just appear out of thin air. Before Ped-Sig II, there was the original version, founded and run by Sonia Zyngier and Urszula Clark, which led to some influential publications (see e.g., Clark and Zyngier 2003) and before that there were several excellent publications on the topic of pedagogical studies coming out of the stylistics and applied linguistics communities (e.g., Short and Breen 1988; Carter 1989). Indeed, one can keep going back through the centuries in this rich teaching tradition, past the likes of

2

Pedagogical Stylistics

Hugh Blair and Erasmus, until we arrive at the rhetoric teachers of classical antiquity, such as Quintilian and Isocrates, consummate rhetoric instructors who were doing things in their classrooms that are not too dissimilar to what the pedagogical stylisticians of today are attempting to achieve. A key contention of the present volume is, as Paul Simpson and Patricia Canning argue in Chapter 2, ‘that pedagogical stylistics should occupy a central position not only within its parent discipline, stylistics, but within other cognate disciplines which rely on the application of linguistic models to text and discourse’, for, they go on to say, pedagogical stylistics is a testing ground for stylistic analyses, being part of a ‘circle of understanding’ that involves the text, the theoretical framework and finally the classroom. It is in the classroom that pedagogical stylistics can try out analyses, see what works with what sort of students. It is there that students learn how to read between the lines and how to apply what they have learnt to their various purposes of working with texts. Pedagogical stylistics has the advantage over some other linguistic disciplines, in that it is not ‘pure’ on two grounds at least: by being interdisciplinary, as it always has been, and recently by being decidedly learner-friendly. Students like to have hands-on experience with texts, and although we all realize that the theoretical framework needs to be taught at some point, and in some way, pedagogical stylistics puts emphasis on letting students do what they like doing, allowing them to learn stylistics through reading and analysing texts: in short, learning stylistics through doing stylistics. A consequence of this is the heightened importance of the texts that the students read and analyse in the chapters included here, regardless of whether the approach of the research is theoretical, empirical or practical. Text-wise, the chapters include novels, extracts from novels, short stories, short poems, short quotations from written and spoken discourse and metaphors as starting points for analysis and teaching. The student subjects and student readers vary in age, nationality and knowledge of English. Most are studying English literature or linguistics. However, not all groups are this uniform. There is even a prison-based reading group. Pedagogical stylistics has an interest in individuals and the researchers in this volume report on their work with students. They describe the ways in which they design and teach courses and they explain how they do research that makes pedagogical stylistics more effective. The twelve chapters in this volume are divided into three sections. In the opening chapter, which is the first of four in the section entitled ‘Analysis, Reading and Reception in Pedagogical Stylistics’, Peter Verdonk, as proposed in the title ‘Paraphrase as a Way to a Contextualized Stylistic Analysis of Poetry: Tony Harrison’s “Marked with D”’, reads the Harrison



Introduction

3

poem with his students, and gradually, starting from paraphrase, textual and contextual features, leads them to a stylistically informed understanding of the poem. In doing so, he provides the students with essential categories that will facilitate the reading of any literary text for them in the future. In the second chapter, by Patricia Canning and Paul Simpson, entitled ‘Chicken and Egg Stylistics: From Lexical Semantics to Conceptual Integration Theory’, a poem is read in a cloze-test format, line by line, eliciting lexis, interpretative skills and leading, finally, to a reading that uses conceptual integration theory. Chapter 3 sees Peter Stockwell give expression to a general tendency to capture the motivating and revealing appreciation of texts before actually teaching the nuts and bolts of stylistic analysis. In ‘The Reader’s Paradox’, he takes a short poem and first just reads it with students for intuitive, precritical, even emotional reactions. He then hypothesizes how the readers’ minds work during the reading process and provides detailed stylistic analyses involving cognitive poetics, blends and layers of linguistic study. In the fourth and final chapter in this opening section, Sonia Zyngier, Olivia Fiahlo and David Miall, in ‘Experiencing or Interpreting Literature: Wording Instructions’, found that the wording of instructions for reading experiments influences whether the response will be personal and affective or scholarly and cognitive, while reading the same text, namely, James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’. This shows that if we want to capture the students’ personal and highly motivating responses to reading, we must check the wording of our instructions too: the timing of those questions in itself is not enough. The second section in this volume looks at a diverse range of ‘Emerging Trends and Methods in Pedagogical Stylistics’. In Chapter 5, for example, Michael Burke in ‘Systemic Stylistics: An Integrative, Rhetorical Method of Teaching and Learning in the Stylistics Classroom’ sets out what he terms a ‘systemic’ approach to teaching and learning stylistics. This pedagogical model, structured within Bloom’s taxonomy for educational learning objectives, sees stylistics at the heart of a three-tiered rhetoric programme. First, students are taught basic rhetoric, where they learn to recall and recount all kinds of structural aspects and phenomena, pertaining to invention, composition, stylization, logos, ethos, pathos, style figures, etc. Then, at the second-year level, students learn stylistics, where they bring to bear what they have learnt in the previous, lower-level rhetoric module. The focus here is not on remembering and recall, but on analysis and analogy. After stylistics, at the third level, students engage in a course called ‘a rhetorical and stylistic approach to creative writing’. Here, it is not

4

Pedagogical Stylistics

remembering or analysis that is important, but synthesis and creation. Burke argues that learning stylistics within such a rhetorical framework enhances learning, understanding, creation and cognition, and perhaps more pertinently, makes students potentially better stylisticians than if they had just taken isolated stylistics modules. Burke’s chapter employs both theoretical modelling and qualitative analysis in order to make a case for the adoption of a ‘systemic’ approach to teaching stylistics. Following on from Burke, in Chapter 6, Jeremy Scott explores a stylistics of creative writing as a novel use of the art. In his chapter entitled ‘Creative Writing: A Stylistics Approach’, Scott advocates creative writers engaging in stylistics to reach critical creativity (Rob Pope’s term) so that they should not only practise, but also understand, what they are doing. Raising consciousness of stylistic effect can prevent underutilizing the critical faculty in the heat of creative writing. Exercises such as changing the homodiegetic perspective and idiosyncratic voice in novels such as Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day make writers-to-be realize how the same story can be told in different ways. Chapter 7 sees Dan McIntyre in his study entitled ‘Corpus Stylistics in the Classroom’ argue that the commitment of stylistics to improving the learning experience of students goes hand-in-hand with the stylisticians’ enthusiasm for integrating teaching and research. This commitment to the pedagogy of the discipline is important, since new analytical and methodological techniques can take time to trickle down to the stylistics classroom, especially when they require special facilities and know-how, as in the case of using large-scale computer corpora in stylistic analysis. McIntyre focuses initially on the pedagogy of corpus stylistics: that is, how best to teach this particular approach. He claims that this can have ‘washback’ effects on pedagogical stylistics in general. He takes an electronic version of For Whom the Bell Tolls and compares it to a large corpus, in order to validate or disprove non-electronic literary critical analyses. Such possibilities are likely to intrigue and motivate present-day students, not just researchers. Although McIntyre focuses on the pedagogy of corpus stylistics in particular, his work impacts on other areas of study and has the potential to reach all kinds of students. He envisages ‘a circular and mutually beneficial relationship between the pedagogy of stylistics specifically, and pedagogical stylistics generally.’ In Chapter 8, Billy Clark and Nicky Owtram, in ‘Imagined Inference: Teaching Writers to Think Like Readers’, investigate short texts we say or hear, write or read and put them in the inferential perspective to make writers conscious of the effect they may create. In the following example,



Introduction

5

the last sentence is analysed for probably intended and probably perceivable meanings: ‘A tennis player is interviewed after a very close match which she finally won. She is asked whether she feels any compassion for the player who lost and she replies: “I’m a human being”’. In Chapter 9, entitled ‘Literary Pragmatics in the Advanced Foreign Language Literature Classroom: The Case of Young Werther’, Chantelle Warner employs literary pragmatics, changing the approach from top-down referential preparation of the text to its representational, bottom-up, inferential introduction in class, thereby exploiting the motivating power of emotional involvement and personal discovery. Warner argues that ‘the umbrella framework of literary pragmatics can help us to attend to our students’ personal, affective responses to works of literature, while also recognizing the differential symbolic power of the cultural and social knowledge, which different readers access in given contexts’. In the final chapter in this section, Chapter 10, Paola Trimarco in ‘Stylistic Approaches to Teaching Hypertext Fiction’ first teaches Labov’s phases of narration, and cognitive linguistic categories, such as text worlds, subworlds, schemata refreshment and the like. When the students already have narrative and cognitive maps in their minds, that is, when the teacher sends them into the wilderness of a hypertext love story of ‘lies and reality’ to find their way, they create their own versions of the story. Her experiment shows that both the narrative and the cognitive groups benefited from pretraining; the maps made their journeys more exciting and memorable. The third and final section of this volume focuses on ‘EFL and Pedagogical Stylistics’. In Chapter 11, Geoff Hall provides, in ‘Revenons à Nos Moutons! Metaphor and Idiom in EFL and ESL Teaching and Learning’, examples of metaphors from literary and business texts. He advocates a ‘return to first principles’ in learning. This ‘back to basics’ appeal is not as conservative as it may at first seem. He notes how cognitive linguistics  (CL) has certainly shown us much of interest about metaphorical thinking and conceptualization, if not so much about the use of such language or about its learning. He argues further though that corpus linguistics, discourse analysis and even conversation analysis are more informative than cognitive linguistics when it comes to understanding language use. He ends with a plea to teachers and course material designers and developers to be well informed and to work in a way that is appropriate to a knowledgeable state. Chapter 12 is the final chapter both in this section and in the volume. Here, in ‘Stylistics for Language Teachers’, Judit Zerkowitz argues for the text-first approach in teaching stylistics to language teachers and learners as well, for after being made aware of grammatical correctness in formal teaching, what is

6

Pedagogical Stylistics

needed is awareness of stylistic maxims and values to complete their textual awareness. An example of stylistics for language learners is presented, and then tried and tested in a secondary-school classroom. Two translations and the original of a 100-word-long Hungarian short story, ‘In memoriam of Dr K.H.G.’, are offered to students for comparing bottom-up, descriptive, linguistic pattern-driven analyses, and top-down, literary interpretation-driven analyses. Two lists of analytical terms, informal and intuitive for the language learners, and formal and stylistic for the language teachers, are then proposed as being useful for teaching language through stylistics. Two ‘loops’ or ‘circles’, as it were, stand out as features that appear in all the chapters in this volume and which also characterize the dynamism of the field: the circle of understanding between text, theory and classroom (see Canning and Simpson), and the circle that connects pedagogical stylistics to the pedagogy of stylistics (see McIntyre). The methods that the researchers use vary from introspection to corpus studies, from empirical research to teaching practice. The variety of issues raised, the emerging trends, the differing methods and ways and the enthusiasm of the parties involved (researchers, teachers, students) all show that there is a keen interest in this fast developing area of pedagogical stylistics. It is hoped that the twelve studies in this volume will inspire and motivate other teachers to experiment in their language, literature and stylistics classrooms with the learning processes of their students. After all, it is the learning of our students that is paramount. As Bellard-Thomson (2010: 55) has noted, ‘it seems not unreasonable that we should examine our concept of how stylistics is learned’. This idea is echoed in certain ways in a recent paper entitled ‘Why care about pedagogical stylistics?’ (Burke 2010). In this paper, Burke (2010: 11) argues that ‘while doing stylistics for the sake of ourselves is a pleasurable exercise, doing it for the sake of our students is a commendable necessity’. This sentiment, where the student learner and his/her learning processes and experiences take centre stage – rather than the ‘teacher as theatrical performer’ or, equally incongruously, the ‘teacher as talking textbook’ – is at the very heart of this volume.

References Bellard-Thomson, C. A. (2010), ‘How students learn stylistics: Constructing an empirical study’. Language and Literature, 19, (1), 35–57. Burke, M. (2010), ‘Why care about pedagogical stylistics’. Language and Literature, 19, (1), 7–11.



Introduction

7

Carter, R. (1989), ‘Directions in the teaching and study of English stylistics’, in M. Short (ed.), ­Reading, Analysing and Teaching Literature. London and New York: Longman, pp. 10–21. Clark, U. and Zyngier, S. (2003), ‘Towards a pedagogical stylistics’. Language and Literature, 12, (4), 339–51. Short, M. and Breen, M. P. (1988), ‘Innovations in the teaching of literature (1): Putting stylistics in its place’. Critical Quarterly, 30, (2), 18.

8

Part One

Analysis, Reading and Reception in Pedagogical Stylistics

10

Chapter 1

Paraphrase as a Way to a Contextualized Stylistic Analysis of Poetry: Tony Harrison’s ‘Marked with D’1 Peter Verdonk

1.1  Paraphrase: An Ancient Pedagogical Device Most desk dictionaries define both the verb and the noun ‘paraphrase’ as expressing the meaning of a text by using different, usually simpler words, often to achieve greater clarity. Considering this definition, it is not surprising that paraphrase is a frequently used teaching strategy (Pope 1998: 266). As a matter of fact, it is literally an ancient pedagogical device, already used in the classical schools of oratory. For example, the famous Roman teacher of rhetoric and orator Quintilian (c. 35–c. 95 AD) made the following observations in his equally famous Institutio Oratoria (Training of an Orator): . . . paraphrase . . . is specially valuable with regard to poetry; . . . the lofty inspiration of verse serves to elevate the orator’s style and the bold license of poetic language does not preclude our attempting to render the same words in the language natural to prose.  .  .  .  For, instead of ­hurriedly ­running a careless eye over the writings [of the greatest authors], we handle each separate phrase and are forced to give it close examination, and we come to realise the greatness of their excellence from the very fact that we cannot imitate them. (Quintilian c. 94, trans. Butler 1993: 115–17) Therefore, although in principle subscribing to the New Critical doctrine that in poetry as well as in other arts, form and content are inseparable, I would not go as far as calling any attempt to paraphrase a poem ‘heretical’ (Brooks 1947: 192–214). On the contrary, I have found that an explanatory paraphrase of a poem is often pedagogically useful because it reveals the

12

Pedagogical Stylistics

student’s struggle with the text when trying to account for its possible meaning by rewording it. Furthermore, paraphrase gives rise to an implicit discussion and elaboration of the notion of literary style (Nash 1992: 67– 82). And last but not least, when paraphrasing a poem, other relevant theoretical issues, such as the concepts of text, context, discourse, reference and representation, also come into play.

1.2  A Students’ Paraphrase of Tony Harrison’s ‘Marked with D’ Let us first look at Tony Harrison’s poem ‘Marked with D’ and then at a possible paraphrase, which was recently made by students of a liberal arts and sciences international undergraduate honours college during a guest workshop:2 Marked with D 1. When the chilled dough of his flesh went in an oven 2. not unlike those he fuelled all his life, 3. I thought of his cataracts ablaze with Heaven 4. and radiant with the sight of his dead wife, 5. light streaming from his mouth to shape her name, 6. ‘not Florence and not Flo but always Florrie’. 7. I thought how his cold tongue burst into flame 8. but only literally, which makes me sorry, 9. sorry for his sake there’s no Heaven to reach. 10. I get it all from Earth my daily bread 11. but he hungered for release from mortal speech 12. that kept him down, the tongue that weighed like lead. 3. The baker’s man that no one will see rise 1 14. and England made to feel like some dull oaf 15. is smoke, enough to sting one person’s eyes 16. and ash (not unlike flour) for one small loaf. Tony Harrison (1987, 2007)3 After reading the poem quite a few times, the students came up with the following interpretative paraphrase, which I have put together from an amalgamation of their diverse input. To begin with, prompted by the intrigu­ing title ‘Marked with D’, the British contingent in the class cleverly



Paraphrase as a Way to a Contextualized Stylistic Analysis of Poetry

13

spotted the allusion to the following well-known nursery rhyme and clapping song: Pat a cake, pat a cake, Baker’s man. Bake me a cake As fast as you can. Pat it and prick it, And mark it with B, And put it in the oven For Baby and me. Anonymous (1985: 92) All students were quick to sense the cruel irony of the allusion. In the children’s rhyme, the baker’s man is asked to put a cake in the oven and bake it to celebrate a new life, whereas in the poem it is the baker’s man who is put in an oven to be cremated. (Not to mention the preliminary pricking and marking!) Therefore, it seems plausible to assume that the capital D in the poem’s title stands for ‘Death’. At the same time, the majority of the class also felt that there is enough textual evidence to argue that the D may also be an abbreviation of ‘Damnation’ in the sense of ‘condemnation to hell’, which would fit in with the speaker’s obvious scepticism about a life hereafter (lines 7–12). Furthermore, considering what the speaker bitterly observes about the baker’s marginalization in England’s class-conscious society, a valid hypothesis could also be that the D stands for ‘Doom’ in the sense of ‘social doom’ (lines 13–14). Yet another possibility is that it hints at the baker’s feeling ‘Dumb’ because he felt hampered by his heavy local accent (lines 11–12). When rounding off the discussion about the poem’s title, it was suggested that the speaker’s attitude towards the baker’s man is complex and ambivalent, to say the least (see the paraphrase below). All the same, the wording of his thoughts in lines 3–9 and lines 13–16 is affectionate and intimate enough to justify the presumption that the baker’s man is the speaker’s father, in which case the D might also stand for ‘Dad’. Now for a paraphrase of the poem itself. The speaker in the poem begins with an account of the cremation of a baker, ironically comparing his dead body to chilled dough being shoved into an oven, not unlike the ovens he had fuelled all his life. Entirely in agreement with this indifferent attitude towards the deceased, the speaker consistently refers to him in the third person and, at one time, even as the baker’s man (line 13) from the nursery

14

Pedagogical Stylistics

rhyme, which, at least to some extent, has a rather distancing effect. Then, more sympathetically, he sees in his imagination the cataracts in the dead man’s eyes, ablaze with a heavenly fire and blissful happiness at the sight of his dead wife, with whom he is now reunited. A beam of light is emitted from his mouth, shaping her name, not Florence and not Flo but always Florrie (line 6). In the same train of thought, the speaker imagines how the numbed tongue of the deceased catches fire, be it only literally and not in religious ecstasy. This makes him feel sorry, not for himself but for the sake of the baker, that there is no Heaven to go to. Realistically and perhaps cynically, the speaker concludes that he himself has to make a living in this world and that, being a poet, the daily language used around him is his bread and butter. This is in stark contrast to the deceased, who had always been eager to be freed from the shackles of the language of mortals, which had made him feel inadequate in self-expression, with his tongue feeling as heavy as lead. Returning to the scene of the cremation, the speaker reflects ruefully that no one will ever see the baker’s man rise neither to heaven nor in this world, where throughout his life, class-conscious England had made him feel like some stupid person, who is now no more than a wisp of smoke enough to sting the speaker’s eyes, and a bit of ash (not unlike bakery flour) barely enough for only one small loaf. Herewith ends the students’ joint attempt at a paraphrase of the poem and begins my solo effort to add some theoretical points.

1.3  Text, Context and Discourse Because of its pivotal role, I must first discuss the concept of text, which may be defined as the verbal record of an oral or written act of communication. Now, the meaning of a text does not come into being until it is actually related to an appropriate context of use. This process of contextualization of the text is actually the listener’s or reader’s attempt at a reconstruction of the speaker’s or writer’s intended message or discourse. Naturally, this is an ongoing activity because the text by itself, i.e., without guidance from the context, is to a large extent meaningless. Similarly, a contextualized discourse without its textual guide would lose its linguistic bearings and, in point of fact, not come into being at all (Werth 1999: 149–50). In sum, one might say that, in a way, discourse takes text and context together because they may be seen as interacting generators of meaning. When making their paraphrase, the students must have done this inferencing of the poet’s discourse more or less intuitively. Being verbal



Paraphrase as a Way to a Contextualized Stylistic Analysis of Poetry

15

creatures, they must have followed their communicative instincts and searched the poet’s text for clues as to how they had best visualize or reconstruct the whole contextual environment in which the discourse appears to occur, ranging from the narrower context of the immediate situation to the much wider context of social, cultural or historical factors. At this point, it is essential to note that this contextual orbit also includes the actual reader’s own perspective on the poem’s discourse, which unavoidably colours its interpretation. Of course, this individual influence differs from reader to reader because they come from different social and cultural backgrounds and thus have different beliefs and attitudes. Because it is an immense topic, I need to be a bit more precise about the notion of context. In actual fact, there are two types of context. The first is the internal linguistic context, that is, the surrounding features of language inside a text, like sounds, words, phrases and clauses – for example, the verbal patterns in ‘Marked with D’, as discussed in a later section. The second is the somewhat bewildering non-linguistic context that draws us to ideas and experiences in the world outside the text and includes components like the following: (a) The personality, emotions, abilities, beliefs and assumptions of the poem’s speaker and interlocutor, if any. (b) The reader’s own perspective on the discourse. (c) The temporal and physical situation of the discourse. (d) The sociocultural situation inside and outside the poem. (e) The general background knowledge required for the discourse to be understood. (f) Knowledge of the stylistic conventions of the text type or genre. For example, in poetry, its particular semantic phenomena like imagery and figures of speech; its spatial arrangement in lines and stanzas; its parallel sound patterns, vocabulary or syntax. See also the discussion of the Meredithian sonnet in a later section. (g) Intertextuality, i.e., the association with other similar or related text types. For instance, the allusion to the nursery rhyme ‘Pat a cake, pat a cake’. Readers might enlarge the intertextual range of ‘Marked with D’ considerably by reading some more poems from The School of Eloquence, such as ‘Book Ends I, II’, ‘Confessional Poetry’ and ‘Long Distance I, II’ in Harrison (1987: 109ff). Considering the reader’s natural role as a builder of contexts in order to unravel the poet’s discourse or artistic message, I think it would be an

16

Pedagogical Stylistics

interesting and instructive exercise to read carefully once more the students’ paraphrase of Harrison’s poem, listing the contextual features that possibly influenced their inference of the poet’s discourse. At the same time, they might make a note of their own personal, and perhaps different, views on the matter.

1.4  Reference and Representation The above process of inferring a speaker’s or writer’s intended discourse by relating the relevant text to a particular context is, in principle, the same for non-literary and literary texts. However, there is an essential difference between the kinds of contexts of these two types of texts because non-literary texts are used within an identifiable and describable contextual situation, whereas in the case of literary texts, readers have to construe a context from the text itself (Leech 2008: 33). This implies that the language of nonliterary texts is referential, in other words, that it is used to make direct reference to all sorts of things in an observable context. Naturally, this use of language for efficient and effective communication is common social practice. Note, too, that in this referential function, language is by definition transitory because we tend to forget about it the moment we have identified the items referred to. Literary texts, on the other hand, provide a representation of a self-construed context – in other words, through their peculiar and unconventional uses of language, they invite and motivate, sometimes even provoke, readers to create an imaginary alternative world. In this case, the language becomes the constant factor to which we have to go back every time we wish to recall what we have imagined (Widdowson 1992: 16–25).

1.5  Verbal Patterning and Representational Meaning in Harrison’s ‘Marked with D’ As we have noted, language in its referential function is determined by an identifiable context. With representation, however, the context has to be inferred from the text and is therefore dependent on language, which is often arranged into unique patterns disclosing a world different from that transferred by everyday referential language (Widdowson 1992: 33–8). Thus, given the fact that the occasion of the poem is the cremation of ‘the baker’s man’, which perhaps in itself is somehow ironic, we might have expected lexical patterns appealing to our knowledge frames relating to



Paraphrase as a Way to a Contextualized Stylistic Analysis of Poetry

17

such a ceremony. These frames or schemata are cognitive constructs built up in the course of our personal and social lives about all kinds of experiences, which we project onto situations and events in the discourse we are trying to interpret. A lexical pattern is an arrangement of words that tend to turn up together in texts because they relate to the same topic, e.g., ‘ice’, ‘snow’, ‘frost’, ‘blizzard’ and ‘showers’ in a weather forecast. This high density of meteorological terms is clearly expected in such a context. The pattern is referential and therefore makes little or no lasting impact. However, in literary texts, the effect of a particular lexical pattern is representational so that the reader has to construe a context that makes sense of the pattern. So, in this poem we would probably have expected a lexical pattern describing a cremation; however, what we do find is an extensive string of words and phrases, running throughout the poem, which build up to an image summoning up the process of bread-baking, involving heating an oven and stoking up the fire to a blaze: the chilled dough; went in an oven (1); fuelled (2); ablaze (3); radiant (4); burst into flame (7); daily bread (10); the baker’s man; rise (13) (note the pun); smoke, enough to sting one person’s eyes (15); ash (not unlike flour); one small loaf (16). It almost seems as if, as a result of the cremation, the baker himself had been baked into one small loaf (16), which might well reflect his underdog position in society. This breaking down of an existing knowledge schema (here one about a cremation), reorganizing it and building a new one, which Cook (1994: 10–11, 189–99) has appropriately called ‘schema refreshment’, is a characteristic style feature of literary discourse. It is a typical instance of my earlier assertion that literary discourse makes no direct reference to the world of our ordinary existence. Instead, it provides a representation of it through its peculiar uses of language, which motivate readers to take a different perspective on what is familiar and to create an alternative internal context. Another such example is the gruesome image in the first line, When the chilled dough of his flesh went in an oven. We would have expected much milder words, but instead the speaker chooses a cold-hearted representation of this emotional moment. This stands in stark contrast to the representational pattern of light images in lines 3–6, describing the bond of love that existed between the baker’s man and his wife, whom I believe to be the speaker’s parents: I thought of his cataracts ablaze with Heaven / and radiant with the sight of his dead wife, / light streaming from his mouth to shape her name, / ‘not Florence, and not Flo but always Florrie’. The inclusion of the pet name reveals the closeness and intimacy in the couple’s relationship, which, it seems, was missing between the speaker and his father.

18

Pedagogical Stylistics

Then the poet shifts again to the relationship with his father in lines 7–9: I thought of his cold tongue burst into flame / but only literally, which makes me sorry / sorry for his sake there’s no Heaven to reach. Why is his father’s tongue (note the pun) represented as cold? Is it morbid death imagery, or is it another example of the strained bond between the poet and his father? Furthermore, the word literally is significant because it implies that the poet can only take the image his cold tongue burst into flame literally and that he is unable to believe in its transcendental meaning as it is worded in the biblical scene in which the Holy Ghost descends on the apostles at Pentecost: ‘And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them’ (The Acts of the Apostles, ch. 2.3). Moreover, in lines 7–10 we might see a possible reason for the estrange­ ment between the poet and his father. Being a working-class man, his father probably had a strong religious background, which the highly educated poet did not share: there’s no Heaven to reach / I get it all from Earth my daily bread. This last phrase is clearly reminiscent of the Lord’s Prayer (Mt. ch. 6.6). Note here, too, the pun in the metaphor in line 13: The baker’s man that no one will see rise. On the one hand, it may illustrate again the poet’s disbelief in religious matters: there will be no rising to heaven, no resurrection. All that is left of us is smoke and a little ash. Again, the use of the word ash in line 16 may be a play on words in that it may be taken literally and it may evoke the phrase used during the burial service, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, usually spoken as the dead person is about to be buried. On the other hand, however, if the reader interprets rise as part of a political or ideological scheme in the sense of ‘social climbing’, the metaphor might also imply that in the class-divided society that England is, the baker’s man will be given no chance whatsoever to rise above his own class, the working class. Actually, this theme of social oppression appears to begin in lines 11–12: but he hungered for release from mortal speech / that kept him down, the tongue that weighed like lead. (As noted before, the word tongue is used ambiguously.) Probably, the poet  alludes here to his father’s futile attempts to escape from the social stereotypes about local English dialects, which made him feel he had a speech impediment.

1.6  Linguistic Markers of Perspective and Positioning of the Reader In our search for the context of a poem’s discourse, we make use of a frequently occurring knowledge schema expressing interpersonal relationships.



Paraphrase as a Way to a Contextualized Stylistic Analysis of Poetry

19

It has to do with how people in a communicative discourse refer or ‘point’ to themselves, to others and to place and time – e.g., I tell you this here and now. ‘Pointing’ through language is one of the most basic things we do in discourse, and the technical term for the phenomenon is deixis, from the Greek word for ‘pointing’ or ‘showing’, while the linguistic forms used to accomplish this pointing are called deictics or deictic expressions. We may distinguish three types of deictics: place or spatial deictics including adverbs such as here (near the speaker), there (away from the speaker), prepositional phrases like in front of, behind, to the left; demonstrative pronouns this and these (near the speaker), and that and those (away from the speaker); and the deictic verbs come and bring in the direction of the speaker, and go and take in a direction away from the speaker. Another category is time deictics, including items such as now, then, today, yesterday, tomorrow. Other important time deictics are the present and past tenses of full verbs, e.g., play(s), played, and of auxiliaries, e.g., was, were. The third category is person deictics, which include the first-person pronoun I (and its related forms me, my, mine), and the second-person pronoun you (and its related forms your and yours). These are the terms that people use to refer to themselves and to talk to each other. In deictic terms, therefore, third-person pronouns like he, she, her, him, they and them are no direct participants in basic I/you interaction and, being outsiders, are necessarily more distant. You will have noticed that deictic expressions depend for their interpretation on the speaker and hearer sharing the same context. Indeed, deictic expressions have their most basic uses in face-to-face spoken interaction. However, in writing, and so in Harrison’s poem, things are different. Consider, for example, a simple written note saying Meet me here tomorrow. Obviously, you can only interpret this pragmatically, i.e., if you know the context, so if you know the person me, the place here and the time related to tomorrow. Similarly, in Harrison’s poem, readers know, of course, the semantic or dictionary meaning of its deictic words, but they do not know their situational (i.e., contextual) or pragmatic meaning. However, prompted by their experience of the real world, that is, their deictic schemata, readers will understand these context-sensitive expressions as representations of the people, places and times in the poem, and they will act on them as cues to imagine themselves as participating in the situation of the fictional world of the poem’s discourse. It is important to realize that deictics are clearly tied to the speaker’s context of person, time and place, the so-called deictic centre. Deictics are

20

Pedagogical Stylistics

egocentric, so to speak, with the most basic distinction between deictic expressions being ‘near the speaker’ versus ‘away from the speaker’. In English, the ‘near-speaker’ or proximal terms are this, here and now. The ‘away-from-speaker’ or distal terms are that, there and then. The same goes for the present and past tense of verbs, e.g., I live here now and I lived there then. Probably, the pragmatic (i.e., contextual) basis of distal deixis is psycho­ logical distance. Physically close objects or people will tend to be treated by the speaker as psychologically close, e.g., These are my friends. Also, something/ someone that is physically distant will generally be treated as psychologically distant, e.g., That man over there. However, a speaker may also wish to mark somebody who is physically close as psychologically distant, I don’t like that man. Similar psychological processes seem to be at work in our distinction between proximal and distal expressions, which are used to mark time deixis. For example, in If I were rich, the past tense does not refer to something that happened in the past. In fact, it never happened. It is presented as deictically distant from the speaker’s current situation. So distant, indeed, that it actually communicates the negative, i.e., we infer that the speaker is not rich.

1.7  Deixis and Perspective in the Poem As we have seen, the discourse in the poem is representational, and not referential. Hence, the deictic first-person pronoun I in the poem does not refer to the biographical poet, but to a persona or speaker acting on his behalf within the discourse world of the poem. This poetic character may resemble him but is not his equivalent. In other words, readers are not assumed to focus on the speaker’s external context, but only on that which is internally created in the poem itself. As a matter of fact, the same holds for all other deictic words in the poem, because prompted by their schematic knowledge and real-world experience, readers will interpret these contextsensitive words as referring to the people, places and times within the world of the poem, in sum, its internal context. Obviously, this enables readers to create an imaginary alternative world. Because deictics are speaker centred, humans are cognitively primed to relate the persons, objects, space and time in the world around them to their own subjective position, that is, to see them from their own perspective. Accordingly, everything in the world of the poem is seen and understood



Paraphrase as a Way to a Contextualized Stylistic Analysis of Poetry

21

from the viewpoint of the poetic speaker. Obviously, readers are potential speakers, too, having the same cognitive ability, and they will therefore intuitively share this perspective. For the same reason, they notice that there is no deictic second-person you in the poem, with the natural result that they feel drawn in to fill this role so that they will be maximally involved in the happenings in the poem. Having found this out, readers will realize that a strategic use of deictic terms is a powerful rhetorical weapon. For instance, the earlier mentioned first-person deictic I is used in a conspicuous position at the beginning of lines 3, 7 and 10, while in line 8 the deictic me appears to get more emphasis because of the repetition of the object complement sorry in the next line. Perhaps the earlier-mentioned absence of the second-person you also suggests that the speaker wants to keep the cremation personal and intimate. Furthermore, it is striking that the distribution of the deictic first-person pronoun I splits the poem into two clearly separate parts. The first part, embedded in lines 1–12, describes the cremation and the speaker’s reflections on this, whereas the last four lines (lines 13–16) express a strong protest against the English social and political system, which makes it virtually impossible for a working-class man to work himself up in the world. By now, the speaker is hiding behind the impersonal phrase one person’s eyes in the last but one line. The past-tense verbs went in line 1 and thought in lines 3 and 7 are used deictically because they point to the time to which the speaker relates the imagined events he describes during the cremation. Putting it differently, the past-tense verbs are psychologically lodged in the speaker’s temporal self-orientation. The rhetorical effect of these past tenses, like the absence of the second-person deictic you, may also be that the speaker wants to keep the reader at some distance to mark once more that the ceremony is a private matter. There is a transition to the deictic present tense in line 8: which makes me sorry. It is continued in line 10: I get it all from Earth my daily bread, and line 15: [The baker’s man] is smoke, enough to sting one person’s eyes. This choice of the deictic present tense appears to have the effect of bringing the events to the speaker’s immediate psychological awareness. Since readers have the same cognitive ability, the rhetorical effect will be that they are prompted to reconstruct this temporal shift and thus share the speaker’s perspective of immediacy. It follows from the earlier-mentioned speaker-centred nature of deictics that not all the past and present tenses in the poem are used as such because they are not oriented to the speaker’s temporal and spatial situation. For example, the narrative past tenses in lines 2: not unlike those he fuelled all his

22

Pedagogical Stylistics

life, 11: he hungered for release from mortal speech, 12: that kept him down, the tongue that weighed like lead and 14: and England made to feel like some dull oaf. Actually, these past tenses turn out to be related to the life and experiences of the depersonalizing metaphor the chilled dough of his flesh in the first line. Perhaps deliberately, this macabre image is not identified until line 13 as The baker’s man, who has so far been cataphorically referred to by the nonidentifying third-person pronouns he/his/him in  almost every line. In the meantime, readers may well have got the distinct impression that The baker’s man has been marginalized not only by a class-conscious society but also by the poetic speaker.

1.8  Style and Meaning: The Verse Form of ‘Marked with D’ Style has a phenomenal as well as a conceptual element, which, although they can be distinguished, are at the same time inseparably interconnected. For instance, Tony Harrison’s frequent use of puns is a recognizable phenomenal aspect of his art, which simultaneously conveys a conceptual significance. In other words, it appears that style is concerned with the mutually creative interplay between perceptible form and intangible content. This inseparability of style and meaning also comes up with regard to the question of why the poetic speaker has chosen the form of the so-called Meredithian sonnet, which is a kind of challenge to the limitation of the traditional 14-line sonnet. The 16 lines of ‘Marked with D’ rhyme alternately throughout the poem, in a kind of back-and-forth form: ababcdcdefefghgh. (Note the imperfect rhyme between oven and Heaven in lines 1 and 3. Does this dissonance reflect the speaker’s disbelief worded in line 9?) The layout of the poem on the page, however, does not show eight couplets, but a group of six, two groups of three and a separate group of four lines. So, like most conventional sonnets, the Meredithian sonnet also makes use of a turn or volte after 12 lines. The significance of this formal separation might be interpreted as iconic of the isolated and dead-end situation of the working-class man in English class-conscious society. This again might suggest the possibility that the poetic speaker’s preference for this subverted version of the conventional sonnet is an expression of his social and political rebelliousness. At the same time, the disciplined and orderly structure of the Meredithian sonnet, in spite of, or perhaps just because of its waywardness, prevents the poem’s speaker from losing control over his language when protesting against the ills of modern society. Evidently that would be a fundamental mistake because, in terms of the



Paraphrase as a Way to a Contextualized Stylistic Analysis of Poetry

23

point that this chapter has tried to make, he would no longer be the untouchable persona living within his self-created poetic context, but become a mere political pamphleteer in the context of the wicked world outside.

Notes The author and publisher are grateful to Tony Harrison for his permission to reproduce his poem ‘Marked with D’, which appears in Selected Poems and Collected Poems (Penguin 1987, 2007). 2 I am most grateful to Dr Michael Burke, associate professor of rhetoric and stylistics at Roosevelt Academy, Middelburg (Utrecht University), for his invitation to give this paper and to the students involved for their active and inspiring cooperation. 3 Line numbers added by present author.

1





References Anonymous (1985), Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes. Illustrated by Hilda Offen. ­London: Octopus Books. Brooks, C. (1947), The Well Wrought Urn. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Cook, G. (1994), Discourse and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harrison, T. (1987), Selected Poems (2nd edn). London: Penguin Books. Leech, G. N. (2008), Language in Literature: Style and Foregrounding. Harlow: Pearson Education. Nash, W. (1992), The Uncommon Tongue: The Uses and Resources of English. London and New York: Routledge. Pope, R. (1998), The English Studies Book. London and New York: Routledge. Quintilian, M. F. (c. 94)/Butler, H. E. (transl.) (1993), The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian (Vol. IV). Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Werth, P. (1999), Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse. Harlow: Pearson Education. Widdowson, H. G. (1992), Practical Stylistics: An Approach to Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 2

Chicken and Egg Stylistics: From Lexical Semantics to Conceptual Integration Theory Patricia Canning and Paul Simpson

2.1  Pedagogical Stylistics: Core or Periphery? This chapter develops and argues a series of interrelated points, among which is the key contention that pedagogical stylistics should occupy a central position not only within its parent discipline, stylistics, but within other cognate disciplines that rely on the application of linguistic models to text and discourse. A special characteristic of pedagogical stylistics, we argue, lies in its value as a testing ground for models and frameworks whose development has otherwise been entirely intuited by linguists from an introspective ‘knowledge’ about language. Moreover, testimony to the special place afforded to pedagogy in contemporary stylistics comes, paradoxically, through the marked absence of this synergy in parallel disciplines. For instance, critical linguistics, which is often thought of as stylistics’ sister discipline, has to the best of our knowledge no comparable emphasis on pedagogy, no programme where the central and guiding theoretical tenets of the discipline can be developed, revised or remodelled in the language classroom. Over the course of this chapter, we argue that the pedagogical dimension in stylistics is itself part of a circle of understanding that also encompasses the (literary) text under scrutiny and the theoretical framework that underpins the stylistic analysis. In the present study, we naturally foreground the primacy of the classroom. However, we also expand the framework of reference by looking outside the traditional teaching and learning environments of the university to consider data from a prison reading group alongside examples of interactive learning from online Facebook data. In all, and through the comparison of this evidence from non-traditional sources, we hope to demonstrate how pedagogical stylistics offers some validation for theoretical frameworks that have, as it were, been developed in vitro. And we hope by imputation to show that the pedagogical dimension



Chicken and Egg Stylistics

25

is not so much an adjunct to an analysis, but is at the core of the stylistics endeavour. Our method is built on an earlier exercise by Simpson (1997), which is itself predicated on a previous analysis by Thorne (1970). Both of these studies focus, broadly, on patterns of semantics and lexico-grammar in Theodore Roethke’s short poem ‘Dolour’.1 Thorne seeks to account for unusual grammatical structures in the poem by suggesting that readers develop a ‘grammar of the poem’ to help accommodate these anomalies and deviations. Thorne’s is an important study in a number of respects, not least because it marks, outside some of the work of Ohmann (e.g., 1964), one of the few stylistic applications of transformational generative linguistics to literature. The ‘grammar-of-the-poem’ thesis is also intriguing because, pace contemporary cognitive stylistics, it probes the reading strategies that readers employ to make sense of the often complex language of literary texts. Thorne’s arguably most contentious claim, however, and the one that prompts Simpson’s subsequent study, is his assertion that the reader’s development of a grammar to understand a poem is a process akin to ‘learning a new language (or dialect)’ (Thorne 1970: 194). Addressing this particular formulation, Simpson argues that the understanding of anomalous language is an intra-linguistic phenomenon, the explanation for which is not analogous to a speaker’s understanding of different or distinct language systems (Simpson 1997: 97). Indeed, if the interpretation of deviant structures in poetry is to be equated with the learning of a new language, then the process of literary ‘reading’ would be much the same as that of a native speaker of English learning French or Spanish. Simpson’s method was therefore to reassess the Roethke poem in a more ‘bottom-up’ way, employing a technique familiar to pedagogical stylistics. This is the technique of cloze procedure, which is the blanking-out of items in a syntagmatic chain and the subsequent eliciting of informants’ predictions about which sorts of entries could fill that particular grammatical context. Using the procedure, Simpson created a number of lexical gaps in the first six lines of the poem, and then investigated participant responses to these gaps in terms of how they were shaped by grammatical determinants across the remainder of the poetic line. Although rudimentary both in terms of experimental design and theoretical rigour, the exercise nonetheless hinted at how certain sequences of text, no matter how ‘deviant’, can inform and affect the predictive reading of subsequent lines of text, and how semantically anomalous patterns in a text can (often quickly) engender strongly constrained text-intrinsic expectations.

26

Pedagogical Stylistics

The present study revisits the cloze test exercise, but develops it in signi­ ficant ways. First, it tightens up considerably both the experimental design and the informant base on which the original exercise was based. Equally importantly, it uses the experiment to elucidate contemporary cognitive poetic models, principally conceptual integration theory, by presenting an interactive analysis of the model at work in the lexical selections generated by the cloze test. The pedagogical dimension of the exercise, in line with the comments made above, aims to offer an empirical base for some aspects of the conceptual integration model. Overall, it seeks to show how, as stylistics as a discipline moves on, the familiar exercises in its pedagogical toolkit can still have a significant bearing on how we explore, illuminate and even validate the new models it draws from other branches of linguistics and cognitive psychology.

2.2  Conceptually Transgressing ‘Neat Boxes’: Design and Implementation An initial pilot study was conducted with 13 undergraduate students2 using a cloze test format in which the first half of the Roethke poem was presented sequentially, line by line, but with specific lexical omissions. Informants were requested to complete these lexical ‘blanks’ intuitively before moving on to the next line. Participants were given a short time to write what they thought was the most appropriate response on a sheet of paper, which they then submitted anonymously. The only information given to participants was a straightforward request to fill in the blanks with their immediate, honest responses. So, the first line was presented accordingly, below: I have known the inexorable sadness of      , As soon as informants made their lexical selections, the ‘right answer’ was revealed, via PowerPoint, before the next incomplete line was presented. The point of this sequential structuring was to elicit responses that accorded with the semantic direction established by each line, which provided a way of ‘tracking’ responses within a particular framework of meaning relations. So, if a particular line marked a shift away from an established semantic field, it was predicted that informants would exhibit contiguous semantic selections in their subsequent responses. As predicted, informants’ responses to the first line did demonstrate concordance within the frame­ work of emotion, impelled by the lexical triggers ‘Dolour’ and ‘sadness’.



Chicken and Egg Stylistics

27

The 13 responses can be broken down numerically into the following con­ textually ‘appropriate’ terms: ‘loss’ (4), ‘death’ (4), ‘love’ (3), ‘life’ (2) All suggestions presuppose an emotive subject as the missing word, so there was, in the terms of Simpson’s earlier study (1997: 87–88), a collective ‘cognitive jolt’ when the real answer was revealed: I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils, The semantic incongruity in the opening line is generated metonymically through the collocational clash between ‘dolour’ and ‘sadness’ (from within the conceptual field of ‘emotion’) on the one hand, and ‘pencils’ (a category member from within the conceptual field of ‘office stationery’) on the other. Further compounding the ‘jolt’ is the switch in register from the more formal Latinate lexis of ‘dolour’ and ‘inexorable’, to the more prosaic and commonplace lexeme ‘pencils’. Armed with this new semantic framework, that is, one in which human emotion can be attributed to inanimate office objects, informants tendered responses to the next line: Neat in their boxes,       of pad and paperweight, Responses indicated that informants were mentally restructuring the initial collocational clash of ‘sadness’ and ‘pencils’ and developing a new cognitive frame in which the attribution of human emotion to inanimate objects was conceptually coherent. The responses were as follows: ‘friend’ (5), ‘neighbour’ (3), ‘companion’ (2), ‘bereft’ (1), ‘deprived’ (1), ‘heavy’ (1) Responses indicated that informants were engaging in some kind of cognitive restructuration, in which the initial collocational clash between ‘sadness’ and ‘pencils’ was less anomalous. Again, moving metonymically from the specific to the general (and from more to less discordant), these responses converge thematically and act as indicators of the existence of a more general – but also, crucially – congruent semantic framework of ‘emotion’.

28

Pedagogical Stylistics

Interestingly, all of the above responses anaphorically refer to ‘pencils’, which suggests that in the absence of an alternative trigger, the reader retains the anomalous clash (of emotionally receptive inanimate objects) from the first line, makes it conceptually cohere, and then carries the newly configured structure over to the next line. This is the ‘right’ thing to do as the real ‘answer’ is revealed as follows: Neat in their boxes, dolour of pad and paperweight, As the poem progresses, informants seem to become quickly attuned to this newly accepted cognitive clash and provide answers with greater ease, exhibiting greater semantic ‘concordance’. Here is the third line with its blanked out entry: All the       of manila folders and mucilage, The missing lexeme here is ‘misery’, which is predicted with uncanny accuracy by a number of the participants. The full set of results for line three is as follows: ‘misery’ (4), ‘pain’ (2), ‘colours’ (2), ‘grief’ (2), ‘depression’ (1), ‘chaos’ (1), ‘companion’ (1) To bring this account of the pilot study to a close, here are the remaining lines presented in the cloze test along with their responses on the right. The missing words are, respectively, ‘Desolation’ and ‘pathos’:    

in immaculate public places.

The unalterable      of basin and pitcher,

‘loneliness’ (7), ‘dolour’ (6) ‘pain’ (8), ‘suffering’ (3), ‘mood’ (1), ‘pathos’ (1)

The results from the pilot study established group concordance across semantic domains, in that two, initially clashing, conceptual frameworks very quickly made sense for the group. As more contextual cues prompted a shift in meaning, by the end of the test, it was almost ‘natural’ for inanimate office objects to experience deep human emotion. The preliminary study tends to presuppose, however, that these cognitive processes, which will be explored in more detail in the next section, are universal phenomena. A more directed form of empirical testing is therefore



Chicken and Egg Stylistics

29

necessary to validate the claims made by this and perhaps other studies into cognitive processes in reading poetry. Indeed, one of the criticisms of this particular method of response elicitation is that it presupposes a ‘representative’ reader, yet undergraduate students of English language and English literature cannot be said truly to reflect everyday reading communities. If, indeed, these cognitive processes are universal, as the analysis and interpretation in this chapter suggests, then the informant base of the study needs to incorporate a more representative sense of ‘reader’, one from outside the academic environment traditionally favoured by analysts. To this end, the revised study incorporates three participant groups from diverse sections within a particular community focus. We offer here a short overview of these groups, before outlining some modifications to the experimental method, while the section as a whole concludes with a broad assessment of the patterns of responses elicited under these new experimental conditions. Building on the pilot study, we conducted further qualitative and quantitative studies with academic participants (in this case, two more groups of undergraduate students), and two new participant groups, one of which was a small group of female prisoners, and the other were members of a social networking site (Facebook).3 The group of female prisoners comprised of four women with an age range of 21–39. All of the prisoners are members of a unique community-based (non-pedagogical) reading project, ‘Get Into Reading’, which is run in Hydebank Prison, Belfast, Northern Ireland. The Facebook group comprised of both males and females with an age range of 24–45, only one of whom had an academic background in the Humanities. None of the participants had encountered the poem before. As noted above, this expansion is a movement away from the use of exclusively academic sources, although we heed Allington and Swann’s warning, made in their programmatic statement on literary reading as social practice, that results elicited under such experimental conditions are not necessarily indicative of ‘how literature is read – in general’ (Allington and Swann 2009: 224, original emphasis). Regarding the test itself, the pilot study, such as it was, explored responses to one semantic domain, the field of ‘emotion’, and so all the omitted lexemes were thematically situated within this domain. We wanted to take this further and offer two versions of the cloze test. Retaining the one used in the pilot study (see cloze one, below), a second, additional test was developed, which omitted, from line two onwards, all lexemes relating to the semantic framework of ‘stationery’ while retaining all lexemes pertaining to ‘emotion’. Here, for ease of reference, are both versions:

30

Pedagogical Stylistics

Cloze One. ‘Emotion’ I have known the inexorable sadness of      , Neat in their boxes,      of pad and paperweight, All the      of manila folders and mucilage,      in immaculate public places.      reception room, lavatory, switchboard, The unalterable      of basin and pitcher Cloze Two. ‘Stationery’ I have known the inexorable sadness of      , Neat in their boxes, dolour of      and      , All the misery of      and      , Desolation in immaculate           , Lonely      ,      ,      , The unalterable pathos of      and      , While the blanked out words in both tests diverged thematically on semantic grounds, both versions had an identical opening line. The purpose of this was to set up the initial field of reference as ‘emotion’ and then test convergence or divergence from this domain according to the particular test used. Moreover, cloze two offered an opportunity to examine not only lexical suggestions, but also collocational patterns, as often two or three lexical items were omitted. The rationale for using both versions of the test was to investigate the consistency of the cognitive processes at work in semantic mapping across conflicting domains during real-time reading. Both tests were conducted twice, cloze one with the following groups: (a) Undergraduate students (b) Female prisoners and cloze two with the following groups: (c) Undergraduate students (d) Facebook members For groups (a) and (c), the poem was presented as a PowerPoint slideshow in exactly the same manner as the pilot study above. Each line was delivered with lexical blanks and participants gave their responses on paper before



Chicken and Egg Stylistics

31

the ‘correct’ answer was revealed and the next line was presented. For group (b), the cloze test was conducted in a complementary manner, although a more basic method of delivery was necessary due to constraints on computerized equipment within the prison. Instead, strips of card containing each line of the poem and the corresponding blanks were distributed and completed before informants submitted their completed cards face down on a centrally positioned table. On submitting each response, the participants in group (b) were given the ‘answer’ before being presented with the next strip of card and the subsequent line. The participants in group (d) were emailed fixed instructions to complete the line of poetry and return their thoughts online via email or to post their responses as a live status feed. On returning their ‘answers’, the next line was emailed along with the completed preceding line. The purpose of this latter method of responding via status update was to observe the reaction that such a cryptic post would generate in each participant’s own home page. As it happened, of those that posted their responses as a status update, several of their Facebook friends posted their own one word status updates to correspond with the participant’s! So, a chain of semantically congruent reports kept popping up for the duration of the experiment, which lasted for a few weeks until all responses were collated. This may be more of a comment on social acceptability than on the marvel of conceptual and semantic concordance. As was the case with the pilot study, revealing the first blanked out word (‘pencils’) provided participants with a particular semantic field within which to frame their lexical selections for the subsequent lexical omissions. Again, based on the pilot study, we predicted that the first response in both versions of the cloze test, ‘I have known the inexorable sadness of      ’, would reflect cultural knowledge of the world and derive wholly from the conceptual domain of ‘emotion’. This was indeed the case for every response4 and our full set of tabulated results is set out in the Appendix to this chapter. By way of illustration, the following is an overview of the responses to line one of the poem across the full participant base (including the pilot study):

Line 1

Cloze test one (‘emotion’): 24 informants

Cloze test two (‘stationery’): 22 informants

‘I have known the inexorable sadness of     ’

death (15); love (3); pain (2); life (2); magpies (1); jail (1)

life (5); loss (5); death (4); love (3); loneliness (2); lost loves (1); heartbreak (1); dog death (1)

32

Pedagogical Stylistics

As can be seen in this overview, responses converged on the semantic field of ‘emotion’ for every participant in both tests; ‘death’ predominated overall, while ‘life’ and ‘loss’ were the second most popular suggestions. The responses to cloze one (‘emotion’) continued largely in a similar vein to the pilot study, yielding responses to line two from the domain of ‘emotion’ (i.e., ‘waste’ and ‘free’). Interestingly, some responses were framed according to grammatical cues, so that the comma in line two after ‘boxes’ signalled, for some informants, a shift from an anaphoric perspective to a cataphoric one (compare, e.g., ‘free of pad and paper­ weight’, with ‘stacks of pad and paperweight’), rather than a shift in semantic fields. The next section offers a fuller account of these and other responses to the protocolled readings elicited through cloze one and cloze two.

2.3  Interpretation: Pencils, Pedagogy and Conceptual Integration So what cognitive processes are at work in shaping informants’ responses? How can we explain the conceptual shift from one semantic framework to a seemingly incongruent framework? In other words, how can we rationalize the progress from the initial context-appropriate responses within the domain of ‘emotion’ to the conceptually (and perhaps culturally) inappropriate domain of ‘stationery’ for cloze one, and for its reversed domain in cloze two? Moreover, why does this shift become easier to process and more ‘naturalized’ as the poem progresses and the ‘correct answers’ are revealed? In an attempt to answer these questions, we offer an analysis of the dynamic and interactive readings of the poem through a cognitive stylistic model, conceptual integration theory, which, we argue, helps us to understand the ways in which readers formulate such semantically congruent responses – congruent, that is, in the world of the poem – and how they are retained through networks of meaning as the poem progresses. A corollary of this is that in so doing, we also highlight the ways in which pedagogical tools – such as the cloze test – can help affirm the integrity of the model under scrutiny. Echoing our opening comments, we suggest that our study can simultaneously underscore the effectiveness of the pedagogical exercise as well as the model that the pedagogical exercise is attempting to elucidate – in short, they are mutually reinforcing.



Chicken and Egg Stylistics

33

In their seminal work on mental spaces and conceptual integration theory, Fauconnier and Turner (2002: 7) investigate the role of, what they term, ‘the mind’s three I ’s [sic]’. These are: Identity, the recognition of which they believe is ‘a spectacular product of complex, imaginative, unconscious work’; Integration, which has elaborate ‘structural and dynamic properties and operational constraints’; and Imagination, without which ‘identity and integration cannot account for meaning and its development’. Fauconnier and Turner’s (1995, 1998, 2000, 2002) extensive investigation of this phenomenon aptly demonstrates the role of the mind in the generation and interpretation of meaning. Conceptual integration theory, or ‘blending’, is based on the invocation and mapping of mental spaces, defined as ‘small conceptual packets constructed as we think and talk, for purposes of local understanding and action’ by Fauconnier and Turner (2002: 40), and as ‘temporary cognitive structures prompted by the use of linguistic forms’ by Dancygier (2006: 5). By selectively projecting information frequently (but not always) connected by counterpart relations from a range of mental spaces that act as inputs to a blended space, we can make sense of concepts and structures ranging from the most basic to the deeply anomalous. As Fauconnier (1997: 149) puts it, ‘thought and language . . . depend among other things on our capacity to manipulate webs of mappings between mental spaces’. He proposes that blending operates on two input mental spaces to yield a third space, the blend, adding that ‘the blend inherits partial structure from the input spaces and has emergent structure of its own’ (Fauconnier 1997: 149, emphasis ours). The basic blend structure, then, can be presented diagrammatically as in Figure 2.1. In Roethke’s poem, the first line invokes a specific mental space, one that could be termed the ‘emotions’ space, impelled by the word ‘sadness’ (and the poem’s title, ‘Dolour’). When we conceive of ‘sadness’, ‘dolour’ or ‘misery’, we do so experientially – that is, we associate the feeling of sadness with events we know to have caused sadness or with what we know could potentially cause sadness. We expect, therefore, that the mappings between these words and their potential collocates ‘fit’ conceptually and so would ordinarily expect to find what Thorne (1970: 195) calls ‘animate nouns’. In the test, then, informants responding to the first line of the poem follow this mapping route and make their lexical choices accordingly. This can be represented in the blend in Figure 2.2. By following this particular route, informants engage, to some degree, in what Frazier and Rayner (1982) call the ‘garden path theory’ of comprehension, whereby they select a word that plausibly corresponds

34

Pedagogical Stylistics

Figure 2.1  Basic blend stucture.

Figure 2.2  Possible ‘fits’.



Chicken and Egg Stylistics

35

with or coheres with the concept/experience of sadness. In other words, informants are led by the ‘clues’ to make an informed plausible and coherent guess. However, the word ‘pencils’ (like ‘manila folders’, ‘pad’ and ‘paperweight’ in cloze two) presents a conceptual anomaly that we can only begin to reconcile by creating what Thorne (1970: 197) refers to in his analysis as an ‘ad hoc transformation’. Aligned with the present account, this transformation seems to inhere in the invoking of a second input space that has no obvious connection to the first, one that contains inanimate objects – in this case, of stationery. Essentially, we now have two input spaces (Figure 2.3). Both inputs have properties that, while initially conceptually exclusive, come together in a third space, the blend, allowing us to conceive of a relationship between the disparate elements across both inputs. In so doing, relations established across the inputs are also projected or compressed in the blend, generating the emergent structure – which is that inanimate objects can potentially ‘feel’ (Figure 2.4). The connecting relations between the mental spaces are termed ‘vital relations’, given their fundamental role in making the blended space cohere. These are listed in Fauconnier and Turner (2002: 101, 92–111) as representation, analogy, identity, cause–effect, time, space, change, part–

Figure 2.3  Actual ‘fit’.

36

Pedagogical Stylistics

Figure 2.4  Relationship between input spaces.

whole, role, disanalogy, property, similarity, category, intentionality and uniqueness. In the integration network above, there are two disparate organizing frames that act as inputs. Turner and Fauconnier (2002: 131; Turner 2006: 19) refer to this type of blended network a ‘double-scope blend’,5 and propose that such blends have ‘organizing frames that receive projections from each of those organizing frames [the input spaces]’. The new information in the blend, the emergent structure, contains information that ‘cannot be found in any of the inputs’ (Turner 2006: 19). Indeed, in the poem, the two organizing frames/inputs (of emotion and stationery) are incompatible – there is no analogous relationship between the concept ‘sadness’ when considered of pencils. In the blend, however, this relation is compressed into ‘uniqueness’ (as is the case with many double-scope blends), generating, as Dancygier (2006: 6) puts it, ‘new meanings out of the existing knowledge structures’. The integration network established in line one of the poem (that material objects can feel or project human emotions) is developed as the poem progresses. This is known as ‘running



Chicken and Egg Stylistics

37

the blend’ (Fauconnier 2005: 529) and allows us to become more sophisticated in our interpretation by constructing dynamic mappings between subsequent anomalous concepts. We can see this at work in the responses to line two. The blend constructed in line one serves as an input to the next blend so that a network is established and maintained here. For example, informants’ responses to ‘neat in their boxes,      of pad and paperweight’ (‘bereft’, ‘deprived’, ‘friend’) remain within the same conceptual paradigm that ascribes human emotion/relationships to inanimate objects in the previous line. This is perhaps more evident in version two of the cloze test, in which the lexemes relating to ‘stationery’ and office equipment were blanked out: Neat in their boxes, dolour of     

and      ,

The responses to line two (‘black and white’, ‘blue and grey’, ‘colour and sharpness’, ‘blue and red’ and so on) were sharp deviations from these same informants’ responses to the first line (‘death’, ‘loss’, ‘life’, ‘death’ and so on), indicating ‘ad hoc transformations’ that, contrary to Thorne, are not evidence of purely linguistic phenomena; in other words, they are not so much a reflection of a ‘countergrammar’ at work (Thorne 1970: 195), but rather, they point towards the largely unconscious cognitive processing involved at the conceptual level in constructing dynamic complex blends. Keeping the focus on cloze two, informants’ responses suggest a shift between the two inputs of ‘emotion’ and ‘stationery’; for instance, group (c) responds with ‘life’ for line one of the poem, but switches between both domains where there is greater potential for expansion, offering ‘pencils, sad, pencils’ for line five: Lonely      ,      ,      board’)

(‘reception room, lavatory, switch-

and ‘pencils and man’ for line six: The unalterable pathos of     

and     

(‘basin and pitcher’)

As the cloze test unfolds, informants’ perception shifts back and forth between the two input spaces and some even seem to bring this part of the poem to a ‘natural’ end by incorporating both organizing frames into one

Pedagogical Stylistics

38

conceptual snapshot. Consider the responses to line six, the final line of the cloze test (but not of the poem): The unalterable pathos of     

and      ,

The responses included interesting collocations, such as ‘pencils and man’, ‘people and things’ and ‘home and office’. Up until this point in the poem, most of the collocations exhibit semantic congruity (‘writing and reading’, ‘suffering and endurance’, ‘sharpening and blunt’), with the exception of ‘pages, people, places’ and ‘pencils, sad, pencils’, offered as responses to the preceding line: Lonely      ,      ,      , Significantly, these responses occurred in the penultimate line in the cloze test where informants would have been conscious of this fragment of the poem’s impending end. This tendency towards a holistic conclusion could signal a need for informants to bring the text back full circle, as it were, by uniting both input spaces, thus imposing some kind of unity on an otherwise semantically disparate topology. This is perhaps most readily discerned with group (b), the female prisoners, for whom the desire to blend both organizing frames was apparent in their responses to cloze one as outlined in the following table: ‘Neat in their boxes,      of pad and paperweight’

‘All the      of manila ‘     in folders and immaculate mucilage’ public places’

‘     reception room, ­lavatory, switchboard’

1 death

Wads

dullness

appropriate

2 Jail 3 death 4 Pain

paper piles notes

books – Pens

shops cleaned books

funeral parlour living room Bathroom Workers

‘I have known the inexorable sadness of      ’

‘The unalterable      of pitcher and basin’ tragedy wall picture sin

In these responses, the informants took account of the cognitive jolt im­pelled by the revelation of ‘pencils’ in line one, and collectively foregrounded the ‘stationery’ space in running the blend for line two. Interestingly, for line three, this was retained for two participants (2 and 4); however, of the remaining two participants, one demonstrated a return to



Chicken and Egg Stylistics

39

the ‘emotion’ organizing frame in selecting ‘dullness’, but for the other participant, there was only confusion, and no response was tendered. Yet, when all four participants reached the end of the test, there was an even split in the responses for the first time: two participants offered suggestions from within the semantic field of emotion (‘tragedy’, ‘sin’) and two offered responses from within the semantic field of ‘inanimate objects’ (‘wall’, ‘picture’), a superordinate category from which ‘office stationery’ is derived.

2.4  Concluding Remarks: Chicken and Egg Stylistics As signalled at its outset, this study invokes a circle of understanding between the text, the classroom and the stylistic model. We assume no hierarchical organization in the interaction of these elements; nor do we assume a primacy of order about which element, pace the old ‘chicken and egg’ conundrum, should ‘come first’. Moreover, our analysis does not seek to foreclose either on the additional elements of textual patterning that might merit stylistic attention, or on other theories or applications that may be applied to, or focused on, the same text. For instance, a useful question, with respect to the first of these issues, is the extent to which the syntagmatic organization of each line, Jakobson’s ‘axis of combination’, acts as a determinant on prediction. Consider in this respect the phonetic significance of items like ‘pathos’ and ‘misery’ for which the alliterative pairings ‘pitcher’ and ‘mucilage’ are picked up across the poetic line. With respect to the second issue, we acknowledge that complementary stylistic models might be (and indeed have been) brought to bear on the same literary text. For instance, Miall and Kuiken, in a paper influenced by van Peer (1986), argue, making some reference to ‘Dolour’, that literary response is influenced by stylistic features that engender defamiliarization (Miall and Kuiken 1994: 337–52). Our study, by contrast, argues for the cognitive nature of a literary response that, having been influenced initially by the stylistic jolt of the defamiliarized lexeme ‘pencils’, implements stylistic features anticipating, thereby making familiar the poem’s unusual conceptual clashes. Moreover, Miall and Kuiken contend that defamiliarization invokes feeling that calls on personal perspectives and meanings. They assert that Van Peer’s study (1986: 120) provides evidence that: such sensitivity appears to be independent of literary training or experience: [Van Peer’s] readers noted the presence of foregrounding in

40

Pedagogical Stylistics

poetry whether they had received academic training in stylistics or had had no university level teaching in literature. (Miall and Kuiken 1994: 352) Indeed, our study has, we hope, provided useful and further empirical evidence for this claim: it has generated defamiliarized collective responses from within the same semantic field. Within this, it has elicited individual responses that signal ‘personal perspectives and meanings’, as the participant response ‘jail’ to line one in the test with the female prisoners aptly demonstrates. This lends support to Miall and Kuiken’s (1994: 352) claim that ‘because defamiliarization involves feeling, readers may then vary considerably in the individual perspectives and memories they bring to bear on the text’. In keeping with the broader aims and praxis of contemporary pedagogical stylistics, we have also sought to demonstrate how the techniques employed here offer a good way of getting ‘under the skin of the text’, providing a method of textual intervention (Pope 1994) that offers a foundation for critique and interpretation. Suffice it to say, both of the present authors have had less productive seminars on ‘Dolour’ when presenting, ab initio, the poem to the class in its entirety and without any of the stylistic interventions detailed here. Indeed, it seems that the poem’s central theme, the dehumanizing drudgery of office life and work, is placed in sharper relief when the compositional design of the text’s central metaphor is brought more fully to the fore in classroom discussion. Given that its interpretative paradigm sees syntax as the central language facility, Thorne’s (1970: 195) important analysis has proposed that what is going on stylistically in ‘Dolour’ is a case of grammatical deviance. However, what this study has sought to show is that what may seem initially like grammatical deviance actually becomes perfectly grammatical – how else can our informants’ cognitive restructuring be explained on such a universal basis? Seeing clausal structures in the poem as ‘obviously deviant sentences’ tends to ignore the dynamic and creative nature of interpretation and meaning construction. As Fauconnier (1997: 37) puts it, a language expression does not have a meaning in itself, but rather has ‘a meaning potential’ and it is only ‘within a complete discourse and in context that meaning will actually be produced’. Indeed, as we have tried to show in the application of the cloze tests, seemingly disparate organizing frames are no impediment to the collective generation of contextually appropriate responses. In fact, they kick-start our cognitive engines as we try to make sense of them. As readers, we make things ‘fit’. Mapping and managing



Chicken and Egg Stylistics

41

networks of meaning across clashing semantic fields is creative, dynamic and interactive – not ‘deviant’ and ‘ungrammatical’. What this analysis seeks to demonstrate is that through teaching stylistic models in this interactive way, students can become part of the lesson itself, thus gaining deeper insights into the validity of the model taught that would otherwise only exist as text on the page. By making students and readers in general a part of the pedagogical exercise, they become not only part of the proof, but part of the pudding.

Notes   1

Roethke’s poem, which is alternatively spelt ‘Dolor’ in some North American editions, was first published in 1948 as part of a themed collection entitled The Lost Son and Other Poems. The version we use here is from the 1957 collection Words for the Wind (London: Secker and Warburg, p. 55). The general literary critical consensus on the provenance of the poem is that it correlates with a period of office employment that Roethke experienced around the time that he suffered a nervous breakdown, although we prefer not to speculate any further on the biographical factors that may have influenced the poem’s thematic concerns. We reproduce here the poem in its entirety: Dolour I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils, Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight, All the misery of manila folders and mucilage, Desolation in immaculate public places, Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard, The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher, Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma, Endless duplication of lives and objects. And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions, Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica, Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium, Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows, Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.

The pilot study group comprised 13 senior (third-year) undergraduate students at Queen’s University, Belfast. All students had previously taken modules in either English language or English literature as part of their degree pathway. The balance of gender was eight female to five male, while three students were from Great Britain, one from Bulgaria and the remainder were from Northern Ireland. The pilot study was conducted on 6 April 2010. 3 The undergraduate cohort comprised two groups of students. More junior than the group in the pilot exercise, these students were in the first term of their BA

2



42





Pedagogical Stylistics

degree at Queen’s University Belfast. Although some were taking courses in other areas of the Humanities, all were currently enrolled in two modules in English, one in English language and one in English literature. Of the 18 students in total, two were from Great Britain and the remainder were from Northern Ireland. Whereas all of the students had a qualification at school level in English, none had any knowledge of stylistics or any prior experience of the sort of ­pedagogical activity undertaken in this experiment. The undergraduate studies were conducted between 1 and 21 October 2010. 4 Student study one (cloze one, ‘emotion’) has a suggestion of ‘magpies’ from participant number four. This may have some figurative emotional significance for the participant, but to retain anonymity, this response was not explored further. 5 A double-scope blend is one in which two often clashing organizing frames act as inputs – elements from each are projected into the blended space, offering the potential for ‘rich clashes’ and dynamic mappings, which offer ‘challenges to the imagination’ (Fauconnier and Turner 2006: 19), such as those found in the poem.

References Allington, D. and Swann, J. (2009), ‘Researching literary reading as social practice’. Language and Literature, 18, (3): 219–30. Dancygier, B. (2006), ‘What can blending do for you?’ Language and Literature, 15, (1), 5–15. Fauconnier, G. (1997), Mappings in Thought and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —(2005), ‘Compression and emergent structure’. Language and Linguistics, 6, (4), 523–38. Fauconnier, G. and Turner, M. (1995), ‘Conceptual integration and formal expression’. Metaphor and Symbol, 10, (3), 183–203. —(1998), ‘Conceptual integration networks’. Cognitive Science, 22, (2), 133–87. —(2000), ‘Compression and global insight’. Cognitive Linguistics, 11, (3–4), 283–304. —(2002), The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and The Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books. Frazier, L. and Rayner, K. (1982), ‘Making and correcting errors during sentence comprehension: eye movements in the analysis of structurally ambiguous ­sentences’. Cognitive Psychology, 14, (2), 178–210. Miall, D. S. and Kuiken, D. (1994), ‘Beyond text theory: understanding literary response’. Discourse Processes 17, 337–52. Ohmann, R. (1964), ‘Generative grammars and the concept of literary style’. Word, 20, 424–39. Pope, R. (1994), Textual Intervention. London: Routledge. Simpson, P. (1997), Language through Literature. London: Routledge. Thorne, J. P. (1970), ‘Generative grammar and stylistic analysis’, in J. Lyons (ed.), New Horizons in Linguistics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 185–97.



Chicken and Egg Stylistics

43

Turner, M. (2006), ‘Compression and representation’. Language and Literature, 15, (1), 17–27. van Peer, W. (1986), Stylistics and Psychology: Investigations of Foregrounding. London: Croom Helm.

Appendix 1. Facebook study: Cognitive field ‘stationery’ with 12 participants.

Participant

‘I have known the inexorable sadness of      ’

‘Neat in their boxes, dolour of      and      ’

‘All the misery of      and      ’

FB1 FB2 FB3 FB4 FB5

loss loss loneliness love loneliness

X and O white and red yellow and black pleasure and pain black and white

eraser and inkblot boxes and folders writing and sharpening life and death lead and trees

FB6 FB7 FB8 FB9 FB10 FB11

loss loss lost loves love heartbreak death dog death

point and line red and lead yellow and black pad and paper red and yellow pens and paper colours and rubbers

ink and stencils sharpeners and erasers infection and rejection line and stop black and white death and destruction pencils and paper

FB12

2. Student pilot study: Cognitive field ‘emotion’ with 13 participants.

‘I have known the inexorable sadness of      ’

‘Neat in their boxes,      of pad and paperweight’

‘All the      of manila folders and mucilage’

loss (4) death (4) love (3) life (2)

friend (5) neighbour (3) companion (2) deprived (1)

misery (4) colours (2) pain (2) grief (2)

heavy (1)

companion (1)

bereft (1)

depression (1) chaos (1)

‘     in immaculate public places’ loneliness (7) dolour (6)

‘Lonely reception room, ­lavatory, switchboard’

‘The unalterable      of pitcher and basin’

N/A

pain (8) suffering (3) pathos (1)

Pedagogical Stylistics

44

3. Student study 1: Cognitive field ‘emotion’ with 7 participants. ‘I have known the inexorable sadness Participant of      ’

‘Neat in their boxes,      of pad and paper­weight’

‘All the      of manila ­folders and ­mucilage’

‘     in immaculate public places’

‘     reception room, ­lavatory, switchboard’

‘The unalterable      of pitcher and basin’

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

lots rubbers plenty waste stacks beside free

colours grandeur many melancholy fuss fun friends

paper statues found silence housed placed alone

the crowded bedroom empty welcoming kitchen lonely

position isolation colour sin despair place pairing

death death death magpies death pain death

4. Student study 2: Cognitive field ‘stationery’ with 11 participants. ‘I have known the inexorable sadness P of      ’

‘Neat in their boxes, dolour of      and      ’

‘All the misery of      and      ’

a

death

b

loss

c

life

d

life

e

love

black and pen and white paper blue and grey short and long colour and lead and shaprness sharpenings red and blue sharpeners and rubbers blue writing

f

life

g

death

h

deaths

i

life

j

death

k

life

‘Lonely ‘Desolation     , in immacu     , late      ’      ’ white paper

desperate and sad solitary figures, confinement sadness, regret straight pencils, precision sad, pencils all alone together, sad done books library, schoolroom red and sharpening pencil pots centre, purple and blunt garden, park black and pain and colouring despair, blue misfortune pencils sadness, isolation red and blue writing and polly pockets lonely, reading lonely, lonely life and death pain and suffering and people illness endurance wandering aimlessly blue and red ink and file dividers sharpeners, paper staples, pens lead colour writing and pages, people, reading places

‘The unalterable pathos of      and      ’ home and office people and humans stationery and writing pencils and man N/A people and things life and death life and death death and funerals silence and emptiness paper and pencils

Chapter 3

The Reader’s Paradox Peter Stockwell

And all night long they sailed away;   And when the sun went down, They whistled and warbled a moony song To the echoing sound of a coppery gong,   In the shade of the mountains brown. Here is a text, and there is a reader. In fact, several readers: you, individual, reading these words; you, plurality, reading these words; and me, writing here and also reading just back there. In fact, each of these notions of the reader is also rather more complex. A writer is not just a producer but also, crucially, a first reader. A reading community is composed of many different people, embodying different cultures and experiences, engaged in reading with different motivations and in different moods. Even an individual reader can be regarded as a temporary and provisional configuration of personal dispositions, differently deployed on different occasions to read sometimes like this and other times like that. So, there is a text and there is a matrix of possible readers, and out of the coincidences arises a literary work – neither the text alone nor the reading alone, but the combined effect and experience of the literary object in the conscious world. It should be clear from this formulation that the most principled and direct way of attempting an account of what is happening on each occasion of literary reading must involve a proper knowledge of how the language in and of the text works and a decent understanding of how readers’ minds work. I can think of no simpler or more robust rationale for the application of a cognitive poetics as the primary proper objective of literary scholarship (Stockwell 2002). In this chapter, I elaborate on this basic truism; I demonstrate how it works in a practical setting; I identify the key theoretical question for all literarycritical positions; and I offer a ground for resolution that returns to the theme of this beginning.

46

Pedagogical Stylistics

The passage above, taken out of context, is usually appreciated by readers as a pleasingly lyrical piece of poetry. Read on its own like this, readers intuitively mention its attractiveness, its measured tone, and talk about a sense of calmness that comes from it. They like it, saying it is a beautifully framed description; it is simple but somehow richly articulate. They guess that it forms part of a longer, ballad-type narrative poem, and mention the names of Tennyson, Browning, Rossetti or Byron as possible authors. Because they do not recognize the passage, they qualify these high-canonical names by suggesting that the poem might be the work of a more minor poet, Clare or Longfellow or Kipling, perhaps. They decide, though, more often than not, that the writing is accomplished, impressive and good. When asked what they mean by this, readers will start to look more closely at the passage for the close textual evidence to support their feelings. They suggest that the content of a group of people sailing away and singing under the moonlight is matched by the sense that the rhythm of the lines carries you onwards. All agree that the sea is calm and the night is warm and peaceful, although they cannot point to a particular part of the text that says this explicitly: it is just a general sense derived from the whole. Someone says it reminds them of a painting, and when they are asked to scribble down a quick pencil sketch of what the painting might look like, all of them produce a picture that is compositionally very similar. Someone else suggests that the perspective starts from a position of a viewer watching the sailors sail away in the first line, but this visual point of view gradually changes to adopt the travellers’ perspective as they sing and listen. One reader says that the overall effect is like a lullaby, albeit one that is rich and rather sophisticated: it is not childish but child-like. By ‘readers’, here, you will have understood by now that I do not mean the general reader or an ideal reader or an implied reader, or any sort of idealized, non-actual theoretical reader (terms from Booth 1961; Iser 1974; Chatman 1978; Eco 1990). My readers are highly actual – in fact, the comments I have sketched are authentic responses of final year under­ graduate and masters literature students at the University of Nottingham in 2010. What I have said they said in the previous few paragraphs is pretty much what they did say. I didn’t audio-record them, but I did scribble their phrases down as they talked, and those are the sorts of things they said. For the purposes needed here, there was no need for a close transcription or questionnaire or tight protocol. What we have here are largely feelings not meanings. The meaning of the passage is fairly self-evident and straightforward: a group of people sail off at night, singing as they go. Its tone, its atmosphere and its aura are more



The Reader’s Paradox

47

tenuous and elusive experiences that are difficult to articulate precisely, and indeed the readers (approximately 24 split two-thirds to one-third across two groups) relied heavily on impression, metaphor, analogy and bodily gestures in their attempts to capture the felt sense of the passage. It is like a picture; it is calming and soothing; it carries you away with it; it is pleasingly settled and rounded. Let’s say all that again, in a different voice. This time the voice is mine: an analytical voice, trying to explain the same perceptions and experiences that these actual readers sketched out, but in a more descriptively disciplined way, perhaps. First, then, why do most of the readers recorded above regard the poem extract as being pictorial, and even visualize virtually identical scenes, tones and colours? The key is in the textual manipulation of perspective, which is so artfully constructed that the imposition presented by the text largely determines the effect, leaving the natural dispositions of the readers relatively weak: readers with stronger dispositions might picture the scene differently – I can imagine a reading group of trainee sailors, perhaps. (See Stockwell [2009: 43–53, 166–67] and Stockwell [2011] on textual imposition and readerly disposition.) Here, though, the textual configuration is strongly delineated and consistent, producing a fairly homogeneous effect. The first line of the passage – ‘And all night long they sailed away’ – establishes a viewing position that is static, and an object being viewed (‘they’) that is moving off relative to the viewer. This perspective is imposed by several means, which all work together so that the effects are aligned, so to speak. For example, at the lexical level, the object is pronominalized, which removes any possibility for linguistic enlargement: pronouns cannot normally be pre- or post-modified by adjectival phrases. An alternative stylistic choice would have been ‘And all night long the singing people in the unusual boat sailed away’, but this would have focused attention on the object by providing distracting details. Instead, the object moving away is kept appropriately small, telescoped down to its smallest possible lexical component. It is also placed in the middle of the line, which begins in the middle of a process (‘And’), so the sense of movement is all the stronger. The adverbial phrase (‘all night long’), which serves to establish the ground for the main verb that is to come, is composed in such a way that it makes the night larger (‘all’ and ‘long’), so that the people in the boat become relatively smaller and diminished, and this effect is further continued as the perspective is pointed further ‘away’ by another adverbial. In this first line, the trajectory of the main attentional figure (‘they’) is traced away from the  landmark (the reader’s viewing position) fairly quickly: the whole

48

Pedagogical Stylistics

­ ight-time and the night voyage are squeezed down into one predication. n The attentional scanning is summary in this sense (rather than being a sequential scan of the voyage event by event, for example). The effect of a textual organization that imposes a summary scanning disposition on the reader is an objective construal, in which the viewing position is felt to be less prominent than the object being viewed; and so it is here, with attention moving off with the boat out to sea. By contrast, the remaining four lines of the passage switch the perspective in order to stretch the night out and reiterate it step by step: note that the story begins again ‘when the sun went down’ at the beginning of the night. These four lines enlarge the object of the people in the boat by repeating the pronoun – this time in prominent line-initial position and capitalized ‘They’ – and by making it even more prominently the actor, topic and agent of the clause by attaching not one but two predicates (‘whistled and warbled’). The attentional effect for a reader is one of zoom, in which you are taken into the boat alongside the people, and can experience their perceptions, sights and sounds with them. The trajectory of their action is delineated in these verbs, and is placed very precisely in relation to the other participant roles in the clause, all of which serve as grounding landmarks that provide a rich context for the focus of attention. The flurry of four prepositions (‘To the echoing sound of a coppery gong, in the shade of the mountains brown’) emphasizes the rich grounded nature of the action, and step by step it blends sight and sound. As in these four lines, the effect of a textual organization that imposes a sequential scanning disposition on the reader is a subjective construal, in which the viewing position is felt to be prominent: this accounts for the sense that the readers had that they are carried away and placed in a rich sensory and soothing context. The sense is stronger than the initial static viewing position not least simply because it takes four lines rather than one to articulate it, and the time period is reiterated and echoic (the word ‘echoing’ even appears in the passage, of course). The analysis so far draws heavily on my application of Langacker’s (2008) systematic cognitive grammar (in Stockwell 2009), which sets out a coherent and principled framework for the analysis of textualized attention and perspective. Other insights from cognitive linguistics in general can be deployed to illuminate some other of the passage’s effects as reported by the readers above. For example, there is a conceptually conventional up– down metaphor at work in these lines, which is aligned with the manipulation of light and dark in the passage (see Croft and Cruse 2004; Evans and Green 2006). There is a great deal of perspectival movement in which, first, the



The Reader’s Paradox

49

boat sails away horizontally, then the sun up in the sky goes down, and then the people on the surface of the sea sing up to the ‘moony’ sky, and they are then set at a point below and within the ‘shade of the mountains’. There is a simultaneous dimming of the light across the passage, from the bright ‘sun’, to the less bright moon, to the darker copper and finally to the dimmest ‘shade’, the ‘brown’ of the mountains. The active, most energyloaded verbs (‘sailed’, ‘went down’, ‘whistled and warbled’) are collected together at the beginning, and gradually give way to less active verb forms and derivations: the last two lines only have a participle ‘echoing’ and a series of trailing prepositional phrases that suggest rather than assert movement. All of these features are aligned, working towards the same effect to produce a sense of iconicity (see Nanny and Fischer 1999; Muller and Fischer 2003): textual patterns are perceived as reinforcing each other in both form and meaning. Further iconic alignments can be uncovered with a simple phonological analysis of the passage. For example, the ABCCB line-end rhyme scheme does not capture the full richness of the internal rhymes in these lines. The first line ends with a triple repetition of /εi/ in ‘they sailed away’, picked up only in the last line in ‘shade’. The echoing nature of this falling repetition might even be seen in its diminishment in the final syllable of ‘mountains’, where the prosody of the line renders it towards a /ə/. The two B rhymes at line ends are echoed in mid-lines by (appropriately) ‘sound’ and the first syllable of ‘mountains’. The two CC rhymes ‘song’ and ‘gong’ are prefigured in the first line by ‘long’. The generally downward perspectival sense of nestling and comfortable snuggling is matched by the line positioning of ‘down’ on a prominent rhyme point, and also by reversing the normative adjectival position of ‘brown mountains’ in order to keep the dimming, syntactic and rhyming effects carefully aligned. It is this sense of alignment that allows readers to regard the non-normative word order not as incompetent writing, but as pleasing and complete. One of my readers noticed the strong alliteration internal to the line, which recalled for her the Anglo-Saxon poetic patterning, but it is only on a close analysis that the consistency, complexity and richness of these echoic phonemic patterns become explicitly apparent. The classic arrangement of Old English poetry features alliteration in the same syllabic position on both sides of a half line. This certainly occurs throughout the lines of the passage: /l/ in the first line, /w/ in ‘when’ and ‘went’ in the second line, /w/ in ‘whistled and warbled’ and /k/ in ‘echoing’ and ‘coppery’. There are also other, more subtle alliterative echoes: parallel nasal consonants in ‘And . . . night long’, and then in almost every word of ‘And when the sun

50

Pedagogical Stylistics

went down’ – a line that is very nearly palindromic; then /d/ in ‘whistled and warbled’ and /ŋ/ in ‘echoing’ and ‘gong’. This is merely to recognize a traditional view of phonetic classification. If we take a more prototypical view (see Jaeger and Ohala 1984) in which voicedness or approximant-ness are regarded as on a cline rather than absolutes, we can see certain clusters of sounds being patterned together even more subtly. So, the first line’s collocation of nasals /n/ and /ŋ/ and liquid approximants /w/ and /l/ can be seen as closely echoic. Even the /d/ and /b/ stop consonants around here are prosodically devoiced towards /t/ and /p/, and towards an affricated form /s/. All of the consonant sounds in the first three lines are articulated towards the front of the mouth, so it is a marked contrast when the fourth line produces a set of velar sounds /k/ and /g/, and places the dental and bilabial plosives /t/, /d/ and /p/ in prominent positions: ‘To the echoing sound of a coppery gong’. The final line returns again contrastively to the devoiced, nasal and sibilant patterns: ‘In the shade of the mountains brown’. This closer phonetic analysis offers a strong descriptive account to explain readers’ intuitive awareness that the sound patterns of the passage suggest a felt experience of quietness, calmness and a lulling sense of comfort, again iconically aligned with the meaning. The Anglo-Saxon poetic patterning reminded some readers of the fact that several celebrated Old English poems concern sea voyages, or have an elegiac feel just like these lines. Poems like ‘The Seafarer’ or ‘The Wanderer’ have a narrative element but are more lyrical and elegiac in tone, just like the passage. In the context of literary form, the poem is metrically complex. It begins iambically, with a tetrameter in the first line (prototypically the English ballad form), reduced to a diminishing iambic trimeter in the second line as the sun goes down and the light begins to fade. The sense of onward rolling movement in the final three lines are the product of anapaestic rhythms (‘echoing sound of a coppery’), balanced at beginning (‘They’) and end (‘brown’) by off-beats, but otherwise consistent and reminiscent of a shanty or simple song. These alignments of poetic form and literary meaning can also be regarded as part of the pleasing iconicity of the passage, and what might appear, on analytical inspection, as fanciful connections often made intuitively by readers, turn out to have some basis in iconic textual values. Lastly, in this stylistic exploration, just as the perspective and viewpoint shifts, so the lexical choices align and reinforce the sense that we move from being an observer in the first two lines to being a participant in the last three lines. There is nothing particularly idiosyncratic in the lexis of the



The Reader’s Paradox

51

first two lines, but the choices of ‘whistled’ and ‘warbled’ and especially ‘moony’ in the third line suggest a form of free indirect discourse, in which the third-person narrative has become blended with the world view and the expression of the child-like people in the boat. Their difference from us is perhaps also marked, then, in their unusual choice of ‘coppery gong’ as a collocation, and in their odd inversion of ‘mountains brown’. Only three of my readers recognized the text, and depending on the sort of reader you yourself are, you may also have recognized the extract as coming from Edward Lear’s (1871) poem ‘The Jumblies’, a text that is usually designated as ‘nonsense verse’. It begins like this: They went to sea in a Sieve, they did,   In a Sieve they went to sea: In spite of all their friends could say, On a winter’s morn, on a stormy day,   In a Sieve they went to sea! And when the Sieve turned round and round, And every one cried, ‘You’ll all be drowned!’ They called aloud, ‘Our Sieve ain’t big, But we don’t care a button! we don’t care a fig!   In a Sieve we’ll go to sea!’    Far and few, far and few,     Are the lands where the Jumblies live;    Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,     And they went to sea in a Sieve. Now that we have plugged the text in to its moment of history, and given it an originating context and a generic context, we can re-evaluate the intuitive and text-driven observations that the student readers and I made above. There was a time when these concerns would have been judged to fall outside the scope of stylistics, although even in its most text-focused manifestations as 1920s Russian Formalism, 1950s American New Criticism or British stylistics of the 1960s and 1970s, the literary linguistic approach has never been absolutely text immanent. Modern stylistics has long encompassed matters of pragmatics, sociolinguistics and social linguistics, and recent stylistic work has emphasized the critically situated position of the stylistician, the historical linguistic context and the psychological dispositions of the reader (for historical examples, see Carter and Stockwell [2008], and for current examples see Lambrou and Stockwell [2007] and McIntyre and Busse [2010]).

52

Pedagogical Stylistics

For my readers, when they realized that the passage came from ‘The Jumblies’, they experienced a moment of happy recognition, one that no doubt took them back to their own childhood. The intuitive and stylistically formalized impressions set out above can easily be seen to be consistent with the grounding historical context. Their guesses as to authorship can be seen to be reasonably precise (especially Tennyson, a contemporary friend and admirer of Lear and the author of his gravestone epitaph) in the late British nineteenth century. Their sense that the people on the boat are not normal adult people, but a ‘jumble’ of child-like and imaginary characters, is validated by the whole text. The sense of comfort and the soothing nature of the lines can be seen as textually consistent and not simply the product of childhood memory and associations, although now these can be regarded as mutually reinforcing. In short, even the briefest stylistic analysis of five lines from the poem can be seen to correspond with the readers’ local intuitions about the extract. Offering a plausible account of intuition at the edges or just below the surface of articulate conscious awareness is the basic validatory moment in stylistics. To this extent, stylistics is a form of applied linguistics: it takes an object in the world (natural reading) and aims to provide a descriptive account of it. To the extent that the particular account fits in with more general patterns of both reading and language, the stylistic description can then also be regarded as having an explanatory power. However, as a basic condition of its nature, stylistics is descriptive of actual readings. However, what happened in the seminars with the students set out above is that the detailed stylistic investigation that followed their initial reading resulted in several moments of insight, illumination and appreciation. In this respect, the stylistic analysis was also productive in bringing to conscious awareness matters of felt experience that were initially inarticulable. My contention is that these insights – not startlingly shocking for this small extract, admittedly – were there to be discovered in the natural hinders, rather than being an epiphenomenon of the analysis itself. (Stylistics as a methodology has been accused of constructing readings in readers in this way by, most infamously, Fish [1980].) A simple indication that this is the case is that each element of aligned iconicity revealed by the closely attended analysis produced not shock or surprise, but a pleasing sense of recognition: this was evident by observing their faces and it was also reported as a felt sense when the readers were asked about it afterwards. Stylistics, I argue, is fundamentally and always descriptive, and sometimes it has the capacity for being productive of those features of interpretation and feeling that are just below the level of articulate conscious awareness.



The Reader’s Paradox

53

On a very few occasions, a close linguistic analysis can also indicate the possibility of a reading that can initially seem counter-intuitive or implausible. However, if the basis of the analysis is properly transparent and evident, then it is possible for such an analysis to contribute towards such an innovative reading. This happens (see a surprising analysis of a Byron poem in Mullany and Stockwell [2010: 103–16], and similarly in Freeman [1993], for example), but is relatively unusual. This scale of capacities and values sets stylistics apart from critical theoretical approaches to literature, to the extent that I think it is reasonable to argue that stylistics is not in itself a critical theory. It is more in the nature of a method – although it can certainly be used in the service of a range of critical theories. However, the key issue for stylistics is the same key issue that dogs all approaches to literary study: what is the nature of the validity of interpretative claims made about literary works? In simpler words, how can we know that the theoretical account of reading is in any way underpinned by actual readings? Since stylistics claims an applied linguistic heritage, this question of validity is even more crucial than other critical approaches founded merely on metaphor or poetic analogy. In the literature classroom described above, natural intuitions about a short text can be set against analytical statements that claim to ‘explain’ them. However, how can we be sure that the analysis really is an explanation? A possible objection that my readers raised is to suggest that the stylistic analysis tells them nothing new that they couldn’t fumble towards – admittedly less fluently – in their own intuitive impressionistic account. My analysis above makes a virtue of the fact that it mainly simply matches those initial intuitions. I would argue further that the application of a systematic framework has several advantages: it ensures a consistency of analysis; it provides a common currency of terms to allow disagreements to proceed on a proper footing; and it has the potential to offer a usefully overengineered model that can winkle out further patterns in the text. Nevertheless, the essential problem remains one of theorizing the gap between intuition and analysis. This raises the question as to what is the role of a systematic, rational and empirical stylistics in current literary scholarship, as far as students of literature are concerned. In my experience of university literary teaching, I have seen both students and non-academic readers increasingly alienated first by the end-of-century focus on ‘Theory’ and then by the retrenchment into historical cultural studies. Although both forms of literary framing have their merits, the key feature in both approaches is to relegate the reading of the literary text itself to a footnote or coincidence. A rational and empirically valid stylistics, with a focus on

54

Pedagogical Stylistics

both textuality and readerly impact, presents the clearest solution: at least it provides a basis for filling the reader–analyst gap. Why, then, is there such resistance to its widespread adoption? There are a number of institutional reasons for this, including the lack of much training in linguistics for literary scholars. However, the major principled and long-standing objection from critical theorists and historiographers – and like my students above – concerns the nature of the connection between textual description and interpretative significance. Stylisticians have attempted in a variety of ways to address this problem of validity, which arises constantly in the stylistics classroom. Stylisticians have especially claimed external validity, in the form of empirical methods of reporting, the application of generally valid linguistic frameworks and comparative computational corpus data. All of these methods, though, are subject to the key factor that lies at the heart of literary scholars’ antipathies: they cannot resolve the observer’s paradox. In the humanities and social sciences in general, the observer’s paradox concerns the distorting effects of the process of data collection and analysis: the act of observing a social phenomenon necessarily involves participating in it, and thus the object is altered. Once it is accepted in the literary field that the object of investigation is not the linguistics of the text or the psychology of the reader but the heteronomous emergent property of both (in Ingarden’s [1973] formulation), then the object of analysis is literary reading. This is a form of consciousness, and the observer’s paradox – difficult enough in other fields – becomes potentially devastating. Since we are dealing with literary reading, we might call this particularly thorny manifestation, the reader’s paradox. You cannot be both reader and analyst at the same time, and the fact that you necessarily can only toggle between the two, means that the reader is always and at any single moment inaccessible to the analyst. For example, from my readers’ responses to ‘The Jumblies’ extract above, it is not clear how ‘natural’ their natural, intuitive, pre-analytical impressions are. In the first place, they all bring their dispositions of personality. Then, even when their responses are recorded immediately, there is both a tem­ poral and ontological shift, after which we are not looking at a first reading but a reflexive perspective on that reading. How can this special case of the observer’s paradox be addressed? In the natural sciences, problems of observation and experimenter bias are resolved by the use of experimental controls and double-blind tests, where the analyst does not even know which outcome is in process. In the social and human sciences, this is more difficult, and solutions are aimed more at minimizing or mitigating the effects of the observer’s paradox



The Reader’s Paradox

55

rather than denying it. Techniques for attempted avoidance include the use of raw, pre-study data: for example, examining social features that already exist in a studiable form, so that the analyst had no part in constructing the data set. An example of this would be the sociolinguistic examination of reading-group discourse, where the reading group already recorded its own discussions and was not set up by a researcher (Swann and Allington 2009; Whiteley 2010; Stockwell 2010). Another possible method is trawling, in which no specific hypothesis or research question is formulated in advance, but an entire field of investigation is recorded in its complexity, with categories and features allowed to emerge ‘naturally’ from the data. Anthropological and ethnomethodological studies are examples of this (such as Scollon 2001). Participant observation is a further method, in which the fact of the observer’s paradox is embraced and the analyst becomes an explicit and full member of the community being studied (Milroy 1987). Additionally, the triangulation of several different quantitative methods aims at isolating the phenomenon under investigation, while accepting that direct observation is not possible (Labov 2001). There are obvious counter-arguments and problems in  all of these techniques in the social sciences, although most of them have been reasonably successfully applied in the field of stylistics. The movement within stylistics, which is firmly social scientific in attitude (Miall 2006; Hakemulder, Zyngier and van Peer 2007), has produced valuable insights and real advances in our understanding of literary reading. However, in these quantitative, lab-based and empirical forms of stylistics (which is properly stylistics as a social science), such techniques ultimately achieve merely a best possible situation, rather than an absolute resolution. As a result, we can say that we know quite a lot about readers in test situations reflecting on their own prior activity, but generalizing these findings to natural reading in the population at large is not a safe extension. A principled stylistician might argue that the application of linguistic models with validity established for the language system as a whole can be used reliably to reach aspects of a reading that are subconscious or even unconscious: I came very close to arguing for this in my analytical account of the readers’ intuitions above, and I do think there is some merit in it. Introspection, as long as it is followed by a systematic analysis and articulate clarity, remains a useful and relatively direct gaze straight at the reader’s paradox. However, it may well be that any social scientific attempt to minimize, mitigate or evade the reader’s paradox in literary study is futile. Indeed, the reader’s paradox is itself a key feature of literary reading; it is an irreducible part of that form of consciousness. A desire to ‘resolve’ the reader’s paradox

56

Pedagogical Stylistics

does not recognize that a complementary key feature of literary engagement is the singularity of the experience (Attridge 2004). If a literary work is regarded as singular by definition – defamiliarizing, generically and intertextually positioned while still retaining some uniqueness of creative invention – then this is a product of both the text and the singularly unrepeatable nature of any particular given reading experience. It strikes me that a cognitive poetics sensitive to the collision of meaning, feeling and readerly positioning as encompassed by texture (Stockwell 2009) offers the most promising research ground here. In the process of gathering my readers’ impressions of ‘The Jumblies’, and then formulating them into a texturally principled discussion, what emerged in  all our experiences was a recovery of the child-like sense of wonder and appreciation of Lear’s literary work. Whether we ascribed the intricate cleverness and rich detail of the poem to Lear’s intellect or to the language system in which he was immersed, the outcome of the discussion was a better and richer understanding of the artwork itself simply as a brilliant object in the world. Although ‘appreciation’ is rather an oldfashioned notion in literary scholarship, it remains the key explanation for reading literature and pursuing it as an experience that increases in value. Valuing students’ intuitive responses and finding their place within a disciplinary training are also essential and affirming actions. Additionally, it is important to emphasize that this can be done without resorting to an ineffable, mystifying or sacred view of literature as being somehow beyond the possibility of analysis. The reader’s paradox, then, is not a problem to be resolved, but is part of the object to be studied in its own right. In order to do this, I suggest the best way of doing stylistics and teaching stylistics lies in embracing the analytical involvement in the reading experience, rather than attempting to deny it or minimize it. In aiming exclusively for social scientific paradigms in stylistics, I think there is a risk of losing sight of the more unmeasurable, difficult, intangible and subtle features of literary reading. Stylistics can certainly be a social science, but it can also be an artful science, whose aim is towards a principled and humane literary scholarship.

References Attridge, D. (2004), The Singularity of Literature. London: Routledge. Booth, W. C. (1961), A Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Carter, R. and Stockwell, P. (eds) (2008), The Language and Literature Reader. ­London: Routledge.



The Reader’s Paradox

57

Chatman, S. (1978), Story and Discourse. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Croft, W. and Cruse, D. A. (2004), Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge ­University Press. Eco, U. (1990), The Limits of Interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Evans, V. and Green, M. (2006), Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Freeman, D. C. (1993), ‘“According to my bond”: King Lear and re-cognition’. ­Language and Literature, 2, (1), 1–18. Ingarden, R. (1973), The Literary Work of Art: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Ontology, Logic, and Theory of Literature (trans. G. Grabowics, from the third edition of Das literarische Kunstwerk, 1965; after a Polish revised translation, 1960; from the original German, 1931). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Iser, W. (1974), The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Labov, W. (2001), Principles of Linguistic Change (3 vols). Oxford: Blackwell. Lambrou, M. and Stockwell, P. (eds) (2007), Contemporary Stylistics. London: ­Continuum. Langacker, R. (2008), Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction. Oxford: Oxford ­University Press. Lear, E. (1871), Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets. London: Robert Bush. McIntyre, D. and Busse, B. (eds) (2010), Language and Style. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Milroy, L. (1987), Language and Social Networks (2nd edn). Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Mullany, L. and Stockwell, P. (2010), Introducing English Language. London: ­Routledge. Muller, W. and Fischer, O. (eds) (2003), From Sign to Signing: Iconicity in Language and Literature. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Nanny, M. and Fischer, O. (eds) (1999), Form Miming Meaning. Amsterdam: ­Benjamins. Scollon, R. (2001), Mediated Discourse: The Nexus of Practice. London: Routledge. Stockwell, P. (2002), Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction. London: Routledge. —(2009), Texture: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. —(2010), ‘Humanity and the art of literary linguistics’. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia: International Journal of Linguistics, 42, (1) (special issue of the Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen Vol. XXIII, eds A. Hjorth Balle, T. Jelsbak and N. Zeuthen), 103–16. —(2011), pp. 35–51, ‘Ethics and imagination in literary reading’, in R. Jones (ed.), Discourse and Creativity. London: Pearson. Swann, J. and Allington, D. (2009), ‘Reading groups and the language of literary texts: a case study in social reading’. Literary Reading as Social Practice. Special Issue of Language and Literature, 18, (3), 247–64. Whiteley, S. (2010), Literary Emotional Impact: A Text World Theory Account of Readers' Emotional Responses to Literary Texts. (Unpublished PhD thesis: University of ­Sheffield).

Chapter 4

Experiencing or Interpreting Literature: Wording Instructions Olivia Fialho, David Miall and Sonia Zyngier

4.1  Introduction Instructions reflect the attitudes and opinions of those who word them. In this sense, the way teachers conduct their classes can play a relevant role in students’ responses. However, traditionally, what may seem obvious has not been subjected to empirical investigation. Since the origin of academic literary studies in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, there has been a mismatch between the idea that literature could be used as a vehicle of education and one of its primordial functions: to be ‘simply enjoyed or absorbed as part of the normal upbringing of gentlefolk’ (Graff 1987: 1). Other problems involve the lack of training for the job of teaching and the fact that few are involved in studying their own practice (Hanauer 2010). Over a century of teaching has resulted in a disservice to the area, contributing to ‘extinguishing the flame [by] deadening students’ literary sensibilities, and demanding students’ assent to a partisan, dogmatic, and incoherent system of beliefs’ (Berkowitz 2006). Indeed, resisting a more evidence-based approach to research, many literary critics and teachers have argued that the area cannot be subjected to empirical testing. This has not been the case with pedagogical stylistics, which, from its early days, has always promoted observation of real data (Burke 2008; Clark and Zyngier 2003; Verdonk 2002; Carter and McRae 1996; among others). The present study contributes to literary education by emphasizing how students write about their reading experiences and what can be inferred from observing the textual patterns they create when they respond to instructions proposed by the teacher. We assume that stylistics can help students understand verbal manipulation and response without losing the focus on the centrality of the reading experience. In Gribble’s (1983: 32) words, if literary education has led ‘to a cold and clinical approach to literature, this may be due to the inadequacy of the teaching’. This situation is precisely what we would like to avoid.



Experiencing or Interpreting Literature

59

4.2  Traditions in Teaching Despite its many different strands (see Zyngier 2006), the teaching of literature can be broadly categorized into a tendency to follow the hermeneutic tradition of textual interpretation, like close reading, or interpretations informed by the various perspectives in literary theory (feminist, post-structuralist, etc.), and a more textual-oriented approach, which is essentially the role that stylistics plays (see Short 1996; Carter et al. 1997). What all these approaches have in common, though, is the fact that, in the institutional setting, a personal experience is not solicited for many different reasons, and this raises problems about how to evaluate students’ performance. In fact, several surveys in the past decades have indicated a worldwide crisis in reading (PISA 2000, 2003, 2009; IDEB). For example, ‘Reading at Risk’, a report issued by the National Endowment for the Arts (2004), presented a detailed but bleak assessment of the decline in reading in the United States. This survey of national trends in literary reading assessed more than 17,000 adults, covering most major demographic groups. They found that less than half of the adult population surveyed read literary texts and concluded that there was a decline in other sorts of reading as well. These facts have called for urgent measures, which may just be starting to take effect (see Reading on the Rise 2010). It is true that research has been developed to help change this scenario (e.g., Watson and Zyngier 2007; Language and Literature February 2010; Burke 2010), but not much can be claimed to have been achieved in terms of sensitizing students to the literary experience. Irrespective of the strategy employed, dealing with literary texts in the classroom has led students to a detached and clinical attitude. Research is still needed before we can definitively state why we have arrived at the present situation. If we believe that literary texts should still find a place in the curriculum, measures should be taken so that all involved (teachers, students, parents, authorities) contribute to make reading literary texts memorable and relevant.

4.3  An Earlier Attempt: Literary Awareness One of the first attempts to put Rosenblatt’s (1938) proposal into practice and to produce a pedagogic experience from personal literary reading was a course on Literary Awareness (Zyngier 1994) that was intended to sensitize readers to the verbal artistry of texts. In its workshops, individual English as

60

Pedagogical Stylistics

a foreign language (EFL) readers would account for the emotional impact of specific linguistic patterns and open the possibility of being personally changed by the reading experience. Besides developing autonomy, Literary Awareness enabled students to build a coherent and substantiated interpretation relying on tools provided by stylistics. The aim was to make learning an engaging and meaningful activity, providing room for students to experience the text and account for it from a linguistic perspective. The concept of Literary Awareness relied largely on the assumptions provided by critical pedagogy. In Freire’s (1970/1987: 58) words, ‘there is only knowledge in invention, in re-invention, in the impatient and permanent search that individuals do in the world and with the world’ (our translation). From the point of view of critical pedagogy, literary education should be regarded as an event that takes place in a specific social context that depends largely on interpersonal engagement and dialogue. However, over 15 years since the conception, description and application of Literary Awareness, we have realized that facilitating the initial impact of texts and acquiring a linguistic toolkit is not enough to guarantee meaningful reading (Zyngier et  al. 2007; Fialho 2011). Emotional involvement is in question, besides a manifest need for more empirical research.

4.4  Experiencing and Interpreting: Defining the Terms It is our contention that much that occurs in the literature classroom steers students away from the reasons that brought them into literary study in the first place. While a student may become intrigued by, say, a Marxist interpretation of the poetry of Blake, or a post-colonial view of Conrad, these views are likely to repress their immediate sense of engagement with the literary text, especially as such theoretical approaches are made to seem more powerful than the literary text itself. Nowadays, as Graff (2009: 7) observes, we teach ‘suspicious interpretation’ instead of ‘affect, absorption, and rapture’. Yet what else are we to do? As Fish (1980: 355) has put it, ‘like it or not, interpretation is the only game in town’; and, if so, this necessarily underestimates the immediacy of the encounter with the text itself. In brief, if students are alienated, as Felski (2009: 30) observes, it is because ‘the theories they encounter are so excruciatingly tongue-tied about why literary texts matter, offering only a critical deflation of the reasons rather than a searching engagement with them’. This approach is only a more sophisticated version of that question invariably asked in both high school and higher education: What is this text about? – A question designed to deflect or



Experiencing or Interpreting Literature

61

obscure whatever response to the text the student may already have formed. Since this question also signals where authority to interpret is actually located, it may, as Miall (2006: 39) suggests, ‘lead to dispiriting games in the classroom where the student is supposed to guess what the teacher or examiner has in mind’. In this chapter, we propose not that interpretation should be eliminated, but that it becomes a meaningful exercise only after students (and their teacher) have explored their experiences of the text while first reading it. What feelings does the text evoke, and in relation to what passages? Does the imagery called up by the text remind the students of scenes from their own lives? How is the students’ sense of their own identity summoned by the text and, perhaps, called into question? In Felski’s (2009: 31) words, ‘[a]rt is the quintessential mood-altering substance. Broaching questions of aesthetic emotion virtually guarantees surges of animation and spirited engagement in the classroom’. At the same time, exploring such experience is challenging. Sikora et al. (2010: 136) suggest that ‘[i]t confronts one as an apparition whose presence is undeniable’, but works at the level of mood, so that ‘what often matters most in our experience of the text cannot be fully articulated’. Thus, the study that we now present is designed to illuminate the differences between two forms of articulation in response to the literary text: that calling for an interpretative process of investigation, and an alternative based on experiencing forms of response.

4.5  The Experiment This study aims at reinstalling the relevance of the literary experience in pedagogical settings by examining two different types of instructional interventions, or two different tasks – different in the sense that they are worded differently. We assume that the way instructions are worded can affect students’ responses to literary texts. The experiment was carried out in a span of 2  weeks as part of the curriculum of an introductory course on World Literature, with the first author as instructor, teaching a class in which she was the primary instructor. The study was repeated the following year with the same instructor teaching a different class in which she was not the primary instructor. All in all, there were 28 participants, who were first-year Comparative Literature students of a Canadian university. However, for this study, only the essays of the participants who handed in both essays (for the experiential and the interpretative groups) were used. After the cut, we counted 17 pairs of essays.

62

Pedagogical Stylistics

Thirteen participants were female and four were male. During these 2 weeks, students were asked to read two modernist texts and attended 6 classes of 50 minutes each. In the first week, they read and discussed James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’. In the second week, the text was Clarice Lispector’s ‘The Daydreams of a Drunk Woman’. Classes followed the same structure, as described next. Class  1: A 10-minute introduction followed by a 40-minute small group discussion, based on the homework (see extract of pre-reading activity in Section 4.6) and an in-class activity sheet. During this time, students started discussing their responses to the pre-reading activity and continued working on those proposed as part of an in-class worksheet. Class  2: A 30-minute whole group discussion, based on the correction of the in-class activity sheet distributed in Class 1, followed by a 20-minute lecture on the text studied. Class 3: A 30-minute lecture on the text studied, followed by a 20-minute whole group discussion.

4.6  Research Design Randomized into two groups, students worked under two conditions, as they completed two different sets of pre-reading (homework) and reading instructions (in-class activity). The control group worked with a set of what the researchers called ‘interpretive instructions’, which focused on the more traditional tasks of literary analysis and interpretation. The experimental group was given a set of less typical ‘experiencing instructions’, which focused on experiencing reading that foregrounded personal responses (Rosenblatt 1938; Miall 2006; Kuiken 2009; Fialho 2012). The following were the pre-reading (homework) activities for the control group (please note that bold type is used for marking the differences between the groups). Control group Read ‘The Dead’ (2002: 1945–74) from beginning to end. After reading the whole text, divide the text into three sections: (a) Up to ‘when the piano had stopped’. (b) From ‘Lancers were arranged’ up to ‘Good night. Good night’. (c) From ‘The morning was still dark.’ to the end of the text.



Experiencing or Interpreting Literature

63

Select three passages from each section that you consider important to the understanding of the text (each selected passage should be somewhere between a few words and a full sentence). After selecting three important passages, write about your initial interpretation of the text as a whole: what is the story about? Write as much as you would like to. The following were the pre-reading activities for the experimental group. Experimental group Read ‘The Dead’ from beginning to end. As you read, take time to linger and reflect; give the text a chance to affect you. Divide the text into three sections: (a) Up to ‘when the piano had stopped’. (b) From ‘Lancers were arranged’ up to ‘Good night. Good night’. (c) From ‘The morning was still dark.’ up to the end of the text. Read each of the sections a second time, but this time with emphasis on a passage that you find especially striking or evocative (each selected passage should be somewhere between a few words and a full sentence). As before, take time to linger and reflect; give the text, especially the passage you select, a chance to affect you. Now I would like to know more about your response to the entire story: any impressions and evaluations of the text as a whole. Describe any thoughts, feelings, images, impressions or memories that were part of your experience. Write as much as you would like to. Here we provide one example of how the questions were worded in the in-class activity that was proposed to them. Interpretative group Gabriel’s self-image is challenged three times in the story: in his encounter with (a) Lily (p. 1947) (b) Miss Ivors (pp. 1952–54) (c) Gretta (pp. 1967–74) In what ways do these three moments challenge his self-image?

Pedagogical Stylistics

64

Experiencing group Underline the words that qualify Gabriel’s emotional state in his encounter with: (a) Lily (p. 1947) (b) Miss Ivors (pp. 1952–54) (c) Gretta (pp. 1967–74) In what ways are these three moments significant for Gabriel? What kind of emotional change does he experience? These two sets of instructions show that the control group was prompted to read the text for meaning, whereas the experiencing group was asked to reso­nate affectively to it. Both groups read both texts and received the two different sets of instructions, in a counterbalanced design, as shown in Table 4.1. Despite the differences in the wording of the instructions, classes were planned so as to follow the same structure. In this study, in-class activities included lectures and small group and large group discussions, and the teacher’s role varied between discussion leader (during lectures) and moderator, as the teacher mediated students’ discussions. The instructional orientations for the control and experimental groups were adapted from Eva-Wood’s (1994: 179) proposal, and are summarized in Table 4.2.

4.7  Measurement All participants completed four measures: (1) an adapted version of the Literary Response Questionnaire (LRQ; Miall and Kuiken 1995); (2) a selfperceptual depth scale of the Experiencing Questionnaire (EQ; Kuiken et al. 1987, 2010); (3) a Class Assessment Questionnaire; and (4) a response essay. Video recording of small group discussions was also conducted. In the present study, we take a primarily qualitative approach and report the Table 4.1  Research design Group 1 Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ Lispector’s ‘The Daydreams of a Drunk Woman’

Group 2 Interpretative Experiencing

Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ Lispector’s ‘The Daydreams of a Drunk Woman’

Experiencing Interpretative



Experiencing or Interpreting Literature

65

Table 4.2  Instructional orientations Group

Control

Experimental

Teacher’s role Orientation to text

Small group discussions Literary analysis in small groups Large group discussions Discussion leader/mediator Emphasis on interpretation

Curricular emphasis Guiding questions

Interpretation What is this text about?

Small group discussions Experiencing activities in small groups Large group discussions Discussion leader/mediator Emphasis on feelings, initial reactions on the reading experience Experiencing reading What are the effects of the text on you? What does the text mean to you?

Group process

results of the response essays. The results of the other measures are discussed in Fialho et al. (2011, forthcoming). They indicate little difference between the experimental and the control group in class assessment and in the LRQ, and none in the self-perceptual depth scale of the EQ. The video analysis, however, shows that the experiencing group was much more engaged in voluntary participation. For the present study, 34 essays produced by the 17 participants were examined to see what patterns emerged from the students’ written responses to their reading. The objective here was to extract possible language patterns and preferences that would enable us to see how each group reacted collectively. Resorting to methods from corpus linguistics (Sinclair 1991), we wanted to see how the way the instructions were worded affected the responses.

4.8  Treatment of Data Once the essays were collected, they were digitized ipsis litteris and made machine-readable. In this study, the interpretative corpus amounts to 10,930 words, and the experiencing to 9,769 words, numbers that qualify both corpora as small (Berber-Sardinha 2004: 26; Ma 1993). They were probed by WordSmith Tools (Scott 1999), which offers three main tools: WordList, Concord and KeyWords. As two small corpora were being compared, only the first two tools were used. WordList provides data on the number of different words (types) and running words (tokens) in each of the corpora. It also gives information on the standardized type/token ratio of words, which allows us to assess lexical variety. Type/token ratio is obtained when

66

Pedagogical Stylistics

the number of types is divided by the number of tokens and the result is multiplied by 100. As this ratio varies according to text length, standardized type/token ratio was used here. In this case, instead of single items, WordSmith computes the ratio for groups of tokens (every 1,000) and then calculates a total average. This means that the higher the result, the more lexically varied the corpus. We were also interested in verifying whether there were statistically significant differences in the use of words between the groups. To this purpose, we first calculated the use of each word as a proportion of the total number of words in each corpora. Then, we conducted a hypothesis test, the two proportion z-test, to identify significant differences between these proportions. In the following section, we report the results of this combination of qualitative and quantitative analyses.

4.9  Analysis A list of the most frequent words was extracted from each of the corpora and the percentages were observed. For the sake of clarity, the control group is labelled INT and the experimental group EXP. 4.9.1  Text length and lexical variety An initial observation showed that INT used more words (10,153) than EXP (9,769). This means that they wrote more and their standardized paragraph length was also higher (364.40    188.84). However, they produced less lexically rich essays. Their standardized type/token ratio was lower than EXP (37.30    39.54%). In order to find out some of the aspects that characterized the groups, we listed the 100 most frequent words in each group; however, we are aware that there are many possibilities for exploring the data obtained, which remain for further studies. Here, we limit ourselves to some that stand out at first glance and may help indicate if there are differences between the two groups. 4.9.2  Thinking vs. feeling One of the first evidences that draws our attention, when comparing both  corpora, is the fact that ‘discuss’ (0.27    0.19%) and ‘understand’ (0.29  0.15%) occur more frequently in INT, and that ‘feel’ only appears among the 100 most frequent words in the EXP group (0.18%). In INT, it



Experiencing or Interpreting Literature

67

only occurs 0.09%. The same happens with ‘feelings’, and in this case the difference is significant (0.15% in EXP and 0.06% in INT; p  0.05). When we look at the collocations of ‘feeling’ and ‘feelings’, a pattern emerges for INT. The nominal phrase ‘the/a feeling(s) of’ occurs 7 times out of 14 occurrences of the word in INT (e.g., ‘the entrapping feelings of an unsatisfied thought’) and 3 times out of 24 in EXP. What we might be seeing here is that INT shows a trend towards definition instead of relating it to a personal experience. ‘My feeling’ (3  0) as well as ‘her/his feeling’ (5  0) only occur in the EXP group. This may indicate that EXP seems to give more value to experience as something personal rather than to the notion of what the phenomenon is. Another word worth mentioning, although not among the 100 most frequent ones, was ‘experience’ (0.06% in INT and 0.11% in EXP). ‘Experi­ encing’ only occurs with INT (0.02%), but EXP produces ‘experienced’ (0.04%) and ‘experiences’ (0.05%). Not only is the word ‘experience’ more frequent in EXP, but this group also sees it in a span of time (past and present), whereas INT sees it in terms of a continuum. The collocates1 of ‘experience’ are also more varied in EXP, as shown in Table 4.3. An examination of the word ‘as’ also reinforced this tendency. It is more frequent in INT (1.01  0.95%). However, when we look at the collocations, INT shows more focus in argumentation whereas EXP focuses on experience. Table 4.4 indicates how ‘as’ collocates in both corpora. ‘As though/as if’ is more frequent in EXP, which reveals a tendency to construct comparisons, whereas in INT it occurs as an adversative or an additive discourse marker (however, as well as). This implies that the higher occurrence of ‘as well as’ in INT and ‘as if/as though’ in EXP may imply that the former is more argumentative and the latter is more imaginative in the sense that they create scenarios for possible comparisons. Table 4.3  Collocates of ‘experience’ INT enriching human reading

EXP Enriching Human Reading Surreal Thoughtful First Life My Life

Pedagogical Stylistics

68

Table 4.4  Collocates of ‘as’ and number of occurrences Collocate

INT

EXP

as though/as if as well as however as discussion as class as I felt as I feel as

2 16 3 5 2 1 0

6 10 0 1 4 0 2

4.9.3  Narrative perspective Another finding that draws our attention is the INT preference for ‘story’ (0.93    0.80%), whereas EXP prefers to use ‘text’ (0.60    0.51%). In relation to characters, there is a marked preference of EXP for the female character, which shows in the significant differences in the use of ‘she’ (1.34% EXP    0.84% INT; p    0.00); ‘her’ (1.48% EXP    1.01% INT; p    0.00). The same occurs with the use of ‘woman’ and ‘character’, although these are not statistically different. The fact that there were more women participating in the experiment may explain this empathy for the female character. However, with INT, a shift to preference for the male character occurs. Differences are statistically significant as regards the use of ‘he’ (0.70% INT  0.46% EXP; p  0.03); ‘his’ (0.78% INT  0.37% EXP; p    0.00) and ‘Gabriel’ (0.70% INT    0.33% EXP; p    0.00). Difference was also found in the use of ‘him’, although not significant (0.22% INT  0.18% EXP), as shown in Table 4.5. The role that readers play here is also interesting for understanding their narrative perspective. Our initial findings show differences in how they Table 4.5  Response to characters

her she woman character his he Gabriel him

INT

EXP

1.01 0.84 0.34 0.28 0.78 0.70 0.70 0.22

1.48 1.34 0.44 0.41 0.37 0.46 0.33 0.18



Experiencing or Interpreting Literature

69

perceive distance and proximity. Although ‘is’ occurs with the same frequency in both corpora (1.57%), ‘was’ is more frequent with INT, which is statistically significant (1.81    1.31%; p    0.01). Proximity increases when this finding is placed together with the results of ‘this’, which is less frequent with the same group (1.29  1.31%). Although difference in the use of ‘that’ is minimal between the groups, a report of how this pronoun is used is informative. There is a slight tendency to occur more frequently with INT (1.78  1.74%). Further investigation could highlight if indeed INT becomes more distanced than EXP. In terms of the first personal pronouns, other findings are indicated in Table 4.6. What draws our attention here is that the occurrence of ‘I’ is almost the same in both corpora, although it occurs more frequently in EXP. Similarly, ‘my’ is also more frequent in EXP, although these differences are not significant either. The same is not true in relation to ‘me’, which shows a higher proportion in INT (0.67    0.42%; p    0.02). The objective case here is nearly an inverted reflection of the use of ‘my’, again reinforcing a difference of attitude. Participants in the EXP group seem to take possession of the experience and to have a greater sense of agency, although more data are needed to test this hypothesis. Another finding that seems to confirm the tendency for EXP to adopt a more active posture is in regard to the use of ‘we’. Although it is more frequent in INT (0.48  0.39%), an analysis of its collocates shows that the definite article ‘the’ occurs more frequently in the third position to the right (R3) of ‘we’ in INT essays, initiating a noun phrase (11 occurrences, e.g., ‘we concluded that the aunts’, ‘we also compared the previous reading’), whereas it only occurs six times in the EXP corpus. This again shows the INT group tendency towards nominalizing rather than acting. Despite the fewer occurrences of ‘we’ in the EXP group, the verb ‘discuss’ is used as the action performed more frequently by EXP (6  5). The same occurs with ‘were’ (4  0) and ‘have’ (4  2). This finding may lead us to infer that ‘we’ seems to be associated with more action in EXP. As for self-reference, differences in the use of the word ‘self’ are also significant. Its proportion is higher in the EXP group (0.33  0.17% INT; Table 4.6  I-positioning

I me my

INT

EXP

2.20 0.67 0.37

2.23 0.42 0.46

Pedagogical Stylistics

70

Table 4.7  Collocates of ‘own’ INT beliefs country (men) existence experience family land language purpose reactions wife

EXP body association frustration life experience interpretation life interpretation focus reading self-dignity self-image state of being words

p  0.02). Adding to that, a quite curious finding concerns the word ‘own’. It is again more frequent in INT (16  13%), which also displays ‘his’ (9) and ‘my’ (5) as collocates, whereas those for EXP are ‘image’ (6) and ‘dignity’ (5). When we look at the collocations, we find a series of words that make up the phrase ‘own X’, revealing a more material perspective from INT, whereas EXP places the word in a more experiential context, as shown in Table 4.7. In terms of plot, ‘about’ may also be revealing. Not only is it more prevalent in the INT group (0.67    0.59% EXP), but it reflects some patterns of usage, collocating with ‘text’ (seven times), ‘setting’ and ‘scene’ (two times each), whereas no repeated pattern appears in the EXP group. 4.9.4  Perception of classes When we look at how the lemma ‘class*’ (referring to the classroom and its members) is used in both corpora, INT shows a slight prevalence (0.53  0.52% EXP). Table 4.8 shows some of its collocates. The way ‘class*’ collocates with the two demonstrative pronouns ‘this’ and ‘that’ brings us back to the pattern distance–proximity discussed above. The fact that INT collocates with ‘that’ might indicate that this group assumes a distanced perspective towards the class, whereas by collocating the lemma with ‘this’ EXP assumes a closer and more intimate perspective. A supporting finding is the fact that ‘class*’ collocates more frequently with ‘our’ in EXP. In addition, ‘class*’ collocates with ‘after’ and ‘other’ in INT, indicating a tendency towards avoiding the palpable sense of ‘being there’. Another pattern that is recurrent here is the fact that this lemma collocates



Experiencing or Interpreting Literature

71

Table 4.8  Collocates of ‘class*’ and number of occurrences Collocate that this other our after text

INT

EXP

9 0 6 6 6 0

0 13 0 8 0 6

with ‘text’ in EXP. Again, while commenting on the class, it seems that EXP is more attuned to the texture of the text rather than focusing on the story. It is important to note that ‘other classmates’ occur only in INT (3) and ‘my classmates’ only in EXP (2). Also, ‘in class’ occurs 16 times in INT and 19 in EXP. Both these findings allow us to infer that the participants in the EXP group were more involved and demonstrated a stronger sense of belonging, an interpretation that is supported by the video recording (see Fialho et al. 2011, forthcoming).

4.10  Conclusion We are aware that this study is just the beginning of a long path for investigation. It indicates where and how two different pedagogical strategies may affect responses to texts and classes. The blend of qualitative and quantitative analyses conducted here has helped show that, although not writing more than the other group, students following experiencing instructions produced essays that were more lexically rich. They drew more comparisons and were more imaginative than students following interpretative  instructions. The interpretative intervention seems to have promoted a more argumentative posture. If, on the one hand, the experiencing group perceived texts and classes as offering more personal relevance, on the other hand the interpretative group focused on defining their experiences. The experiencing group also showed more involvement with texts and classes than the interpretative group, who regarded them from a more distanced perspective. In addition, the experiencing group demonstrated a greater sense of agency and promptness to act. In addition, it seems that the interpretative group had a more story-driven reading, that is, they read for plot and story line rather than relating the text to their own experiences.

72

Pedagogical Stylistics

The patterns that appeared in the way both groups used pronouns were also revealing. Previous research has already demonstrated that pronouns are a linguistic form that plays a powerful role in determining the perspectives taken during narrative comprehension (Herman 2002; Bergen and Chang 2005; Brunyé et al. 2009). Our findings, especially as regards the use of demonstrative pronouns, seem to corroborate and extend these results and enable us to conclude that instructions may play an important role in the perspectives that students assume. In this sense, the experiencing instructions seemed to promote an environment where a more intimate transaction between student-readers and texts took place. We believe that empirical evidence can reveal why the flame that Berkowitz and many others referred to (see above) is under threat of extinction in literature classes and help us kindle it instead. In suggesting that pedagogical strategies may affect the way students respond to texts and classes, our study demonstrates the need for more empirical research into pedagogical interventions. As evidenced in this study, an experiencing pedagogy may promote an environment where literary education recovers its meaning and relevance.

Note 1

All collocates reported here are adjacent, unless otherwise noted.

References Berber-Sardinha, T. (2004), Linguística de Corpus. São Paulo: Manole. Bergen, B. and Chang, N. (2005), ‘Embodied construction grammar in simulationbased language understanding’, in J.-O. Östman and M. Fried (eds), Construction Grammars: Cognitive Grounding and Theoretical Extensions. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Press, pp. 147–90. Berkowitz, P. (2006), ‘Review of Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral (eds), Theory’s Empire: An Anthology of Dissent’. Policy Review [online] Web Special (January 2006). Available at: http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/2913906.html. Accessed 12 January 2009. Brunye, T., Ditman, T., Mahoney, C. R., Augustyn, J. S. and Taylor, H. A. (2009), ‘When you and I share perspectives’. Psychological Science, 20, (1), 27–32. Burke, M (ed.) (2010), Pedagogical Issues in Stylistics, Language and Literature, 19, (1), 5–128. —(2011), Literary Reading, Cognition and Emotion: An Exploration of the Oceanic Mind. New York: Routledge.



Experiencing or Interpreting Literature

73

Carter, R., Goddard, A., Reah, D., Sanger, K. and Bowring, M. (1997), Working with Texts: A Core Book for Language Analysis. London and New York: Routledge. Carter, R. and McRae, J. (eds) (1996), Language, Literature & The Learner: Creative Classroom Practice. London and New York: Longman. Clark, U. and Zyngier, S. (2003), ‘Towards a pedagogical stylistics’. Language and Literature, 12, (4), 339–51. Eva-Wood, A. L. (2004), ‘Thinking and feeling poetry: exploring meanings aloud’. Journal of Educational Psychology, 96, 182–91. Felski, R. (2009), ‘After suspicion’. Profession, 2009, 28–35. Fialho, O. (2010), ‘Linguistic basis for numerically-aided phenomenology: a study on self-modification in literary response’. Paper presented at the 2010 IGEL conference, Utrecht University, 7–11 July 2010. —(2012), ‘Self-Modifying Experiences in Literary Reading: A Model for Reader Response’. (PhD dissertation: University of Alberta). Fialho, O., Zyngier, S. and Miall, D. (2011), Interpretation and Experience: Two Pedagogical Interventions Observed. English in Education, 45, (3), 236–53. Fialho, O., Zyngier, S. and Miall, D. (forthcoming), ‘Pedagogische strategieën voor literaire educatie: Een empirische studie’. Submitted to The Dutch National Reading Foundation – stichting lezen. Fish, S. (1980), Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Freire, P. (1987 [1970]), Pedagogia do Oprimido (33rd edn). Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra. Graff, G. (1987), Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. —(2009), ‘Presidential forum: the way we teach now’. Profession, 2009, 5–10. Gribble, J. (1983), Literary Education: A Revaluation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hanauer, D. (2010), Poetry as Research: Exploring Second Language Poetry Writing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Press. Herman, D. (2002), Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Hjort, M. and Laver, S. (eds) (1997), Emotion and the Arts. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. INEP. IDEP: Índice de Desenvolvimento da Educação Básica [online] web. Available at: http://sistemasideb.inep.gov.br/resultado/Accessed at 2 December 2011. Joyce, J. (2002), ‘The dead’, in S. Lawall et al. (eds), The Norton Anthology of World Literature (2nd edn) (Vol. F). New York: Norton, pp. 1941–74. Kuiken, D. (2009), ‘A theory of expressive reading’, in S. Zyngier et al. (eds), Directions in Empirical Literary Studies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Press, pp. 49–68. Kuiken, D., Carey, R. and Nielsen, T. (1987), Moments of affective insight: their phenomenology and relations to selected individual differences. Imagination, Cognition, and Personality, 6, (4), 341–64. Kuiken, D., Campbell, P. and Sopcak, P. (2010), ‘The experiencing questionnaire: locating exceptional reading moments’. Paper presented at the 2010 IGEL conference, Utrecht University, 7–11 July 2010.

74

Pedagogical Stylistics

Lispector, C. (2002), ‘The daydreams of a drunk woman’, in S. Lawall et al. (eds), The Norton Anthology of World Literature (2nd ed. Vol. F.). New York: Norton, pp. 2800–9. Ma, B. K. C. (1993), Small-corpora concordancing in ESL teaching and learning. Hong Kong Papers in Linguistics and Language Teaching, 16, 11–30. Miall, D. S. (2006), Literary Reading: Empirical and Theoretical Studies. New York: Peter Lang. Miall, D. S. and Kuiken, D. (1995), ‘Aspects of literary response: a new questionnaire’. Research in the Teaching of English, 29, 37–58. National Endowments for the Arts (2004), ‘Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America’ [online]. Research Division Report #46. 1 August 2007. Available at: http://www.nea.gov/news/news04/ReadingAtRisk.html. National Endowments for the Arts (2010), ‘Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Literacy’ [online]. Available at: http://www.nea.gov/research/ Readingonrise.pdf. Accessed 6 April 2011. Oatley, K. (2004), ‘From the emotions of conversation to the passions of fiction’, in A. S. R. Manstead, N. Frijda and A. Fischer (eds), Feelings and Emotions: The Amsterdam Symposium. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 98–115. PISA 2000 (2001), Relatório Nacional. Brasília: INEP. PISA 2003. Resumo Técnico [online] web. Available at: http://download.inep. gov.br/download/international/pisa/result-pisa 2003–resum-tec.pdf Accessed 2 December 2011. PISA 2009 Results: What students know and can DO – Student Performance in ­Reading, Mathematics and Science (Volume I). [online] web. Available at: http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/10/61/48852548.pdf Accessed 2 December 2011. Rosenblatt, L. (1938), Literature as Exploration. New York: MLA. Short, M. (1996), Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose. London and New York: Longman. Sikora, S., Kuiken, D. and Miall, D. S. (2010), ‘An uncommon resonance: the influence of loss on expressive reading’. Empirical Studies of the Arts, 28, 135–53. Sinclair, J. (1991), Corpus. Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Verdonk, P. (2002), Stylistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Watson, G. and Zyngier, S. (eds) (2007), Literature and Stylistics for Language Learners: Theory and Practice. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Zyngier, S. (1994), ‘Introducing literary awareness’. Language Awareness, 3, (2), 95–108. —(2006), ‘Stylistics: pedagogical applications’. Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics, 12, 226–32. Zyngier, S., Fialho, O. and Rios, P. A. P. (2007), ‘Revisiting literary awareness’, in G. Watson and S. Zyngier (eds), Literature and Stylistics for Language Learners: ­Theory and Practice. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 194–209.

Part Two

Emerging Trends and Methods in Pedagogical Stylistics

76

Chapter 5

Systemic Stylistics: An Integrative, Rhetorical Method of Teaching and Learning in the Stylistics Classroom Michael Burke

5.1  Introduction Stylistics is most often taught in universities as a stand-alone, modular course in either a language or a literature department.1 What I have always been interested in, as a teacher and facilitator of student learning, is whether there are additional pedagogical benefits to teaching stylistics in a more integrative, systemic way: in a way that sees stylistics taught on a learning cline, rather than as an individual category. A projected outcome of such an incremental method should ideally lead to improved student learning in the undergraduate university classroom. This systemic method of learning locates stylistics at the centre of the cline of modules to be learnt. The research question that this chapter sets out to investigate and report on, is whether stylistics can be taught successfully at the centre of a designed system of learning. I say report on here because such a programme is already in place and has been running for five years now. The main purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to describe that programme and to illustrate its processes and its provisional outcomes. I will begin by setting out the pedagogical environment where this macro experiment into teaching and learning stylistics is currently taking place. I will then show an example of how this form of stylistics teaching and learning works; from first-year/level rhetoric, through second-year/level stylistics and on to third-year/level creative writing. Thereafter, I will report on some emerging data given anonymously and voluntarily by students on the programme. Lastly, I will draw some tentative conclusions and point to future challenges and plausible improvements of the model.

78

Pedagogical Stylistics

5.2  Background This study is about teaching systemic stylistics. Before setting out the pedagogical background to this experiment, let me first say that the term systemic has nothing to do with the popular linguistic notion of Halidayan systemic functional grammar. I use the term in its most literal sense, namely, stylistics taught in a pedagogical system of integrated learning: a kind of stylistics learning that takes place on a cline of integrated and supportive rhetorical and grammatical modules, not learning stylistics as an isolated course. The experiment reported on here is currently being run at Roosevelt Academy (RA) in the Netherlands. Founded in 2004, RA, which is located in the city of Middelburg in the Dutch province of Zeeland, is the second liberal arts and sciences undergraduate honours college set up by Utrecht University. These colleges follow a pedagogical model of teaching and learning excellence developed in U.S. colleges.2 They are characterized by their broad, small-scale character. For example, at RA, all instruction is in English, class sizes are never larger than twenty-five and the college never houses more than 600 students at one time (200 in each of the three years). Further, students select a broad major (arts and humanities, social sciences or sciences) and take a set of foundation courses from the academic core department, which teaches skills pertaining to academic thinking, writing, speaking and reasoning. Essentially, therefore, the academic core department supports the three main departments (see Figure 5.1). Semesters are fifteen weeks long and the class meets twice a week for two hours, totalling sixty contact hours. In addition, students are obliged to spend ten hours a week reading and preparing for the two sessions. Thus, the preparation and contact hours totals 210 hours per course, per semester. Students take four courses per semester. The pedagogical model adopted in the classroom is one of active learning, meaning that no frontal, formal lecturing takes place. Instead, the instructor is a didactically qualified academic who facilitates discussion and critical thinking, monitoring the

Figure 5.1  The four departments in the RA liberal arts and sciences system.



Systemic Stylistics

79

dialogues and putting the discussion back on track, if necessary, by means of critical questioning. At RA, stylistics is housed in an academic core department and not within a modern language department, as it almost exclusively is in other academic institutions. In such departments elsewhere, heated discourses can sometimes develop between literature scholars on the one hand and linguistics scholars on the other. The content of such discussions usually pertains to where stylistics does and does not belong in the department.3 As mentioned above, the academic core department at RA teaches mainly mandatory courses to the entire student body. These courses fall broadly into two interrelated categories: reasoning skills and communication skills. The communication skills are primarily housed in the English for academic purposes (EAP) track and the foreign language acquisition track, while the reasoning skills are taught in the methods and statistics track and the rhetoric and argumentation track. Stylistics is located in this rhetoric and argumentation track. It was mentioned above how systemic stylistics operates on a cline of learning rather than as a category. The general pedagogical principle of a system of courses, building on each other, gradually becoming more difficult, harks back to the tried and tested system employed in the rhetorical schools of the ancient Roman world, called the progymnasmata. There is, however, a difference. Whereas this ancient method was more linear, often incorporating a series of fourteen oral and written tasks that gradually increased in difficulty, systemic stylistics is more integrative and less linear. Figure 5.2 attempts to reflect this. From Figure 5.2, one should be able to differentiate between three distinct levels: 100, 200 and 300. These relate to first, second and third-year courses. The courses labelled with an a (i.e., 100 grammar and 300 journalism) are, formally speaking, part of the EAP track. The other courses labelled with a b (i.e., 100 rhetoric [and argumentation], 200 stylistics and 300 creative writing and 300 persuasion in social discourses) are all in the rhetoric track. Figure 5.3 shows the rhetoric track more clearly. An important pedagogical principle that both guides and structures the didactic relationship between the 100, 200 and 300 levels is Bloom’s Taxonomy of learning: a primarily social sciences pedagogical framework that clarifies learning objectives within education. First published by Benjamin Bloom in 1956, the taxonomy refers to a classification of different sets of objectives that instructors set for students. Bloom’s original goal was to develop a holistic approach to education based on three domains: the cognitive, the emotive and the psychomotor. Centrally, the taxonomy

80

Pedagogical Stylistics

Figure 5.2  Related courses in the EAP and rhetoric tracks.

Figure 5.3  The rhetoric track.

prescribes three levels, with two concepts in each level, moving from lowerorder thinking skills to higher-order ones. The lowest level involves knowledge and comprehension, the second level focuses on application and analysis and the third and highest level promotes the faculties of synthesis and evaluation (Table 5.1). Since the 1950s, the taxonomy has gone through several revisions. Perhaps one of the most significant was developed by Anderson and Krathwohl



Systemic Stylistics

81

Table 5.1  Bloom’s taxonomy of learning Higher-order thinking skills 3 3

Evaluation Synthesis

2 2

Analysis Application

1 1

Comprehension Knowledge Lower-order thinking skills

Table 5.2  Anderson and Krathwohl (2001): a re-ordering/updating of the levels of learning Higher-order thinking skills 3 3

Creating Evaluating

2 2

Analyzing Applying

1 1

Understanding Remembering Lower-order thinking skills

(2001), who made two central changes. First, they modified the levels of learning by refining a number of categories to make them reflect more accurately what they do. This led to an activization of descriptors. For example, they switched the focus from knowledge skills to remembering skills, and from the capacity to evaluate to the ability to create. Second, they turned all their categories from noun forms into -ing verbs forms. This facilitated better descriptions in the students’ learning goals and general learning objectives that are stated in course manuals and outlines (Table 5.2). With all this in mind, let us now turn to an example of how this works in practice within a systemic stylistics framework. In the following section, I sketch out a real example used in the course.

5.3  Systemic Stylistics in Practice The first level of the rhetoric track is the 100-level introduction to rhetoric and argumentation module. This course is mandatory for arts and

82

Pedagogical Stylistics

humanities majors and used to be given twice a year to accommodate this group of students. This means that each semester a group of twenty-five students took the course, equaling fifty per academic year. However, in the last couple of years, many social sciences students have opted to take the course as an elective, because perhaps they see that the skills offered and thus acquired on this course are just as essential for them as they are for their arts and humanities peers. As a result, the course is now given five times a year, meaning that 125 students can take the module. It is primarily focused on introducing concepts. The skills that the students acquire on this basic level course are those of understanding and remembering, essentially lowerorder skills that, following Bloom’s taxonomy, are pedagogically appropriate for this level.4 Let us now look more closely at the third of the five canons of rhetoric, which is concerned with style in language.5 This involves the notions of clarity, appropriateness and ornament. The first of these, and to some extent the second, are about acquiring and employing good usage in grammar, syntax and vocabulary. Ornament is largely about style figures and it is this in particular that we will focus on in this chapter. Style figures usually fall into the category of either schemes or tropes.6 The former deviate at the level of syntax, while the latter deviate on the semantic level. To return to the design of the pedagogical experiment, the focus here, at this first-year level, is just ‘knowing’ what these style figures are, and also knowing what they can do, i.e., what effect they can have on discourse and ultimately on discourse comprehension. Appropriate descriptor questions that usually end up in the class examinations and assignments should ask students to describe and/or define certain schemes or tropes.7 Other, more comprehension-based questions might ask students to discuss and/or summarize how they believe certain style figures work and whether they deviate in either structure or meaning. Such questions are more difficult than remembering and reproducing ones, but are nonetheless still essentially lower-order questions. Moving on, stylistics is located at the hub of the rhetoric track, at the second (i.e., 200) level (see Figure 5.2). The stylistics course is currently offered just once a year, to a maximum of twenty-five students, and is populated by both arts and humanities and social sciences students. The main course book is Short (1996), while Wales (2001) is the mandatory reference book.8 Following Bloom’s taxonomy model, at this level the focus is on middle-order skills such as application and analysis. Some example application questions that occur in examinations and assignments, which are set by the instructor, could ask students to show or examine how



Systemic Stylistics

83

foregrounding manifests itself in a text and how the affects of foregrounding operate on them as a reader of the text. Additional questions that might occur in examinations or assignments might ask students to analyse and/or order different levels of foregrounding, such as levels of parallelism, repetition, deviation, etc. This is basically asking students to conduct a stylistic analysis. Let us now try to make this discussion more concrete by introducing a text fragment that I have used in previous real teaching situations. Consider the following text. It is the penultimate paragraph at the end of Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves. Again I see before me the usual street. The canopy of civilization is burnt out. The sky is dark as polished whalebone. But there is a kindling in the sky whether of lamplight or of dawn. There is a stir of some sort — sparrows on plane trees somewhere chirping. There is a sense of the break of day. I will not call it dawn. What is dawn in the city to an elderly man standing in the street looking up rather dizzily at the sky? Dawn is some sort of whitening of the sky; some sort of renewal. Another day; another Friday; another twentieth of March, January, or September. Another general awakening. The stars draw back and are extinguished. The bars deepen themselves between the waves. The film of mist thickens on the fields. A redness gathers on the roses, even on the pale rose that hangs by the bedroom window. A bird chirps. Cottagers light their early candles. Yes, this is the eternal renewal, the incessant rise and fall and fall and rise again. We might call this a rhetorical-stylistic analysis. Examples of style tasks that have been used in the stylistics classroom situation with this particular text include the following: zzTask:

With your knowledge of rhetorical figures gained at the 100-level rhetoric course, first identify as many figures as you can and then equate them to the higher, macro levels of stylistic foregrounding. Try to say whether they rely on parallelism or repetition or deviation. Now consider what effect (if any) these figures have on you as a reader? zzTask: Viewed from a structural, stylistic perspective, is there a kind of recap or what you might term an emotional/rhetorical flourish at ­closure? If so, which style and/or linguistic elements are formally responsible for this effect? Also, how does it affect you, as a reader, if at all?

Pedagogical Stylistics

84

Table 5.3  Textual elements highlighted by the students in the past Text fragment

Style figure (description)

‘canopy of civilization’

A visual rather than phonetic version of alliteration ‘The sky is dark as polished whalebone’ Simile ‘There is a kindling - There is a stir - There is a sense Repetition, anaphora (a near isocolon) (of the break of day)’ ‘What is dawn in the city to an elderly man standing Erotema (rhetorical question) in the street looking up rather dizzily at the sky?’ ‘Some sort of whitening – some sort of renewal’ Repetition, anaphora (a near isocolon) ‘Another day; another Friday; another twentieth of Repetition March, January, or September. Another general awakening’. ‘The stars draw back - The bars deepen themselves Repetition The film of mist thickens’ ‘Cottagers light their early candles’. A loose oxymoron ‘The incessant rise and fall and fall and rise again’ Chiasmus (an antimetabole)

If we look at the first question, students in previous classroom situations have regularly highlighted a number of elements in this Woolf text. Table 5.3 lists some of the elements that are most often picked up on and successfully labelled by the students. Let us now move on to creative writing, or rather a rhetoric and stylistics approach to creative writing, which is located at the top end of the systemic stylistics rhetoric track at the 300 level. The focus here is on aspects of production, including synthesis, evaluation, modification and composition. Examples of questions that have been used in previous classroom tasks to facilitate both modification and reproduction skills include the following: zzTask:

Copy a number of style figures in a final paragraph that you have composed (namely, metaphor, chiasmus and hyperbole). You choose the semantic content. zzOutcome: Students often find this task challenging, but they usually show signs of satisfaction, in some cases amazement, when they see the final product. Another exercise at this level pertains to textual intervention, inspired by the exercises set out by Pope (1994). Past exercises in the classroom situation have included: zzTask:

Where certain style figures appear incomplete or slightly off­target in the Woolf text fragment, now make them whole/complete. Once



Systemic Stylistics

85

you are finished, explain what it is you have done textually and rhetorically. Also, explain why you have made certain changes rather than others. zzOutcome: Student examples from this exercise have included changing the phrase ‘the canopy of civilization’ as it is not a good phonetic example of alliteration. It only works visually. Students have made it more ‘complete’ by matching the consonant sounds, for example, ‘the canopy of culture’ and ‘the sunshade of civilization’ are examples that students have come up with previously. zzTask: Modify the simile into a metaphor. What is the effect? Now, you choose what to modify and reflect on the effect produced by those choices. zzOutcome: Student examples of the above have included altering the simile ‘the sky is dark as polished whalebone’ into ‘the darkening sky of polished whalebone’, a more indirect metaphorical comparison. Evaluative exercises are also useful at this higher-learning level. These involve tasks that require students to access and judge their own work, and sometimes that of their peers. Previous example questions along these lines have included the following: zzTask:

Reflect on the text that you have just created. What emotive effect does it have on you, and why? What effects do you predict it might have on your peers when they read it, and why? zzTask: On reflection, could you have written the piece better? If so, how? Now rewrite your text and reflect critically on what you have attempted to do and how successful you think you have been, and why. At this level, students have had to complete more extensive tasks, including the following: zzTask:

Create your own final paragraph where you work towards a final crescendo. In that crescendo employ the style figures of antimetabole, metaphor and anaphora. Also, think critically about the levels of stylistic foregrounding you will be employing here. Set up a three-beat parallel structure in your crescendo and make it deviate on the fourth count (the anaphora style figure will help you here – feel free to use epiphora instead if that works better for you). Once it is written, sit back, re-read and reflect. Does it work for you? How? Why? Now let the person ­sitting next to you read it. What does he/she think? Are you going to

86

Pedagogical Stylistics

i­ncorporate his/her feedback into your final version? Why? Why not? Ask your instructor for advice. Now show it to the person sitting on your other side. Finally, reflect critically on all the feedback you have received and proceed accordingly. zzTask: Take a final paragraph from any novel that appears to affect you deeply. Now identify which rhetorical and stylistic elements are at work on you at this emotive level and intervene by either deleting, adding or changing the existing language structures. Once you are finished, reflect. Does the text still have the same emotive effect on you? Why? Why not? Now intervene again and make it rise to a crescendo two sentences before it ends. Keep the final two sentences very short. How have you achieved all this in stylistic, rhetorical and linguistic terms? What is the effect? Having now seen how systemic stylistics works in practice through the three levels, let us view and analyse the responses given by students who have taken stylistics in this innovative stylistic learning environment. It would be methodologically questionable, i.e., potentially too leading, to use data taken directly from the stylistics course. Instead, I present data taken when students exited the track after completing the creative writing course. The students were reflecting back on how useful (or not) their knowledge of stylistics had been for their creative writing learning. These data should better reflect the usefulness of stylistics operating in a systemic learning system. Incorporating the revised model of Bloom’s taxonomy, we can say that the 100-level rhetoric course demands lower-order thinking skills, such as knowing, comprehending, understanding and remembering; the 200level stylistics course requires intermediate skills, such as application and analysis; and the 300-level courses, like the creative writing course under discussion, demand higher-order skills such as creating, evaluating, synthesizing, etc.

5.4  Data Two sets of data, from the Fall semesters of 2008 and 2010, will be presented and discussed. All data below were gathered anonymously. In the first study from 2008, there were just thirteen students in the class. Of these, only ten chose to complete the questionnaire. Of the three who did not complete the questionnaire, one simply did not do the survey and the other two chose to ignore the six questions posed and instead wrote a reflection story/narrative.



Systemic Stylistics

87

Although these data produced some useful feedback to improve the course in future semesters, they are ineligible to be used here. Thus, we have just ten sets of response data. The five statements were as follows. I will be focusing solely on question three (in bold) as this is the only one pertaining to stylistics. 1. As a result of this course my English creative writing skills have improved 2. As a result of this course my general knowledge of the English language (writing, style, grammar and comprehension skills) has improved 3. As a result of this course my knowledge of stylistics has become clearer 4. As a result of this course my knowledge of rhetoric has become clearer 5. Some of the skills I have learnt in this class will help me to perform ­better in some of my other RA courses In addition to these statements, which previously sought to elicit qualitative data, there was a basic quantitative section for each question, which asked the subject to give a score on a 1–5 scale from ‘strongly disagree’ to ‘strongly agree’ – a psychometric system, also known as the Likert scale. The numerical outcomes pertaining to the 300-level creative writing class can be seen in Table 5.4. Table 5.5 shows the ten qualitative responses to statement number three above. It is hoped that if the responses are deep and rich enough, they can be coded and analysed to see whether significant patterns can be located, which can then be discussed.9 As can be observed, the data set lacks any real depth, as the responses are far briefer than had been anticipated. It is therefore deemed not worthwhile to try to code the data by putting them into theoretically defined categories in order to analyse them systematically. However, although too sparse to code, the data can still be reported on in a very general fashion. It can be observed Table 5.4  Quantitative data from the first study 3. A  s a result of this course my knowledge of stylistics has become clearer 1. Strongly disagree 2. Disagree 3. Neutral 4. Agree 5. Strongly agree

0 0 3 6 1

Average on a five-point scale

3.8

88

Pedagogical Stylistics

Table 5.5  Qualitative data from the first study 1. It has become clearer in so much as that first my knowledge has been freshed [sic] up again, and secondly been put to active – rather than passive i.e. analytical – use (in the assignments). Also the continuous application of stylistics terminology on the short stories we read during the course helped to get the knowledge more readily available and applicable. 2. I used stylistics in a very practical way in this course, which perhaps revived my knowledge of style figures a bit, but I do not have the feeling my knowledge about stylistics has become much clearer. I do realize how difficult it is to achieve the right effects in a text. 3. Recognizing stylistic elements in the text is one thing. Using them consciously in a text is another. I think learning to use them makes recognizing them easier also. 4. This course brought back information I learnt in stylistics, and also clarified some things I was not so sure about before. 5. I do not necessarily disagree with this yet I learnt more about stylistics when I took Stylistics than during Creative Writing. During this course I focused more on the book by Novakovich and the assignments we did in class. Of course those assignments entailed theory from stylistics yet I cannot say that I have very consciously used this theory now. 6. I don’t think I learnt a lot about stylistics that I didn’t learn in the 200-level course. ­However, I got to use stylistics a lot, which in a way strengthened my understanding of stylistics. I started using it in my writing and making an effort to use stylistics to my advantage, something that I probably would not have done, or at least not to such an extent, had I not taken this course. 7. As I didn’t do ACC 220 Stylistics, and can’t do it anymore because I will leave RA after this semester, I was a little worried that my knowledge of stylistics would be insufficient. I learnt a great deal of the books that I had to work through for the entrance exam for this course, but I feel that also in the classes I learnt lots of stylistics, especially how to apply the theories and ‘tricks’. If it would have been possible I surely would have taken ACC 220, to expand my knowledge of stylistics, but I have to do it without that course. I still feel that I could follow the course pretty well, and I didn’t feel that I missed a lot. Also the reading of other short stories helped improving my stylistic knowledge, especially the recognition. 8. Yes, definitely. Now I am consciously aware of the techniques writers have used and why, and I know when to use what for what effect. 9. I wouldn’t say that I knew that much about stylistics in the first place (you know I barely made it into the course in the first place), and I don’t think the course has really improved me that much in that way because we didn’t do that much stylistics in the first place. But I’m taking stylistics next semester so there is still hope . . .  10. Personally I feel that this course has little to do with stylistics. To clarify this; in my writing I have used metaphors, alliteration, antonyms, parables and so on. It is about using stylistic figures to foreground events in the story, however throughout the course it is not really necessary to be in touch with stylistic definitions (as long as you can work with them and I think that often I even do it unconsciously). My knowledge of stylistics has neither increased nor decreased.

that, by and large, the data are mixed. For example, some responses appear to reject the underlying pedagogical aim of systemic stylistics, e.g., response numbers two, five and ten, while others appear to be more accepting, e.g., responses one, four and eight. Juxtaposed with these are responses that are unsure; for example, respondent number six suggests that the creative writing



Systemic Stylistics

89

module has not increased his/her understanding of stylistics at all, only to add in the following sentence that he/she, on reflection, actually used stylistics a lot during the course and that, as a result, this has probably strengthened his/her understanding of the subject matter after all.10 Let us now look at the second set of data in Table 5.6, taken two years later from the Fall 2010 semester.11 It should be said that whereas the Fall 2008 course employed a purely rhetorical and stylistic approach to teaching and learning creative writing, only half of the Fall 2010 course was taught in this way. The other half of the course was taught in a more traditional fashion by an experienced published author who was also an experienced creative writing teacher.12 It is expected that this will affect the data compared to the previous set. There were sixteen subjects in the class. Thirteen completed the questionnaire. Of the three not handed in, one was written in an essay style and is therefore not admissible here. Table 5.7 presents the responses. Once again, it was hoped that these would be qualitatively rich enough to be able to code and analyse. Regrettably, the responses were, once again, much briefer than had been anticipated. As such, any coding exercise based on categories, e.g., grounded theory or content analysis, would have little methodological purpose. As done earlier, I will therefore briefly highlight some of the more general impressions experienced by these subjects. It should be said that a number of these students were allowed to enter the creative writing course without having done stylistics; however, they did all take stylistics in the succeeding semester (Spring 2011). This means that responses two, three and eight are invalid. It also means that the above qualitative data are, to some extent, tainted.13 The idea of stylistics acting positively within a systemic system to improve learning of both stylistics and creative writing can be seen reported in responses four, nine and ten. However, others clearly question the pedagogical benefits of systemic stylistics. These include responses six, twelve and thirteen. Once again, however, as in the 2008 data, some responses were somewhat Table 5.6  Quantitative data from the second study 3. As a result of this course my knowledge of stylistics has become clearer 1. Strongly disagree 2. Disagree 3. Neutral 4. Agree 5. Strongly agree

0 1 4 8 0

Average on a five-point scale

3.5

90

Pedagogical Stylistics Table 5.7  Qualitative data from the second study 1. It was nice to find the stylistic devices spoken of in stylistics back in the short stories read, though I have to admit that in the first half of the course, with Ana, we didn’t discuss them a whole lot. 2. I haven’t taken stylistics yet, but I read the book, and some of the things are clear, but I do not think that I can judge yet about stylistics since I haven’t started it closely yet. 3. I haven’t had stylistics yet so at times this course was a bit difficult but I have definitely learnt more about stylistics. Mostly by discussing the short stories we read. 4. I agree, because it was nice to employ the concepts that I have learnt in Stylistics class. I remembered the significance between the difference in active and passive sentences, and deictic markers. 5. I took Stylistics last semester and really enjoyed the course. I don’t think much of the knowledge has become clearer, but it was nice to put it into practice. For example, Point of View is something we discussed in stylistics and which returned in Creative Writing. Or small things, like when you use ‘a’ or ‘the’ and ‘this book’ or ‘that book’, depending on your narrator. However, I already had this knowledge. I don’t think there was so much focus on stylistics that my knowledge of it actually became clearer: it was only (sometimes automatically) putting into practice what I already knew. 6. The most knowledge of stylistics I gained was due to the ACC220 course, although some stylistic features were vague back then. This course did not really improve the understanding of these concepts. 7. I saw where the concept of stylistics came into the course, and I ­definitely used my knowledge from that prerequisite course in my writing, however I don’t feel like I learnt anything new that I hadn’t understood before. In reading stories I was easily able to label stylistically interesting parts of the text, it was not unclear. 8. As I have yet to take Stylistics, I started this course with hardly any knowledge of stylistics. However, I do feel that taking Stylistics next semester will be easier because of Creative Writing – especially since I learnt to consciously work with my texts and learnt to look at what is important in texts. 9. As I mentioned in the first question, this course made me realize how important the stylistic part is in crafting a great story. Reading and identifying the stylistics in another person’s piece is one thing, but creating it yourself forces you to process the rules of stylistics more ‘centrally’ haha. Creating your own pieces makes you so much aware of what is being done and if it is effective or not. 10. Because we had to consciously apply stylistics to our writing, mostly in the second half of the semester, I now see more clearly that it is often a deliberate choice on the writer’s behalf to use style figures in his ­writing. By using them myself as well and looking at how successful ­writers used style figures to create more powerful sentences I have come to a better understanding of how much impact they can have on the ­audience. (Continued )



Systemic Stylistics

91

Table 5.7 (Continued)  Qualitative data from the second study 11. My knowledge of stylistics has become a bit clearer; because when you apply the knowledge you’ll understand it at a deeper level. That’s at least how I experienced it. In stylistics we did look at texts and how linguistic style (for example simple sentences for the POV of a retarded person) can be used to show what type of character the writer is dealing with. Doing that yourself however, makes this a lot clearer! You have to think about the process a lot more. Instead of just observing how you should do it, you create, produce and thereby think a lot more about it. There were also some differences between terms between the courses that actually made certain terms a bit confusing. The differences in describing POV for example. I found that the theory of POV was clearer in the stylistics course, the terms used in the course book of the creative writing level were sometimes a bit unclear to me. Another example is ‘in medias res’. Stylistics seems to define something as this more often than the creative writing course, maybe because stylistics is even more focused on the tiny details of language. Starting with ‘the’ as a determiner in the first sentence was often already defined as ‘in medias res’ in stylistics, but not in creative writing. Maybe that could be cleared up. 12. This was mostly done by the readings. I already knew the terms from stylistics, but by reading multiple texts I saw how/if/why it worked. However, I am not sure if I could write a proper stylistic analysis. ­However, during the assignments I did have the chance to play a bit with it which also increases you knowledge. 13. The focus is not that big on this course as in the 200 level, I feel that rather than clearer, the knowledge of stylistics became more practical.

ambiguous, and it is these that perhaps tell us the most. For instance, respondent number five writes ‘I took stylistics last semester and really enjoyed the course. I don’t think much of the knowledge has become clearer, but it was nice to put it into practice. For example, point of view is something we discussed in stylistics and which returned in creative writing’. This respondent goes on to add, ‘I don’t think there was so much focus on stylistics that my knowledge of it actually became clearer: it was only (sometimes automatically) putting into practice what I already knew’. In general, we might say that although the second set of data appears to be slightly less enthusiastic about the pedagogical benefits of systemic stylis­ tics, both sets were generally similar, both qualitatively and quantitatively. First of all, this was unexpected given the different nature of the 2010 course, which poses interesting questions about course design that should be examined at a later stage. Second, at a general level, both sets of data, for all their methodological drawbacks, can be said to be slightly more positive than they are negative. The essence of this claim can be located in part of the answer given by respondent number eleven from the second set of data,

92

Pedagogical Stylistics

namely, ‘My knowledge of stylistics has become a bit clearer; because when you apply the knowledge you’ll understand it at a deeper level. That’s at least how I experienced it’. In sum, we can generally say that although several students felt that they were not learning anything new about stylis­ tics, they did feel that they were learning about stylistics again, from a different angle. It is this off-centre learning phenomenon, perhaps, that might be the greatest pedagogical benefit of systemic stylistics, judging by these very preliminary sets of response data.

5.5  General Discussion and Graduate Developments With the above short discussion still in mind, let us now conduct a macro level discussion about the aims and achieved goals of this systemic approach to teaching stylistics. I think that there are three main advantages, all of which are related. The first, as experienced by me as the instructor, is that while students are being taught stylistics, they are making links back to what they have learnt in previous courses, including both their grammar and rhetoric 100-level foundation classes. A second advantage seen in the data in Section 5.4 is that the students are being taught stylistics even when they are being taught creative writing at the upper levels of the track. A third advantage is the obtuse, ‘off-angle’ view of learning stylistics in a creative writing class, as it gives the students a different insight into the discipline. As one subject noted in the first data set, ‘you can turn passive skills into active ones’ and ‘it refreshes your knowledge of stylistics’. I also think that there are at least three clear disadvantages of teaching systemic stylistics, from my perspective as a track instructor and coordinator. These again, like the advantages, are related. The first is that an integrative skills-focused approach does not seem to allow enough time for the individual and the class to reflect on and experience the aesthetic value of literature. In short, skills and practice always win out over art and beauty and this is not a wholly desirable outcome when your object of focus is literature. The second is that stylistics is somehow watered down by being part of a system in a rhetoric track, housed in an academic core or methodological skills department. One could argue that this would not be the case were the course an independent subject in a language and literature department, housed in a humanities faculty, as it most often is elsewhere in other universities. As a result of this, we arrive at our third disadvantage, namely, that students at RA cannot major in stylistics the way they might at another academic institution, and, as a result, are unable to enter MA and



Systemic Stylistics

93

PhD stylistics programmes, the main reason for this being that they are simply underprepared and lack the depth of knowledge. Despite this being a logical concern, the emerging evidence is that the systemic stylistics method is not hampering RA students too much from entering excellent international stylistics programmes. It is also not deterring them from presenting their stylistics research papers at international conferences (see Tables 5.8 and 5.9). These numbers are admittedly small, and the achievements are certainly limited when compared to students elsewhere who have completed a BA in English language and/or literature with a focus on stylistics. However, I do think these limited achievements are respectable, given the various complicating factors involved. Table 5.8  RA students in international stylistics graduate programmes RA students in international stylistics graduate programmes 2007 – the first RA Two students who had completed the rhetoric track enrolled in an MA graduate cohort in stylistics at Nottingham University, which they both successfully ­completed in 2008. Both are now taking some time out but are committed to starting a PhD at a UK university some time in the near future. 2008 No students took stylistics at graduate level, but one student enrolled in an MA in rhetoric and argumentation at the University of Amsterdam, which she successfully completed in 2009. It is unlikely that she will start a PhD. 2009 One student enrolled in an MA in stylistics at Nottingham University, which she successfully completed in 2010. She has since been awarded a fully funded PhD place at Sheffield University, which she is now in the process of fulfilling. 2010 No students went on to take stylistics at graduate level in this year.

Table 5.9  RA undergraduate students presenting their research at international conferences RA undergraduate students presenting their research at international conferences 2009

2010

2011

At the 2009 International Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA) conference held in Middelburg, the Netherlands, three RA undergraduate students, who had completed the rhetoric track, presented their stylistics papers. All three were very well received. At the 2010 International Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA) conference held in Genoa, Italy, one RA undergraduate student and one RA alumna, who had both completed the rhetoric track, presented their stylistics papers. Both were very well received. At the 2011 International Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA) conference held in Windhoek, Namibia, three undergraduate students, all of whom have completed the rhetoric track, presented their papers, which were well received.

94

Pedagogical Stylistics

5.6  Conclusion I started with the question of whether stylistics could be taught in a more integrative, modular, systemic way that will lead to improved student learning; stylistics learning on a cline, rather than as a category. As it stands, the rhetoric programme, with stylistics at its heart, is still in need of much development and improvement and this will take place in the next two to three years. Similarly, much more data need to be gathered from students exiting the track, to get their feedback on how their learning has developed. The questionnaire method discussed in this chapter has clearly failed to elicit the quantity of qualitative data required. Therefore, the method of semi-structured interviews might be employed next time in order to gain greater depth and better quality responses. This would allow for coding, categori­zation and insightful discussion to take place. This aside, however, I think that the early signs emerging from the data are encouraging. It is hoped that the preliminary successes seen in this systemic way of teaching stylistics – stylistics taught on a cline at the heart of a rhetoric track – might encourage fellow stylistics teachers, who are either setting up new stylistics programmes, or who need to revamp an existing one, to consider employing such a systemic pedagogical method of teaching stylistics as a trial or pilot study. The students in the RA programme seem to be telling their instructors that their learning strategies appear to benefit from this pedagogical approach. Despite the reservations that still very much exist, if nothing else, this must be an encouraging development as we strive to become better facilitators of undergraduate student learning in our stylistics classrooms.

Notes Sometimes, of course, there may be more than one stylistics course on offer. For example, a student might be able to take a ‘stylistics of poetry’ module followed by a ‘stylistics of prose’ course, or maybe even an advanced module on corpus or cognitive stylistics. In all these scenarios, however, stylistics is still essentially taught as a category, since the cognitive learning involved, from one module to the other, does not develop between courses. In effect, there is no real sense of incremental learning taking place, from lower-order to higher-order skills.   2 The example is Smith College, which is part of the Five Colleges network in New England.   3 For more on such debates, see Short (1996:1).   1



Systemic Stylistics

95

There is, however, a second dimension to this, operating in tandem, as this course is also structured along the system of the five canons of rhetoric, meaning it ends with delivery, i.e., creation, which is a higher-order skill.   5 The five canons, developed in the Roman age of rhetorical scholarship and practice, are (1) invention, (2) arrangement, (3) stylization, (4) memorization and (5) delivery. Most rhetoric courses and rhetoric textbooks are structured along this logical pedagogical cline of learning that teaches students to become more effective, more ethical and more competent speakers and writers.   6 Another division is sometimes made between figures of speech and thought, although the line between these is not as clear as the one that divides schemes and tropes.   7 These, for example, could be such figures as anaphora, isocolon, antimetabole, antithesis, climax, alliteration, erotema, etc.   8 Currently, this module is not taught by me, but by my colleague Dr Ernestine Lahey. At the moment, I teach at the 100 and 300 levels of the rhetoric track.   9 Original language errors have been maintained in  all of the qualitative feedback. 10 Response number seven can be discounted in this data set because this person had not taken the stylistics course previously. 11 As the course is currently only taught once every two years, this is very much an adjacent/successive set of data. 12 I refer here to the American-Cuban author, my colleague in the Fall 2010 semester, Ana Menendez. 13 This, of course, also applies to the quantitative data.   4

References Anderson, L. W. and Krathwohl, D. R. (2001), A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. New York: Longman. Bloom. B. S. (1956/1984), Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Pope, R. (1994), Textual Intervention: Critical and Creative Strategies for Literary Studies. London: Routledge. Short, M. (1996), Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose. London: ­Longman. Wales, K. (2001), A Dictionary of Stylistics (2nd edn). London: Longman. Woolf, V. (1931/1992), The Waves. London: Penguin.

Chapter 6

Creative Writing: A Stylistics Approach Jeremy Scott

I would maintain that to formulate observation by means of words is not to cause the artistic beauty to evaporate in vain intellectualities; rather, it makes for a widening and deepening of the aesthetic taste. It is only a frivolous love that cannot survive intellectual definition; great love prospers with understanding. Leo Spitzer (quoted in Leech and Short 2007: 2)1

6.1  Introduction The genesis of this stylistics-based approach to the academic discipline of creative writing proceeded from an observation: that many of the prevailing creative writing pedagogies within the academy centred on what might loosely be termed a ‘self-expression’ approach. The assumption often seemed to be that students will write with confidence and fluidity if simply pushed in at the deep end and asked to produce full stories, or entreated to ‘just write’. While this short, sharp shock has the potential to lead to good work, there is also a strong argument for using more critical, theoretical routes into the subject. Perhaps an analogy could be drawn with the processes involved in learning to paint. In all probability, a student’s first instruction in an art class would not be to sit down and paint a still life in oils. There is an argument for approaching creative writing in a similar way. In other words, it is interesting to begin with the following assumption: that a writer has available to him or her a set of linguistic tools in the same way that an artist has a range of colours on his or her palette and a spread of different sized brushes in the china pot next to the easel. Where an art student might learn to lighten a deep red through the addition of a drop of white paint, so a writer might benefit from exploring the ways in which a particular mood in a piece of narrative fiction can be foregrounded by careful selection of a particular lexis, by repetition, or through a carefully constructed extended metaphor. Just as a painter learns to use shading to



Creative Writing: A Stylistics Approach

97

create the illusion of depth, so can a writer discover how fracturing syntax and linguistic deviation can be exploited to simulate the workings of a character’s mind. It is proposed here that this set of tools can be defined, taught and explored through the discipline of stylistics. The first section of this study will discuss in detail the theoretical background to the approach and the various pedagogical and academic motivations underpinning it. Second, the methodology will be seen ‘in action’, as it were, through a detailed description of two sessions currently delivered on a module at the University of Kent, entitled ‘Creative Writing: A Stylistics Approach’: the first on the use of linguistic deviation and its relation to concepts of ‘literariness’, and the second on focalization and point of view in narrative fiction. Third, methods of assessment will be discussed briefly along with observations on the important function that stylistics could play in formulating more detailed and rigorous assessment criteria for the discipline of creative writing as a whole. By way of conclusion, the outcomes of the approach will be analysed based on the responses that students gave both to a specially formulated self-assessment questionnaire and to formal feedback forms, along with more general remarks about future directions, developments and goals.

6.2  Motivations: Theoretical Background There are three central motivations underpinning this stylistics-based approach to creative writing: first, an attempt to combine the theoretical infrastructure of stylistics with its ‘practice’ (‘doing stylistics’ in the broadest sense of that expression); second, the inherent interdisciplinarity of the approach, sitting as it does squarely and energetically in the liminal space between language and literary studies; third, its correspondence to principals of active learning (Bonwell 2009). Current creative pedagogy often appears to distance itself from critical theory. Arguably, these types of teaching see the processes of authorship and textual creation predominantly as an act of individual expression rather than encompassing aspects of craft and technique. They bifurcate the student writer, with one branch focusing on the creative process while the other cultivates an ‘editorial’ sensibility. Elbow (1998: 9), for instance, has argued that ‘creativity is strong only when critical thinking is weak, or vice versa’. While there is plenty to be said for the notion of the writer as doublesided (a critical half versus a creative half), it could be argued that the critical faculty is too often underutilized in some conventional approaches

98

Pedagogical Stylistics

to the discipline, or relegated to producing a kind of post-event editorial commentary – with a detrimental effect on the writing. The two branches should instead be merged and become simultaneously exercised during practice. As Boulter points out: Writers are often . . . insulated from other writing, especially writing about fiction, literary criticism or literary theory. This, especially the latter, is seen as some sort of bloodless, life-draining pursuit: a parasite practice that writers must avoid lest they too be sucked dry of the true life-force of writing. . . . There are hundreds of incisive, inspirational ideas in what has been termed “theory” or even worse “criticism”, and these ideas can enrich the process of fiction writing. Even if, as writers, we reject them utterly, we can still find inspiration from our disagreement. (Boulter 2007: 5) The close analysis of texts has enormous value for students of writing, and these skills need to be combined with those involved in the process of textual production. In other words, developing craft necessarily involves conscious critical reflection (in this case, through stylistics) on details of practice and the texts that practice produces. This aids understanding and adeptness to the point where such thought processes become second nature; the conscious, critical intellect is recruited into working simultaneously with the subconscious imagination. This ambition to integrate theory and practice maps usefully onto a prime ambition of most if not all programmes in English Studies within the academy: to engage students in the practical application of abstract (theoretical) concepts. Pope writes in support of this combined approach, and its role in cultivating students’ own reflective learning styles, dubbing it ‘critical-creative’: Why critical-creative? The answer is simple: because in education, especially self-consciously “higher education”, evidence of critical understanding is as important as demonstration of creative capacity. Whatever you may do with writing “outside the academy”, within it you have to show that you know what you’re doing, or at least make some informed and plausible gestures. It’s like doing maths: you have to show the workings, not just the results. (Pope 2006: 130) ‘Showing the workings’ also, by necessity, trains practitioners in methods of close reading – a skill of great value when it comes to the study of language



Creative Writing: A Stylistics Approach

99

and literature more generally, even if stylistics is much more than just close reading by another name. So, in the context of this study, for ‘critical theory’, read ‘stylistics’: a particular set of paradigms with which to approach the task of textual analysis, and, further in this case, textual production. Through the medium of stylistics, students are introduced to a series of concepts (e.g. linguistic deviation, deixis, register, focalization, strategies for representing thought and speech and cognitive approaches to metaphor) and then explore and implement these concepts through creative exercises (e.g. using linguistic deviation to foreground themes and images, or using variable focalization to narrate a story from different perspectives). Sometimes, exemplar texts may also be used as examples of the techniques and concepts under discussion. Assessment is via a portfolio of creative work (which may be one or more complete stories, a selection of poems, a dramatic text, or a mixture of all of these) accompanied by a critical commentary that rigorously explains how an exploration and a detailed understanding of stylistics has impacted on the production and reflective revision of the work. To turn to the second impetus: interdisciplinarity and the fruitful crossfertilization between language and literary studies is a cornerstone of this approach. It is designed to play to the considerable strengths of programmes that combine the study of English Language and Literature: their ability to ‘cross the divide’. A significant proportion of students have their feet firmly in both camps, taking English language and/or linguistics combined with literary studies (especially in the form of joint honours programmes). The increasing take-up of the A-level in English language and literature has also helped swell the numbers of this constituency.2 Stylistics draws on both disciplines, of course, creating an enlivening context for the study of both language and literature and the multitude of intersections between them. To an extent, then, the ambition of approaching the subject of creative writing from a stylistics perspective responds to an aspiration common within the stylistics research community: to ‘reach out’ to literary studies, to argue for an approach that draws on the strengths of both disciplines and to react against the now-entrenched separation of the two subjects – in short, to mend what Glisan (2007) refers to as ‘the language-literature split’. Further, there has been an increasing awareness within the stylistics community that the discipline has a great deal to contribute to the teaching of creative writing within the academy, and that this resource has been underexploited to date (Simpson 2006: 2). The final motivation underpinning the approach is the recognition of its rootedness in principles of active learning. Harper has identified the

100

Pedagogical Stylistics

intrinsically active nature of the critical-creative approach and linked it to the wider evolution of creative writing as a scholarly discipline within the academy under the umbrella term ‘gramography’. Gramography  .  .  .  is a site at which both the practice and the theory of creative writing can be incorporated and its pedagogy developed, where debates around creative writing skills and knowledge can be discussed.  .  .  .  Gramography is human centred. It is learner conscious. (Harper 1997: 11) Teaching is delivered through 2-hour, small-group ‘workshops’ in a series of 10 weeks, with two 1-week breaks (‘reading weeks’) for writing and research. A workshop is, by its very nature, student-centred and various definitions of the workshop have been offered by academic literature: from a place where ‘master writer or mentor discusses drafts of student writing in near finished state’ (Bishop 1998: 10) to, more relevantly, where fellow students ‘respond orally and often in writing, suggesting changes, offering interpretations and responses to the piece’, to ‘[a learning environment] where the student’s writing is put into a posture of dignity, demanding the kind of critical attention that will help it be what it wants to be’ (Stegner 1988: 62). The underlying principle in all definitions, though, is that students learn actively from each other in these environments. While this is common within creative writing courses, it is proposed here that the stylistics-based method of delivering theoretical content through practice differs funda­ mentally from the usual approaches and produces better learning, and deeper understanding, of both theory and creative output. Fenza (2000) writes, with particular relevance to the stylistic approach: ‘[The creative writing workshop] fosters a study of literature that marries theory and practice, aesthetics and scholarship  .  .  .  and innovation’. In short, the workshop allows the possibility of learning by doing, thus fostering the kinds of active engagement with practice and, crucially, theory, one of the principal motivations underpinning this approach. Classes are broadly structured as follows: the first part of the session is devoted to ‘input’ of key themes (normally the particular stylistic tenet – deviation, say – under discussion) accompanied by examples from previously published literary texts (from an eclectic range of sources, canonical to contemporary). This is followed by a series of short exercises, and, often, small group work in which students analyse and discuss the results of these exercises. Finally, the students will be encouraged to incorporate the results of these activities into longer pieces of work destined for submission for



Creative Writing: A Stylistics Approach

101

assessment in a final portfolio of their creative work (with a total word limit of 3000), along with a critical essay/stylistic analysis (1500 words). Both the teaching strategies deployed and the critical-creative content (as already defined) chime precisely with the ‘major characteristics’ of active learning as espoused by Bonwell (2005: 2). He proposes that ‘students are engaged in activities’ in active pedagogical environments; accordingly, a significant portion of classroom sessions are taken up by a writing activity in which the students explore a particular stylistic tenet by working on exercises. For example, in a session exploring point of view (discussed in more detail later), students take an excerpt from a piece that they have already begun and rewrite it from two different points of view (e.g., homodiegetic becomes heterodiegetic).3 They would then discuss the results in small groups, commenting in rigorous linguistic terms on the way in which methodological choices relating to point of view are crucial in determining the overall expressive effect of the piece, focusing, for example, on deictic language, instances of modality, evaluative language and tense (all of which would signal the presence of a particular ‘position’, a subjectivity). They would also see ‘by doing’ that terms such as third person and first person are principally grammatical distinctions, whereas the more precise narratological terms encapsulate the ontological relationship between a narrator and the text-world that he or she mediates. This accords with another of Bonwell’s (2005: 2) propositions: that ‘students are involved in higher order thinking (analysis, synthesis, evaluation)’. Of course, any creative writing class will draw on these kinds of activities. However, a fundamental difference between a stylistics approach and other methods of teaching the subject is that the students begin with a (descriptive) stylistic tenet and then proceed (analytically) to enact its implications. Rather than a student simply making subjective judgements and making comments such as ‘I like that’ or ‘this works well’, they are given a specific technique or function to comment on, and will ask instead ‘Does this piece of writing do the job it is (presumably) intended to? If so, how? If not, why not?’ Firmly based on principles of active learning, the approach moves from demonstration, to practice, to discussion, to reflection and, eventually, to second-nature practice.

6.3  Methodologies: The Approach in Action It will be useful, by way of concrete example, to discuss in detail two typical sessions from the module as taught at the University of Kent: on linguistic

102

Pedagogical Stylistics

deviation (with a view to investigating definitions and incarnations of figurative language), and focalization and point of view (discussed briefly in the previous section). As specified in Section 6.1, the concepts are demonstrated initially through definitions and examples; students then move on to practice and implementation. Linguistic deviation, along with the crucial cognitive stylistic concept of foregrounding, is introduced initially with reference to the following standard definition by Leech: As a general rule, anyone who wishes to investigate the significance and value of a work of art must concentrate on the element of interest and surprise, rather than on the automatic pattern. Such deviations from linguistic or other socially accepted norms have been given the special name of “foregrounding”, which invokes the analogy of a figure seen against a background. The artistic deviation “sticks out” from its background, the automatic system, like a figure in the foreground of a visual field. (Leech 1969: 57) The various categories of deviation should also be introduced and illus­ trated: discoursal, semantic, grammatical, morphological, phonological and graphological. It is, in fact, often reasonable to assume (especially within the context of a language and linguistics programme) that the student will already have a good understanding of this core stylistic paradigm: linguistic deviation versus ‘standard’ language, along with the notion of foregrounding. These kinds of manipulation of linguistic structure can be a source of poetic invention. With Standard English as ‘ground’, deviations become ‘figure’, foregrounded, and thus emphasized in the mind of the reader. A good source of examples has been found in the work of the English novelist Martin Amis, whose style (especially in his earlier work) is replete with this kind of discourse, a characteristic blend of demotic cadences and mandarin artistic description. The following are all taken from the novel London Fields (Amis 1989)4: ‘Selina came at me in queries of pink smoke’ (37), with its foregrounded use of a compound noun, ‘The splayed, eviscerated suitcase’ (53), exhibiting a non-standard use of adjectives, or the inventive deployment of adverbs and conventional poetic devices such as alliteration and rhyme in ‘Her ferociously tanned hair hung in solid curves over the vulnerable valves of her throat and its buzzing body-tone’ (49) and ‘Tuxed fucks’ (18). Metaphorical transfer and extension is also common in the prose of this novel, taking qualities of depth in the following example and reapplying them to disparate objects through parallelism: ‘We passed through the



Creative Writing: A Stylistics Approach

103

damp dust of the velvet curtain, into deeper noise, deeper smoke, deeper drink’ (61) and ‘The deep lees of high-tab dinners’ (14). It is crucial to point out that no qualitative judgements are implied about these particular examples; they are simply instances of the ways writers manipulate language. An issue frequently highlighted by this exercise is the relationship between a lack of deviation and narrative transparency (or covertness; i.e., the visibility or otherwise of the narrating agency). The following question is implicit here: is the presence of deviation sufficient as a definition of the poetic? (Almost certainly not, but the assertion is a good starting point for more detailed exploration of the subject.) Bakhtin’s (1935) essay ‘Unitary Language’ is also referred to in order to complicate and challenge the students’ preconceptions of what ‘standard’ language might be, and what is entailed in, or implied by, any deviation from it (embracing, perhaps, discussions of the relationship between language, ideology and power). The second key concept that can be discussed in connection with deviation and foregrounding centres on the linguistic notion of connotative versus denotative language. Students can discuss the extent to which figurative language (or poetic discourse?) relies on the latter capacity of language, and lays the ground for a richer, more textured and nuanced interaction between reader and text. Instead of following well-worn paths in language, the writer can aim to ‘make fresh’, and thus to create expressions that are more vivid, and more effective (reference could also be made here to the theories of Jakobson [1960], especially in relation to his ‘communication model’ and its anatomization of poetic language). When figurative language follows well-trodden paths, the effect ceases to be inventive, and instead denotative. The other side of this equation would be discussed too: the dangers of stylistic inventiveness for its own sake, addressing also the question of ‘stridency’ (or what Toolan calls ‘perceptibility’ [2001: 63]), leading to a discussion of the extent to which the very ‘effervescence’, or exuberance, of these styles can divert attention away from the text-world and lead to undue focus on the discourse-world. Deictic shift theory (Green 1995) also provides useful insights into this process, and could be introduced at this point. This notion of the ways in which style relates to the text-world provides a useful illustration of one of this pedagogical approach’s paradigms: the concept of stylistic balance (Boulter 2007: 76). This can be illustrated using a see-saw metaphor. Style is the pivot under the plank, and on one side of the plank is ‘the text-world (the world we see through language)’ and on the other ‘the discourse-world (the world we write)’. The see-saw must compensate for emphasis on one side by lessening emphasis on the other;

104

Pedagogical Stylistics

as it were, the ‘canvas’ of a piece of imaginative writing is of a fixed size. Putting more emphasis on one side of this equation (say, through overtness of style and the accompanying narratorial perceptibility) leads to a change in the nature of the other side (the imaginative world as ‘seen’ by the reader is more mediated). A further interesting question is implicit here: can a style that is highly foregrounded (because it is deviant, vigorous or highly idiosyncratic in some way) prevent the reader from experiencing the imaginative world – in other words, can it lead to a lessening of expressive effect? Proceeding from this, the metaphor of the see-saw can be applied to the relationship between mimesis and diegesis. It is a given, surely, that narrative methodology must respond to and/or correlate with specific visions of the world. Therefore, it is arguable that a literary style should not draw undue attention to itself (overemphasizing diegetic process), but should focus the reader’s attention instead on the fictional world itself (mimetic process). There is a fundamental methodological choice (or, at least, a balance to be found) for the writer here, which stylistics can illustrate: between style that calls attention to itself and style that calls attention to the fictional world. The see-saw metaphor is also a rigorous illustration of the show-tell cline, as discussed frequently in more ‘standard’ creative writing pedagogies. As an exercise exploring these ideas, the students write two stanzas of overtly ‘poetic’ poetry, putting in as many linguistically deviant features as possible. Then, they discuss the results, concentrating on grammatical features that seem expressly poetic in nature. This process would culminate in a rewrite of the piece, which aims to smooth away those aspects deemed to be excessive, alongside rigorous consideration of why they should be deemed so. The students should find themselves asking the following questions: what happens if the poem is rewritten in as ‘standard’ a discourse as possible? What judgements have been brought into play to decide whether language is standard or not? How does an awareness of these judgements question the existence of a unitary language? As already pro­ posed, they should be aiming to make these kinds of critical processes a second-nature feature of their writing practice. The second topic to be illustrated here is point of view. This session builds on the mimesis-diegesis (show-tell) cline as discussed previously and focuses on one of the essential methodological choices that any writer makes in the act of sitting down to a new project: who tells and (often) who sees (or shows)? Too often, the term ‘point of view’ is used as a catch-all phrase; it will help the students to distinguish between telling and perceiving, and to identify that the entity who sees what is happening in a scene need not be



Creative Writing: A Stylistics Approach

105

the same as who tells the reader about it. Stylistics can help to make this distinction clearer. An essential contrast is drawn between ‘who tells/ speaks’, defined as point of view (signalled, for instance, by grammatical features such as past tense, third-person verb forms), and ‘who sees’, defined as focalization (signalled by deictic language and the discernible presence of an origo).5 Terminology drawn from narratology is introduced to distinguish between differing types of point of view: heterodiegetic, homodiegetic and so on. There is an obvious link to previous work done on diegesis (the narrative processes involved in describing the ‘universe’ of the narrative, i.e., ‘telling’ or ‘recounting’), and to differentiations theorized in cognitive stylistics between a text-world (or diegetic universe, inhabited perhaps by a homodiegetic narrator) and further sub-worlds (which may be set up, for example, by subsequent intradiegetic narration or by flashback). It is very useful for the writer to envisage their narrator in relation to this universe: within it or without it, integral to the story or removed from it and so on, and thus be alert to the epistemological and ontological status of that narrator, and, further, the expressive potential of this status. Briefly, this will impact on the kinds of knowledge that he or she will or will not (or should or should not) have access to and, crucially, the kinds of language that he or she will or will not use. A case in point might be where the idiolect of a 14-year-old character-narrator living on the streets in Liverpool sounds suspiciously similar to that of a Cambridge-educated writer in his or her mid-forties. Focalization is defined as the perspective from which the diegetic universe is perceived and represented at any given moment of the narrative; this may or may not be the same as the point of view and may or may not vary throughout the progress of the narrative. Terms such as fixed focalization, attenuated focalization, variable focalization and multiple focalization are introduced and illustrated with reference to Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day (1989) and Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), the former with its very limited point of view and single focalization throughout, the latter with a heterodiegetic point of view but multiple focalization. The example used from To the Lighthouse centres on the dinner party episode (part 1, ch. 17). The passage begins with direct thought (‘“But what have I done with my life?” thought Mrs Ramsay, taking her place at the end of the table . . .’); this appears to be straightforward heterodiegetic narration, with a character focalizer. Two paragraphs later, the focalization shifts (‘Lily Briscoe watched her drifting into that strange no-man’s land where to follow people is impossible . . .’), and again two paragraphs further on (‘“What damned rot they talk”, thought Charles Tansley, laying down his spoon precisely in the

106

Pedagogical Stylistics

centre of his plate  .  .  .’). Arguably, the functions of point of view and focalization merge here due to the use of interior voices (often direct thought) and the very close identification of the narrator with the perspectives of the characters – an issue also examined and illuminated by deictic shift theory (Green 1995). It is useful to discuss this ‘problematizing’ of the terminology with students. The principal aim of the examples, however, is to show them the wide range of options available to the writer and the creative possibilities and tensions that can be exploited. The exercises for this topic focus initially on textual intervention (Pope 1995), or creative rewriting, and are preparation for the rewriting of the students’ own work, as discussed briefly in Section 6.1. The students are given a short extract from the opening of The Remains of the Day (replete as it is with modal and evaluative language, overtly homodiegetic and subjective) and rewrite it from a heterodiegetic perspective. They then consider some stylistic questions relating to the interrelationships between style and processes of narrative mediation. What grammatical and syntactical changes are necessitated? What is lost (in expressive terms, in terms of world creation and in terms of the reader’s experience of the narrative) in the heterodiegetic version and what is gained? How is it possible to transform a character idiolect into a narrative voice (prefiguring subsequent discussions in later sessions of free indirect discourse)? A follow-up exercise asks the students to attempt the ‘impossible’ and enter and illuminate ‘that strange no-man’s land’ by rewriting the dinner party scene from To the Lighthouse as described above from Mrs Ramsay’s (or even Mr Ramsay’s) point of view only, either in homodiegetic of hetero­ diegetic form. The famous ‘brown stocking’ scene, as discussed at length in Auerbach (2003), has also been used for the same exercise to good effect. The students consider the same questions, with a view to con­trasting the expressive potentialities of limited perspective versus ‘omni­scient’ ways of seeing, with reference, again, to the text-world and sub-worlds and the tension between mimesis and diegesis. Overall, the students should emerge from the session with a sophisticated and nuanced appreciation of the fact that choice of narrative perspective is central to the effect of their writing; it is a defining choice, not an ancillary one.

6.4  Results: Assessment and Subjectivity When it comes to the crucial stage of evaluating the achievement of learning outcomes, two related approaches have been taken: first, the submitted



Creative Writing: A Stylistics Approach

107

work itself – the portfolio of creative work and accompanying critical discourse – and its achievement or outcomes in the light of detailed assess­ ment criteria (currently drawn from ‘mainstream’ creative writing courses); second, students fill out a specifically devised self-assessment questionnaire that aims to test their responses to the content of the module more directly. In the critical commentary, students are expected to reflect rigorously on the learning that they have undertaken. This provides a space for more dispassionate, objective reflection than is offered by the conventional academic essay, where energies can often be overexerted in ‘showing what I know’ rather than demonstrating how this knowledge has been critically applied, put into practice and absorbed. It is crucial to the success of this approach that the learning undertaken is self-reflective, and the critical commentary is the arena in which this self-reflection should be demonstrated in scholarly terms. To return to Boulter: Commentaries should not be seen as diaries, progress reports, political essays or literary criticism, although they might borrow from each of these forms. The commentary is a piece of writing that enables a student to develop and understand their own critical-creative approach to writing fiction. (Boulter 2007: 173) It is also anticipated that the approach provides a solution to a perennial problem – the difficulty of assessing creative writing – as well as providing students with a robust technical vocabulary (the set of tools) with which to analyse their own and others’ work. The assessment of creative writing in itself is a complex task, and can seem redolent of subjectivity and personal judgement (Dawson 1997: 70). Accordingly, it is suggested that inclusion of the specific stylistic components unique to this module actually helps the processes of assessment, by providing a rigorous critical apparatus with which to measure achievement and progress. As Rodriguez points out: If creative writing is to finally take its rightful place in academia as a valid and necessary discipline, it must bear evaluation. The difficulty of grading creative writing has been based on the idea that it is emotive. . . . The only way to grade creative writing fairly is to acknowledge the underlying narrative structures. For this, narrative theory is key in clarifying the assessment process. (Rodriguez 2008: 171) An assessment rubric based on the kinds of specific skills identified in each strand of the approach (e.g., point of view and focalization, metaphor,

108

Pedagogical Stylistics

representing speech and thought, linguistic deviation and so on), with the accompanying emphasis on technique, would prove useful in removing some of the subjective elements involved in assessing creative writing, assuage the prevailing emphasis on ‘expressivism’, remove the existing gap between critical theory and creative practice and also assist in the discipline’s aim to become a site of rigorous knowledge.6 For example, the assessor could consider a student’s use of specific stylistic tenets covered in the module in his or her own work: focalization, metaphor, narrative structure (e.g., discourse versus fabula), representations of speech and thought, deviation and so on. This consideration would be carried out in tandem with the critical commentary, examining not just the effectiveness or otherwise of the student’s use of particular methodologies, but their understanding of the stylistic and linguistic concepts that underpin them. This formulation of assessment criteria based fundamentally on stylistics is an ongoing process; there is a need to create more rigorous and appropriate assessment criteria that ‘map’ onto the theoretical components. The work of Rodriguez (2008) has proved invaluable in this respect. She proposes a rubric and a set of criteria for grading creative writing, which are based on narrative theory, principally Chatman (1993) and Van Loon (2007). Work has already begun on adapting and extending Rodriguez’s framework to embrace stylistic components.

6.5  Conclusions: Evaluation and Reflection The aforementioned self-assessment questionnaires (see Appendix) have been essential in evaluating the success of this pedagogical approach. The questions were designed to perform two roles: first, to ascertain the influence (if any) their learning in stylistics and narrative theory had played in the planning and execution of their creative work (the ways in which theory informed their practice). Second, the questionnaire performs a selfreflective role in that it gives students an opportunity to plan their portfolio submissions, reflect on skills areas in which they have improved and identify areas that need further work. Crucially, it then requires students to reflect on how they have arrived at judgements about these aspects of their learning; in short, it is hoped that students will recognize that they have used the stylistics toolkit to self-assess their own work and the ways in which their writing techniques have evolved. It is beyond the scope of this study to go through the student responses to the questionnaire in detail. Suffice to say, many have commented positively



Creative Writing: A Stylistics Approach

109

that they had used stylistics theory in the editorial and rewriting stages. Most popular were notions of point of view and focalization, but students also found sessions on complex narrative structure, linguistic theory of metaphor, sound patterns and effects, and linguistic deviation useful. It is gratifying that all theoretical concepts introduced were mentioned somewhere among the responses. However, the responses to the question ‘What stylistics tools did you use during the writing process itself?’ were less satisfactory; a small number of students mentioned using stylistics as a means of evaluating the ‘success’ or otherwise of their writing, e.g., ‘the stylistics skills went a fair way into establishing what was/wasn’t successful in my work’ and ‘I’ve used the worksheets as a guide to trying things out’. However, most were more vague, citing ‘reading aloud to friends’ or ‘discussions with my tutor’ as the primary means of self-reflection. This, arguably, is a rupture in the critical-creative paradigm discussed earlier in this chapter, and will need to be addressed. It is fundamental to the success of this approach that students see stylistics as integral to their creative practice, as part of the process of writing, rather than just a ‘post-event’ tool for editorial exegesis and reflection. By way of conclusion, it will be useful to list some issues that still need further consideration and development. First, there is a pressing need to formulate assessment criteria that ‘map’ onto the stylistic components. Second, there is a perceived resistance to what some students might see as the ‘overtheorizing’ of creative practice integral to critical-creative approaches. However, overall, as mentioned, student reaction has been positive. In the formal student evaluations of the module as required for quality assurance purposes, the average student rating (from a total of 62 responses) for satisfaction with the module and teaching quality as a whole was 4.8 (out of a maximum score of 5), and all students indicated that they would recommend the module to colleagues. Students of both language and literature take the module at the University of Kent and report on their evaluations that it interfaces well with other aspects of their study, fulfilling its ambition of occupying an interdisciplinary liminal space well. Third, there is the impossibility of introducing more than a ‘taste’ of stylistics and narrative theory in one term; at times, the treatment can appear a little cursory. This may in part account for the sometimes disappointing use of the theory in students’ practice. As already stated, it will be necessary to further emphasize the analytical and formative aspects of doing stylistics. This is an essential step in developing students’ propensity for critical selfreflection in all areas of their studies. Part of the solution may be to ‘create shared understandings of reflection’ (Bold and Hutton 2007: 23); i.e. to

110

Pedagogical Stylistics

establish at the outset a kind of ‘contract’ between teacher and learner, ensuring that all parties understand what is meant by ‘being reflective’ and ‘reflective practice’, and how important it is that this reflection has its basis in the tenets of stylistics. To conclude, it is hoped that this stylistics-based approach to creative writing stands at the beginning of (or a little way over) a bridge across two important divides: between critical and creative practice, and between linguistic and literary studies. In an academic climate that places greater emphasis and importance on interdisciplinarity, approaches such as this, appealing to students working within traditionally ‘separate’ subject areas, should surely be welcomed and supported. As Gerber writes: Learning is always a little bit transgressive, and what we learn around the edges of . . . established disciplines often sticks more than what we learn when we’re in harness. (Gerber 2004)

Notes In the footnote that follows their quotation of Spitzer, Leech and Short state that they have been unable to find the original source. They themselves take the quotation from the Preface to Graham Hough’s Stylistics. I am still in the process of tracking it down. 2 See (2009) ‘Literature Study Post-16 I’ [online]. Available at www.ite.org.uk. Accessed 20 October 2010. 3 These terms are drawn from Genette’s (1983: 245) Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method and are in general use within narratological studies. A homodiegetic narrator is part of the story world that he or she narrates (e.g. Huckleberry Finn in the eponymous novel); a heterodiegetic narrator exists outside the story world (as would be the case in most third-person narration). 4 My italics throughout. 5 In pragmatics, the origo (‘beginning’ or ‘origin’) is the focal point on which ­deictic relationships are focused. 6 It is beyond the scope of this study to discuss methods of assessment in any detail, but the reader is referred by way of example to Rodriguez (2008).

1









References Amis, M. (1989), London Fields. London: Penguin. Auerbach, E. (2003), Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.



Creative Writing: A Stylistics Approach

111

Bakhtin, M. (1935), ‘Unitary language’, in L. Burke, T. Crowley and A. Girvin (eds) (2003), The Routledge Language and Cultural Theory Reader. London: Routledge, pp. 269–279. Bishop, W. (1998), Released into Language: Options for Teaching Creative Writing (2nd edn). Portland, ME: Calendar Island. Bonwell, C. C. (2007), Active Learning: Creating Excitement in the Classroom [online]. Available at: www.active-learning-site.com. Accessed 20 March 2009. Boulter, A. (2007), Writing Fiction: Creative and Critical Approaches. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Camoin, F. (1994), ‘The workshop and its discontents’, in W. Bishop and H. Ostrom (eds), Colors of a Different Horse: Rethinking Creative Writing, Theory and Pedagogy. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, pp. 3–7. Chatman, S. (1993), Reading Narrative Fiction. New York: Macmillan. Dawson, P. (1997), ‘The function of critical theory in tertiary creative writing programmes’. Southern Review, 30, (1), 70–80. Elbow, P. (1998), Writing with Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fenza, D. W. (2000), ‘Creative Writing and Its Discontents’ [online], The Writer’s Chronicle (March/April). Available at: www.nawe.co.uk. Accessed 15 March 2009. Gerber, M. (2004), quoted in ‘Theorizing Interdisciplinarity: The Evolution of New Academic and Intellectual Communities’ [online], A. Dalke, P. Grobstein and E. McCormack. Available at: serendip.brynmawr.edu/local/scisoc/theorizing. html. Accessed 23 March 2009. Glisan, E., Smith-Sherwood, D., McDaniel, S. and Brooks, F. (2007), ‘Using Assessment to Mend the Language-Literature Split in Higher Education’ [online]. Available at: www.allacademic.com/meta/p173583_index.html. Accessed 30 April 2009. Green, K. (ed.) (1995), New Essays in Deixis: Discourse, Narrative, Literature. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Harper, G. (1997), ‘Creative writing in higher education: introducing gramography’. Writing in Education, No. 12, (summer). Jakobson, R. (1960), ‘Closing statement: linguistics and poetics’, in T. A. Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language. New York: Wiley. pp. 350–377. Leech, G. (1969), A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry. London: Longman. Leech, G. and Short, M. (2007), Style in Fiction (2nd edn). London: Longman Pearson. Pope, R. (1995), Textual Intervention: Critical and Creative Strategies for Literary Studies. London: Routledge. —(2006), ‘Critical-creative rewriting’, in G. Harper (ed.), Teaching Creative Writing. London: Continuum, pp. 13–146. Rodriguez, A. (2008), ‘The “problem” of creative writing: using grading rubrics based on narrative theory as solution’. New Writing, 5, (3), 167–77. Segal, E. M. (1997), ‘Deixis in short fiction: the contribution of deictic shift theory to reader experience of literary fiction’, in B. Lounsberry (ed.), Telling Tales: Perspectives on the Short Story. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, pp. 283–94. Short, M. (1996), Exploring the Language of Poetry, Plays and Prose. London: Longman. Simpson, P. (2006), Stylistics: A Resource Book for Students. London: Routledge.

112

Pedagogical Stylistics

Stegner, W. (1998), On the Teaching of Creative Writing. Hanover, NH: University of New England Press. Toolan, M. (1998), Language in Literature: An Introduction to Stylistics. London: Arnold. —(2001), Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction. London: Routledge. Van Loon, J. (2007), ‘Narrative theory/narrative fiction’, New Writing, 4, (1), 18–25. Vanderslice, S. (2006), ‘Workshopping’, in G. Harper (ed.), Teaching Creative ­Writing. London: Continuum, pp. 147–57.

Appendix: The Self-assessment Questionnaire 1. How much creative writing have you done in the past? 2. Have you ever studied creative writing formally before taking this module (e.g., at school or college, or in another area of this university)? If so, please give details. 3. How does the approach taken by this course differ from creative writing studies you have undertaken previously, if at all? 4. General remarks regarding your creative writing (e.g., genres and topics presently working on and planning to submit in the portfolio). 5. What stylistics tools did you use during the writing process itself? 6. Have you taken a risk by trying something new in any of your writing? Explain. 7. What stylistics tools did you use during the rewriting/editing process? 8. Things you do well. 9. Areas where you have shown recent improvement. 10. Areas needing further work.

Chapter 7

Corpus Stylistics in the Classroom Dan McIntyre

7.1  Introduction Two particular strengths of stylistics are (i) its practitioners’ commitment to improving the learning experience of their students and (ii) stylisticians’ enthusiasm for integrating teaching and research. Evidence for both of these points can be seen in the wealth of publications relating to the teaching of stylistics (classic examples of which are Carter and Brumfit [1986] and Short [1989]). This commitment to the pedagogy of the discipline is important, since new analytical and methodological techniques can take time to trickle down to the stylistics classroom, not least because of practical difficulties in integrating them into the curriculum. One methodological technique, which has increasingly been adopted by stylistics researchers over the last decade or so, has been the practice of using largescale computer corpora in stylistic analysis. Insights from corpus linguistics have made it possible for stylistics to circumvent the difficulties associated with analysing whole texts (on which topic, see Leech and Short [2007]), as well as for stylisticians to return to the kind of questions with which stylistics was originally occupied. These include questions of authorial style and what makes one text-type distinct from another. The growth of research in this area has led to the emergence of what is often now termed corpus stylistics – a sub-branch of stylistics that uses corpus techniques to support the analysis of stylistic effects in texts. In this chapter, I discuss the integration of corpus linguistic techniques into stylistics teaching. I focus on two main questions: (i) why teach corpus stylistics? and (ii) what is the best way to teach corpus stylistics? I demonstrate the value of corpus stylistics for producing analyses that are replicable and falsifiable, and I argue that to successfully introduce students to the techniques of corpus stylistics, there are particular approaches that are perhaps best taught before others.

114

Pedagogical Stylistics

7.2  Stylistics and Pedagogy Before going on to examine the teaching of corpus stylistics in detail, it is worth clarifying the type of pedagogical stylistics advocated in this chapter. Elsewhere, I have drawn a distinction between pedagogical stylistics on the one hand and the pedagogy of stylistics on the other (see McIntyre 2011). The former refers to the application of stylistic techniques in teaching, although not necessarily in the teaching of stylistics specifically. Typical examples of this would include research into the teaching of English literature to foreign learners of English (see Short and Candlin  1989) and the use of foregrounding theory to improve large group teaching (McIntyre 2003). Watson and Zyngier’s (2006) edited collection is a prime exemplar of pedagogical stylistics. The pedagogy of stylistics refers to the study of how best to teach stylistics in particular. Good examples of such work can be found in Short et  al.’s (2006) special issue of the journal Language and Literature, focusing on ‘The Language and Style Pedagogical Investigations’, and in Jeffries and McIntyre (2011). The importance of making such a distinction can be seen if we consider Laurillard’s (1993: 7) point that efforts to improve university teaching should not simply focus on general pedagogic practice, but on the pedagogy of specific disciplines. I draw the distinction here because I focus initially on the pedagogy of corpus stylistics; that is, how best to teach this particular approach. Nonetheless, I will also claim that an understanding of the pedagogy of stylistics can have washback effects on pedagogical stylistics generally. I will return to this point at the end of the chapter.

7.3  Why Teach Corpus Stylistics? At the heart of stylistics is a focus on objective analysis. This means basing our interpretations of texts on linguistic evidence rather than subjective opinion. Corpus linguistic techniques can be extremely valuable to stylisticians because they can be used to generate supporting evidence for a critical position. At its most basic, the corpus linguistic method can provide the simple frequency information that is often necessary for quantifying aspects of style. For example, in a recent research project investigating discourse presentation in Early Modern English writing, a colleague and I wanted to ascertain whether the stylistic techniques of speech, writing and thought presentation had changed at all between the Early Modern period



Corpus Stylistics in the Classroom

115

and the present day (see McIntyre and Walker 2011). To do this, it was necessary to build a small corpus representative of Early Modern English writing, annotating the corpus to indicate every instance of discourse presentation in it, quantifying the various discourse presentation categories and comparing our results against a similarly annotated corpus of Present Day English writing. Figure 7.1 shows the relative distribution of speech, writing and thought presentation in Early Modern and Present Day English. Statistical comparison shows that the distribution of discourse presentation follows the same pattern in Early Modern English as that of Present Day English; that is, speech presentation is the most dominant form, followed by thought and writing presentation. Statistical calculations were used to normalize the differences that arose as a result of the two corpora being different sizes. This is just one very simple example of how corpus linguistic software can be used to count stylistic items, thereby providing empirical evidence of particular stylistic traits. However, this is not a particularly sophisticated use of corpus techniques. Corpus tools have much more to offer. Beyond providing frequency information about linguistic categories, corpora can also provide insights into usage that can be used to support a stylistic analysis. This is what O’Halloran (2007) calls corpus-assisted stylistics.

Figure 7.1  Distribution of speech, writing and thought presentation in Early ­Modern English writing and Present Day English writing.

116

Pedagogical Stylistics

7.4  Corpus-Assisted Stylistics Searching a corpus to find out what constitutes ‘normal’ usage can be a useful way of validating a stylistic analysis (or even a simple intuitive response to a text). One particularly useful technique is to determine the collocates of the node word; that is, those words that frequently turn up in close proximity to the search term. Collocation can result in the node word being imbued with the semantic meaning associated with its collocates. This is what Louw (1993) describes as semantic prosody. For example, consider one of the lines from Robert Graves’s poem ‘The Cool Web’. ‘There’s a cool web of language winds us in’. We might ask why Graves describes language as a web. Intuitively, we might have some sense of what an answer might be; possibly that it is composed of interconnecting elements, that it is complicated, beautiful, etc. Identifying the collocates of web in a corpus helps us to provide support (or not) for these intuitions and might also reveal other connotations that we would not have guessed at intuitively. A search of the British National Corpus (BNC) for adjective collocates of web reveals these to be: tangled, seamless, intricate, sticky, complex, complicated, fine, economic, international, social, large and whole. It is not difficult to imagine the metaphorical correspondences between these collocates and language, thus the corpus search may well help a reader to interpret the poem. This is a relatively straightforward example of how collocational information can be beneficial to the literary critic. Louw (1993) goes further and in an analysis of Philip Larkin’s poem ‘First Sight’, he demonstrates how deviating from collocational patterns can result in foregrounding effects that lead to irony. O’Halloran (2007) uses corpus-assisted analysis to provide support for Roger Fowler’s reading of Fleur Adcock’s poem ‘Street Song’. The point from all of these analyses is that doing corpus-assisted analysis does not involve any difficult work in corpus creation, nor does it necessitate particular skills in computing. It is thus an unintimidating way into corpus-related work for those students who might normally prefer to avoid this kind of analysis. Furthermore, it provides a clear and obvious introduction to the techniques of objective analysis demanded by stylistics.

7.5  Corpus-Based Stylistics and Corpus-Driven Stylistics Corpus-assisted stylistics, as described above, uses existing corpora to support the analysis of a single text. However, an alternative way to use corpus techniques in stylistic analysis is to treat the target text as a corpus in its own right.



Corpus Stylistics in the Classroom

117

A division is often made in corpus studies between corpus-based linguistics and corpus-driven linguistics. Tognini-Bonelli describes the former as when: [c]orpus evidence is brought in as an extra bonus rather than as a determining factor with respect to the analysis, which is still carried out according to pre-existing categories; although it is used to refine such categories, it is never really in a position to challenge them as there is no claim made that they arise directly from the data. (Tognini-Bonelli 2001: 66) In defining corpus-driven linguistics, she notes the following: There might be a large number of potentially meaningful patterns that escape the attention of the traditional linguist; these will not be recorded in traditional reference works and may not even be recognised until they are forced upon the corpus analyst by the sheer visual presence of the emerging patterns in a concordance page. (TogniniBonelli 2001: 86) In effect, the distinction that Tognini-Bonelli makes here is between an approach that uses corpora to support existing categories and classifications of language (corpus-based linguistics) and one that uses corpora themselves to derive categories and classifications (corpus-driven linguistics). Hardie and McEnery (2010: 385) describe the two approaches as, respectively, the ‘methodologist’ and ‘neo-Firthian’ traditions, noting that the former sees corpus linguistics as a methodology and nothing more, while the latter views corpus linguistics as a distinct subdiscipline of linguistics that has theoretical status in its own right. Debate among corpus linguists as to which of these approaches constitutes the right way to go about doing corpus linguistics has often been heated (see, e.g., Teubert’s [2010] contribution to a special issue of the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics on this topic). Despite this, Hardie and McEnery (2010) show that, in reality, the two traditions have an equally long history, and that the distinction between them seems likely to diminish over time as neo-Firthian discoveries (such as pattern grammar) pull corpus-derived theories closer to non-corpus-derived theories, such as those developed in cognitive linguistics. The distinction between corpus-based and corpus-driven linguistics, then, would seem to be neither a black-and-white distinction nor a sustainable one. Nonetheless, I would argue that the terms can be appropriated for pedagogical reasons in corpus stylistics, albeit with slightly different glosses.

118

Pedagogical Stylistics

I want to argue that we might conceive of corpus-based stylistics as the practice of using corpus analysis to validate existing theories and hypotheses. Corpus-driven stylistics, on the other hand, might be seen as the practice of using the results of corpus analysis to formulate new stylistic theories and hypotheses. The distinction between these two endeavours should be clearer after some examples. Often, what we want to do in stylistic analysis is to validate (or invalidate) the more subjective views of mainstream literary critics. And we can use corpus evidence to help us do this. Here, I want to consider what corpus techniques can reveal about Ernest Hemingway’s writing. I will focus particularly on Hemingway’s novel about the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls. Much has been written about Hemingway’s style from a literary critical standpoint. Gates, for instance, claims that Hemingway created a new style of fiction ‘in which meaning is established through dialogue, through action, and silences – a fiction in which nothing crucial – or at least very little – is stated explicitly’ (Gates, quoted in Putnam 2006). While Gates may well be responding to what he perceives as some of Hemingway’s stylistic traits, it is not at all clear that his summary of Hemingway’s style is in any way useful. What does it mean, for instance, to say that ‘meaning is established through dialogue, through action, and silences’? This, arguably, is how meaning is conveyed in most novels! In short, Gates’ view is unfalsifiable and therefore not helpful critically. Some critics, however, come closer to expressing what the roots of Hemingway’s style might be. Trodd (2007: 8), for example, writes that ‘[w]ithin his form, Hemingway embedded a further commentary upon language’s depleted capacity for expression. For example, his paratactic syntax – which juxtaposes clauses and like syntactic units without subordinating conjunctions – creates static, abrupt sentences that seem to stammer or bark’. We might take issue with the claim that language has a ‘depleted capacity for expression’, or what is meant by the claims that syntactic structures without subordinating conjunctions seem ‘to stammer or bark’, but elsewhere, at least, Trodd is talking about formal features of language, and this opens up his claim to testing. If Trodd is claiming that paratactic syntax is a distinctive feature of Hemingway’s style, and that subordinating conjunctions are noticeable only by their absence, then we might hypothesize that subordinating conjunctions are significantly under-represented in Hemingway’s writing. This, at least, is a hypothesis that can be tested. To do this, I took an electronic version of For Whom the Bell Tolls (note that for a truly representative answer, we would need to look at a corpus of the



Corpus Stylistics in the Classroom

119

whole of Hemingway’s output) and uploaded it to Wmatrix, a web-based corpus analysis tool that automatically tags texts for part-of-speech and semantic field information. By comparing the output for the Hemingway novel against a reference corpus consisting of 222,541 words of fiction texts from the BNC, I was able to generate a list of the key parts-of-speech in For Whom the Bell Tolls. A key part-of-speech list is simply a list of those word classes that are both over and under-represented in the target corpus when compared against their distribution in the reference corpus. Wmatrix uses the log-likelihood statistical test to determine keyness, wherein a loglikelihood score of 15.13 or above indicates 99.99 per cent confidence of statistical significance (that is, the observed result is indeed significant, rather than being an accident of the data). The immediate results of this test seem to undermine the literary critical position. While coordinating conjunctions are the second most overrepresented part-of-speech in For Whom the Bell Tolls (which would fit with a consequent under-representation of subordinating conjunctions), what we find is that subordinating conjunctions are also over-represented in the novel. This result runs counter to our hypothesis, derived from Trodd’s (2007) claim, that subordinating conjunctions will be under-represented in Hemingway’s writing. However, before making any sweeping statements, we need to look in more detail at the results. First of all, Wmatrix distinguishes between different subordinating conjunctions. Some, such as whether, are neither under nor over-represented. Secondly, of those that are over-represented, what we find on closer inspection is that they tend to be used in the direct speech of characters, as the following concordance extract shows: 1. remember it . “ “ It was built 2. is the easy country of the pass 3. e stream flows gently . Below , 4. , screwed the eyepieces around 5. that rose behind the open shed 6. ere we will hide this explosive 7. half an hour from the bridge , 8. as steeper and more difficult , 9. is way to the bridge ? “ “ No . 10. the bridge . “ “ You will see . 11. but he was not usually worried 12. it was to cross through them , 13. ortance to what happened to you 14. and he knew from following him 15. ported it , as he remembered it 16. uld ? “ “ It will start on time 17. ? “ Robert Jordan had asked . “ 18. t bridge is gone . Not before ,

since you were here . The old mill is where the stream flows gently . Below where the road turns out of sight in t until the boards of the mill showed su where the circular saw was , and a str until it is time . I would like to hav if that is possible . “ “ That is s until finally the stream seemed to dro When we go to the bridge it will be b If you are not satisfied , we will because he did not give any importance t if you had a good guide . It was on if you were caught that made it dif since before daylight that the old man when he had walked over it on his way if it is your attack , “ Robert Jor After the attack starts . As soon as t so it can be repaired if the attack

120

Pedagogical Stylistics

19. before , so it can be repaired 20. is postponed . No . It must go 21. u ? “ “ Then I may take it that 22. either do I like it very much . 23. to undertake it , say so now . 24. w will you advance on La Granja

if when when If If if

the attack is postponed . No . I the attack starts and I must kno the planes unload , the attack h you do not want to undertake it you think you can not do it , sa that bridge is blown ? “ “ We go

What our corpus stylistic analysis allows us to do is refine Trodd’s literary critical comment. The discourse structure of novels is complex (see Short 1996) and it is too sweeping a statement to claim that Hemingway’s style ‘juxtaposes clauses and like syntactic units without subordinating conjunctions’ (Trodd 2007: 8) without first considering whether this is occurring in narration or reported speech. A corpus-based stylistic analysis thus allows us to take a hypothesis and test it against a large body of data and, in so doing, we can ensure stylistic analyses that are detailed, accurate and replicable. How, then, does corpus-based stylistics differ from corpus-driven stylistics? I would argue that the former involves testing hypotheses using categories not derived from corpus research (e.g., the grammatical definition of the subordinating conjunction in the Hemingway example is not derived from a corpus study). The latter involves approaching the corpus without any preconceptions in the form of hypotheses, and instead generates insights about stylistic techniques and effects in a bottom-up form of analysis. Stubbs (2005) is an example of what I would term corpus-driven stylistics. Stubbs (2005) analyses Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. He begins with few preconceptions about the text and uses the results of an initial corpus analysis to determine his critical appraisal of the story. For example, he discovers that the word grass is associated by collocation with ‘death, decay and desolation’ (Stubbs 2005: 14), and that one of the most significant keywords is seemed, suggesting a preoccupation in the novel with uncertainty. It is unlikely that many of Stubbs’s analytical discoveries would have been uncovered through qualitative analysis alone. This kind of corpus-driven approach to literary analysis allows a greater degree of objectivity than is found in traditional literary criticism. This is because it does not involve the analyst deciding beforehand what aspect of the target text to focus on (as in the Hemingway example). Instead, frequency lists and keyness analysis can be used to determine what aspects of the target text are distinctive in stylistic terms and what particular parts of the target text are ripe for qualitative analysis. Corpus-driven stylistics also provides a useful means of generating specific research questions to focus on in qualitative analysis. For example, a



Corpus Stylistics in the Classroom

121

Wmatrix analysis of semantic domains in John McGahern’s short story ‘The Creatures of the Earth’ reveals substances and materials: liquid to be an over-represented category when compared against the BNC Written Imaginative sampler. The contents of this category can be seen in this extract from the concordance for this semantic domain: 1. In wild , wet January weather , two months after 2. is shoulder whenever the grass was wet . All through his final illness the 3. looked gravely down on the surging water of the Sound . The cottage was by a 4. ‘ve not been drinking ? “ “ Not a drop . But I intend to have a stiff drin 5. the harbour they were scraping and tarring the boats . A man was lovingly meas 6. ering it with a boiling mixture of tar and pitch from a tin jug . She love 7. She loved the smell of the boiling tar in the sea air . There was a crazy 8. ieved in the healing properties of tar , and each summer he tarred his ten 9. erties of tar , and each summer he tarred his ten children from head to toe . 10. n , and they walked far out to the water ‘s edge , a white froth marking the 11. out to the water ‘s edge , a white froth marking the tideline , a gentle , d 12. ine , a gentle , dirty backwash of water and sand curling back underneath th 13. d sand curling back underneath the froth . A single man followed them out an 14. ed them out and searched along the froth until he found a green plastic oil 15. oth until he found a green plastic oil can which marked a set line . He th 16. hut and carried upside down to the water . There were four men to each curra 17. with eight legs advancing into the water . There they floated the boats and 18. e as they bobbed listlessly on the water , the men resting on their oars wit 19. e air as it was flung out over the water . She had to get away quickly . “ W

This domain has what Louw (1993) terms a negative semantic prosody. That is, in this story there are strong negative connotations associated with words from this semantic field. In essence, liquids are associated with misery. For example, in line 1, January weather is ‘wet’ when Mrs Waldron, the main protagonist, leaves her house following her husband’s death. In line 3, a black cat looks ‘gravely down on the surging water of the Sound’ (this is especially significant when we consider that the cat ends up being drowned). In lines 6 and 9 respectively, the tar is described as a ‘boiling mixture’ and is used in the tarring of children. Clearly, interesting stylistic effects derive from the semantic patterns inherent in this domain. What is also interesting about ‘Creatures of the Earth’ is that another over-represented domain in the story is substances and materials: solids. The following is an extract from the concordance for this domain: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

he bed , burying her face in the he traditional way , with a blue ditional way , with a blue stone st the storms . There were a few s lovingly measuring a square of efore covering it with a boiling mixture of tar and pitch from a a thick jersey of unwashed grey

fur stone slate wooden calico mixture tin wool

, and left the darkened room to t slate roof and a small porch in f roof and a small porch in front . crayfish creels along the short p over weakened timbers before cove of tar and pitch from a tin jug . jug . She loved the smell of the with a worn black suit and a clot

122

Pedagogical Stylistics

9. and turned on the big square of 10. rring as the cat curled into the 11. ving hay . There was much broken 12. their throats so that the light 13. ransistor . Heslin had a large , 14. went towards them and rubbed her 15. ng hands and thrust her into the 16. ssively in red helmets and black 17. en the cars and the strand . The 18. le , dirty backwash of water and 19. the froth until he found a green 20. , freshly baiting each one with 21. with sand eels taken from a red 22. attracted by the cries from the 23. ‘t appear to notice . Throwing a

gravel . Instead of coming straight into eiderdown , declaring to all her own approv glass along the roads . Eileen had take cotton floated out behind them in the oc canvas bag slung from his shoulder in wh fur against the bars of the gate . As canvas bag . The cat alternately tore an leather , a blue insignia painted on the sand was as white and unspoiled as it sand curling back underneath the froth plastic oil can which marked a set line . sand eels taken from a red plastic buc plastic bucket . His catch was small , th canvas bag , but he did n’t appear to no metal weight on the end of the line far

What is striking is that materiality appears to be a strong element in this story. Furthermore, we can contrast the significance of solids with the significance of liquids and this leads to an interesting research question for qualitative analysis, either of a stylistic or literary nature, namely: what is the function of liquids and solids in ‘Creatures of the Earth’? (For a fuller analysis of this story, see Busse et al. [2010]). In this respect, corpus-driven analysis can lead us to a focus for qualitative analysis, one that we might not have arrived at without the tools of corpus linguistics.

7.6  What is the Best Way to Teach Corpus Stylistics? Unsurprisingly, there is no ‘one size fits all’ answer to the question posed in the title of this section, but there are at least some considerations that we can make. One factor that will almost certainly affect which approach to corpus stylistics is most effective is the educational background of the students in question. For those who have a predominantly literary background, corpus-assisted stylistics can be a good starting point for corpus stylistic analysis, since it does not involve corpus construction or complex queries. Existing corpora can be used to find support for initial stylistic analyses or to determine the validity of intuitive responses to the target text. As I hope to have shown in Section 7.3, a lot can be gleaned simply through the analysis of concordance lines for the target search term. In this way, students can be introduced to the value that can be gained from supporting analyses with corpus data. Once students are comfortable with the concept and value of corpusassisted stylistics, an obvious next step is to move on to corpus-based stylistics (that is, treating the target text as if it were a corpus and searching it to



Corpus Stylistics in the Classroom

123

validate or invalidate pre-existing hypotheses, often from literary criticism). Indeed, anecdotal evidence from my own teaching would suggest that students themselves will recognize the possibilities afforded by corpus linguistics even before the full range of techniques has been introduced to them. Not long after trying out corpus-assisted analysis, a number of my students started to ask whether they could treat their target text as a corpus instead of using pre-existing corpora. The value of corpus-assisted stylistics is that it forces students to think about the kind of queries they would need to be able to carry out in order to address the hypothesis or research question that they are working on. This can then lead them to refine their hypothesis or research question in order to make it more manageable, and this is a valuable skill to learn. From a pedagogical standpoint, the value of corpus-based stylistics is that it allows for a focused analysis concentrating on specific questions. It is thus useful for getting students to produce analyses that are detailed and replicable. I would suggest that corpus-driven stylistics is best introduced after corpusassisted and corpus-based approaches. One issue with this approach is that it is potentially very open-ended in the sense that it involves approaching a text (or texts) with no preconceived hypotheses. This is potentially problematic for students with little sense of methodological procedures generally and there is the danger that this can then lead to students simply describing their corpus rather than analysing it. This can be a particular problem for students with a literary rather than a linguistic background, since mainstream literary studies do not generally focus on research design and methodologies in the same way that the social sciences do. Nonetheless, if introduced after corpus-assisted and corpus-based approaches, corpusdriven stylistics can be used to generate research questions, thereby aiding qualitative analysis, as well as leading to new insights into how stylistic effects are created. Throughout this chapter, I have focused on the pedagogy of corpus stylistics; that is, why corpus stylistics is a valuable subject to teach and how best to teach it. One further beneficial effect of corpus stylistics that we might well expect to see is a washback effect on students’ capacity for doing qualitative stylistic analysis. Corpus stylistics familiarizes students with key methodological concepts, such as research questions, hypotheses, data, methods and tools of analysis. Once students have a firm grasp of these concepts, it can be much easier for them to apply what they have learnt to qualitative stylistic analysis (and, of course, to other subjects and disciplines). Corpus stylistics has the potential to improve students’ abilities in stylistic

124

Pedagogical Stylistics

analysis generally. Thus, while this chapter has focused on the pedagogy of corpus stylistics in particular, it also has the potential to have a pedagogical impact on other areas of study. In this sense, we see a circular and mutually beneficial relationship between the pedagogy of stylistics specifically and pedagogical stylistics generally.

References Busse, B., McIntyre, D., Nørgaard, N. and Toolan, M. (2010), ‘John McGahern’s stylistic and narratological art’. Lexis, 5, 101–31. Carter, R. and Brumfit, C. (eds) (1986), Literature and Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hardie, A. and McEnery, T. (2010), ‘On two traditions in corpus linguistics, and what they have in common’. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 15, (3), 384–94. Jeffries, L. and McIntyre, D. (eds) (2011), Teaching Stylistics. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Laurillard, D. (1993), Rethinking University Teaching. London: Routledge. Leech, G. and Short, M. (2007), Style in Fiction (2nd edn). London: Pearson. Louw, B. (1993), ‘Irony in the text or insincerity in the writer? The diagnostic potential of semantic prosodies’, in M. Baker, G. Francis and E. Tognini-Bonelli (eds), Text and Technology: In Honour of John Sinclair. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 157–76. McIntyre, D. (2003), ‘Using foregrounding theory as a teaching methodology in a stylistics course’. Style, 37, (1), 1–13. —(2011), ‘The place of stylistics in the English curriculum’, in L. Jeffries and D.  McIntyre (eds), Teaching Stylistics. Basingstoke: Palgrave/English Subject ­Centre, pp. 9–29. McIntyre, D. and Walker, B. (2011), ‘Discourse presentation in Early Modern ­English writing: a preliminary corpus-based investigation’. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 16, (1), 101–30. O’Halloran, K. A. (2007), ‘Corpus-assisted literary evaluation’. Corpora, 2, (1), 33–63. Putnam, T. (2006), ‘Hemingway on war and its aftermath’. Prologue, 38, (1). Available at: http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2006/spring/hemingway.html. Short, M. (ed.) (1989), Reading, Analysing and Teaching Literature. London: ­Longman. —(1996), Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose. London: L ­ ongman. Short, M. and Candlin, C. (1989), ‘Teaching study skills for English literature’, in M. Short (ed.), Reading, Analysing and Teaching Literature. London: Longman, pp. 178–203. Stubbs, M. (2005), ‘Conrad in the computer: examples of quantitative stylistic ­methods’. Language and Literature, 14, (1), 5–24. Teubert, W. (2010), ‘Our brave new world?’. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 15, (3), 354–58.



Corpus Stylistics in the Classroom

125

Tognini-Bonelli, E. (2001), Corpus Linguistics at Work. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Trodd, Z. (2007), ‘Hemingway’s camera eye: the problem of language and an interwar politics of form’. The Hemingway Review, 26, (2), 7–21. Watson, G. and Zyngier, S. (eds) (2006), Literature and Stylistics for Language Learners. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Chapter 8

Imagined Inference: Teaching Writers to Think Like Readers Billy Clark and Nicky Owtram

8.1  Introduction This study presents and discusses activities designed to make writers more aware of inferences made by readers when reading texts and of inferences made by writers when writing them. The two kinds of inferences are connected: some inferences made by writers are about the inferences that readers are likely to make when reading, and some inferences made by readers are about the inferences that writers might have made when writing, or about their intentions more generally. A full understanding of verbal communication requires an understanding of inferences of both types. We are working to develop a theoretical model of the inferential processes of writers, and the work presented here is an early stage of this project. This work is designed both to help us move closer to developing our model and, at the same time, to help develop the writing practices and understanding of our students. Section 8.2 presents some of our assumptions about the inferences involved in writing, our aims in developing these activities and connections with previous research. We hope that our approach will complement and help to flesh out previous work on the cognitive processes involved in writing (see Torrance [2006] for a brief overview). We also hope to contribute to the development of pragmatic theory by focusing on inferences involved in production as well as comprehension. While many pragmatic theories focus mainly on the processes of comprehension, some theorists (e.g., Thomas 1995) have stressed the importance of seeing verbal communication as involving an interaction between communicators and interpreters. However, even approaches that seem to focus mainly on interpretation (e.g., Grice 1975; Sperber and Wilson 1986) make reference to the inferences of communicators. We hope that our work will develop our understanding of the nature of inferences made by communicators.



Imagined Inference

127

Section 8.3 presents and discusses the activities we have developed in two institutions: at Middlesex University in London and at the European University Institute in Florence. Students at Middlesex are in the final year of an undergraduate programme involving work on English language (work that focuses on language from a psychological and a sociological point of view, including practical analytical and productive work). Students in Florence are working on graduate programmes in social sciences. We present and consider some of the evidence provided by our work on these activities. Section 8.4 reflects on what we have discovered so far and considers our next steps. Our work with students suggests that activities like this will indeed help students to develop their abilities and understanding. Our next steps will include developing these activities and developing a fuller model of writer inferences.

8.2  Inference and Writing It is clear that writers make inferences when producing written texts, just as speakers do when producing speech, and that these inferences are often about what readers will infer when reading the text (see Nystrand [1986] for a discussion of this idea). Sometimes, writers discuss this explicitly and sometimes not. A writer who considers which of the following formulations to use will base her/his decision to a significant extent on the effects each formulation is likely to have on her/his reader: (1a) ‘Hi, Thanks for the note. Will get back to you asap :-)’ (1b) ‘Dear Billy, Thanks very much for your note. We will respond to your query as soon as we can. Best wishes, . . .’ (1c) ‘Dear Dr Clark, We write to confirm receipt of your letter of the 12th November. We appreciate your taking the time to contact us and to draw this matter to our attention. We will consider the matter carefully and respond to you in due course. Yours, . . .’ A skilled writer will consider inferences likely to be made by readers of each of these formulations and choose the one that is most likely to receive the kind of interpretation that she/he is aiming for. (1a) might seem too informal in some contexts and (1c) too formal in others. Writers, of course, will vary in how consciously they think about these things when preparing a text. Readers also vary with regard to how consciously they are aware of the

128

Pedagogical Stylistics

implications of different formulations. Readers who find (1c) off-putting might formulate their responses with different degrees of explicitness and readers will also vary with regard to specific inferences they might make about, for example, the competence of the writer and the extent to which they are consciously aiming for a particular effect or set of effects. In designing the activities described below, we hoped to help writers become more aware of the possible effects of different formulations and to be able to reflect more explicitly on how different formulations give rise to different effects. Ultimately, we aim to develop a model of writer inferences within the framework of relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986) and this work provides some informal evidence to help us develop this model. In developing this model, we aim to build on existing insights from pragmatics and also from work on the cognitive processes involved in writing. Many pragmatic theories have followed Grice (1975/1989) in prioritizing hearers and readers when developing accounts of pragmatic inference. At least at first, this is mainly a methodological decision, and we would expect pragmatic theories ultimately to say something about the inferences made by communicators as well as interpreters. Thomas presents a stronger view, suggesting the following: meaning is not something that is inherent in the words alone, nor is it produced by the speaker alone, nor by the hearer alone. Making meaning is a dynamic process, involving the negotiation of meaning between speaker and hearer, the context of an utterance  .  .  .  and the meaning potential of an utterance. (Thomas 1995: 22) Our aim is not to argue for or against Thomas’s view or other conceptions of pragmatics, but, more modestly, to explore the inferences made by writers as part of the writing process. It is worth noting, however, that even ‘addressee-centric’ approaches such as Grice’s theory of conversation and relevance theory, do say something about the inferences made by communicators. Here, for example, is Grice’s suggested ‘general pattern for the working out of a conversational implicature’: He has said that p; there is no reason to suppose that he is not observing the maxims, or at least the Cooperative Principle; he could not be doing this unless he thought that q; he knows (and knows that I know that he knows) that I can see that the supposition that he thinks that q is required; he has done nothing to stop me thinking that q; he intends me



Imagined Inference

129

to think, or is at least willing to allow me to think, that q; and so he has implicated that q. (Grice 1975/1989: 31) The reflexive nature of the hearer’s inferential processes is clear. Note, in particular, the reference to the hearer’s assumption that the speaker ‘knows (and knows that I know that he knows)’ that the implicature is required. Clearly, Grice’s approach assumes that addressees make assumptions about what communicators have assumed and that communicators make assumptions about what addressees will assume. Relevance theory makes similar, although different, assumptions about the reflexivity of assumptions made by addressees and communicators. This involves a technical notion of ‘mutual manifestness’ and the related notion of a ‘mutual cognitive environment’. Briefly, an assumption is manifest to an individual at a particular time ‘if and only if he is capable at that time of representing it mentally and accepting its representation as true or probably true’ (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 39). An individual’s ‘cognitive environment’ at a particular time consists of all the assumptions that are manifest to that individual at that time. Assumptions are ‘mutually manifest’ to a set of individuals when they are both manifest to each individual in that set and it is manifest to each individual that they are manifest to other members of the set. The set of assumptions that are mutually manifest to more than one individual constitute their ‘mutual cognitive environment’. The notion of ‘manifestness’ is not a purely psychological notion, since an assumption can be manifest without being entertained (e.g., it is manifest to most people at the time of writing that Nelson Mandela has never been to Mars, even though most people are not currently entertaining that thought). The notion plays a crucial role in relevance theory since the set of assumptions that could be used in ostensive communication are those that are ‘mutually manifest’ at the time of communicating. These notions are then used in explaining specific acts of communication and interpretation. Sperber and Wilson suggest the following: A communicator who produces an ostensive stimulus is trying to fulfil two intentions: . . . the informative intention, to make manifest to her audience a set of assumptions . . . and the communicative intention, to make her informative intention mutually manifest. (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 163) Without going into detail on how relevance theory aims to explain communication, it is clear that this approach makes assumptions not only

130

Pedagogical Stylistics

about what addressees do, but also about what communicators do. In fact, it is fairly easy to understand relevance theory as addressing both ‘sides’ of the communicative process simultaneously, seeing communication as being about adjusting mutual cognitive environments. Ultimately, one of our aims is to flesh out our understanding of the inferences made by communicators. Writing might be a useful way into this process, since the interaction between writer and reader is arguably more salient, partly because of the extra time available for composition and for interpretation. A number of researchers have developed fuller accounts of the cognitive processes involved in producing written texts (see Torrance [2006] for a brief overview). Other work includes Alamargot and Chaquoy (2001), Bereiter and Scardmalia (1987), Candlin and Hyland (1999), Flower and Hayes (1981), Hayes and Flower (1980) and Stainton (1996). For a discussion of academic writing in particular, see Bruce (2008), Crismore (1989), Hyland (2002, 2005), Swales and Feak (2004) and Vande Kopple (1985). For work within a relevance-theoretic framework, see Aguilar (2008) and Owtram (2010). Gutt (1991) focuses on translation from the point of view of relevance theory and this work is also an important source for us. Work on the cognition of writing usually follows Flower and Hayes (1981) in seeing the writer’s task as consisting of three stages: planning (which involves decisions about content and structure), translating (realizing the planned structure as text) and revising (checking whether the current version seems to realize the writer’s intentions). While inference must be involved at each of these stages, it is perhaps easiest to see how inferential processes are involved in the revision stage, where writers can be seen as imagining the effects that particular formulations might have on their projected readership. Ultimately, we aim to develop a more fully articulated model of these inferential processes from the point of view of relevance theory. The work discussed here is designed to make students more aware of the inferential processes in which they engage as writers, and more able to discuss them explicitly.

8.3  Teaching Inference This section presents and discusses an approach to teaching stylistics in general and writing in particular, focusing on the nature of the inferences made by writers when producing texts. The approach has been developed in a number of courses, including a level 3 undergraduate module taught



Imagined Inference

131

at Middlesex University in London and a postgraduate course for students in social sciences taught at the European University Institute in Florence. Student feedback on both courses has been very positive, and student coursework provides evidence of significant development in abilities to produce and analyse written texts, which has taken place while or since working on these activities. With this approach, students are introduced to the notion of pragmatic inference and develop their abilities to understand and explain specific inferences in a number of spoken and written contexts. They apply this ability in explaining the effects of specific texts and connect their work on this with their understanding of stylistic analysis in general. They practice writing and rewriting texts and explore the inferential processes involved in these tasks. At the end of the process, students approach written tasks with greater confidence in the choices they make and a more sophisticated understanding of the arguments for and against particular linguistic decisions. This work looks at a wide range of genres, including text messages, emails, instant messaging, social networking status updates, formal and informal letters, academic essays, business and technical writing, poetry, drama and prose fiction. The remainder of this section presents an overview of the activities carried out in both institutions. We took full account of ethical considerations in carrying out and reporting this work (see the Recommendations on Good Practice suggested by the British Association for Applied Linguistics, available at: http://www. baal.org.uk/public_docs.html). 8.3.1  Teaching inference at Middlesex The work reported here was part of an undergraduate module taught to students in the third and final year of a BA programme taught at Middlesex University campuses in London and Dubai. In London, the module is part of a BA programme in English Language also taken by students on other programmes, including Advertising & PR, Business Communication, Education & English Language and Publishing & Media Studies. The English Language programme is designed to be a natural next step after working on English language at school and is largely focused on ideas from linguistics. In Dubai, the module is part of a BA in Communication & Media Studies. In the year that we worked on these activities, 48 students completed the module as part of a BA programme at Middlesex in London and 23 students completed the module as part of their programme in Dubai. Five more students studied the module in London as part of an exchange

132

Pedagogical Stylistics

programme. In total, 67 students took part in these activities. The students were a diverse group from a mixed range of cultural and academic backgrounds. They also had different interests in terms of their own writing practice and what they hoped to achieve from the course. This diversity existed within each of the separate seminar groups on both campuses, i.e., both the student bodies in London and in Dubai were made up of students with a wide range of backgrounds. This was addressed early in the course with activities that helped to reveal and explore the different kinds of reading and writing practices of the students. The module outline (available at: http://billyclark.net/ teaching/0910cml3102outline.pdf) contains a full statement of its aims and how these are addressed. The central aims are easy to express and were repeated at nearly every session. They are to explore connections between linguistic decisions made by writers and the effects of texts on their readers. We explain to students that exploring these connections is a central activity of the discipline of stylistics and we spend some sessions exploring this subject explicitly, looking at stylistics readings and textbooks. Students apply these ideas in analysing texts written by others and also in developing their own writing. The texts studied and produced come from a wide range of genres. A typical activity (based in this case on a chapter in one of the main course textbooks [Wright and Hope 1995: 1–34]) might involve the following: (2a) Introducing a particular linguistic phenomenon (e.g., the structure of noun phrases in English and how individual noun phrases differ from each other). (2b) Considering how these differences might lead to different effects (e.g., the effects of complex nominal pre-modification or post-modification). (2c) Looking at a specific text and exploring this linguistic structure in that text (e.g., noting that a text has lots of complex post-modification). (2d) Working out what the effects of this linguistic decision might be (e.g., that the narrator seems to focus particularly on the detailed visual properties of material objects). (2e) Rewriting the text to change the linguistic decision and consider what effect this has. A recurring theme of the module is that writers need to have a clear idea of exactly who their audience is and what the likely effects of particular kinds of writing are on that audience. Discussion of inference is connected



Imagined Inference

133

to this idea. Explicit discussion of inference features early in the module, in the second and third weeks of a 24-week, year-long module. Work then focuses on other topics with little discussion of inference until near the end of the module. In the year when the work reported here was carried out, inference was discussed in weeks two and three. The tasks carried out here were carried out in weeks sixteen and seventeen. While the module is a year long, running for 24 teaching weeks, exchange students attend only the final 12 weeks. For exchange students, then, the task carried out here appeared in the fourth and fifth weeks of a 12-week module and inference had not been discussed at all before students began working on this task. The discussion at the start of the module introduces a number of ideas about inference, but in less detail than might be covered in a course focusing mainly on linguistic meaning. Some of the students are taking a module on linguistic meaning alongside this one, so they do explore inference in more detail. The key ideas introduced at this stage are the following: (3a) There is a gap between what is linguistically encoded by an expression and what is understood in a particular context. (3b) Audiences ‘fill in’ the gap by making inferences. (3c) This depends on accessing particular contextual assumptions and using them in a particular way. (3d) One thing communicators do is make assumptions about which assumptions audiences will access and how they will use them. Here is a typical example that might be used to illustrate these ideas (this particular one was used in a coursework exercise designed to reinforce and develop an understanding of this): (4) A tennis player is interviewed after a very close match that she has finally won. She is asked whether she feels any compassion for the player who lost and she replies: ‘I’m a human being’. The instructions in the coursework question were as follows: (5) ‘Write a paragraph explaining how you think her utterance should be understood. Your answer should at least include discussion of the difference between the “linguistically encoded meaning” of her words and what we take to be the overall meaning of the utterance in this context (meanings which go beyond just the linguistic meaning)’.

134

Pedagogical Stylistics

An answer to this question that showed good understanding of the ideas discussed in the module would indicate the following things: (6a) That the linguistically encoded meaning of ‘I’m a human being’ indicates only that someone is entertaining the thought that whoever is referred to by ‘I ’ has the property of being a human being at some time or in some situation. (6b) That the hearer is likely to infer that the intended referent of ‘I ’ here, is the tennis player just mentioned and that she is communicating that she believes that she has the property of being a human being. (6c) That the hearer is likely to infer that the tennis player is not simply communicating her membership of a particular biological species, but rather wants to draw attention to some properties she has that are typical of human beings. (6d) That there are at least two directions in which a fuller interpretation might be developed: one on which the tennis player intends to remind the hearer that she has natural human emotions and therefore she does feel compassion for her opponent alongside her happiness at having won; one on which the tennis player intends to remind the hearer that she has natural human emotions and therefore she cannot be blamed for feeling happy despite the fact that her happiness goes alongside the unfortunate outcome for her opponent. The later section of the module that focused on inference began with a task that did not explicitly mention inference. Students worked individually, preparing a text of a type chosen from a list that included an apology for late submission to a student journal, a letter from a bank announcing increased overdraft charges, a leaflet advertising a local homeopathy service, a press release for a musical stage show and a letter to schools announcing an English language event for prospective students. Following this, students discussed their initial draft with a partner and developed a new version based on this discussion. After this, the focus moved on to inference. Students were asked to do the following: (7a) Make a note of any inferences you think a reader of your piece of writing might make based on how the current version looks. (7b) Choose one that you think you can eliminate by rewording the text. (7c) Rewrite a relevant part of the text in a way that you think makes it less likely that a reader will make the inference.



Imagined Inference

135

The aim here was to focus on inference in retrospect, i.e., to consider inferences that might be made based on an existing version of a text. The next step was to think about inference before preparing a first draft. Students were asked to choose a new writing task, which could be from the previous list or a new kind of task, and then to: (8a) Make a plan for your piece of writing by identifying at least one inference that you think you would like your reader to make and at least one that you would not like your reader to make. Make a note of them. (8b) Write your text, thinking about how to make sure these inferences are either made or avoided. At this stage, students had written a text without thinking explicitly about inferences, then considered possible inferences, revised their text to reduce the likelihood of one possible inference and to increase the likelihood of another and finally drafted a new text while already having some possible inferences in mind. Discussion following this raised a range of interesting questions and focused on the effects of a number of specific possible formulations. These included: (9a) Comparing different ways of beginning an email (‘Dear Dr Clark’ vs. ‘Dear Billy’ vs. ‘Hi Billy’ vs. ‘Hi’ vs. [no greeting]). (9b) The contrasts between saying ‘If you have questions . . .’ and saying ‘If you have any questions . . .’. (9c) The difference between saying ‘ . . . please feel free to contact one of our agents on 0800 . . .’ and saying ‘ . . . please feel free to contact us at any of our branches or call us on 0800 . . .’. It was clear from the subsequent discussion that this work helped students to develop their understanding of inference in general and of specific kinds of inferences associated with specific formulations, their confidence as writers, their ability to discuss writing plans in advance and their ability to explain and defend specific writing decisions. This understanding was then further applied and developed by looking at examples of existing writ­ ing and considering inferences that readers might make when reading them. This was followed with a discussion of possible reformulations that would make specific inferences more or less likely. Finally, coursework exercises gave students the opportunity to demonstrate their ability to discuss inferences and to revise texts to adjust the likelihood of specific inferences.

136

Pedagogical Stylistics

Student feedback following these activities was very positive. Here are some responses that students made when asked to write comments on how useful they thought these activities were: (10a) ‘It’s useful because it helps you to comprehend what your reader or interpreter is thinking about your text’. (10b) ‘It is really important. A writer should set him/herself in the reader position in order to make a piece of writing appropriate’. (10c) ‘It is very important. You must get into the reader’s head to assume what they are receiving from reading your article . . . this is hard to do’. (10d) ‘It is important to think about inferences in order to avoid misunderstanding or false conclusions’. (10e) ‘However it is hard to plan by identifying inferences, before the original piece of writing is made’. It is clear from comments such as (10a)–(10d) that students find these activities valuable. Comment (10e) makes clear that some students are thinking carefully about the usefulness of the activities and about details of how and when thinking about inference might be useful. 8.3.2  Teaching inference at the European University Institute In the second teaching situation, i.e., a small international research institution specializing in postgraduate and postdoctoral studies, the main approach used to help sensitize students to the importance of taking inferential processes into account as they write involves developing what is called a ‘meta-awareness’ of text comprehension processes. Interviews with successful postdoctoral researchers clearly show that they are very aware that conventional strategies for processing academic texts differ across cultures and languages. They also show that these researchers adjust their writing strategies accordingly. This is what has led us to feel that it is important to provide opportunities for novice academic writers to develop a capacity to observe and discuss texts from a reader’s perspective. This belief has informed our pedagogical practice in three different learning situations: (i) postgraduate writing courses for subject specialists, (ii) writers’ groups with postgraduate and postdoctoral students from different cultural backgrounds and (iii) individual tutorials with English for Academic Purposes (EAP) specialists. Let us look at these in turn in order to see how they can contribute to raising students’ levels of awareness.



Imagined Inference

137

In the specialist writing courses, which typically include students from 10 to 12 language backgrounds, many writing activities are done in pairs and small groups in order to enhance students’ sensitivity to the different assumptions and expectations that they bring to the writing process. Classlevel discussions on their own texts and how their fellow students perceive them, typically elicit a great deal of reflection about different rhetorical traditions. Writers’ groups normally consist in regular meetings of groups of four or five writers (in our case, all coming from the same disciplinary tradition) to discuss work in progress. In this setting, the teachers act as facilitators as the group members focus on one piece of work at a time. The aim is to elicit multiple perspectives on the same piece of writing, so that the participants can become more aware of the clarity and effectiveness of their writing. Often, particularly when focusing on shorter segments, this leads to rewriting. Again, this activity is designed to raise a meta-awareness of pieces of writing from the reader’s perspective. In the same way, having feedback from a reader (in this case an EAP specialist) in individual tutorials can prove very useful. In this setting, a technique is used that can be called ‘pedagogical scaffolding’, where much of the feedback consists of questions like Did you mean X? or What did you mean here? An important feature of this kind of scaffolding is that it can be used to guide novice writers towards an awareness of the importance of manipulating linguistic and informational constraints on the inferencing process at key junctures in the reading process. A first example of this technique can be seen in the short extract written by Oliver, who is arguing in favour of rational choice approaches. (11) ‘(1) Despite being parsimonious and elegant, rational choice approaches have been deemed as being realistic. (2) Judge (2009: 129) points out that, by restricting the “world out there” to stylized facts, “rational choice approaches fail to capture [its] complexities”. (3) Nonetheless, rational choice models offer political scientists the possibility to create parsimonious and testable hypotheses in a manageable fashion. (4) One should bear in mind that the three approaches are ideal-types and one can surely counterbalance the difficulties of rational choice approaches by means of thick description of the phenomenon under analysis’. Oliver has already guided the reader through the placing of despite at the beginning of the first sentence and an adversative nonetheless at the beginning

138

Pedagogical Stylistics

of the third. We thus understand that he is outlining a position in the first two sentences in order to provide a counterargument in the third and fourth sentences. In order to show the reader that the fourth sentence is a second step in the counterargument, however, one may feel the need for more explicit signposting, for example, through the inclusion of furthermore at the beginning of the fourth sentence. The addition of this (or a similar linker) essentially constrains the inferences that the reader can make, so that the two sentences are unequivocally perceived as forming part of the same argumentative move: (12) ‘(1) Despite being parsimonious and elegant, rational choice approaches have been deemed as being realistic. (2) Judge (2009: 129) points out that, by restricting the “world out there” to stylized facts, “rational choice approaches fail to capture [its] complexities”. (3) Nonetheless, rational choice models offer political scientists the possibility to create parsimonious and testable hypotheses in a manageable fashion. (4) Furthermore, one should bear in mind that the three approaches are ideal-types and one can surely counterbalance the difficulties of rational choice approaches by means of thick description of the phenomenon under analysis’. Inviting novice writers to entertain  alternative wordings through queries such as Where do you want to take your reader here? draws their attention to the importance of managing intended effects, a classic characteristic of English academic writing. Scaffolding can also help novice writers to become aware of the need to provide information that helps move the inferencing process along the desired track. An excerpt from Danielle’s work highlights how it is common for novice writers to overestimate the reader’s cognitive abilities and contextual resources, leading to what for most readers may be too big a cognitive leap between sentences (2) and (3). (13) ‘(1) Health is an important concern for modern society. (2) Individuals want to be and remain healthy and this is viewed as one of the most valuable assets a person possesses. (3) In terms of society, healthy populations are not only economically productive, but also socially more cohesive’. In the second version below, we see that Danielle has attempted to make the move from (2) to (3) more explicit through support for the view



Imagined Inference

139

expressed in (2) as an evidential warrant. This is given in new sentences (2b) and (2c) by the scholar Gostin (even though she does not tell us who Gostin is, perhaps expecting us to supply this knowledge ourselves). (14) ‘(1) Health is an important concern for modern society. (2) Individuals want to be and remain healthy and this is viewed as one of the most valuable assets a person possesses. (2b) According to Gostin, “Health is necessary for much of the joy, creativity and productivity that a person derives from life”. (2c) But health is not only indispensable to individuals. (3) In terms of society, healthy populations are not only economically productive, but also socially more cohesive’.

8.4  Conclusion While they are unlikely to use the vocabulary we have used here, there is considerable evidence that writers do make the kinds of inferences we have described, and, in some cases, that they do so explicitly. The film director and writer Darren Aronofsky (in an interview with Brian Tallerico; available at: http://www.ugo.com/ugo/html/article/?id    16102), quoting the director Stuart Rosenberg (who was his teacher in film school), has said the following: My mentor is Stuart Rosenberg . . . and he said, “You have to have a sign on your desk that says ‘where’s my audience now?” And I have that sign on my desk. I think about it all time – where is the audience? This suggests a focus on the current cognitive status of audience members and how to construct a screenplay and a film in such a way that audience members will respond in the way the writer and director intends. The writer Raymond Carver (in an interview with Kay Bonetti in the Saturday Review) reflects the interactive nature of communication in saying the following: Art is a linking between people, the creator and the consumer. Art is not self-expression, it is communication, and I am interested in communication. (Saturday Review September–October 1983: 21–3) It is easy to find examples of writer revisions that reflect a focus on the inferences likely to be made by audiences. One of Raymond Carver’s stories

140

Pedagogical Stylistics

is about a man and a woman in the process of breaking up, who begin an argument over possession of their baby. This develops into a physical struggle, which is heading towards a devastating conclusion (see Clark [1996] for discussion). The story exists with three titles: Mine, Popular Mechanics and Little Things (two versions are available in the 2009 Collected Stories). Each of these titles highlights a different set of possible inferences about the story. Most of our students come to see quite quickly that inferences like these are involved in any piece of writing or other kind of communication that they produce. Working on activities such as those mentioned above helps to raise awareness of these inferences and helps students to focus on how particular formulations are likely to affect readers. This leads on, quite naturally, to a fuller and more focused discussion of specific linguistic formulations. At the end of the courses that contain these activities, students report very favourably on what they have achieved and say that they have a clear and explicit sense of what they have achieved. While it seems that this practical work does not depend on the adoption of a particular theoretical framework, we have found a framework based on relevance theory particularly useful. This is partly because it provides an explicit overall framework in which to develop our ideas and partly because students find it relatively accessible and close to some of their informal ideas about interpretation. The work reported here is practical work with students based on a theoretical model of pragmatic inference. In future work, we aim to develop the theoretical model more fully and to develop an understanding of the inferential processes involved in writing in general. One question that we hope to address in this work is how to model differences between writers who think in different ways and in different amounts of detail about the inferences they are making about their readers-to-be.

References Aguilar, M. (2008), Metadiscourse in Academic Speech: A Relevance-Theoretic Approach. New York: Peter Lang. Alamargot, D. and Chanquoy, L. (2001), Through the Models of Writing. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic. Bereiter, C. and Scardmalia, M. (1987), The Psychology of Written Composition. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. British Association for Applied Linguistics. Recommendations on Good Practice in Applied Linguistics [online]. Available at: http://www.baal.org.uk/public_docs. html. Accessed 17 May 2011.



Imagined Inference

141

Bruce, I. (2008), Academic Writing and Genre: A Systematic Analysis. London: ­Continuum. Candlin, C. N. and Hyland, K. (eds) (1999), Writing: Texts, Processes and Practices. London: Longman. Carver, R. (2009), ‘Popular Mechanics’ and ‘Mine’, in W. L. Stull and M. P. Carroll (eds), Collected Stories. New York: The Library of America, pp. 302–03 and 915–16. Clark, B. (1996), ‘Stylistic analysis and relevance theory’. Language and Literature, 5, (3), 163–78. —(2009), Module Outline for CML3102 Writing Techniques [online]. Available at: http://billyclark.net/teaching/0910cml3102outline.pdf. Accessed 17 May 2011. Crismore, A. (1989), Talking with Readers: Metadiscourse as Rhetorical Act. New York: Peter Lang. Flower, L. S. and Hayes, J. R. (1981), ‘A cognitive process theory of writing’. College Composition and Communication, 32, 365–87. Gutt, E. (1991), Translation and Relevance: Cognition and Context. Oxford: WileyBlackwell. Hayes, J. R. and Flower, L. S. (1980), ‘Identifying the organisation of writing processes’, in L. Gregg and E. R. Steinberg (eds), Cognitive Processes in Writing. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 3–30. Hyland, K. (2002), Teaching and Researching Writing. London: Longman. —(2005), Metadiscourse: Exploring Interaction in Writing. London: Continuum. Nystrand, M. (1986), The Structure of Written Communication: Studies in Reciprocity between Writers and Readers. London and New York: Academic Press. Owtram, N. T. (2010), The Pragmatics of Academic Writing: A Relevance Approach to the Analysis of Research Article Introductions. Oxford: Peter Lang. Sperber, D. and Wilson, D. (1986), Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Stainton, C. (1996), Metadiscourse: The Rhetorical Plane of Text (Nottingham Working Papers, Vol. 2). Department of English Studies, University of Nottingham. Swales, J. M. and Feak, C. B. (2004), Academic Writing for Graduate Students: Essential Tasks and Skills. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Torrance, M. (2006), ‘Writing and cognition’, in K. Brown (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Language & Linguistics. Oxford: Elsevier, pp. 679–83. Vande Kopple, W. (1985), ‘Some exploratory discourse on metadiscourse’. College Composition and Communication, 38, 82–93. Wright, L. and Hope, J. (1995), Stylistics: A Practical Coursebook. London: Routledge.

Chapter 9

Literary Pragmatics in the Advanced Foreign Language Literature Classroom: The Case of Young Werther Chantelle Warner

9.1  Introduction What opens our eyes to the contradictions and constraints in our pedagogical practices can often be traced back to a single unsatisfying lesson. I will begin with such a case from my own teaching. The setting was an advanced German Studies classroom at the University of Arizona, a large public research university in southwestern United States. The students in the course included both undergraduates in their final year of study and masters students, who were just beginning their programme. The purpose of the course, as stated on the syllabus, was to provide ‘an overview of significant historical events and cultural milestones that have shaped Germany from the Middle Ages to the present with an emphasis on forms of literary production’. With this educational objective in mind, I had assigned students to read Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s loosely autobiographical novel, Die neuen Leiden des jungen Werther (The Sorrows of Young Werther) – a work that literary historians often cite as a seminal work of the Sturm und Drang movement of the eighteenth century, and which also exhibits some characteristics of the German Classical and Romantic movements that would follow. After they were presented with a summary of the characteristics of Sturm und Drang literature at the beginning of class, students were asked to identify features in the text congruent with these descriptions. In groups of three and four, the students eagerly discussed the text, but as I moved through the room it became clear to me that it was not the work’s adherence to a particular literary epoch that was inspiring the enthusiastic hubbub around the room, but rather their fervent dislike for the novel’s protagonist, Werther. During in-class discussion and in the reaction journals that they kept as part of their regular coursework, several students decried Werther’s



Literary Pragmatics

143

‘whininess’ and the perceived ‘melodrama’ of the work, readerly reactions that they attributed to their cultural and historical distance from the text.1 The majority of The Sorrows of Young Werther appears as a collection of letters written by Werther, a young artist of highly sensitive and passionate temperament, and addressed to his childhood friend Wilhelm. In these letters, Werther shares details about his stay in the fictional village of Wahlheim, his enchantment with the local peasants and – most famously – his growing adoration for Lotte (Charlotte). Lotte, a beautiful young girl who is caring for her siblings after the death of their mother, becomes the primary focus of Werther’s passions, despite the fact that she is, as he is well aware, already engaged to Albert, a man 11  years her senior. Werther’s rhapsodic proclamations of love for Lotte generate the extreme sentimentality that made this novel a prototypical work of the German Sturm und Drang movement. While these facts (provided by me during in-class mini lectures and on handouts) may have explained why the work is an exemplum of a particular moment in cultural history, they did very little to help my students to more critically understand their own reactions to the work. On the contrary, my attempt to elucidate the work’s value in terms of literary historical information only exacerbated my students’ sense that this work was very distant from their lives and interests and that studying Goethe had little to do with their emerging identities as readers of German. Moreover, they had not developed a further understanding of literary language as anything more than a conveyor of socio-historical discourse, something bereft of social power, pragmatic intimacy and symbolic force. Whether, how much and how to contextualize a text are questions that arise in  almost any foreign language literature classroom. In contrast to other pedagogical situations, such as the teaching of English-language literature in anglophone countries or the treatment of translated texts as ‘world literature’, the literary works taught in foreign language classrooms are axiomatically positioned as Other, as meaningful to some unfamiliar group of readers with whom it is assumed the student-readers do not selfidentify. For this reason, as Kramsch (1993) notes in her book Context and Culture in Language Teaching, the contextualization of second language literature has often favoured what Rosenblatt in her reader-response theory described as efferent reading. When we read efferently, our attention is on the information that we take away with us, the information offered by the text. When we teach efferent reading, we encourage learners to skim for gist. We ask students to seek clues about the historical moment depicted in the work and we present background information from which the students can infer the meaning of unknown words and complex structures.

144

Pedagogical Stylistics

With reference to the role of contextualization in stylistic analysis, Stockwell (2000: 20–1) reminds us that the contexts of any given text are in actuality varied and multidimensional, a fact that is often obscured within historicist approaches to literature, which privilege the work’s relevance to broader national and cultural narratives. Not least of the contexts relevant to any written work is the disposition of the readers, for whom the experience of reading a text framed as ‘literature’ and especially one also flagged as ‘foreign’ is very different from curling up with a novel in their free time. Contemporary literary studies has tended to ignore ordinary (i.e., nonacademic) readers who take pleasure in the verbal art of literature and read for the enjoyment of exploring the world of the text, rather than in order to construct or deconstruct particular cultural narratives and historicist perspectives, and this bias towards historical and socio-cultural contexts is only exacerbated in the teaching of foreign language literature. For this reason, the importance of the second mode of reading described by Rosenblatt, aesthetic reading, has been downplayed in foreign language pedagogy. In aesthetic reading, the focus is on the immediate experience of reading (Rosenblatt 1978: 23–5). It is aesthetic reading that drives us to re-read the same work multiple times or to love or hate the characters in fictional works and to integrate the perspectives of literary figures with our own, in the ways described by theorists of intercultural education (e.g., Bennett 1993). Granting primacy to national-historical context can cause students to feel unsteady about the legitimacy of their own aesthetic responses, leading even those individuals who enjoy reading, to proclaim that they dislike ‘the study of literature’. At the same time, the ‘overpersonalization’ of literary interpretation, which is often characteristic of beginning and intermediate language pedagogies, does very little to expand students’ understanding of the world or to foster their sensitivities as readers (Krueger 2001). The crux of the pedagogical problem posed by my opening classroom anecdote is how to make our students aware of the fact that their own reactions are worthwhile objects of critical analysis. They must learn, in short, not only what texts mean, but how meanings are made, for and by whom, and in what circumstances. This echoes a key finding of the 1997 PALA pedagogical stylistics workshop, as reported by Clark and Zyngier (2003: 350) in the journal Language and Literature, that the process of improving students’ linguistic sensibilities must include a recognition that cognitive as well as linguistic elements of interpretation function within quite specific social and cultural contexts. In the case of the foreign language and literature classroom, the aim is not to correct or even addend students’ reactions to



Literary Pragmatics

145

literary works with an understanding of the ‘native’ context of production and reception, but rather to help learners to become aware of how certain aesthetic responses are sanctioned, legitimated or prized as more native, more scholarly or more deserving of a high grade. In this chapter, I argue that a pragmatically oriented pedagogical stylistics that helps learners to understand the meaning potential of particular forms as manifest in a nexus of readerly and writerly contexts is well suited to the kind of advanced language and literature classroom that I have described above. Literary pragmatics in its broadest sense concerns the relations between texts as linguistically designed social acts and the positions allotted to texts, their multiple potential meanings, their producers and their readers – both of those more and less ratified at the moment of the work’s conception – within particular fields of cultural practice (see Black 2006; Mey 1999; Sell 1991).2 As a theoretical orientation, literary pragmatics shares much in common with contextualist approaches to stylistic analysis (e.g., Bex et al. 2000; Zyngier 2001). Underlying the theories and methods discussed in each of these contributions is the belief that language, including literary language, is a form of communicative practice constituted by linguistic forms and the meanings that individuals subscribe to them in particular social contexts (Hanks 1996), and thus, principled study of the relationships between stylistic features and their various symbolic effects is central to our understanding of both literature and language more generally. In this chapter, I make a case for the efficacy of pragmatic stylistic analysis in foreign language and literature teaching, by drawing from contemporary scholarship in language pedagogy and stylistics and build on what my colleague David Gramling and I have elsewhere conceptualized as a ‘contact pragmatics’ stance (Gramling and Warner 2010), a pedagogical orientation emphasizing the potential meanings of a literary utterance and their relative values. Finally, I return to the example of my students reading The Sorrows of Young Werther, in order to demonstrate what kinds of classroom practices might emerge from this approach.

9.2  Literary Pragmatics and the Development of Translingual Literacy in the Post-Secondary Foreign Language and Literature Classroom Students at the advanced levels of study in foreign language depart­ ments occupy a precarious position. At the same time as they are being acculturated into a disciplinary field, just as their fellow students from

146

Pedagogical Stylistics

other programmes of study, they are doing so in languages that are, for many of them, viscerally and even scintillatingly not their own. In a discussion that took place in an introductory seminar on issues and methods in the teaching and learning of foreign languages, which I recently led at the University of Arizona, I was surprised to learn that none of the postgraduate participants who taught a language that was not their native tongue felt that they were themselves members of the discourse communities, to which their students would purportedly gain access through the communicative teaching methods stressed in the first year of the language programmes. Most of these students had learnt the languages that they taught in the same secondary and post-secondary system in which they were now teaching. Over the last decade, the bifurcation of university foreign language and literature programmes in Englishspeaking countries has been heavily dissected, discussed and debated (e.g., Fandrych [2007]; Modern Language Report [2007]; Lyman-Hager [2000]; del Carmen Yáñez Prieto [2010]; see also indications of a shift in Carter [2007: 10] and Levine et al. [2008]). In addition to creating intradepartmental hierarchies, scholars have voiced concerns that the division of curricula into basic language programmes and upper-division language and literature courses creates an artificial division between the study of linguistic structures and the study of context and meaning. In the first 2  years of language study, the focus is typically on concrete, propositional meanings exchanged in predominantly culturally neutral or cosmopolitan settings, such as grocery stores and train stations. From here, students are often thrust directly into the upper-level literature/culture courses, where they are asked to make sense of literary texts, which by virtue of their allusions to unfamiliar social situations and cultural trajectories, are often exclusionary. What too often remains consistent across the lower and upper levels of foreign language and culture curricula is the persistence of the same ‘deficit model’ of learning, which has been heavily criticized in contemporary language education theories, wherein the learner’s responses to literary works are subordinate and supplicant to the more culturally and historically informed (and largely idealized) native and expert readings of the work. Given curricular designs that consistently orientate learners as outsiders vis-à-vis the languages that they teach and study, it is hardly a wonder that these students qua teachers did not feel themselves empowered as ‘participant users’ (Magnan 2004: 97) of their respective foreign languages. Inspired by the concept of multiliteracies put forth by the New London Group in 2000, proponents of literacy-based approaches remind us that the



Literary Pragmatics

147

objective of language education is to prepare students to design their own social futures in increasingly globalized, culturally and linguistically diverse societies (e.g., Byrnes 2005; Kern 2000; Kramsch 2002). To this end, literacy, and by virtue language teaching, should involve not only the use, i.e., the reproduction of material, but also ‘at least a tacit awareness of the relationships between textual conventions and their contexts of use and, ideally, the ability to reflect critically on those relationships’ (Kern 2000: 16). The predominantly North American literacy turn in the field of foreign language pedagogy over the last 10 years shares much in common with the more European-dominated discussions of (critical) language awareness and it can even be understood as incorporating this approach. In addition to stressing learners’ explicit reflections on linguistic forms and functions, literacy approaches adopt the metaphor of design in order to explain the ways in which speakers channel this awareness into the creative production of meaning. Learning a new language entails not only or even most importantly the mastery of a new code, but the expansion of one’s repertoires of available designs. Recent work in pedagogical stylistics has demonstrated the potential for drawing from the rich insights of the field in order to promote students’ critical linguistic awareness (Burke 2010; Carter 2010; del Carmen Yáñez Prieto 2010), their sensitivity to how the qualities of language can be manipulated for particular effects (Zyngier et  al. 2007; Zyngier and Fialho 2010) and their development of a meta-language for articulating their personal responses to texts (Zyngier and Fialho 2010: 118). The metaphor of design follows other contemporary theoretical discussions in applied linguistics by positioning learners not as deficient communicators embarking on a linear trajectory towards ‘native-like’ proficiency, but as creative participants in a dynamic field of practical choices and constraints. In order to distinguish the particularities of the foreign language speaker’s experiences from those who are bilingual or multilingual as a result of familial, societal or geographical circumstances, I would like to retain the term ‘translinguality’ for the emergent literacy of adult foreign language learners. The concept of translinguality emphasizes that the kinds of social capital that grant individuals equitable access to the personal and economic futures they desire when they pursue language study requires that people not only act ‘proficiently’ in schematic cultural interactions, but that they interact in rapidly shifting social, media and political contexts; that they not only express meanings, but discern, dissect and design meanings; that they not only convey information through the foreign language, but joke, rant and weep through it.

148

Pedagogical Stylistics

In Clark and Zyngier’s (2003) report on the state of pedagogical stylistics, they caution that the goal of pedagogical stylistics is not to improve learners’ competence. Competence, this central educational objective of the 1980s proficiency movements in language teaching, is typically defined in terms of effectivity. But what does it mean to read a literary work ‘effectively’? Even standard alternative expressions like ‘culturally appropriate’ feel odd when applied to literary reading in the wake of reader-response theories with their attention to the particular emotions, concerns, life experiences and knowledge of individuals, which ought to make us pause before reifying a standard interpretation, even one that is supposedly culturally located. While it may be unclear what it means to competently read a literature, it becomes quickly apparent to students in the advanced levels of literary studies that not all consistent interpretations are evaluated equally. As Stockwell (2000) argues, there is a vast incongruence between the readerly concerns of average readers and the sanctioned ways of taking meaning within scholarly fields of literary studies. In other words, natural readers are primarily concerned with character, empathy, identification, recognition, motivation, story, coherence, feeling, texture, mood, sensation and emotion (Stockwell 2000: 144). While Stockwell directs his comments towards literary studies research, his point that the affective dimension of literary reading has been underemphasized in the humanities scholarship is also relevant for literary pedagogy. With reference to foreign language teaching, Zerkowitz (2007: 155) makes a similar point, when she writes that our tendency to neglect the expressive and integrative functions of language use in lieu of communicative functions ‘paves the way for some sort of advanced Pidgin, a language to do business in’. For this reason, theorists from within the fields of pedagogical stylistics and language pedagogy have similarly argued that ‘literary awareness’ (Zyngier and Fialho 2010; Zyngier et  al. 2007) or ‘literary competence’ (Dobstadt 2009)3 sensitivity to the aesthetic and symbolic powers of texts, is an integral part of foreign language acquisition (see also Mattix 2002). Our challenge as scholars and educators of language and literature is to develop a pedagogical model that celebrates the creative potential that language learners bring to their interactions with foreign language texts, while also accounting for the interpretative transgressions that can arise when ‘unratified’ readers enter these literary worlds. With the concept of contact pragmatics, my colleague David Gramling and I seek to acknowledge exactly these ‘interstices, overlaps, misalignments, and disjunctions’ inherent in learner’s interactions with texts that are designed to operate within certain



Literary Pragmatics

149

primary domains of opposition and exchange (Gramling and Warner 2010: 64). Contact pragmatics, with its emphasis on the addressivity and circulation of literary utterances, provides a framework, within which a variety of contextualist stylistic approaches can be actualized in the classroom. Within the aggregate model of contact pragmatics, insights from contextualist stylistics can provide a meta-language with which foreign language learners can describe their own readerly responses and those of others. Towards the admittedly ambitious goal of aligning the notion of translingual literacy with existing and emerging pedagogical stylistic practices, I have identified three components of aesthetic reading, which can serve as a starting point: choices and constraints, cultural patterns and fragments of knowledge, emotional resonances and moral imaginings. 9.2.1  Emotional resonances and moral imaginings In a paper titled ‘Language and emotional experience: The voice of translingual memoir’, Besmeres (2006: 55) analyses several autobiographies of bilinguals in order to investigate the inflection of emotion in different languages and concludes that these narratives ‘suggest that emotional vocabulary – expressive forms, emotion concepts, terms for emotional behaviour – give a certain distinctive shape to a speaker’s feeling’. What Besmeres is carefully suggesting is that along with a new language, individuals may acquire new forms of expression, which may in turn affect the ways in which we experience. In order to account for the kind of awareness exhibited by the authors analysed by Besmeres, any discussion of translingual literacy must also include a knowledge of how symbolic forms are embodied with ‘experiences, emotional resonances, and moral imaginings’ (see Kramsch 2006: 251). Although the emotional dimension has all but been ignored in current language teaching methodologies, the connections between affectivity and language have been the focus of recent studies not only in bilingualism (as cited above), but also in other areas of applied linguistic research. Experiments in empirical literary studies by Miall and Kuiken (e.g., Miall 2008; Miall and Kuiken 2002) and Emmott (2010) have shown the affective effects of stylistic features, such as foregrounding and point of view. Tools from corpus linguistics might help us in the task of teaching vocabulary by providing information about other aspects of a word’s meaning, such as its semantic prosody, the ‘consistent aura of meaning with which a form is imbued’ by virtue of its frequent association with other words (Louw 1993: 157). These studies point to the fact that

150

Pedagogical Stylistics

languages convey not only meaning, but also feelings to their speakers, and they compel us as language teachers to consider how to acknowledge and describe affective reactions in our classroom practices. 9.2.2  Cultural patterns and fragments of knowledge The valuable conceptual and pedagogical tools provided by experiential approaches can help us to understand our affective responses to literary texts and to foster students’ awareness of the ‘verbal artistry’ (Zyngier and Fialho 2010: 15) of literary language; however, in the wake of the cultural studies turn of the 1980s and 1990s and in light of current discussions of intercultural competence and globalization, work with foreign language literary texts is often also promoted as a means of fostering ‘cultural competence’. Such an approach encourages students to skim for relevant cultural information that confirms expected cultural schema and discourages any intense interaction with the text (see Carroli 2008: 92). This can lead students to reify cultural context as a supersignifier for literary reading, rather than considering the textual embeddedness of the cultural patterns that function as a shorthand for our (self-) perceptions and assumptions (Altmayer 2006), and the fragments of knowledge about our world and our ways of being in it that these interpretative constructs encompass. For example, the students described in Byram and Kramsch (2008) readily perceived East German portrayals of history as propagandistic, while seeing American versions as neutral accounts. These fragments of knowledge include not only shared cultural references (see Lantolf 1999; Geisler 2008), but also the metaphorical and figurative ways of speaking that speakers engage in even the most everyday purposes (Littlemore and Low 2006). Pedagogies attuned to cultural patterns and their textual mediation emphasize the importance of reflection, discourse analysis and dialogue, in order to help students to understand, evaluate and revise their own presuppositions, while at the same time expanding their repertoire of interpretative patterns through their growing familiarity with the new language and new textual traditions. 9.2.3  Choices and constraints As a means of establishing the relationship between cultural patterns and stylistic or textual patterns, some proponents of multiliteracies and critical language awareness approaches have turned to genre theory informed by Hallidayan systemic functional linguistics (e.g., Byrnes 2005; Swaffar and



Literary Pragmatics

151

Arens 2005).4 Despite the insights that the approach opens up with regard to the meaning energy of grammatical forms and genres as patterns of language use with particular functions in given social and cultural contexts, a strictly Hallidayan approach falls short when our attention turns to literary texts. The tools of systemic functional grammar fail us when we attempt to account for not only social and ideological dimensions of meaning, but effects such as authenticity, immediacy, estrangement, humour and, yes, even whininess. Halliday’s lack of attention to the ‘poetic effects’ of language has been a recurring criticism of his literary analyses. For example, Clark (2009: 37–7), revisiting Halliday’s famous discussion of William Golding’s The Inheritors, has argued using Sperber and Wilson’s pragmatic relevance theory that in some cases an account of the inferential processes of readers can help us to better understand the experience of a text, by making clearer how stylistic features such as repetition can implicate a particular emotional state. A better understanding of both language use and textual construction as functioning within contextualized systems of choices and constraints – as it is conceived in both textualist and pragmatic stylistics circles – may help students to move beyond the belief that language learning is primarily the acquisition of a body of grammatical rules, vocabulary items and pragmatics conventions.

9.3  Reading Werther in Arizona: Literary Pragmatics in Pedagogical Practice As I have argued above, what was initially missing from my lessons on The Sorrows of Young Werther was a pedagogy that could enable students to analyse their own affective and stylistic reactions to the text as something intellectually relevant, something that they could channel into a better understanding of the pragmatic horizon of the work in Goethe’s time. Again, the point is not to ‘bridge the gap’ between the world of the text’s production and that of the students nor to put the learners ‘in the other’s shoes’, but to gain a greater awareness of language as a verbal aesthetic and reading as an ‘(op) positional practice’ (Kramsch and Nolden 1996) through which individuals take up space in transcultural and translingual social spheres. The three components of translingual literacy (emotional resonances and moral imaginings, textual and cultural patterns, choices and constraints), the parameters of which I have begun to sketch out above, can be taken as three moves in a pragmatically oriented pedagogy of literary reading, starting with the register of personal expression with which they

152

Pedagogical Stylistics

are often most comfortable and familiar and building towards the critical awareness and meta-language that they require in order to analyse more complex texts such as literary works. The initial personal and affective responses of readers – such as my students’ complaints about Werther’s ‘whininess’ and ‘melodrama’ – are indicative of what I have described as emotional resonances and moral imaginings. As Zyngier et  al. (2007: 4) claim, the immediate, personal reactions of a reader to the text are at first non-formal impressions such as laughter, curiosity, anxiety and irritation. These then also feed our perceptions of character and the texts’ ‘personality’. In addition to making space in classroom discussion for the expression of these responses, the framework of contact pragmatics encourages us to take a comparative look at the reactions of various readers. To paraphrase Verdonk (2002: 6), contextualist stylistic analysis is valid exactly because it reveals the divergent and various effects of style. After compiling and comparing the adjectives and evaluative words that the students had used in the reading journals in order to describe the readings, students were given examples of the reception from Goethe’s contemporaries, and they were asked to compare their descriptions. I have compiled representative results from the ensuing discussion in Table 9.1. In our discussion of these two lists, Arizona students noted that they shared with the eighteenth-century readers a sense of distance from Goethe’s protagonist, despite the subjective, first-person, epistolary form of the novel. This called into question the initial assumption that several of the students had voiced in class discussion that this was how people used to talk in the eighteenth century and allowed us to re-evaluate their initial tendencies to attribute their dislike of the work strictly to historical and cultural distance. What had changed to some extent was the valence of Table 9.1  Some representative results from students’ reading journals Same language, different effects Arizona students 2009 ‘whiny’ ‘melodramatic’ ‘annoying’ ‘wimpy’ ‘sappy’ ‘romantic’

Goethe’s contemporaries ‘empfindungsvoll’ (sentimental) ‘allzuweiches Herz und feuerige Phantasie’ (an all too tender heart and firey fantasy) ‘Schwärmerey’ (excessive sentimentality), ‘überspannt’ (overstrung) ‘entsprungene Desperation’ (emanating desperation) ‘dieses gefährliche Extrem des sentimentalischen Charakters’ (this dangerous extreme of the sentimental character)



Literary Pragmatics

153

Table 9.2  Stylistic features of Goethe’s Werther Stylistic features of Goethe’s Werther Ellipsis: ‘To leave you, whom I so love, from whom I was inseparable, and to be happy!’ ‘I tore myself away from her – God! you see my suffering and you will end it.’ Unended conditionals: ‘When I look out of the window to the far hills, how the morning sun breaks through the fog over them and lights the quiet fields and the soft river writhes towards me between its defoliated pastures – oh!’ Repetition and parallelism: ‘Didn’t I nourish her emotions (Empfindungen)? Didn’t I divert myself with the entirety of nature’s true expressions? Didn’t I -?’ ‘Be still! I beg of you, be still!  . . . Lotte! Lotte, farewell! Farewell!’ ‘I do not want to be counselled, encouraged and cheered on anymore . . . .’ Exclamation: ‘Best Friend!,’ ‘My Best!’ ‘How glad I am to be away again!’

these adjectives, the degree to which sentimentality was esteemed. Using a literary pragmatic framework to integrate these varying reactions allowed us to analyse variations and tendencies in readers’ reactions to Goethe’s novel without positioning the eighteenth-century German audience as a reified superaddressee. From the varied individual reactions of the students and of Goethe’s contemporaries, the students and I created a working representation of the field of interpretative positions. The next step was to examine how these meanings were realized through patterns in the text and how they were actualized through readers’ fragments of knowledge and cultural patterns. To this end, students were asked to work in small groups to identify some of the most prevalent stylistic features of the text. Several features stood out, which I have listed in Table 9.2 under labels that I provided as a meta-language to ease the discussion and recognition of further examples. We then began to consider these forms not as isolated incidences in Werther, but as textual patterns that surface in other practices, using the following as guiding questions for our discussion: – Are there genres or fields of practice in contemporary American society, in which comparable textual features might be found? If so, what are the typical effects of these stylistic devices? – Are there genres or practices today that could be described using the terms that some of Goethe’s contemporaries applied to his work? What

154

Pedagogical Stylistics

are the differences between the textual features of these phenomena and of Goethe’s Werther (The Sorrows of Young Werther)? Are there notable differences between the fields of practice within which they participate? Are there notable differences between your reactions to representational texts from these fields of practice? The students’ responses to these questions helped us to recognize both the stylistic features and some aspects of the students’ experiences reading Goethe’s novel as related to – albeit not homologous with – the forms taken by other texts and practices. With these stylistic patterns in mind, we were able to think about The Sorrows of Young Werther in terms of design, and, thus, to examine the choices and constraints imposed not only on Goethe as the author of the work, but on my students as the readers of his book. In order to do this, we needed to consider the relations between style and participation frameworks, the relative roles that actors occupy in interaction. The epistolary form positions the reader as an eavesdropper in the conversations between Werther and Wilhelm, but the intervention from the editor creates a new frame (or, in the vocabulary of cognitive poetics, a new text world, e.g., Gavins [2007]) within which an implied reader is the ratified addressee. The text thus plays off readers’ positions as ratified or unratified participants in literary events by positioning us as eavesdroppers in someone else’s correspondence. If we resist the urge to ask foreign language students to put themselves in someone else’s place and instead thematize their unique perspective, the context of the foreign language classroom creates yet another level of participation for the text, from which our student readers can consider the creative interpretations their ‘foreignness’ can afford and the constraints placed, for example, by the course syllabus and the values of the relevant scholarly fields.

9.4  Conclusion In this chapter, I have drawn from the broad wealth of analytical practices and diverse insights that the field of contemporary stylistics provides, in order to begin to conceptualize a more ecological model for foreign language literacy. I have argued that the umbrella framework of literary pragmatics can help us to attend to our students’ personal, affective responses to works of literature, while also recognizing the differential symbolic power of the cultural and social knowledge, which different readers access in given contexts. By integrating diverse stylistic approaches,



Literary Pragmatics

155

my hope is that we might develop foreign language pedagogies that empower students to make the kinds of critical and creative interpretative choices that will allow them to pursue independent scholarship, and even more importantly, to see themselves as multicompetent, translingual readers.

Notes The same example is discussed in brief in Gramling and Warner (2010). I am using the term ‘cultural field’ in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense of a system of social positions structured in terms of their differential power relations (see Bourdieu 1993). 3 ‘Literary competence’ is my translation of Dobstadt’s German term ‘literarische Kompetenz’. 4 See, e.g., the Georgetown curriculum project, ‘Developing Multiple Literacies’ (http://www1.georgetown.edu/departments/german/curriculumproject/curriculumproject/).

1 2





References Altmayer, C. (2006), ‘Kulturelle Deutungsmuster als Lerngegenstand. Zur kulturwissenschaftlichen Transformation der Landeskunde’. Fremdsprachen Lehren und Lernen, 35, 44–59. Bennett, M. J. (1993), ‘Towards ethnorelativism: a developmental model of intercultural sensitivity’, in R. Paige (ed.), Education for the Intercultural Experience. ­Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press, pp. 21–71. Besmeres, M. (2006), ‘Language and emotional experience: the voice of translingual memoir’, in A. Pavlenko (ed.), Bilingual Minds: Emotional Experience, Expression and Representation. Clevedon, Buffalo, Toronto: Multilingual Matters, pp. 34–58. Bex, T., Burke, M. and Stockwell, P. (eds) (2000), Contextualized Stylistics. In Honour of Peter Verdonk. Amsterdam, Rodopi. Black, E. (2006), Pragmatic Stylistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1993), The Field of Cultural Production. New York: Columbia University Press. Burke, M. (2010), ‘Why care about pedagogical stylistics?’. Language and Literature, 19, (1), 7–11. Byram, K. and Kramsch, C. (2008), ‘Why is it so difficult to teach language as ­culture?’. The German Quarterly, 81, (1), 21–34. Byrnes, H. (2005), ‘Literacy as a framework for advanced language acquisition’. ADFL Bulletin, 37, (1), 11–15. Carroli, P. (2008), Literature in Second Language Education: Enhancing the Role of Texts in Learning. London: Continuum. Carter, R. (2007), ‘Literature and language teaching 1986–2006: a review’. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 17, (1), 3–13.

156

Pedagogical Stylistics

—(2010), ‘Issues in pedagogical stylistics: a coda’. Language and Literature, 19, (1), 115–22. Clark, B. (2009), ‘Salient inferences: pragmatics and The Inheritors’. Language and Literature, 18, (2), 173–212. Clark, U. and Zyngier, S. (2003), ‘Towards a pedagogical stylistics’. Language and Literature, 12, (4), 339–51. del Carmen Yañez Prieto, M. (2010), ‘Authentic instruction in literary worlds: learning the stylistics of concept-based grammar’. Language and Literature, 19, (1), 59–75. Dobstadt, M. (2009), ‘Literarizität als Basiskategorie für die Arbeit mit Literatur in DaF- Kontexten. Zugleich ein Vorschlag zur Neuprofilierung des Arbeitsbereichs Literatur im Fach Deutsch als Fremdsprache’. Deutsch als Fremdsprache, 46, (1), 21–30. Emmott, C. (2010), ‘Narrative contexts and deixis: social space, place and distance’. Lecture delivered at the Poetics and Linguistics Association conference, Genoa, Italy, 23 July 2010. Fandrych, C. (2007), ‘Aufgeklärte Zweisprachigkeit als Ziel und Methode der ­Germanistik nicht- deutschsprachiger Länder’, in S. Schmölzer-Eibinger and G. Weidacher (eds), Textkompetenz. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, pp. 275–98. Gavins, J. (2007), Text World Theory: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Geisler, M. (2008), ‘The MLA report on foreign languages: one year into the future’. Profession, 229–39. Gramling, D. and Warner, C. (2010), ‘Linguistic practice, stylistics and the advanced language/literature classroom’, in G. Levine and A. Phipps (eds), Critical and Intercultural Theory and Language Pedagogy. Boston: Heinle & Heinle, pp. 61–79. Hanks, W. (1996), Language and Communicative Practices. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Kern, R. (2000), Literacy and Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kramsch, C. (1993), Context and Culture in Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —(2002), ‘Language and culture: a social semiotic perspective’. ADFL Bulletin, 33, 2, 8–15. —(2006), ‘Communicative competence to symbolic competence’. The Modern Language Journal, 90, 249–52. Kramsch, C. and Nolden, T. (1996), ‘Foreign language literacy as oppositional practice’, in J. Roche and T. Salumets (eds), Germanics Under Construction: Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Prospects. Munich: Iudicium, pp. 61–76. Krueger, C. (2001), ‘Form, content, and critical distance: the role of creative personalization in language and content courses’. Foreign Language Annals, 34, (1), 18–25. Lantolf, J. P. (2000), ‘Introducing sociocultural theory’, in J. P. Lantolf (ed.), Sociocultural Theory and Second Language Learning. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–26. Levine, G., Chavez, M., Crane, C., Melin, C. and Lovik, T. (2008), ‘The language program director in curricular and departmental reform: a response to the MLA ad hoc report’. Profession, 240–54.



Literary Pragmatics

157

Littlemore, J. and Low, G. (2006), ‘Metaphoric competence, second language learning, and communicative language ability’. Applied Linguistics, 27, (2), 268–94. Louw, B. (1993), ‘Irony in the text or insincerity in the writer?’, in M. Baker et al. (eds), Text andTechnology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Press, pp. 157–98. Lyman-Hager, M. (2000), ‘Bridging the language-literature gap: introducing literature electronically to the undergraduate language student’. The Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium Journal, 17, (3), 431–52. Magnan, S. (2004), ‘Rediscovering text: multiple stories for language departments’. Profession, 95–106. Mattix, M. (2002), ‘The pleasure of poetry reading and second language learning: a response to David Hanauer’. Applied Linguistics, 23, (4), 515–18. Mey, J. (1999), When Voices Clash: A Study in Literary Pragmatics. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Miall, D. S. (2008), ‘Foregrounding and feeling in response to narrative’, in S. ­Zyngier, M. Bortolussi, A. Chesnokova and J. Auracher (eds), Directions in Empirical Literary Studies: Essays in Honor of Willie van Peer. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Press, pp. 131–44. Miall, D. S. and Kuiken, D. (2002), ‘A feeling for fiction: becoming what we behold’. Poetics, 30, 221–41. MLA Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages (2007), ‘Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World [online]. Available at http://www.mla.org/flreport. Accessed 28 October 2010. Rosenblatt, L. (1978), The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Press. Sell, R. (ed.) (1991), Literary Pragmatics. London: Routledge. Stockwell, P. (2000), ‘(Sur)Real stylistics: from text to contextualizing’, in T. Bex, M. Burke and P. Stockwell (eds), Contextualized Stylistics: In Honor of Peter Verdonk. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 15–38. Swaffar, J. and Arens, K. (2005), Remapping the Foreign Language Curriculum: An Approach through Multiple Literacies. New York: MLA. The New London Group (2000), ‘A pedagogy of multiliteracies: designing social futures’, in B. Cope and M. Kalantzis (eds), Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures. London: Routledge, pp. 9–37. Verdonk, P. (2002), Stylistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zerkowitz, J. (2007), ‘Language teaching through Gricean glasses’, in G. Watson and S. Zyngier (eds), Literature and Stylistics for Language Learners: Theory and Practice. New York: Palgrave Macmillan pp. 155–65. Zyngier, S. (2001), ‘Towards a cultural approach to stylistics’. Cauce:Revista de Filología y su Didáctica, 24, 365–80. Zyngier, S. and Fialho, O. (2010), ‘Pedagogical stylistics, literary awareness and empowerment: a critical perspective’. Language and Literature, 19, (1), 13–31. Zyngier, S., Fialho, O. and do Prado Rios, P. A. (2007), ‘Revisiting literary awareness’, in G. Watson and S. Zyngier (eds), Literature and Stylistics for Language Learners: Theory and Practice. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 194–209.

Chapter 10

Stylistic Approaches to Teaching ­Hypertext Fiction Paola Trimarco

10.1  Introduction One of the most provocative genres to emerge from the burgeoning field of digital literature has been hypertext fiction, such as Michael Joyce’s afternoon. Hypertext refers to ‘chunks of texts and images’ found in digital texts that readers access by clicking on to a hyperlink (Goodman 2006: 315). Typically, these chunks (or nodes, as they are referred to in hypertext writings) are non-sequential, and there is often more than one to choose from, creating different plots and narratives. While these non-linear, or multi-linear, texts have been much discussed by scholars, their use in undergraduate English courses has been somewhat limited, in part by the impracticality of teaching typically lengthy texts with many possible narratives, and because working with these texts involves e-learning or blended learning environments. This, however, is changing with the growing popularity of hypertext short stories and the increased availability of e-learning technologies in higher education. At present, textbooks used in undergraduate linguistics and stylistics courses typically include narrative and cognitive approaches (e.g., Short 1996; Simpson 2004; Goodman and O’Halloran 2006); however, none address the application of these approaches to hypertext fictions. This is understandable and, admittedly, to a large extent logical given the relative newness of hypertext fiction, which first appeared in the early 1990s; these hypertexts were of novel length and required specialist software to read. More importantly, many of these early hypertexts were dismissed by literary critics as being ‘too gimmicky’ and the product of experimenting with technology, as opposed to developing an art form (Eastgate 1996–1999). It was the fields of media studies and linguistics that took an interest in these new forms of literary texts (Bolter 1990; Rice 2006). Given the nature of hypertext fiction, linguists following inherency approaches have studied



Stylistic Approaches to Teaching H ­ ypertext Fiction

159

the narrative structures of these new digitally made texts (including Aarseth 1997; Landow 2006; Toolan 2006). These studies, while not in literary stylistics textbooks as yet, are being used by teachers in stylistics (as demonstrated at recent Higher Education Academy training events and conferences elsewhere). This, however, is not to say that undergraduate linguistic textbooks are devoid of hypertexts. In the Open University course book, Redesigning English, hypertext fiction is introduced in the context of new digital technologies precipitating changes to English language texts and the analyses of such texts (Gardner 2007: 217). In another Open University book, The Art of English: Literary Creativity, hypertext fiction is described in the context of literary creativity and the challenges it poses to the idea of authorship (Goodman 2006). While this is suggestive of cognitive approaches inasmuch as the reader is given consideration as a co-author, the specific application of cognitive approaches is not addressed, even though such approaches make up roughly one-third of the course content. Seeking to fill this gap in current stylistic textbooks and more broadly addressing ways of teaching digital textuality, this study began as an investigation into the efficacy of the narrative and cognitive approaches used in literary stylistics in helping students to understand the nature of hypertext fictions. Of course, it was soon realized that the converse could also be investigated at the same time. In other words, this study asks to what extent hypertext fiction could be employed to help students understand narrative and cognitive approaches. Central to this investigation were teaching sessions where students were given activities involving the reading of hypertext fiction and analysing the text in terms of narrative and cognitive approaches (for ease of expression, these two groups of students are referred to here as the narrative group and the cognitive group). Data collection from the worksheets used during the focus sessions was the key method used for obtaining results in this study. It must be noted, however, that collecting data from students’ responses is not foolproof, as some students had worked together in pairs and because, as the following analysis will discuss, students’ communication skills can impede their abilities to express their understanding. In part for this reason, following the learning activities, students were also asked to complete online questionnaires, which asked for students’ own views on the learning and teaching methods applied. Using a question­­naire to ask students to comment on their learning of stylistics-based analyti­ cal  skills follows current research methods in pedagogical stylistics (e.g., Bellard-Thomson [2010] and Burke in this volume). Moreover, the

160

Pedagogical Stylistics

questionnaires sought other information that could form variables, such as age, gender and students’ experiences with hypertexts before the teaching session. In addition, students were asked for their opinions about their reading experience during the session; that is, whether or not they liked reading a hypertext fiction and what they thought about the story used during the session. This point could be considered an ancillary to the main questions about the effectiveness of teaching hypertext fiction alongside literary stylistics, but it was included given the importance of motivation in higher education learning (as noted in Biggs 2003; Fry et al. 1999), which could have affected the results. With the exception of the generic questions, the remaining opinion questions employed a five-point opinion scale, ranging from Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree. After answering the surveys, each group participated in a feedback session of roughly 10 minutes to discuss their responses. The issues raised during the feedback sessions will be included in the following analysis.

10.2  Context of Study As this project involved digital texts and activities that students engaged in online, digital literacy needs to be taken into account. Prior to my study, the students had some experience using the online facilities of the university, including Blackboard virtual learning environment (VLE), emailing, reading announcements and participating in some optional online discussion forums. It is worth considering the fact that 63 per cent of the narrative group and 59 per cent of the cognitive group were between the  ages of 18 and 25. To use Prensky’s (2001) terms, roughly two-thirds of the students involved in this study could be described as digital ‘natives’. The other third were mature students, who might be described as digital ‘migrants’. Asking students to read online, download worksheets and answer an online questionnaire could be demanding for some. To accommodate this, these sessions were held in rooms where computer training usually takes place; such rooms have the desktops configured so that instructors can easily view students’ screens and offer assistance to those with technical needs. The sessions followed principles of constructive alignment, wherein students construct their own learning through activities that are aligned to learning outcomes and assessments (Biggs 2003). For example, one of the relevant learning outcomes for the Critical Studies module read as: ‘Students will be able to apply the appropriate terminology to the critical analysis of



Stylistic Approaches to Teaching H ­ ypertext Fiction

161

texts’. This was then aligned to the activities used in this session and its outcomes such as: ‘Students will be able to apply the terminology from cognitive stylistics to the analysis of hypertexts’ and ‘students will be able to critically read an example of hypertext fiction’. More importantly, these classroom activities reflect the criteria of assessment used at the end of the term. In the case of the cognitive group, for example, this type of critical analysis will be expected of the same students when they conduct mini research projects as their end-of-module assessment. Students who were taught hypertext fiction using narrative approaches were in their first year of a degree in English. This group was composed of 38 students, 76 per cent female and 24 per cent male. The group was divided into two smaller seminar groups. These students had been introduced to Labov’s (1972) elements of oral narratives during the previous teaching term and had applied the narrative elements to news stories as part of an assignment. Before the focus teaching session using hypertext fiction, these students were given a short story to read with a handout, reminding them of Labov’s elements of narratives (namely, abstract, orientation, complicating actions, evaluation, resolution and coda). They were then asked to apply these elements to the story and come prepared for a discussion. This, in turn, was the warm-up activity for the teaching sessions. The cognitive group was composed of 40 participants who were all secondyear students, 70 per cent of them were female and 30 per cent were male. As with the narrative group, this group was also further divided into two seminar-sized groups. Interestingly, four students of this group said that they had read hypertext before this session, with three of them having read hypertext in the form of webcomics and the remaining student having looked at digital poetry. Before the hypertext session took place, these students were asked to read short sections from Paul Simpson’s Stylistics: A Resource Book for Students (2004: 38–41, 89–92), which introduced the main ideas behind cognitive stylistics with a discussion on schema theory. This was background reading for a lecture on cognitive stylistics, which took place a few days before the hypertext session and included the key concepts of discourse world, text world, sub-worlds, schema refreshment and schema reinforcement. In brief, students had been taught that ‘the language event of the discourse world is the immediate situation, including the text, surrounding and including the discourse participants’ (Stockwell 2002: 136). Factors within the discourse world initially include the background knowledge assumed to be shared by writer and reader. As the text worlds and sub-worlds develop through the act of reading, they too became integral to the discourse world. Text worlds were described as the worlds depicted

162

Pedagogical Stylistics

by the discourse and created in the text, including characters and places described in a text (Werth 1999: 52). Sub-worlds were defined as ‘representing a variation in the texture of the world in focus, without the sense of leaving the current text world’ (Stockwell 2002: 140); this includes flashbacks, dreams and hopes and direct speech. Schema refreshment and schema reinforcement followed Cook (1994): schema refreshment occurs when readers’ schemata are challenged or changed, and schema reinforcement when readers’ schemata are represented and reinforced.

10.3  Stylistics Hypertext Sessions During sessions for both the narrative and cognitive groups, students were given online worksheets, which appeared in their VLE. Both worksheets had the same definitions of hypertext, which were as follows: Hypertext refers to the “chunks” of text or images used in electronic texts such as websites. These chunks are not connected sequentially, but are accessed by readers by clicking on links . . . (Goodman 2006: 315) Hypertext differs from printed texts by offering readers multiple paths through a body of information: it allows them to make their own connections, incorporate their own links, and produce their own meanings. Hypertext consequently blurs the boundaries between readers and writers . . . The extent of hypertext is unknowable because it lacks clear boundaries and is often multi-authored. (Snyder 1998: 127) With all four seminar groups, a whole-group discussion of these definitions took place, with reference to the more familiar Facebook and Wikipedia, and included a demonstration of how to read a hypertext narrative using a collection of linked hypertext short stories on a site called ‘City Threads’. Students were then directed through the VLE to ‘Lies’, a hypertext short story by Rick Pryll. In addition to its brevity, this story was deliberately chosen for two reasons: first, it does not have visual images to confuse the results related to features of the text; and secondly, the story has identifiable narrative elements, is rich in sub-worlds and clearly has features that could be labelled as schema reinforcing and schema refreshing. In brief, the story is about a couple in a relationship, both of whom are having clandestine affairs. They talk to each other about these affairs in the coded language of dance and, at other times, tell blatant lies. Depending on which hyperlinks are clicked, in some versions, the affairs never really took place; a lover



Stylistic Approaches to Teaching H ­ ypertext Fiction

163

Figure 10.1

called ‘Gabrielle’ is really the name of a journal, where all of the lies are stored. On each screen, readers have to choose one of two hyperlinks, truth or lies, in order to continue to the next chunk of text, as indicated in Figure 10.1. In the truth-only version, the couple get back together in the end. In the lies version and versions mixing truth and lies, the couple remain in limbo or go their separate ways. In order to make clearer judgements of students’ comprehension of Labov’s elements, students in the narrative group were asked to first click the truth hyperlinks only. This meant that all of the students were reading essentially the same version, with the elements of orientation and complicating events more clearly defined. Moreover, all of the truth-only versions concluded with the same resolution and the same two codas. For the narrative groups, students used the second part of the worksheet as follows. Activity Go to back to the Module Content page of Textual Studies and click on ‘Lies,’ a hypertext short story. For your first reading, follow the links labelled ‘Truth,’ reading through to the end of the story. Feel free to make notes along the way to help you fill in the table below. Fill in the table with your comments about the elements of narrative that can be applied to ‘Lies.’ Then reread the story from the beginning, clicking on other links to create another version. Please use the additional table for your second version. Version 1. All Truths Abstract Orientation Complicating Actions Resolution Evaluation Coda

Pedagogical Stylistics

164

Version 2 The second version of the story involved filling in the same table again, this time according to the students’ own choices of either truth or lies hyperlinks. For the cognitive groups, students used the following worksheet. Activity Go to back to the Module Content page Critical Studies and click on ‘Lies,’ a hypertext short story. Follow the links as you choose, but you need to get to the end of the story. You can make notes along the way to help you fill in the table below. You are also free to reread the story from the beginning, clicking on other links to create another version. Fill in the table with your comments on how these aspects of cognitive stylistics can be applied to ‘Lies.’ If you have read more than one version of the story, please use the additional table. Version 1 Discourse World Text World Sub-worlds Schema Refreshment Schema Reinforcement Version 2 Another copy of this same table followed, allowing students to fill in another version of the story. Following these activities of reading while filling in worksheets, students answered an online survey, which, as mentioned above, was intended to provide data for this study. It should also be noted at this point that filling in the survey was a learning activity in itself; it enabled students to reflect on their learning and judge for themselves where they were in terms of understanding these approaches in stylistics.

10.4  Discussion of Results Data collected from the worksheets were analysed based on whether the responses revealed an understanding of terms and concepts; they were tagged acceptable (A), partially acceptable (PA), not acceptable (NA) and if students did not provide any answer (NO). For the narrative group, Table 10.1 gives examples of responses that were tagged as acceptable (A)



Stylistic Approaches to Teaching H ­ ypertext Fiction

165

Table 10.1  Narrative study acceptable responses Narrative element

Acceptable (A) responses

Abstract

‘Lies tell you more about a person than the truth does. Lies tell you what a person wants to be, rather than what they are. Lies are dreams, lies are fantasy’. ‘They were lovers who lived together. They’ve known each other for a year. He was in Germany in the summer’. ‘They wrote letters and talked over the phone, they proclaimed their love for each other, and they both had summer lovers and sometimes lied and sometimes told the truth in coded language. He fell in love with Gabrielle in Germany’. ‘The simple truth is that the two main characters find that they can be happy together despite the mistakes they both made over the summer. They decide to move in together. They argue occasionally’. ‘They can be happy together despite the mistakes they both made over the summer’. ‘She wanted to inspire in her lovers a kind of creativity that she thought they weren’t capable of alone’. ‘These codes help us to be more open with each other’. ‘This is the way the story ends: The simple truth is that the two main characters find that they can be happy together despite the ­mistakes they both made over the summer. They decide to move in together. They argue occasionally’.

Orientation Complicating events

Resolution

Evaluation

Coda

in the truth-only version of the story. Responses in quotes are taken directly from the story. For applying the element of abstract to this story, there were two other possibilities in addition to the example given above. This appeared not only in the truth-only version, but also in other versions that the students created, namely: ‘You will never truly understand a person until you understand her lies . . .’ and the Truth/Lies hyperlinks themselves. Both of these appear on the first screen, following Labov’s principle that an abstract usually starts a narrative. As shown in the following summary of responses, the majority of students applied the term abstract correctly. The small number who did not fully understand the Labov explanation of an abstract as being a summary given by the narrator, summarized the story themselves, not showing the narrator’s summary of the story; e.g., ‘It’s a story about a couple who have affairs with other people’. Having said this, they did successfully identify the abstract of the story, which is, to some extent, an achievement. For orientation and complicating events, students tended to summarize these points from the text as opposed to copying and pasting directly from the screen. The majority of students’ responses were accurate and where they were judged as being only partially acceptable (PA), this was because

166

Pedagogical Stylistics

only some of the orientation or only a couple of the complicating events were mentioned. Based on points made by a few of the students in the closing feedback discussion, putting down partial answers seemed the ‘safe (or perhaps even lazy) thing to do’, even though they seemed to have a good understanding of orientation and complicating events as concepts. Having said this, students admitted to struggling with all of the complicating events in their own versions of the story, mixing links of truths with those of lies; in some student versions, there seemed to be two narratives going on at the same time, with some ambiguity over whether particular events belonged to one narrative or the other. A typical example of this type of response was as follows, with quotes for text taken directly from the story: ‘She had invited me secretly, as a secret admirer’. ‘As she danced, and I watched, drinking, another girl came up to me’. ‘Her summer lover was Antoine. Mine was Gabriella’. ‘. . . but one night we got a bit drunk and I woke up in her bed, at her apartment’. In this example, the invitation to the party and the reference to summer lovers could have been background information, forming part of the orientation. Such ambiguities made the tagging of responses untenable, especially as the version of the story chosen by students could not be known within this particular study. In the case of evaluation elements, there were many instances in the story, too numerous to copy and paste them all. Responses were judged as accep­ table where a few or more instances of evaluation were quoted, indicating that students understood the concept. Here, the partially acceptable answers had only one example. In this case, there were no unacceptable responses. Interestingly, students had more responses in their own versions, many of which mentioned that they were lies that were seen as ‘evaluative’. Such comments and connections between hyperlink and text generated more acceptable responses. For resolution and coda, students tended to have acceptable responses. The complication here in terms of analysis is that the resolution was embedded in one of the codas: ‘This is the way the story ends. The simple truth is that the two main characters find that they can be happy together despite the mistakes they both made over the summer’. Students were given credit if they used the full sentence, but responses were labelled as not acceptable (NA) if they referred to a coda as a resolution or vice versa, as in the case of the 13 NA responses.



Stylistic Approaches to Teaching H ­ ypertext Fiction

167

As noted, with this story in the all-truth version, there was another coda: ‘This ending is a bit too anticlimactic, I want to try again’. This sentence was a hyperlink that brought readers back to the beginning. When students did their own version, 21 of them came to another coda, which read: You want the truth? It goes something like this. The narrator is me. The other main character is my girlfriend, with whom I now live. Our summer lovers were real, but they had different names. The journal stuff was true, too. In terms of teaching hypertext fiction, the notion of a coda was particularly valuable. While codas are a common element in oral narratives, as Labov discovered in his original study in 1967, they are quite rare in written texts. Readers know that they are at the end of a story because a book finishes or in the case of news stories, another story starts (Bell 2007: 88). Students were aware of this point from writing their assignments during the previous term involving news stories and from the warm-up, homework-based activity for these focus sessions, which involved applying Labov’s terms to a short story in which there was no coda present. When reading their own version of the story, mixing truth and lies, students who had not reached those points did not answer for resolution or coda; this revealed itself in the feedback part at the end of the session. This helped to illustrate another feature of some hypertext fiction: clicking hyperlinks can lead to versions of texts that can appear to be far from a resolution and coda. As Landow (2006: 228) has noted, ‘Unlike texts in manuscript or print, those in hypertext apparently can continue indefinitely, perhaps infinitely, so one wonders if they can provide satisfying closure’. The collective worksheet results, based on the truth-only versions, can be seen in Table 10.2. Table 10.2  Total results from narrative worksheets Elements of narrative

Truth-only version

Students’ mixed truth/lies version

Abstract Orientation Complicating events Evaluation Resolution Coda

33A, 5NA 28A, 10PA 22A, 16PA 29A, 9PA 32A, 6NA 31A, 7NA

33A, 3NA, 2NO 38A or PA? 38A or PA? 37A, 1PA 10A, 28NO 21A, 17NO

168

Pedagogical Stylistics

The results from the online survey of students’ opinions of the teaching and learning methods suggest a general satisfaction; using Labov to understand hypertext fiction seemed to work more favourably than using hypertext fiction to understand Labov. This could have been the result of trying to label orientation and complicating events in parallel narratives, as noted above. The survey results from the narrative group are indicated in Figures 10.2 and 10.3.

Figure 10.2  ‘Applying ideas from Labov has helped me to understand the ­ eneral nature of hypertext fiction’. g

Figure 10.3  ‘Using an example of hypertext fiction has helped me to understand ideas from Labov better’.



Stylistic Approaches to Teaching H ­ ypertext Fiction

169

Responses to other questions that shed light on this study, come from the answers to opinion questions about liking or disliking such hypertext stories. These are summarized in Figures 10.4 and 10.5. These results suggest that students were generally more favourable towards reading hypertext than they were towards this particular story. This might have had some bearing on the results pertaining to the learning and

Figure 10.4  ‘I enjoyed reading hypertext fiction online’.

Figure 10.5  ‘I enjoyed reading “Lies” by Rick Pryll’.

170

Pedagogical Stylistics

teaching methods, especially when compared with the results from the cognitive group, discussed below. For the cognitive group, Table 10.3 gives examples of responses that were tagged as acceptable (A) in the students’ versions of the story, with responses in quotes taken directly from the story. Such responses fit in with definitions of these terms given to the students in prior sessions. Partially acceptable answers arose from students giving a strong acceptable example of a discourse world concept alongside a feature that could refer to the text world. For instance, ‘They lead separate lives from the ones in their journal’. In terms of a discourse world, people can fantasize or be untruthful in their journals. Yet, at the same time, the reference to ‘they’ could be the characters in the text. In such responses, vague expression may have been at issue. The majority of responses to ‘text world’ were acceptable, allowing for a range of responses that showed the fictional world of the text, as opposed to the discourse world clearly outside of the story (although impacting on the reader’s perception of the text world). The differences between ‘text world’ and ‘sub-worlds’ were sometimes harder to distinguish, as some versions of the story seemed to present parts of the plot, which would be text world, as analepsis, which would be a sub-world. In such cases, students were credited with acceptable or partially acceptable responses based on the content of the rest of their answers. In this way, the feedback part of the session demonstrated how appropriate cognitive approaches are to analysing hypertext fictions. The multi-linear nature of hypertext fictions worked well with the notions of text worlds and

Table 10.3  Cognitive study acceptable responses Cognitive approach concepts Discourse worlds Text world

Sub-worlds Schema refreshment Schema reinforcement

‘Acceptable’ responses ‘Truth and lies of a relationship. Assumptions about modern life and city life’. ‘The two lovers are living together. He’s having an affair and suspects she is too. It takes place in Germany, an apartment, a subway ­tunnel and so on’. ‘He wishes he had affairs; the world of the journal; the coded ­language of dance’. ‘The characters use the language of dance as a code. I never heard of this before’. ‘Lies tell you what a person wants to be, rather than what they are’. ‘This is known to be true in life’.



Stylistic Approaches to Teaching H ­ ypertext Fiction

171

sub-worlds. Where a chunk of text did not seem to be a part of the text world that had been established by previous links, a sub-world could be created in the mind of the reader. In some cases, the sub-world later became joined to the text world, while in other cases, the sub-world was established as a dream or fantasy. This has strong analytical potential, which could be of particular use to students. As noted by Gregoriou, when considering text worlds and the sub-worlds embedded within text worlds, ‘text world analysis can help readers keep track of our mental processes’ (Gregoriou 2009: 85). Moreover, she notes that ‘text world analysis can help us understand ambiguity as well as multiplicity of meaning’ (Gregoriou 2009: 85). Both of these points were evident during the feedback session. Where students’ responses for text world and sub-world were judged as not acceptable (NA), they tended to be too brief or vague; e.g., ‘artist, masterpiece’ was one response for text world and ‘short story’ was one response for sub-world. All in all, cognitive approaches were useful in describing the text in terms of schemas, regardless of whether they formed a clear narrative. The majority of students understood the concepts of schema reinforcement and refreshment, often adding comments, such as ‘this is normal’ for schema reinforcement, and ‘novel’ or ‘new idea’ for schema refreshment. Moreover, some students also included the hypertext format as schema refreshing, which shows further awareness of the role of the reader in cognitive theories. The few partially acceptable responses for schema refreshment and schema reinforcement included these answers: 1. The resolution at the end of the story (refreshment). 2. Reinforcement of the discourse world. Both answers showed some understanding of the terms, but were too vague to be fully judged as acceptable. In the case of the first answer, the student could have been referring to one of the endings of the all-truth version of the story, as noted earlier, where readers click a hyperlink to start all over again in order to achieve a more satisfying ending. For the second answer, inherent in the definition of schema reinforcement is the idea that a text reinforces the readers’ understanding of something that was in their world before they read the text, which would imply something belonging to the discourse world. These results, coupled with observations made during the session, seem to suggest that the concepts of discourse world, schema refreshment and schema reinforcement were better understood by students than were text

172

Pedagogical Stylistics

world and sub-world at the time of filling in the worksheets. Yet, at the same time, the concepts in cognitive approaches made for a richer classroom feedback at the end of the session, as noted above. It is also worth noting that in sessions that followed on from this focus session, Rik Pryll’s ‘Lies’ was referred to for a more detailed understanding of the relationship between discourse world and text world, drawing on the ‘principle of minimal departure’ (from Gavins 2007) and for a more detailed account of sub-worlds, which included deictic, attitudinal and epistemic sub-worlds (based on Stockwell 2002). For the cognitive group, the collective worksheet results (based on an aggregate of all versions of the story created by the students) are listed in Table 10.4. Again, the overall effectiveness of the use of hypertext was judged from the students’ survey responses, observations of the teaching session and  students’ informal comments made during the session. The results from  the methodological questions posed to students are represented in Figures 10.6 and Figure 10.7. With 71 per cent of students either agreeing or strongly agreeing that using hypertext with cognitive stylistics was helpful in understanding both the nature of hypertexts and cognitive stylistics, it could be suggested that using hypertext in this way is an effective teaching and learning method in a similar higher education setting. It is difficult to interpret responses where students neither agreed nor disagreed, but based on student behaviour during the session, it is likely that most of the negative responses had to do with not liking the story or not liking hypertext fiction, which is  evident from the results of other survey questions, represented in Figures 10.8 and 10.9. From the feedback at the end of the session, those who did not like reading hypertext fiction also did not like reading from a screen. Others felt that the story was intriguing in the way that it revealed information in small paragraphs, largely due to the hypertext format; yet, others still did not like the story for the same reason. Table 10.4  Total responses from cognitive group Concepts from cognitive approaches Discourse worlds Text worlds Sub-worlds Schema refreshment Schema reinforcement

Responses 59A, 5PA, 4NA, 1NO 45A, 22PA, 2NA 56A, 11PA, 1NA, 1NO 64A, 3PA, 2NO 63A, 2PA, 1NA, 3NO



Stylistic Approaches to Teaching H ­ ypertext Fiction

173

Figure 10.6  ‘Applying ideas from cognitive stylistics has helped me to understand the general nature of hypertext fiction’.

Figure 10.7  ‘Using an example of hypertext fiction has helped me to understand some ideas from cognitive stylistics better’.

174

Pedagogical Stylistics

Figure 10.8  ‘I enjoyed reading hypertext fiction online’.

Figure 10.9  ‘I enjoyed reading “Lies” by Rik Pryll’.

10.5  Conclusions By taking advantage of the growth in short hypertext fiction, this study has investigated the use of hypertext for teaching Labov’s narrative elements and aspects of cognitive approaches. Students employing narrative elements found the hypertext story, in various versions, useful in providing examples of all of the elements. More importantly, it helped some students to understand the difference between resolution and coda, a distinction that



Stylistic Approaches to Teaching H ­ ypertext Fiction

175

is generally more difficult to demonstrate in traditional, print-based short stories, where codas are rarely present within the narrative. Similarly, students used hypertext fiction to build on their knowledge of cognitive approaches. Particularly useful were the meandering and multiple narratives, raising questions about sub-worlds and text worlds. Furthermore, the idea of schema refreshment was exemplified at sentence level in some instances, but also at the level of digital text, where students viewed the entire reading activity and text type as schema refreshing. Reciprocally, the use of narrative and cognitive approaches helped students to understand the nature of hypertext fiction. Students who attempted to categorize complicating events or resolution in some versions of the story, soon realized the infinitive and multi-linear nature of some hypertext narratives. Applying cognitive approaches was generally more fruitful in demonstrating the generic qualities of hypertext fiction. With concepts like sub-worlds, students were able to describe and appreciate the layers of narrative in the text. For both study groups, students’ responses to the activity and their survey responses confirmed the overall effectiveness of bringing together these particular stylistic approaches with hypertext fiction. After the study, in keeping with constructively aligned teaching, students were assessed on their knowledge of narrative approaches, for the first-year students and cognitive approaches, for the second-year students. Further research from this investigation could include an analysis of hypertext short fiction for its representations of abstracts and codas and a closer consideration of sub-worlds in digital texts as compared with their appearances in traditional printed texts. In addition to using hypertext short fiction for teaching stylistics, pedagogical implications have been realized by this study, including new ways of working with hypertext fiction for an undergraduate course solely devoted to digital textuality.

References Aarseth, E. (1997), Cybertext: Perspective on Ergogic Literature. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Bell, A. (2007), ‘Text, time and technology in the news’, in S. Goodman et  al. (eds), Redesigning English. Abingdon: Routledge and The Open University,­ pp. 79–112. Bellard-Thomson, C. (2010), ‘How students learn stylistics: constructing an empirical study’. Language and Literature, 1, (19), 35–57. Biggs, J. (2003), Teaching for Quality Learning at University (2nd edn). Buckingham: Society for Research in Higher Education and Open University Press.

176

Pedagogical Stylistics

Bolter, D. J. (1990), Writing Space: The Computer in the History of Literacy. London: Erlbaum. City Threads. Available at: http://192.211.16.13/curricular/panopticon/student_ projects/fiction/thread.htm. Accessed 29 September 2010. Cook, G. (1994), Discourse and Literature: The Interplay of Form and Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eastgate (1996–1999), Hypertext Now: remarks on the state of hypertext 1996–1999. Available at: http://www.eastgate.com/HypertextNow/archives/Merit.html. Accessed 19 May 2011. Fry, H., Ketteridge S. and Marshall, S. (1999), A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. London: Kogan Page. Gardner, C. (2007), ‘English and new media’, in S. Goodman et al. (eds), Redesigning English. Abingdon: Routledge and The Open University, pp. 205–31. Gavins, J. (2007), Text World Theory: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Goodman, S. (2006), ‘Literature and technology’, in S. Goodman and K. O’Halloran (eds), The Art of English: Literary Creativity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan and The Open University, pp. 299–363. Goodman, S. and O’Halloran, K. (eds) (2006), The Art of English: Literary Creativity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan and The Open University. Gregoriou, C. (2009), English Literary Stylistics. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Labov, W. (1972), Language in the Inner City. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Landow, G. (2006), Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Age of Globalisation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Prensky, M. (2001), ‘Digital natives, digital migrants’, in On the Horizon, 9, (5). Available at: http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20 Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf. Accessed 15 January 2010. Pryll, R. ‘Lies’. Available at: http://users.rcn.com/rick.interport//lies/lies.html. Accessed 20 May 2010. Rice, J. (2006), ‘The rhetoric of new media: teaching a rhetoric of hypertext’, in M. Hanrahan and D. Madsen (eds), Teaching, Technology, Textuality. Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 148–62. Short, M. (1996), Exploring the Language of Poetry, Prose and Plays. Harrow: Longman. Simpson, P. (2004), Stylistics: A Resource Book for Students. London: Routledge. Snyder, I. (1998), Page to Screen: Taking Literacy into the Electronic Era. London: ­Routledge. Stockwell, P. (2002), Cognitive Poetics. London: Routledge. Toolan, M. (ed.) (2006), The Writer’s Craft, the Culture’s Technology. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Werth, P. (1999), Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse. London: Longman.

Part Three

EFL and Pedagogical Stylistics

178

Chapter 11

Revenons à Nos Moutons! Metaphor and Idiom in EFL and ESL Teaching and Learning Geoff Hall

11.1  Introduction Increasingly ingenious and persuasive proposals for the more systematic and principled teaching and learning of metaphor and more ‘figurative’ and idiomatic language by English as a foreign language (EFL) and English as a second language (ESL) students have appeared from university applied linguistics departments in the wake of broader cognitive linguistic (CL) research (Low [1988]; Lazar [1996]; more lately, Boers [2000] etc.; Csábi [2004]; or Low and Littlemore [2006]). Pedagogical stylistics has, of course, often in one way or another participated in these developments (beginning notably with Steen [1994]). Without wishing to detract at all from the value of such proposals, empirically demonstrated in the best of cases, this chapter proposes to ‘return to first principles’ (in the French fixed expression ‘revenons à nos moutons’), which have not always been sufficiently respected, and to ask for a sharper focus to our efforts. For which learners, learning English (or any other language) for what purposes, and at what levels, is it most likely that metaphor teaching will be a fully appropriate use of limited learner time and attention? Too often, such basic questions seem to have been assumed or quickly passed over rather than explored. What exactly are the issues for teaching to address before we design the materials and procedures? It will be shown that some of the most fluent users of English have never paid any explicit attention to metaphor and, indeed, are largely unconscious of metaphor, as opposed to vocabulary, to this day. Would those very advanced users have learnt better or more efficiently, or could their proficiency today have been further enhanced by the kind of metaphor teaching being proposed? Or is this just a case of what Widdowson (2000) once called ‘linguistics applied’? Educators should beware, according to Widdowson, of applying research insights in an unmediated way to learners

180

Pedagogical Stylistics

without sufficient research and reflection as to the relative value of the findings for learners’ own particular purposes. Metaphor study is advocated for learners, for example, as giving access to a ‘target culture’. Yet the notion of a single ‘target culture’ seems particularly problematic in the case of English, used so widely across and for such an unprecedented variety of purposes, where no single linguaculture is easily identifiable. Perhaps metaphor awareness is of some value to syllabus designers and materials writers, but is it being too precipitately introduced unmediated into frontline classroom activities? My own research into the relative awareness of metaphor of first language (L1) and second language (L2) users of English will be supplemented by a critical review of the relevant research literature concerned with both pedagogy and textual investigations of metaphor in text, including corpus linguistic investigations (Deignan 2005; Partington 1998; Charteris-Black 2005), as well as in conversational exchange (Cameron 2007; Drew and Holt 1998). The study argues in sum that it will be to the benefit of all to delineate more precisely where metaphor learning and awareness-building efforts are best pursued, and where, by contrast, they may be less productive. Advanced learners, English for specific purposes (ESP) and English for academic purposes (EAP) learners who will need to deal with media representations of finance, politics, economics or other specialist registers, e.g., in academic textbooks (Ellis et al. 2008), as well as, more predictably, literature and culture students (Picken 2007), emerge from this examination as our best candidates for specific metaphor learning activities, but the role of metaphor in productive fluency development will also be addressed. What is added or gained by knowing the meaning of a phrase like ‘revenons à nos moutons’ (‘Let’s get back to basics/first principles’, in loose translation from the French, literally, ‘Let us return to our sheep’) or being able to use it appropriately?

11.2  Background: Advances in Cognitive Linguistics There is no doubt that some of the most thought-provoking work in linguistics in recent years has come from the writings of cognitive linguists. Such research would include the cognitive grammars of Langacker (2008) or the construction grammars of Golden or Croft (referenced in Ellis), the language acquisition work of Ellis (2008) or, for stylisticians, the cognitive work on metaphor and figurative speech of Lakoff and many others since.



Metaphor and Idiom in EFL and ESL Teaching and Learning

181

The focus of such writers on language use should logically also be of interest to those who attempt to teach or learn languages, including the notions of embodied or situated language use. Arising from such work are papers and volumes cited later in this chapter, notably the attempts of Boers and Lindstromberg (2008) to apply such insights directly to pedagogy. Central to such proposals is the attractive principle of motivation. That is, as many teachers have long felt, there are reasons why language forms and use are as they are. Our students would benefit from an awareness of these proposed cognitive motivations, or at least materials and activities in the language classroom could be designed, organized and informed more effectively as a result of such an awareness. Students need no longer be told ‘that is how they say it, just learn it’, but would benefit from coming to understand why ‘they’ say it like that, and could then extend their understanding of how ‘forms mean’ to further learning in the future, through a more ‘systemic’ understanding of language forms and use that can facilitate language acquisition. This should aid in ‘getting a feel for’ the language. I cannot pretend to any deep expertise in CL, but can claim a long and wide experience of second language teaching. I am intrigued by this work and feel it holds real potential value for educators; however, at the same time, I am also sometimes made uneasy by its larger claims. I therefore raise some challenges very much in a co-operative spirit, for those working in these exciting areas to incorporate into more specific and so more convincing proposals. It hardly needs to be said that forms are what any stylistics starts with, and the idea that the relation between forms and meanings is highly meaningful is a founding principle of stylistics. Similarly, the idea that figurative language use is a central, not an accidental phenomenon, appeals to the stylistician in  all of us. Therefore, let us now turn to the sheep (‘moutons’) in hand: pedagogical proposals regarding the learning and teaching of idioms and figurative languages inspired by CL.

11.3  Pedagogical Claims Inspired by a Cognitive Linguistic Approach The claims to be investigated here may be best summarized not in my own words, but in those of Boers and Lindstromberg: Arguments in support of cognitive linguistics-inspired teaching include claims that it will help learners attain a more profound understanding of

182

Pedagogical Stylistics

the target language, better remember more words and phrases (owing to greater depth of processing in general and to dual coding in particular), appreciate the link between language and culture, and become more confident (once they realize that — because language is not entirely arbitrary — pathways for insightful learning are available as alternatives to blind memorisation). (Boers and Lindstromberg 2008: 27) Learners of a language, of course, arguably do not directly need the ‘under­ standing’ that a language CL claims to offer. They need to learn how to use it for their own purposes. We will need to return to this point. Certainly, however, psycholinguists and second language acquisition researchers have long argued the importance of attention and repeated and extended meaningful returns to new vocabulary (‘depth of processing’) to establish it in memory and as available for productive use. (For a review of relevant work, see Nation [2001: 239, 310].) ‘Dual coding’, referring specifically in this case to the visual ‘imageability’ of many idioms, is also well established as helping many learners to retain new expressions. Most teachers would intuitively agree that ‘insightful learning’ (at least for adults) is usually more effective, not to say more interesting, than ‘blind memorization’. Similarly, teachers have generally favoured links between languages and ‘their’ cultures, although I will argue that these relations are increasingly problematic in the (post)modern, globalized world, particularly where English is concerned. The idea that language forms and uses are not arbitrary but actually ‘motivated’ is central to sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and so to stylistics. Other important claims for the CL approach are that vocabulary should be taught systematically not randomly (and not just incidentally ‘acquired’): if items in the lexicon can be shown to be related, learners can benefit from this knowledge in organizing their own lexicon. Principles of organization (‘motivations’) are basically semantic, but also phonological (examples follow later). This includes the claim that apparent diversity can be highly interrelated as prototypes and ‘radial’ extensions: thus, Lakoff (1987: 416) argues the case for apparently unrelated senses of ‘bank’ (traditionally homonyms), for example, to be related. Lindstromberg (1998) demonstrates application of the idea to the English preposition system. There is a ‘core’ sense of ‘cut’, it is argued, across the many uses we have heard of that word (cut the grass, cut the paper, cut it out, cut loose, cut to the bone, even nicely cut away to leg [in cricketing jargon]). Metaphors, ‘frozen’ or dead idioms are motivated uses of language, not purely arbitrary, and learners would do well to invest time and effort in coming to understand the motivations behind even an idiom like to kick the bucket.



Metaphor and Idiom in EFL and ESL Teaching and Learning

183

Principles of motivation, in short, can inform the selection and organi­ zation of teaching input. Therefore, I turn now to a brief exposition of this idea of motivations underlying language.

11.4  Four CL Principles of Motivation Motivations, for the cognitive linguist, are the reasons language is as it is. Motivations in this perspective can be conveniently captured as: conceptual; metaphorical extensions of core vocabulary; diachronic; or phonological. Lakoff (1987) and Lakoff and Johnson (1980) are widely known examples of the idea of conceptual groupings of language items: sets of utterances may draw on a conceptual metaphor such as life is a journey or anger is heat in a pressurized container (the body), argument is war, time is money and so on (He’s just wasting my time etc.). Systematically, up is good (evaluated positively) and down is bad. Related to such ideas is the claim for imageability of conceptual groupings (preposition use can be diagrammed, idioms refer to stereotypical scripts). The key research problem with much cognitive argument for the applied linguist primarily interested in language learning and real language use, is the pervasive use of invented or hypothesized examples of language data, rather than the empirical work of, for example, corpus linguistics. More fundamental still perhaps, invented data are acceptable in CL precisely because the primary interest is in ‘thinking’ rather than in language. Conceptual mapping is an interesting explanation that undoubtedly shows real links between actual utterances that people can make or have sometimes made, if approximate, but does not always adequately cope with actual metaphor usage in naturally occurring discourse. (Compare arguments in Deignan [2005].) What it is claimed people say, often does not quite correspond with what they do say. Retrospective explanations of what might have been said will not help a learner or teacher predict with accuracy what actually is said or is likely to be said in a specific situation. (Your argument has subsidence? I detect dry rot in your premise ?) Moreover, Semino (2008) and others show that metaphor use in practice is sporadic ‘one shot’ rather than systematic and consistent, so that awareness of a proposed dominant metaphor for reflecting on life, or even economic troubles for a national economy, will be of limited use in comprehending a particular given conversation or newspaper article. Similarly, Cameron and Deignan (2006) show that metaphor use in conversation is negotiated, emergent and highly contextualized. They also show that when a metaphor becomes a metaphor

184

Pedagogical Stylistics

is not always clear, and will usually need to be agreed by participants. Metaphor use will typically be vague, and used to hesitantly explore emotio­ nally loaded or abstract issues in clusters or bursts of metaphor use. Meta­ phorical uses of words are more likely to be found in chunks, idioms or formulae. Such realities are far removed from the abstractions of most CL, however broadly and conceptually enlightening such work has been. Corpus linguistics indeed reveals many facts of more immediate interest to the language teacher than the broader, certainly more ambitious aims of CL writers. Consider, for one, the genre relativity of metaphor use. Certain metaphors are widely used and even essential for writing and thinking in certain fields, and if you are a user of English in professional fields like business or law, you must be at least aware of these metaphors in, say, a business journalism discussion of trends. (Compare, e.g., Partington [1998].) A brief summary of the news could then be as follows: unemployment has soared/ profits have plunged/ shares have climbed today/ advertising revenues have slumped/ some prices have tumbled by 40%/ the unemployment rate dipped earlier in the year/ China’s economy is galloping ahead/ runaway inflation must be brought under control/ the government has lurched from one crisis to another/ the economy stumbled in the 1980s. If you don’t need to read such pieces, your need for these metaphors is less urgent. Another fascinating aspect of metaphor use to emerge from careful examination of corpus data is the finding that precise forms matter: blooms and budding are likely to be metaphoric, where bloomed and buds are probably more literal (Deignan 2005). It suffices to look at concrete valuable pedagogic outcomes, such as the corpus-informed Cobuild materials of McCarthy and O’Dell, or Deignan’s (1995) Dictionary of Metaphors, to see that there is information here likely to be of direct interest to at least some, mostly more advanced or academic readers and users. To make some of these reservations more specific, let us consider the highly evaluated CL research paper of Verspoor and Lowie (2003), drawn on extensively for example by Littlemore and Low (2006a). The central argument of Verspoor and Lowie is that students learning vocabulary will benefit from being alerted to ‘core’ senses of polysemous words as opposed to their claimed ‘metaphorical extensions’. The presumption of precise semantic meanings for individual vocabulary items is initially problematic for an understanding of vocabulary use in discourse (compare Hall [2007]).



Metaphor and Idiom in EFL and ESL Teaching and Learning

185

But perhaps the key problem arises in the not unrelated business of distinguishing ‘core’ senses from ‘peripheral’ senses. Core is ‘literal’ but not necessarily concrete (Verspoor and Lowie 2003: 554) and certainly not ‘most frequent’. This last, of course, rightly recognizes that metaphorical meanings are often if not typically more frequent than apparently ‘literal’ meanings, however counterintuitive that might seem to those who want to continue to believe in core meanings (Deignan 2005), even leaving aside the vexed question of whether language use can ever be seen to be very ‘literal’ or what that might mean. In fact, corpus research suggests that frequency is more often associated with metaphoricity rather than literalness. The most frequent meanings of items like way, point, work, rich, branch and chain are metaphorical. In a rather circular, but perhaps pragmatically acceptable move, we are told ‘core’ meaning is that most widely accepted by ‘native speakers’(NS) as ‘most literal and central’ (Verspoor and Lowie 2003: 555). A cognitive approach, we are told, requires us to ‘determine a core sense’ (Verspoor and Lowie 2003: 557), where there seems to be a certain degree of willed ‘determination’ whatever recalcitrance real-world uses might show. The experiment that purports to prove the value of teaching core meanings before metaphorical extended meanings, is based on actual metaphors from the New York Times, and immediately the problems multiply. Invented literal sentences (What is that bulge in your pocket? [Verspoor and Lowie 2003: 561]) are more or less probable. (Has anyone truly ever said Boost me up this tree and I will get you an apple?! [Appendix 1, first page].) If they have uttered such an improbable expression, this precisely shows how radically unpredictable and/or variable actual language use is, even to a fluent speaker. The interpretation and discussion of a ‘nugget’ seems to me at least as fanciful. But what is very striking is how the actual metaphors extracted from the database make minimal sense or seem actually eccentric. A repeated example of a ‘bulge’ as a basketball score is not comprehensible out of context, even though that is how it was used. The context is never given, but even if it had been, the non-initiate would probably still be mystified, and so the example usefully makes my point that meanings do not inhere in single isolated words, but in the ongoing stream of language, and that meaning is something participants bring to a text as much as the text takes it to them. Meanings are specific and local and emerge in discourse, to repeat. Meanings do not pre-exist or exist alongside usage. I  pegged him as a big spender also demonstrates the Cameron and Deignan (2006) point that only in a specific context do metaphorical uses emerge and become negotiated and/or that actual uses of metaphor tend to be highly culturally specific. A strong suspicion, not irrelevant perhaps to

186

Pedagogical Stylistics

that last example, is that many of these (to me) odd or difficult to understand examples derive from US English usage, which underlines that the idea of a single ‘English language’ with ‘native speakers’ and a set of core metaphors we can teach students is problematic for another reason too – the wide range of global uses of English. What is valuable about the paper, and I  return to this in my conclusion, is the demonstration that these highly debatable ‘core’ senses intuitively identified, however rocky their theoretical coherence, seem to have actually promoted stronger learning in the subjects of the experiments. This is an important research finding where I would argue that learning is apparently facilitated incidentally by strategies used by the cognitive approach rather than caused by it. Consider in such a light, imageability too. Imageability is another important claimed motivation for idiom use that should also help learners recall these phrases. My point here is that images can, again, often be highly counterintuitive and individual (i.e., your image may seem bizarre to me.) Moreover, there is some evidence that such elaborations slow down access time for learners (Ellis et al. 2008) and, in any case, may more usefully fix meaning in the memory than form. If the images help some learners learn better, without this slowing down in recall or productive use, all well and good. However, we need to say at least that this imageability is highly speculative and individualized. One example may suffice. Littlemore (2001) reports a lesson with some advanced French learners of English. Her learners were puzzled by the expression jumping on the/a bandwagon. Corpus analysis reveals that this phrase is normally used in the negative, ‘not’ jumping on a bandwagon being more desirable. Other people jump on bandwagons. Imaging won’t help learn this fact of usage. Even leaving that fact aside, a significant proportion of a lesson was taken up with elaborate shared visions of a wagon, with a band on it (really!), on which we might wish to jump. Has anyone ever thought of that expression in that way before? It certainly seems highly counterintuitive and even unhelpful to me. And yet, I have no doubt that the reported learning took place. It took place, however, because if you give that kind of extended and detailed attention to any language form, it will, of course, be learnt relatively well. First, then, was this item worth all this attention? Second, what could that significant proportion of a lesson have been better used for? Because space is limited, I move quickly to some further problems with some of the other posited ‘motivations’ of CL. Our third claimed area was diachronic (historically based) motivation. Diachronic motivation refers to etymology and semantic, historically referential reasons why we have the sayings we do. Diachronic motivation is evidently related to the idea of a



Metaphor and Idiom in EFL and ESL Teaching and Learning

187

cultural motivation for many sayings. Thus, researchers point to the surprisingly large number of naval idioms in English, clearly motivated by Britain’s naval history as a small trading island with an empire overseas. This work is fascinating in the way that a game of Scrabble can be fascinating. It doesn’t seem directly practical for a learner to know this kind of ‘trivial pursuits’ information, although I would stress again such attention to these phrases may well incidentally promote the ‘deep processing’ rightly claimed by the cognitivists as a key benefit for learners, just as many other engaging classroom strategies would, whether they are actually true or not. Often, in fact, the diachronic explanation for a saying like a loose cannon or show someone the ropes, take something on board or kick the bucket has never occurred to the speaker who fluently uses it and is certainly in no way salient for them. Once again, however, I concede that users may not be primarily learners. Therefore, if the claim is that such investigations or explanations help learners, I think this may well be the case. Indeed, Boers and others seem to show that this often is the case (although we still await evidence of more longitudinal gains over more extended time). The idea that this naval substratum of understanding of the world and one’s own language use somehow informs actual fluent language user use seems to me much more tenuous and contestable a claim. That is, CL may be showing us the value of teaching certain items through some kind of organization, and through deep processing, but these are not new techniques or insights, and what is not being shown by these experiments (and anyway is of only peripheral interest to the educator) is that CL ideas of the organization of the lexicon, or even of the mind, are valid. The idea that there is no single or shared culture for English speakers is also important to underline. Three strikes and you’re out was explained to me by a cognitive linguist as motivated by baseball (a game predominantly played in the United States). This did not help me understand the motivation any better, although it seemed very surprising to me. I had always taken ‘strikes’ in quite another perhaps ‘folk etymological’ sense. Most to the point, I have used the phrase felicitously and fluently for many years without any need for this knowledge (if such it is). The objection to my ideas here, of course, may be – as I have already tried to concede – that a fluent speaker is not a learner, and it is adult learners who need to see the motivations for metaphorical uses and even to be more aware of how metaphorical much language use is. Yet here too, I have my doubts. Is it possible even that the NS usually uses more metaphorical awareness than a learner? On a taught element of a PhD in an Applied Linguistics programme, I had worked for some weeks through a reading of

188

Pedagogical Stylistics

Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). A required task was then to test these ideas against a selected text, highlighting metaphor use and how ‘conceptual’ it seemed to be (or not). As might be expected, a strong group of experienced and very advanced students carried out this task well. What was truly startling to me, though, was that without exception (17 in the cohort) the NS students (British and North American, total    5) saw many more metaphors than their non-native compeers. Indeed, one Japanese fluent speaker of English and lecturer in English language in a Japanese university told me that there were hardly any metaphors at all in his chosen newspaper article, passing over hawks and doves in the White House, among others I would myself have named. (Rumsfeld in the dock, facing down anger are two more for me but not for this particular student it seems.) Where the NS typically perceives more metaphor the more they look for it, the second language user tends to take surfaces more on trust, I would suggest: learners tend initially at least to take a new vocabulary item as a translation equivalent to a term in their own language. This enables them quite successfully to get on with practicalities of understanding and using the new item without worrying about its etymology or possible metaphorical motivation. This was a sobering, if admittedly very limited, experiment for me. It lies behind my doubts as to how much class or learner time is usefully given to metaphor awareness activities, if the most advanced speakers can be shown to have progressed perfectly well to the highest levels of achievement without any such attention or processing evident. I would have to say at least that my particular group of non-native English teachers needed a lot more convincing of the value of CL approaches to metaphor in English teaching than I was able to conscientiously provide. My findings are not unrelated to those of Picken (2007), whose Japanese literature students were slow to perceive and comprehend metaphor in foreign language literary texts. The difference is that Picken was right to then develop a teaching programme to address a problematic weakness area for his literature students, while I would maintain that such a programme would not always be appropriate for all students. More positively, however, to conclude this cursory survey of the four motivations, a more straightforwardly productive and valuable idea from Boers and Lindstromberg (2008) is drawing to learners’ attention the phonological motivation for many idiomatic and figurative expressions (e.g., alliteration, assonance) – it goes against the grain, a feeding frenzy, centre stage, carry the can, get short shrift, hanging over your head, on the back burner, chop and change and the like. For productive use, precise forms would be important, although again it may be argued that these expressions are



Metaphor and Idiom in EFL and ESL Teaching and Learning

189

better used for comprehension rather than for self-expression, which may confuse others even if perfectly executed. NSs of English in many English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) situations have been criticized precisely for their overuse of such obscure expressions, e.g., in European Union meetings. Again, I would argue that use rather than meaning is the point of such expressions. (See Drew and Holt [1998] for more evidence of this.) Not the referential meaning but the expressive resource of such expressions is surely their point for users, the poetics of everyday talk. Nevertheless, in my experience, phonological motivation is something learners have not noticed much before and immediately find of interest and, of course, useful mnemonically, even intrinsically engaging and enjoyable. Boers and Lindstromberg (2008) claim a ball park figure of about 20 per cent of idioms being phonologically motivated as well as noting other interesting iconic features (e.g., sequence of words), which suggests these features could be helpful for learners to be made more aware of.

11.5  Conclusion: Evaluating CL Claims for Metaphor Teaching At this point, it may be useful to distinguish a weak claim from a strong claim arising from the kind of research I have mentioned in the previous section. zzWeak

claim: Organizing vocabulary learning in almost any way is better than not organizing it at all; deeper semantic processing/elaboration helps receptive knowledge; generalized benefits of awareness raising (compare Verspoor and Lowie 2003). zzStrong claim: CL approaches work because they are really telling us something about how ‘the mind’ works; they are validating wider CL claims. I return to my opening idea that this work often looks suspiciously like a kind of ‘linguistics applied’ (Widdowson 2000). Typically, as with all such initiatives, this ‘linguistics applied’ in pedagogy involves two characteristic and worrying limitations. There are always going to be questions and reservations about experimentalist research designs, with academic high achiever learners at advanced levels in universities or ‘good’ secondary schools tested at sentence or even word levels, e.g., decontextualized translation tests of vocabulary ‘knowledge’. Even if we accept that, at some level, these ‘work’, do such tests, with such groups, really tell us much about

190

Pedagogical Stylistics

the wider world of more typical teaching situations and actual language proficiency? Second, as in my example of the PhD group I worked with myself, we should be aware of the issue of procedural as opposed to analytic abilities. The business journalism of ‘trends’ is not consciously produced or processed by ordinary readers and writers, although post hoc analyses of applied linguists are certainly of theoretical interest. Nobody ever taught these readers and writers that these genres require this kind of ‘metaphorical competence’, but they have nevertheless acquired it quite thoroughly in practice. I began with the claims of the cognitive linguists in their own words. I am pleased to move to a conclusion in the same way. In  1988, in his own concluding sentences, Low (1988: 137) stressed that much of this work was very speculative, investigating ‘hypotheses’; that it was ‘not clear where learners’ problems in fact lie’, and stressing the need for ‘more empirical research’. The fact is that we are still in a rather a speculative and hypothetical stage, judging by the publications in this field to date. The base line, in the words of Littlemore and Low (2006b: 290) is that ‘learning about words is not the same as learning to use them’ and the suspicion has to be that there is still too much of the former and not enough of the latter going on. I would propose in our current state of knowledge that CL has certainly shown us much of interest about metaphorical thinking and conceptualization (its systematicity, basically) if not so much about the use of such language or about its learning. Corpus linguistics, discourse analysis and even conversation analysis are more informative on actual uses. There is now a demonstrable need for teachers, course and materials designers to know about and to mediate this work appropriately to appropriate populations of teachers and learners. However, neither should we forget the relevance of needs analysis: who are the learners and learning for what purpose? What does that analysis then suggest to us about this group’s need for metaphor study? Again, even where such a need can be shown or argued, we should remember that comprehension, being able to ‘cope’ with metaphor, is likely to be more important than any need to actively use these expressions. L2 speakers use many fewer idioms and metaphors until they reach very fluent levels: does it matter? What about the ELF findings I mentioned earlier, the difficulties caused by idiomatic uses of such language in NS– non-native speaker (NNS) interaction? I detect in much CL work in this area an implicit, even sometimes explicit, suggestion of NS norms as the target in learning English, even though professionals in that field have long distanced themselves from that unattainable and in many ways undesirable



Metaphor and Idiom in EFL and ESL Teaching and Learning

191

aim. Does fluent communication necessarily involve metaphor and idiom use where NNS are involved? The CL talk of ‘naturalness’ and fluency is arguably, at times, ethnocentric. Finally, to reiterate, the limited and suggestive successes of CL in this area to date indicate some support for what I have called the weak claim. For everyday teaching, the means can justify the ends, this is not a problem, ‘it works’, so let’s use it where we can. The systematicity claimed may sometimes be more in the mind of the analyst or the learner than an empirical fact; it doesn’t matter if it helps learning. However, let us also note that there is a whiff here of old wine in new bottles, tried and trusted techniques for teaching vocabulary are being presented as if somehow novel (deep processing and attention to form). Let us also not forget the old problem in educational research of Hawthorne effects – that the apparent successes of novel techniques used by enthusiastic teachers or educational reformers tend to plateau and drop off quite quickly. Revenons à nos moutons! This phrase is now even better fixed in my mind, and I have learnt that it derives from a fifteenth-century French comedy. Does that matter? No, but the learning does and we are grateful to the cognitive linguists for having helped us get these principles clearer.

References Achard, M. and Niemeyer, S. (eds) (2004), Cognitive Linguistics, Second Language Acquisition, and Foreign Language Teaching. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Boers, F. (2000), ‘Metaphor awareness and vocabulary retention’. Applied Linguistics, 21, (4), 553–71. —(2004), ‘Expanding learners’ vocabulary through metaphor awareness: what expansion, what learners, what vocabulary?’, in M. Achard and S. Niemeyer (eds), Cognitive Linguistics, Second Language Acquisition and Foreign Language Teaching. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 211–32. Boers, F. and Demecheleer, M. (2001), ‘Measuring the impact of cross-cultural differences on learners’ comprehension of imageable idioms’. ELT Journal, 55, (3), 255–62. Boers, F. and Lindstromberg, S. (eds) (2008), Cognitive Linguistic Approaches to Teaching Vocabulary and Phraseology. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Cameron, L. (2007), ‘Confrontation or complementarity? Metaphor in language use and cognitive metaphor theory’. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 5, 107–35. Cameron, L. and Deignan, A. (2006), ‘The emergence of metaphor in discourse’. Applied Linguistics, 27, (4), 671–90. Charteris-Black, J. (2005), Politicians and Rhetoric. The Persuasive Power of Metaphor. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

192

Pedagogical Stylistics

Csábi, S. (2004), ‘A cognitive linguistic view of polysemy in English and its implications for teaching’, in M. Achard and S. Niemayer (eds), Cognitive Linguistics, Second Language Acquisition and Foreign Language Teaching. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 233–56. Deignan, A. (1995), Collins Cobuild English Guides 7: Metaphor. London: ­Harper­Collins. —(2005), Metaphor and Corpus Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Press. Deignan, A., Gabrys, D. and Solska, A. (1997), ‘Teaching English metaphors’. ELT Journal, 51, (4), 352–60. Drew, P. and Holt, E. (1998), ‘Figures of speech: figurative expressions and the management of topic transition in conversation’. Language in Society, 27, (4), 495–522. Ellis, N. C., Simpson-Vlach, R. and Maynard, C. (2008), ‘Formulaic language in native and second language speakers: psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, and TESOL’. TESOL Quarterly, 42, (3), 375–96. Hall, G. (2007), ‘Every joy is a sorrow to me now: vocabulary in culture and communication’, in P. Davidson, D. Palfreyman and C. Coombe (eds), Teaching and Learning Vocabulary in a Second Language. Dubai: TESOL Arabia, pp. 79–87. Lakoff, G. (1987), Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. What Categories Reveal About the Human Mind. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980), Metaphors We Live By. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Lazar, G. (1996), ‘Using figurative language to expand students’ vocabulary’. ELT Journal, 50, (1), 43–51. —(2003), Meanings and Metaphors. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lindstromberg, S. (1998), English Prepositions Explained. Amsterdam: John ­Benjamins Press. Littemore, J. (2001), ‘Metaphoric intelligence and foreign language learning’. Humanising Language Teaching, 3, (2), 1–8. Littlemore, J. and Low, G. (2006a), Figurative Thinking and Foreign Language Learning. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. —(2006b), ‘Metaphoric competence, second language learning, and communicative language ability’. Applied Linguistics, 27, (2), 268–94. Low, G. (1988), ‘On teaching metaphor’. Applied Linguistics, 9, (2), 125–47. Nation, P. (2001), Learning Vocabulary in Another Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Partington, A. (1998), Patterns and Meanings: Using Corpora for English Language Research and Teaching. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Press. Picken, J. (2007), Literature, Metaphor, and the Foreign Language Learner. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Semino, E. (2008), Metaphor in Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shen, Y. and Balaban, N. (1999), ‘Metaphorical (in)coherence in discourse’. ­Discourse Processes, 28 (2), 139–53. Steen, G. (1994), Understanding Metaphor in Literature. Harlow: Longman. Verspoor, M. and Lowie, W. (2003), ‘Making sense of polysemous words’. Language Learning, 53, (3), 547–86. Widdowson, H. G. (2000), ‘On the limitations of linguistics applied’. Applied ­Linguistics, 21, (1), 3–25.

Chapter 12

Stylistics for Language Teachers Judit Zerkowitz

12.1  Introduction Concentrating on teaching stylistics to future language teachers, this chapter analyses a written text – István Örkény’s In memoriam of Dr K.H.G. – which I have used in a pedagogical stylistics class at Eötvös Loránd Univer­ sity, Budapest, and a language class in a secondary school. Through this text, I shall present simple ways in which stylistic analysis can reveal the linguistic patterning of texts and help students to base interpretation on linguistic evidence. After the analysis, I shall discuss aspects of the role that stylistics can play in lesson planning, during the pre-class analysis of texts to be used, and in classroom observation, during the post-class analysis of lesson transcripts. I shall argue that the stylistics that will best trickle down to language learners is the one that creates a bridge between the interpretation and the description of a particular text, which implies that when we teach stylistics to future language teachers, a ‘text-first’ approach is preferable.

12.2  From Text to Terms The text-first approach allows the students to have a pre-critical personal reaction, unprimed by instruction, and once they are involved in the interpretation, they may become interested in the views of others, the class, the teacher and even in what stylistics may say about the text. Language learners certainly cannot be given long definitions of terms, and language teachers-to-be, in my experience, are generally more of the pedagogical than the linguistic mind and so they too find the text-first then basic analysis approach alluring. In the case that I shall report on, the students belong to two distinct types of groups: group one is composed of university students of English from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, whose knowledge of

194

Pedagogical Stylistics

English is near native, and who are going to teach in a year or two, or have started their teaching practice. Before taking the pedagogical stylistics option, they have already studied English language, linguistics, literature, culture, history, applied linguistics and methodology. All the subjects are taught in English. The second group of students are language learners in a secondary school (Radnóti, Budapest) aged 12–13, whose level of English is intermediate, and they are the kind of target group of learners whom the future teachers will meet in their teaching practice. Our secondary school groups are, in general, monolingual, and most of our future teachers are also Hungarian, or speak Hungarian. The text we worked with in both groups is a Hungarian ‘one-minute’ short story in two English translations (which is also the title of Örkény’s book, as can be seen in the references section). First, I shall show how we discussed the text in the stylistics for language teaching class and then how a lesson plan we created worked in the secondary school, to illustrate the application of stylistics in such learning situations. Stylistic analysis proper observes the three Rs: it should be Rigorous, Retrievable and Replicable and excludes ad hoc impressionistic comments (Simpson 2004: 4); in other words, a transparent and explicit framework is needed. These principles must certainly be upheld, but exhaustive, quasiobjective analyses should be relegated to the realm of research and not required of language teachers. It may well be that students who have gone through an ‘academic’ stylistics course will be at a loss to apply what they have learnt in the language class. In teaching applied stylistics to non-native language teachers, I find that practising basic analytical skills and providing a minimum amount of theoretical explanations lead to better results than making students read long-winded, often repetitive expositions followed by exhaustive analyses. Now that they surf the Net, they are used to tightly packaged, succinct information, a mosaic structure that we cannot ignore, and they can process a plurality of texts rather quickly. The effort needed for them to delve into the intricacies of one definitive short text or, for that matter, large corpora might prove too much for them, especially as these students want to use stylistics as an instrument and not as an end in itself: they learn it as a language, as a means of reading between the lines. Stylistics deals with textual values within a context; therefore, it is profitable to emphasize contextual effect and not isolated categories illustrated by fragments of texts. If we go from text to analytical tools and not the other way round, the skills we teach are easier to acquire for our learners, who, in their everyday practice, are accustomed to the ‘example first then the rule’ model. Especially as what we offer are not even rules, but mostly just maxims



Stylistics for Language Teachers

195

whose effect moves on a contextual cline. Keeping ‘form’ (Ellis 2001) and not ‘forms’ in the text in focus does not mean that a wide repertory of terms, culled from the umbrella of discourse analysis, rhetoric, identity studies, cognitive linguistics and every style-connected textual study should be neglected. On the contrary, the interdisciplinary nature of stylistics requires familiarity with as many as possible of the analytical tools that textual studies offer, but language teachers on average do not need the depth and detail of research in those fields. They should be able to find striking, dominant linguistic patterns in texts that invite interpretations. The questions arise: what separates teaching stylistics applied to language teaching from teaching interdisciplinary textual analysis to language teachers? Where does stylistics end and interdisciplinary textual analysis begin in such a particular teaching situation? I actually say to my students that rigorously searching for contextual meaning in a text with the help of interdisciplinary linguistic means is stylistics. Pedagogical stylistics has two distinct branches: teaching stylistics and applying stylistics in teaching other subjects. What I am interested in here is stylistics-assisted teacher training and language teaching. Stylistics, in this sense, is an umbrella term, like discourse analysis often is, subsuming everything that usefully belongs to the general idea. In what follows, I shall first describe my ‘stylistics for language teachers’ course, and how we work from the text: starting with an analysis, building up a glossary of analytical tools and planning the teaching of the text.

12.3  Dr K.H.G. Top Down: From Interpretation to Description First, we read and interpret the text. The stylistic terms that will get into the glossary are italicized in the analysis and will be first introduced the way new vocabulary is taught in the language class. The notes to the terms (see superscript numbers, explained in Section 12.5) try to give an impression of the kind of ‘from vocabulary to glossary building’ that we do. Having given a basic definition of the terms, very much depending on the level and interest of the class, various short readings and texts may be chosen to elucidate the term and practise analysis. The use of the terms has already started with the first text, whose description required the term in question but no in-depth discussion of the terms, no reading up on them is done until we have gone through the text. It is during the slow second and third reading of the key text that the glossary will be built, and padded out with annotations and examples.

196

Pedagogical Stylistics

In Memoriam Dr K.H.G. by István Örkény ‘Hölderlin ist Ihnen unbekannt?’ Dr K.H.G. asked, while digging the pit for the carcass of a horse. ‘What of him?’ asked the German guard. ‘He is the one who wrote Hyperion’, Dr K.H.G. explained. He loved to explain things. ‘The greatest representative of German romanticism. And how about, for example, Heine?’ ‘What of them?’ asked the guard. ‘They are poets’ Dr K.H.G. said. ‘You possibly know Schiller’s name, don’t you?’ ‘I know him.’ said the guard. ‘And Rilke?’ ‘Him too’, said the German guard, turned to the colour of red pepper and shot Dr K.H.G. dead. On reading the story, students generally look puzzled, shocked and even embarrassed at times. Apparently, the story challenges entrenched views and makes taking sides and especially voicing feelings difficult without gauging the  emotional reaction of other people in the group. Slowly, we ease into negotiating attitudes, learn facts and make our ‘phantom book’1 (Bayard 2008) richer. The strange suspense and the even stranger surprise makes this One Minute dialogic short story of Örkény’s cryptic. However simple and straightforward it may seem at word level, a Hemingway-type readerly2 text, it is not easy to agree on what really happens in it. Stylistics, in accordance with its claims to objectivity, requires consensual interpretation, i.e., an interpretation that is strictly based on textual evidence and acceptable to the majority of readers. The analysis may start bottom up, going through the text with the fine-tooth comb of stylistic categories to see who can discover deviating3 linguistic patterns that foreground4 interpretable elements. Or, alternatively, it may start top down, going from interpretation to description, checking which interpretations are supported or not supported by the text. Let us start with a recently published literary, not stylistic, interpretation, according to which Dr K.H.G. initiates a ‘friendly chat’ in the belief that educated conversation brings people closer to each other, not realizing how inappropriate the idea is between guard and prisoner in a labour camp (Szirák 2008: 278). This Dr K.H.G. is grotesquely out of touch with the world around him, trying to ingratiate himself with the German guard by reminding him of German Romantic greats. Is the interpretation convincingly supported by the text?



Stylistics for Language Teachers

197

The first question, Hölderlin ist Ihnen unbekannt? is in German and in the negative, indicating that K. Havas Géza, a Hungarian Jew who died of a heart attack in a labour camp in 1945, in whose memory the short story was written (Szirák 2008: 277), could speak German, and supposed that the guard, although German by ‘race’, is probably not well versed in Hölderlin. Prisoners generally lose their identity in camps; all they are is a number tattooed on their arms, yet K.H.G. keeps his initials. There is also a slight hint of class difference in the naming, as the guard is only named by his profession while K.H.G. is referred to by his academic title, which makes the question sound far from innocent. In fact, it is unlikely that any highly educated person would strike up a conversation with someone from a less academic walk of life by testing him or her on romantic poetry, unless they had a particular reason for doing so. The guard rightly interprets the question as irrelevant and wants to understand the flout,5 i.e., in Gricean6 terms he would like to know the implicature. He finds the questioning a challenge, an assertion that Dr K.H.G. has kept his mental superiority even in the camp where the guard is given absolute physical power over him. If someone does not know Hölderlin, the ‘explanation’ that he wrote Hyperion is less than helpful even in everyday situations. That Dr K.H.G. does not want to engage in an innocuous conversation is best indicated at the point when the guard says he knows Schiller. If Dr K.H.G. had been looking for a topic to bring them closer to each other, now he had one. Here was a writer that both of them know, the floor is open for an exchange of views. But he does not use the opportunity, on the contrary. He asks: And Rilke? The guard interprets this turn as humiliating: Why, does Dr K.H.G. not believe that he knows Schiller? Or if he does, is he so full of himself and his erudition that he would not deign to discuss Schiller with him, a simple guard? Or, has he, the guard, in fact, been found out with regard to the fact that he really has no idea who they are talking about? Or, has he had enough of being quizzed by a prisoner in a camp, who, like a Victorian child, should only speak when spoken to? And anyway, how do the dead poets come into the picture when the task at hand is to bury a dead horse? Browbeating the interlocutor, which is what Dr K.H.G. manages to do, whatever his intentions may have been, is certainly not a survival strategy under the circumstances. The linguistic pattern of negative questions, the repetitive questioning and the foregrounded ‘And Rilke?’ question, compounded by the guard’s short turns, do not seem to lend support to the friendly chat interpretation at the level of language. In friendly conversations, people want to be liked (positive politeness) and not to be interfered with (negative politeness)

198

Pedagogical Stylistics

and expect that the other also has similar face needs. Dr K.H.G.’s repetitive reference to the poets is a series of face-threatening acts7 for the guard, demanding, but not granting approval or respect. In the prisoner’s particular predicament, the abrupt, curt questions and answers of the guard do not augur well, yet Dr K.H.G. does not seem to notice that the guard is also threatening his face, indeed his existence. From the guard’s, and most importantly, from the reader’s perspective, what Dr K.H.G. manages to initiate is not a simple, friendly chat.

12.4  Dr K.H.G. Bottom Up: From Description to Interpretation Now, let us approach the text from bottom up, demonstrating the procedure that stylistic discipline requires (Short 1996). We know from the title of the story and four other naming phrases in the story that K.H.G. is a doctor of some kind, and therefore we can infer that he is highly educated. It is unusual that he is referred to by his initials alone, so this is bound to provoke inferential behaviour. During the story, Dr K.H.G. is referred to by this phrase four times and once by the pronoun ‘he’. The phrase ‘in memoriam’ in the title also leads us to assume that he must be dead, even though at the beginning of the story he is clearly alive. The German guard is introduced by a phrase that does not name him, but merely indicates his nationality and role. We are thus more distanced from him than Dr K.H.G., whose initials, at least, we know. The guard is referred to twice by the phrase ‘the German guard’ and twice by the phrase ‘the guard’. Hence, we can infer that his nationality and role are being specifically contrasted with Dr K.H.G. The story and title are exactly 100 words long, and in that short space there are four references to ‘the German guard’ and five to ‘Dr K.H.G.’, indicating consistently the contrast we are meant to infer. Event presentation8 is linear from action to speech to action: digging the pit, conversing and shooting. The ideological point of view9 slants somewhat in Dr K.H.G.’s direction: the story is ‘in memoriam’, and we are all expected to know this much Latin, which aligns the reader with the educated speaker. We are told that Dr K.H.G. likes to explain things, a comment about a general characteristic feature of his, while the German guard is only presented from the outside, as he behaves on the spot, as it were. The guard responds to Dr K.H.G.’s question with another question, which suggests that he is trying conversationally to wrest the initiative back from Dr  K.H.G. This behaviour is odd. After all, the guard has his gun, and



Stylistics for Language Teachers

199

ultimately all the power, and so he could have just told Dr K.H.G. to shut up. Dr K.H.G. has longer turns10 than the guard, which, under normal circumstance, could be an indication of power. The guard has only two short questions and two short answers: ‘What of him?’ ‘What of them?’ ‘I  know him’. ‘Him too’. He is rather puzzled by the nature of their unequal encounter: education vs. power, or rather power without education vs. education without power. From the start, he is out of his depth, unable to understand the prisoner’s behaviour in the situation. This very short story is dramatically unmodalized.11 Both the dialogue and the statements are categorical, no flicker of doubt, desire, duty. The narrator is external, refusing access to the thoughts and feelings of the characters, except in the above example. Dr K.H.G. digs a grave for a ‘dead’ horse, inquires about ‘dead’ poets and finally gets shot ‘dead’ by the guard. The ‘object’ of the short story is cumulatively death, as can be expected by the title ‘In memoriam’. Dr K.H.G. appears as an agent, digging, initiating the conversation, and ends as being the patient (victim) of the guard’s action. The parallelism12 in the ‘grave-digging scene’ is remarkable. While Dr K.H.G. is digging a pit for the carcass of a horse, he is also digging his own grave by the taunting questions. Only one verb, digging, is in the progressive aspect, the others are all in simple past or present, thus digging is foregrounded. The continuous nature of the digging is contrasted with the dramatic abruptness of the questions that Dr K.H.G. keeps asking and the guard’s gruff reactions. Narration is in the past and all quoted speech, always direct speech, uses the present, except when referring to past action. ‘He is the one who wrote Hyperion’, ‘They are poets’, says Dr K.H.G., although the poets are long dead. Here, the choice of the present tense carries an optimistic message. The text is rendered cohesive13 by pronominal references till the last sentence, where coherence14 can account for the guard turning red and shooting. The above stylistic analysis used the Géher translation. Now let’s see another translation and see whether all the foregrounded textual features in the first translation are equally foregrounded in the second one.

12.5  Comparison with the Sollosy Translation In Memoriam Dr H.G.K. ‘Hölderlin ist Ihnen unbekannt?’ Dr H.G.K. asked as he dug the pit for the horse’s carcass. ‘Who is that?’ the German guard growled.

200

Pedagogical Stylistics

‘The author of Hyperion,’ said Dr H.G.K., who had a positive passion for explanations. ‘The greatest figure of German romanticism. How about Heine?’ he tried again. ‘Who are them guys?’ the guard growled, louder than before. ‘Poets,’ Dr H.G.K. said. ‘But Schiller. Surely you have heard of Schiller?’ ‘That goes without saying,’ the German guard nodded. ‘And Rilke?’ Dr H.G.K. insisted. ‘Him, too,’ the German guard said and, turning the color of paprika, shot Dr H.G.K. in the back of the head. First of all, the number of words is not 100, as counted in the previous translation, but 110, a 10 per cent difference; however, what does the exact number of words tell us, apart from the sheer interest of the figures themselves? In the stylistic analysis of Dr K.H.G., we attributed significance to the only progressive verb, digging. If we read the Dr H.G.K. text, we find ‘he dug’, and two -ing forms: ‘that goes without saying’, which is just a phrase, and ‘turning the colour of paprika’, where the -ing form introduces the punchline. Here, one might say that ‘turning’ is foregrounded, highlighting the grand design, for Örkény regularly uses joke-like reversals, turning his tales upside down at the end and also, turning ends the loop, as the prisoner started the scene by ‘turning’ against the guard, now the guard ends it by his ‘turning’. No doubt, both ‘digging’ and ‘turning’ are reasonably foregrounded elements and deserve interpretation, just like the repetition of ‘és’ (‘and’) in the Hungarian text. Versions of the same text may vary in detail but not in essentials, not in the heart of the text. I take the expression ‘the heart of the text’ from Sollosy (2009), who writes: . . . to translate a writer like Örkény, the trick is to translate the piece and not the words, the text and not the textual difficulties. After all, a piece is more than the sum of its parts. Get at the heart of the text, and take it from there. (Sollosy 2009) Nowadays, we are warned that we should not believe in one canonical text, but rather view a text as a moment of intertextuality.15 Yet, that momentary constellation has a heart, something immutable, something idiosyncratic that needs to be captured in its every translation. The heart, most certainly, is in the discourse,16 not the story17 here. Stylistics, the ‘myopic’ view of the text, can aid the literary critic not to misjudge the heart of the text, while ‘far-sighted’ literary criticism can enlighten stylisticians not to get lost in the  detail. Naturally, all that wisdom, without meticulous investigation or



Stylistics for Language Teachers

201

theoretical underpinning, must accumulate in the mind of the translator to help them find the heart of the text, and in the mind of the teacher to design appropriate exercises. Sollosy writes: .  .  .  it’s not the language and not the cultural references that pose the real difficulty in translating the One Minute Stories, it is the ­stories themselves.  .  .  .  The stories represent a unique blend of Central­European grotesque that grew out of the need to deal with mid-century ­Central-European political repression.  .  .  .  Örkény’s strength comes from describing seemingly absurd situations in a pared-down “scientific language” (his expression), and the combination unexpectedly reveals to us the truth behind the seeming, hence the laughter, hence the tears . . . (Sollosy 2009) It is clear that both translations get ‘the heart of the text’ across to the reader. Still, there are interesting differences. The first striking difference is that Sollosy changes the initials, considering that in Hungarian the family name (H.) comes first, hence Dr H.G.K. Although Sollosy knows that a pared-down language is needed, her Dr H.G.K. leaves less room for ambiguity than the original or the Géher translation. Here, the guard growls, nods, uses uneducated language, Dr H.G.K. tries, insists. Also, it can be detected that the translator is American, see the use of ‘guy’ and the spelling of ‘color’. The choice of words, paprika for red pepper, the use of ‘had a positive passion for’, instead of the noncommittal ‘liked’, give a certain flavour to the Sollosy text. Its vividness stems from the translator doing part of the interpretation for the reader, which some readers welcome, others find disturbing. A translation cannot help being interpretative to some extent. It has to contextualize the original text in another language and culture. Between the various versions there must be some unavoidable mismatch, which I find salutary as it shows that nothing can stop the fluidity of texts and interpretations. A text is a site of intertextual dialogue and every reader, even every reading, will notice other nuances in it. In the Hungarian text, Dr K.H.G. asks: ‘Schiller nevét sem ismeri?’ (‘Don’t you know Schiller’s name either?’). This negative is very Hungarian, a verbatim translation would not fit the context. Both translators avoid the directly negative question and find ways to express the same ironic tone in English (Géher: ‘You possibly know Schiller’s name, don’t you?’ Sollosy: ‘But Schiller. Surely you have heard of Schiller?’). ‘Many instances of this tendency for directness in Hungarian can be quoted from everyday conversation as well (e.g., unmitigated, yet not insulting declaration: ‘you

202

Pedagogical Stylistics

are wrong’), which may lead to cross-cultural pragmatic misunderstanding of intention if not adjusted stylistically. Readers who have not met people in such war predicaments as the one described might think that the story is entirely absurd, the characters abstruse, while readers who have had such cultural experience may find the story bordering on the realistic and the figures life-like. I discussed the translations with two groups of English majors: Americans from Columbia University, New York, and Hungarians from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, over 3  years; that is 3 times 12–20 American and Hungarian students. The difference of opinion was almost unanimous. American students opted for the absurd reading and favoured the Sollosy translation, not only for its use of American English but also for its being like a film. Shot in the nape sounded to them an especially ‘happy’ rendering as it can be visualized: Dr H.G.K. was bent forward, digging, and the guard was standing behind him. They liked that the translation helped with the interpretation, that it provided a clear verbal indication that the guard was uneducated and morose. Hungarian students generally know the original and recognize that the Géher translation is closer to it. They preferred the Géher translation on other grounds as well. Most of them are more used to British English, that is the unmarked form for them, and the story, for them, is clearly not connected with America. They also know about or can imagine the historical background; they do not need clarification and in their reading, the real aspects of the story blot out absurdity. They consider the story a realistic rendering of tragic grotesqueness. Both groups like the minimalist, laconic style; but for Hungarian students and generally readers who are familiar with Örkény’s style, the less spelt out, the more intriguing, the more attractive. This short story is compulsory reading in Hungarian literature classes, so dealing with it in the English class adds cross-curricular interest on top of raising awareness of cross-linguistic differences. What the translator needs to achieve is to be faithful to the original text and yet reach the other, the target culture reader. Some translators stay close to the source text, others are keen to meet target culture expectations, and both attitudes, if practised in moderation, are justifiable, once what Sollosy termed the heart of the text gets translated. It is of interest for language learners to compare differing translations, and if possible, if the class is bilingual, compare them with the original as well. Stylistics, the fine-tooth comb variety, is prone to attempt an exhaustive, quasi-definitive analysis of a single version of a text. Texts dialogue with each other (Bakhtin  1981), texts change (see generic criticism and



Stylistics for Language Teachers

203

hypertext), albeit not as spectacularly as readers do. In any case, language learners require some leeway in interpretation as they cannot but creatively guess at meanings (Zerkowitz 2007). Versions of the same text help them understand the essence of the text, while the complete analysis of one single text might not only limit their creativity but also overwhelm them with descriptive detail. If we have access to different versions of a text, be it a number of translations of the same text, essential and incidental features can be told apart, the significance of slight differences in couching can be appreciated. For non-native language teachers, translation is a most useful device, both in receptive and productive skills practice (Medgyes 1994). We can ask the learners to translate the English text back into Hungarian and then compare their versions with the original and appreciate stylistic differences. Here, not just the English versions are scrutinized, but interlingual differences can also be discussed, an aspect that, recently, is beginning to regain acknowledgement (the Hungarian original can be found at the end, for the reader who speaks both languages).

12.6  Terms as Vocabulary Having analysed the connections between description and interpretation in the text, we collect and discuss the analytical tools (see the italicized terms). The stylistic ‘vocabulary’ of the above analysis, therefore, looks more or less like this: 1. Phantom book: Bayard suggests that we bring our own ‘inner book’ to the text we read and from scant information create an amalgam of the two, our phantom book. The more we know both of the text and in general, the richer the phantom book. 2. Readerly: (Barthes: lisible) is a transparent text, a prime example, as mentioned above, is Hemingway, writerly (Barthes: scriptible) texts are opaque, like Joyce, not easy to interpret. 3. Deviating from the expected external or internal norm: ‘Yes, I remember Adlestrop’, as the first line of a poem, is unexpected, deviates from the external norm, calls attention to itself, stands out, for it looks as if in a conversation the poet just answered a question. Once the internal norm is established, casual conversation, half way through the poem the reader is surprised by the poetic description, internal deviation, of birdsong and wild flowers (see Edmund Thomas: Adlestrop).

204

Pedagogical Stylistics

4. Foregrounding: is motivated deviation, where the surprising form is clearly intentional, needs time to be interpreted, cannot be automatically processed. 5. Flouting: is when someone evidently disobeys the Gricean maxims (see note 6) implying something that can be guessed. (Father says to mother [children listening] ‘Let’s get something for the kids, but not I-C-E-C-RE-A-M’. . . . Can you guess why he spelt the word?) 6. Paul Grice proposed four maxims of conversational cooperation: we expect our interlocutor to say the truth, say not more or less than is needed, in a customary manner, and what is said must be relevant (Logic in conversation is compulsory reading). 7. FTA: threatens someone’s public face. We all want to be unimpeded and liked and we feel hurt if we are not respected and admired enough. For example, ‘You are wrong’. This direct disagreement can be impolite and threaten public face, more so in English than in Hungarian. 8. Event presentation: is the discoursal order of telling the original chronological story, lending emphasis to certain elements. For example, ‘Here comes the bride’. Concerning emphasis, see the degree of directness in speech and thought presentation. (Recommended texts: from Bleak House, the passage where the coroner refuses to accept Jo’s testimony and also read the chapter on Time in Rimmon Kenan [1983], and speech and thought presentation in Short [1996].) 9. Perspective: point of view, angle, attitude, cf. focalization. (See Short’s [1996] point of view checklist.) 10. Turn: one speaker holding the floor (‘depending on the class, various readings and texts can be chosen to elucidate the term and practise analysis). 11. Categorical statements: are unmodalized, e.g., ‘the sky is blue’, as opposed to a modalized ‘I believe the sky is blue’. 12. Parallelism: contains repetitive structures that inter-react, e.g., ‘out of sight, out of mind’. 13. Cohesion: overtly links sentences into larger units, e.g., ‘That cat has no tail. This one has’ (pronominal reference, ellipsis). 14. Coherence: is implicit, covert, contextually interpretable. For example, A: ‘It’s the phone’. B: ‘I’m in the bath’. A: ‘Okay’ (speech act-wise: request, request, promise). 15. Intertextuality: represents the dialogue of texts, polyphony, e.g., ‘divorces are made in heaven’. 16. Text: how the story is told. 17. Story: the underlying chronological sequence of events, what is told (see Rimmon-Kenan 1983: ch. 1).



Stylistics for Language Teachers

205

In class, we define the terms and demonstrate their use on at least one other text. To make the definition relatively watertight, I use excerpts, short passages from key readings, such as Leech and Short (1981): Style in Fiction; Carter and Stockwell (2008): The Language and Literature Reader; Wales (2001): A Dictionary of Stylistics; Noorgaard et al. (2010): Key Terms in Stylistics; Short (1996): Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose; and Simpson (1994): Stylistics. The above vocabulary-cum-glossary for the teachers is then translated for the language learners, as can be seen in the following lesson plan, in bold type, to show how questions and tasks based on simple paraphrasing of the original terms work.

12.7  Terms Translated for Language Learners as they Appear in the Lesson Plan PRE-reading zzBrief

historical introduction to labour camps, the writer and the genre pattern: frontal, forum (5 minutes)

zzInteraction

DURING reading zzTeacher

reads out text twice. Unknown words are guessed, put on

board. Students in threes exchange their views and then some groups of three read the text out loud, in role, to reflect their interpretation (10 minutes) Stylistics-guided discussion of text Deviation zzAre

Latin and German surprising, unexpected, in the text? you expect the descriptive sentence: ‘He loved to explain’ in the scene? zzWhat makes ‘And Rilke?’ a strange question? zzDid

Foregrounding zzWhat

do those unexpected, deviating forms say?

Pedagogical Stylistics

206

Point of view zzWho

is the teller of the tale? On whose side is the writer?

Speech act zzWhat

does Dr K.H.G. mean by asking all those questions in his situation? What do his questions say to the guard? Does the guard interpret Dr K.H.G.’s intention correctly?

Turn taking zzThe

guard speaks little. Does that mean that he has no power?

FTA zzDo

the two men threaten each other? How?

Relevance zzWhy

does Dr K.H.G. speak about German romantic poetry? When the guard says he knows Schiller, why does Dr K.H.G. not talk with him about Schiller? zzInteraction pattern: frontal, forum (15 minutes) zzSecond translation read out, discussed, both texts read out in roles by students, then choose preferred version. zzInteraction pattern: frontal, then pairs, groups of three, pyramid, forum (10 ­minutes) zzTranslate into Hungarian, then compare with original. zzInteraction pattern: individual, two groups (10 minutes) AFTER reading zzTask

for point of view/focalization down in two sentences your thoughts of Dr K.H.G. before the scene Örkény describes and/or your thoughts of the guard after it. You may start with: ‘I saw’, ‘I felt’, then exchange with pair and read in silence what the other wrote. zzOR or plus: jigsaw made of mixed chunks of the two translations, find the two versions, in groups. zzWrite



Stylistics for Language Teachers

207

zzInteraction

pattern: individual, pair, group (5 minutes) zzHomework: write down the story as seen by another prisoner or guard, include details of place, weather, your feelings. (70–100 words) zzOR: write about teachers who quiz too much. (100–150 words) (This latter alternative task I would offer for the anticipated difficulty that some of the students might find the text unusually serious or they are too familiar with it, this text being compulsory in the Hungarian literature curriculum.)

12.8  After Class Stylistic Analysis, Transcript Analysis and/or Action Research I taught the lesson plan to secondary students, but it would extend the scope of this chapter too much to give a detailed description. Suffice it to say that the students, who in their other classes are not infantilized to the extent that they are infantilized in the English class, seemed to enjoy the seriousness of the task and participated actively. Two emotional reactions stood out: I asked what Dr K.H.G.’s motive could have been and one boy said that Dr K.H.G. wanted to choose the moment when to die, that’s why he teased the guard. There was ‘involved’ silence in the class before and after his comment. The other emotional reaction was triggered by a boy in the last row who said that Dr K.H.G. was like a too inquisitive teacher and deserved his fate for humiliating the poor guard. He added that there are a number of teachers of this kind at the school who would also deserve to be shot. This caused uproar: laughter, shouting and luckily it came to light that he was only joking, but it was a close shave, some Bakhtinian carnivalesque language could be heard. What the stylistic observation can add to the run-of-the-mill classroom observation is valuable: it can capture the performativity of speaking, the challenging of expected social norms as well as feelings, shades of meaning, at first glance not transparent textual patterns. The whole transcript of a class is worth analysing stylistically to find out what was going on at the immediately not observable level. The class described above was not recorded and, unfortunately, I kept no retrievable data of it, but for action research purposes the close attention to what went on seemed to be enough at the time. Re-teaching the plan, I introduced a kind of safety valve for the students who might feel embarrassed talking about cathartic historical issues in the language class, having been accustomed to lightweight ­chit-chat.

208

Pedagogical Stylistics

In the redrafted plan, they do not have to read their point of view exercise out loud, the empathy practice, and they have the chance to write about problems at school if they do not feel like writing about the war.

12.9  Conclusion Once future English teachers are sensitized to pedagogical stylistics, they have at their disposal a practical way of bridging meaning and form and can show the learners ways of building interpretation on textual evidence. The stylistic analysis of texts can help them design better lesson plans and perceive in the actual texts, either written or heard in class, messages that so far they may not have been able to systematically study, or even notice.

References Bakhtin, M. (1981), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, M. Holquist (ed.), C.  ­Emerson and M. Holquist (trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press. Bayard, P. (2007), Comment Parler des Livres que l’on n’a pas Lus? Paris: Lés Éditions de Minuit. Carter, R. and Stockwell, P. (eds) (2008), The Language and Literature Reader. London and New York: Routledge. Chaudron, C. (1988), Second Language Classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ellis, R. (2001), ‘Investigating form-focused instruction’. LanguageLearning, 51, (1), 1–46. Gieve, S. and Miller, I. (2006), Understanding the Language Classroom. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Harmer, J. (2007), The Practice of English Language Teaching (4th edn). Harlow: Pearson Education. Leech, G. and Short, M. (1981), Style in Fiction. London and New York: Longman. Medgyes, P. (1994), The Non-Native Teacher. Houndsmills: Macmillan ELT. Noorgaard, N., Busse, B. and Montoro, R. (2010), Key Terms in Stylistics. Chennai: Continuum. Örkény, I. (1997), One Minute Stories, J. Sollosy (trans.). Budapest: Corvina. Örkény, I. ‘In Memoriam Dr K.H.G.’, in Z. Fráter (ed.), Válogatott Egyperces ­Novellák. Available at: http://mek.oszk.hu/06300/06345/06345.htm#14. Accessed 12 January 2011. Pope, R. (1995), Textual Intervention. London and New York: Routledge. —(1998), The English Studies Book. London and New York: Routledge. Rimmon-Kenan, Sh. (1983), Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London and New York: Routledge.



Stylistics for Language Teachers

209

Short, M. (1996), Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose. London and New York: Longman. Sollosy, J. (2009), From the Translator’s Desk [online]. Available at: http://new21. wordpress.com/2009/02/14/on-translating-orkeny%E2%80%99s-one-minutestories/. Accessed 21 December 2009. Simpson, P. (1994), Stylistics: A Resource Book for Students. London: Routledge. Szirák, P. (2008), Örkény István, pályakép. Szekszárd: Palatinus. Wales, K. (2001), A Dictionary of Stylistics. London, New York: Pearson Education. Zerkowitz, J. (2007), ‘Language teaching through Gricean glasses’, in G. Watson and S. Zyngier (eds), Literature and Stylistics for Language Learners. Chippenham and Eastbourne: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 333-346 Zyngier, S. and Fialho, O. (2010), ‘Pedagogical stylistics, literary awareness and empowerment: a critical perspective’. Language and Literature, 19, (1), 13–33.

Appendix In memoriam Dr K.H.G. – Hölderlin ist Ihnen unbekannt? – kérdezte Dr K.H.G., miközben a lódögnek a gödröt ásta. /Hölderlin is Ihnen unbekannt? asked Dr K.H.G. while for the carcass of the horse the pit he was digging./ – Ki volt az? – kérdezte a német o˝r. /Who was that? asked the German guard./ – Aki a Hyperiont írta – magyarázta Dr K.H.G. Nagyon szeretett magyarázni. – A német romantika legnagyobb alakja. És például Heine? /Who wrote Hyperion, explained Dr K.H.G. Very much he loved to explain. German romanticism’s greatest figure. And for example Heine?/ – Kik ezek? – kérdezte az o˝r. /Who are these? asked the guard./ – Költo˝k – mondta Dr K.H.G. – Schiller nevét sem ismeri? /Poets, said Dr K.H.G. Schiller’s name you don’t know either?/ – De ismerem – mondta a német o˝r. /But I know it – said the German guard./ –  És Rilkét? /And Rilke?/ ˝t is – mondta a német o˝r, és paprikavörös lett, és lelo˝tte Dr K.H.G.-t. – O /Him too, said the German guard and paprika red turned and shot Dr K.H.G./

210

Index Aarseth, E.  159 action  33, 48, 69, 97, 101–6, 118, 198–9, 207–8 action research  207–8 active learning  78, 97, 99, 101 ad hoc transformation  35 addressee-centric approach  128 Aguilar, M.  130 Alamargot, D.  130 Allington, D.  29, 55 alliteration  49, 84–5, 88, 95, 102, 188 alliterative  39, 49 allusion  13, 15 Altmayer, C.  150 Amis, M.  102 analepsis  170 analogy  3, 35, 47, 53, 96, 102 analysis  2–5, 11–26, 29, 32, 35, 39–41, 48–50, 52–6, 62, 65–71, 80–3, 86, 89, 91, 98–9, 101, 113–24, 131, 137–8, 144–5, 150, 152, 159–61, 166, 171, 175, 182, 186, 190, 193–6, 199–200, 202–4, 207–8 analytical statement  53 anaphoric reference  28, 32 Anderson, L. W.  80–1 angle  92, 204 Anglo-Saxon poetic patterning  49–50 application  2, 24, 40, 45, 48, 53–5, 60, 80–2, 86, 88, 98, 114, 158–9, 182, 194 applied linguistics  1, 52, 131, 147, 179, 187, 194 appreciation  3, 52, 56, 106 Arens, K.  150 assessment  29, 59, 64–5, 97, 99, 101, 106–9, 110n. 6, 161 assonance  188 attention  39, 47–8, 66, 68–9, 100, 103–4, 117, 127, 134, 138, 143, 148, 151, 179, 182, 186–8, 191, 203, 207

attentional scanning  48 attenuated focalization  105 attitude  13, 55, 59, 69, 204 attitudinal sub-world  172 Attridge, D.  56 Auerbach, E.  106 Augustyn, J. S.  72 authorial style  113 awareness raising  189 Bakhtin, M.  103, 202 Bayard, P.  196, 203 Bell, A.  167 Bellard-Thomson, C. A.  6, 159 Bennett, M. J.  144 Berber-Sardinha, T.  65 Bereiter, C.  130 Bergen, B.  72 Berkowitz, P.  58, 72 Besmeres, M.  149 Bex, T.  145 Biggs, J.  160 Bishop, W.  100 Black, E.  145 blend  33–8, 42n. 5, 71, 102, 201 blended learning  158 blending  33 Bloom, B. S.  79, 82, 86 BNC see British National Corpus (BNC) Boers, F.  179, 181–2, 188–9 Bolter, D. J.  158 Bonwell, C. C.  97, 101 Booth, W. C.  2 bottom-up representation  5–6, 25, 120, 196, 198–9 Boulter, A.  98, 103, 107 Bourdieu, P.  155n. 2 Bowring, M.  59 Breen, M. P.  1 British National Corpus (BNC)  116, 119, 121

212

Index

Brooks, C.  11 Brooks, F.  99 Bruce, I.  130 Brumfit, C.  113 Brunyé, T.  72 Burke, M.  1, 3–4, 6, 58–9, 77–95, 145, 147 Busse, B.  51, 122, 205 Byram, K.  150 Byrnes, H.  147, 150 Cameron, L.  180, 183, 185 Campbell, P.  64 Candlin, C. N.  114, 130 Canning, P.  24–42 Carey, R.  64 Carroli, P.  150 Carter, R.  1, 51, 58–9, 113, 146–7, 205 cataphoric reference  32 categorical statements  204 category  19, 27, 36, 39, 77, 79, 82, 94, 94n. 1, 121 Chang, N.  72 Chanquoy, L.  130 Charteris-Black, J.  180 Chatman, S.  46, 108 Chavez, M.  146 choice  21, 47, 51, 90, 104, 106, 137–8, 199, 201 Clark, U.  1, 58, 144, 148 clausal structures  40 cline  50, 77–9, 94, 95n. 5, 104, 195 close reading  59, 98–9 cloze procedure  25 cloze test  3, 26, 28–9, 31–2, 37–8 clues  15, 35, 143 cognitive, constructs  17 frame  27 grammar  48 jolt  27, 38 linguistics  5, 48, 117, 180–1, 195 poetics  3, 45, 56, 154 processes  28–30, 32, 126, 128, 130 psychology  26 stylistics  25, 94n. 1, 105, 161, 164, 172–3 coherence  148, 186, 199, 204 cohesion  204

collocation  50–1, 116, 120 communication  14, 16, 79, 126, 129–31, 139–40, 159, 191 communication model  103 communicative discourse  19 composition  3, 84, 130 comprehension  33, 72, 80–2, 87, 126, 136, 163, 189–90 conceptual, frameworks  28 integration theory  3, 24–42 mapping  183 metaphor  183 snapshot  38 conceptualization  5, 190 concordance  26, 28, 31, 117, 119, 121–2 congruent  27, 31–2, 142 connotations  116, 121 connotative  103 consciousness  4, 54–5 constraints  31, 33, 137, 142, 147, 149–51, 154 construal  48 construction grammars  180 contact pragmatics  145, 148–9, 152 context  12, 14–20, 23, 25, 32, 40, 46, 48, 50–2, 60, 70, 99, 102, 128, 133, 143–6, 150, 154, 159–62, 185, 194, 201 contextual cues  28 contextual environment  15 contextual meaning  195 contextualization  14, 143–4 conversation analysis  5, 190 conversational implicature  128 Cook, G.  17, 162 core sense  185 corpus (corpora)  4, 6, 54, 65–7, 69–70, 113, 115–20, 122–3, 184–6, 194 corpus linguistics  5, 65, 113, 117, 122–3, 149, 183–4, 190 corpus stylistics  4, 113–24 corpus-assisted stylistics  115–16, 122–3 corpus-based stylistics  116–23 corpus-derived theory  117 corpus-driven linguistics  117 countergrammar  37 Crane, C.  146 creation  4, 95, 97, 106, 116



Index

creative invention  56 creative process  97 creative writing  3–4, 77, 79, 84, 86–92, 96–110 Crismore, A.  130 critical, awareness  152 creativity  4, 98, 100–1, 107 linguistics  24 pedagogy  60 reflection  98 theory  53, 97, 99, 108 critical-creative paradigm  109 critique  40 Croft, W.  48 cross-linguistic differences  202 Cruse, D. A.  48 Csábi, S.  179 cultural field  155n. 2 cultural pattern  149–51, 153 Dancygier, B.  33, 36 Dawson, P.  107 deep processing  187, 191 defamiliarization  39–40 deficit model  146 definition  11, 16, 56, 67, 102–3, 120, 171, 195, 205 deictic, centre  19 expressions/words  19–20 shift theory  103, 106 sub-world  172 deictics  19–21 Deignan, A.  180, 183–5 deixis  19–22, 99 del Carmen Yañez Prieto, M.  146–7 denotative  103 description  46, 52, 54, 60, 84, 97, 102, 137–8, 193, 195–9, 203, 207 deviation  83, 97, 99–100, 102–3, 108–9, 203–5 diachronic motivation  186 dialogue  60, 118, 150, 199, 201–2, 204 diegesis  104–6 digital, literacy  160 migrants  160

213

natives  160 textuality  159, 175 discourse  2, 5, 12, 14–20, 24, 40, 51, 55, 67, 82, 102–4, 106–8, 110n. 3, 114–15, 120, 143, 146, 150, 161–2, 164, 170–2, 182–5, 195, 200 discourse analysis  5, 150, 182, 190, 195 discourse world  20, 103, 161, 164, 170–2 discussion  12–13, 15, 40, 55–6, 62, 64–5, 68, 78–9, 83, 86, 92–4, 99–101, 103, 106, 109, 127, 130, 132–5, 137, 140, 142, 146–7, 149–53, 160–2, 164–74, 184–5, 195, 205 distal deictics  20 distal terms  20 Ditman, T.  72 do Prado Rios, P. A.  147–8, 152 Dobstadt, M.  148, 155n. 3 double-blind tests  54 double-scope blend  36, 42n. 5 Drew, P.  189 dual coding  182 EAP see English for Academic Purposes (EAP) Eco, U.  46 EFL see English as a Foreign Language (EFL) Elbow, P.  97 e-learning  158 elements of narratives (Labov): abstract, orientation, complicating actions, evaluation, resolution, coda  161 ELF see English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) Ellis, N. C.  180, 186 Ellis, R.  195 emergent structure  33, 35–6 Emmott, C.  149 emotional resonances  149–52 English for Academic Purposes (EAP)  79–80, 136–7, 180 English as a Foreign Language (EFL)  5, 60, 179–91 English as a Lingua Franca (ELF)  189–90 English as a Second Language (ESL)  5, 179–91 English for Specific Purposes (ESP)  180 epistemic sub-worlds  172 ESL see English as a Second Language (ESL)

214

Index

ESP see English for Specific Purposes(ESP) ethos  3 etymology  186, 188 Eva-Wood, A. L.  64 evaluation  80–1, 84, 101, 107–10, 161, 163, 165–7 Evans, V.  48 event presentation  198, 204 examination  11, 15, 67, 180, 184 experimental controls  54 extended metaphor  96 face threatening acts  198 falsifiable  113 Fandrych, C.  146 Fauconnier, G.  33, 35–7, 40, 42n. 5 Feak, C. B.  130 Felski, R.  60–1 Fenza, D. W.  100 Fialho, O.  58–72, 60, 147–8, 152 fibula  108 figurative language  102–3, 181 figure  33–6, 78–80, 82, 115, 163, 168–9, 172–4 figures of speech  15, 95 Fischer, O.  49 Fish, S.  60 fixed focalization  105 flashback  105 flouting  204 Flower, L. S.  130 focalization  97, 99, 102, 105–9, 204, 206 folk etymology  187 foregrounding  39, 82–3, 85, 102–3, 114, 116, 149, 204–5 form(s) orientation  166 fragments of knowledge  149–50, 153 frame  16–17, 27, 31, 36–40, 42n. 5, 154 Frazier, L.  33 free indirect discourse  51, 106 Freeman, D. C.  53 Freire, P.  60 frequency  69, 114–15, 120, 185 frozen idioms  182 Fry, H.  160 FTA  204, 206

garden path theory of comprehension  33 Gardner, C.  159 Gavins, J.  154, 172 Geisler, M.  150 generic context  51 genre  15, 150, 184, 205 Glisan, E.  99 Goddard, A.  59 Goodman, S.  158–9, 162 Graff, G.  58, 60 Gramling, D.  145, 149, 155n. 1 grammatical deviance  40 gramography  100 Green, K.  103, 106 Green, M.  48 Gregoriou, C.  171 Gribble, J.  58 Gricean maxims  204 Gutt, E.  130 Hall, G.  179–91 Hanauer, D.  58 hands-on experience with texts  2 Hanks, W.  145 Hardie, A.  117 Harper, G.  99–100 Harrison, T.  11–23 Hayes, J. R.  130 heretical  11 Herman, D.  72 heterodiegetic perspective  106 heterodiegetic point of view  105 high-order thinking skills  81 historical linguistics  51 Holt, E.  189 homodiegetic perspective  4, 101 homonyms  182 Hope, J.  132 Hyland, K.  130 hypertext  5, 158–75, 203 iconicity  49–50, 52 idiom  5, 179–91 idiomatic language  179 imageability  182–3, 186 imagery  15, 18, 61 imagined inference  4, 126–40



Index

implied reader  46, 154 inference  4, 16, 126–40 Ingarden, R.  54 input space  35 instructions  3, 31, 58–72, 78, 96, 133, 193 intention  129, 202, 206 interaction  19, 39, 103, 126, 130, 150, 154, 190, 205–7 interdisciplinarity  97, 99, 110 interdisciplinary stylistics  195 interlingual differences  203 interpretation  6, 15, 19, 25, 29, 32–40, 52, 59–63, 65, 70–1, 126–7, 129–30, 134, 140, 144, 148, 185, 193, 195–203, 205, 208 interpretative paradigm  40 interpretive reading  62–5, 71 intertextuality  15, 200, 204 intradiegetic  105 intradiegetic narration  105 invention  3, 56, 60, 95n. 5, 102 Iser, W.  46 Jakobson, R.  103 Jakobson’s axis of combination  39 Jeffries, L.  114 Johnson, M.  183, 188 Joyce, J.  62, 64 judgements  101, 103–4, 107–8, 163 Kern, R.  147 Ketteridge, S.  160 knowledge  2, 5, 15–16, 20, 24, 31, 36, 42n. 3, 45, 60, 80–1, 83, 86–93, 100, 105, 107–8, 139, 148–50, 153–4, 161, 175, 182, 187, 189–90, 193 knowledge schema  17–18 Kramsch, C.  143, 147, 149–51 Krathwohl, D. R.  80–1 Krueger, C.  144 Kuiken, D.  39–40, 61–2, 64, 149 Labov, W.  55, 161, 163, 165, 167–8, 174 Lakoff, G.  180, 182–3, 188 Lambrou, M.  51 Landow, G.  159, 167 Langacker, R.  48

215

language acquisition  79, 148, 180–2 the language–literature split  99 Lantolf, J. P.  150 Laurillard, D.  114 Lazar, G.  179 Lear, E.  51–2, 56 learning environment  24, 86, 100, 158, 160 Leech, G. N.  16, 96, 102, 110n. 1, 113, 205 Levine, G.  146 lexical pattern  17 lexical semantics  3, 24–44 lexicon  182, 187 lexis  3, 27, 50, 96 license of poetic language  11 Lindstromberg, S.  181–2, 188–9 linguistic deviation  97, 99, 102, 108–9 linguistically encoded meaning  133–4 Lispector, C.  62, 64 literacy  145–51, 154, 160 literacy-based approach  146 literal meanings  185 literariness  97 literary, awareness  59–60, 148 competence  148, 155n. 3 education  58, 60, 72 pragmatics  5, 142–55 reading  29, 45, 54–6, 59, 148, 150–1 Littlemore, J.  150, 184, 186, 190 logos  3 Louw, B.  116, 121, 149 Lovik, T.  146 Low, G.  150, 179, 184, 190 lower-order thinking skills  81, 86 Lowie, W.  184–5, 189 Lyman-Hager, M.  146 Ma, B. K. C.  65 Magnan, S.  146 Mahoney, C. R.  72 mapping  30, 33, 40, 183 Marshall, S.  160 Mattix, M.  148 Maynard, C.  180, 186 McDaniel, S.  99 McEnery, T.  117

216 McIntyre, D.  51, 113–24 McRae, J.  58 meaning potential  40, 128, 145 Medgyes, P.  203 Melin, C.  146 mental space  33 Meredithian sonnet  15, 22 meta-awareness  136–7 meta-language  147, 149, 152–3 metaphor  5, 18, 22, 40, 47–8, 53, 84–5, 96, 99, 103–4, 107–9, 147, 179–91 metaphorical competence  190 metaphorical meanings  185 methodologist tradition  117 Mey, J.  145 Miall, D. S.  39–40, 58–72, 149 Milroy, L.  55 mimesis  104, 106 the mind’s three I’s, identity  33 imagination  33 integration  33 modification  29, 84 Montoro, R.  205 moral imaginings  149–52 motivation  99, 148, 160, 181, 183–9 Mullany, L.  53 Muller, W.  49 multiple focalization  105 mutual cognitive environment  129–30 mutual manifestness  129 Nanny, M.  49 narrative  5, 21, 46, 50–1, 68–70, 86, 103, 105–9, 110n. 3, 158–68, 171, 174–5 comprehension  72 fiction  96–7 methodology  104 Nash, W.  12 Nation, P.  182 natural intuitions  53 neo-Firthian tradition  117 networks of meaning  32, 41 Nielsen, T.  64 node  116, 158

Index Nolden, T.  151 Noorgaard, N.  122, 205 Nystrand, M.  127 O’Halloran, K. A.  115–16, 158 off-centre learning phenomenon  92 Ohmann, R.  25 oratory  11 ordering  81 originating context  51 Örkény, I.  193, 196, 200–2, 206 Owtram, N. T.  126–40 PALA see Poetics and Linguistics ­Association (PALA) paradox  3, 45–56 parallelism  83, 102, 153, 199, 204 paraphrase  2–3, 11–23, 152 paratactic syntax  118 participant observation  55 Partington, A.  180, 184 pathos  3, 28, 30, 37–9, 41, 43–4 pedagogy of stylistics  4, 6, 114, 124 person deictics  19 perspective  4, 15, 17–22, 32, 46–8, 50, 54, 60, 68–71, 83, 92, 99, 105–6, 136–7, 154, 183, 198, 204 phantom book  196, 203 phases of narration (Labov), abstract  5 coda  5 complicating actions  5 evaluation  5 orientation  5 resolution  5 phonetic classification  50 Picken, J.  180, 188 place deictics  19 poetic invention  102 poetic language  11, 103 Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA)  93 point of view  90–1, 97, 101–2, 104–7, 109, 127, 130, 149, 198, 204, 206 polysemous  184 Pope, R.  11, 40, 84, 98, 106 pragmatic inference  128, 131, 140

pragmatics  5, 51, 110n. 5, 128, 142–55 Prensky, M.  160 production  84, 98–9, 126, 142, 145, 147, 151 proficiency  147–8, 179, 190 progymasmata  79 proximal terms  20 Pryll, R.  162, 169, 172, 174 Putnam, T.  118 Quintilian, M. F.  11 Rayner, K.  33 reader response  143, 148 reader-response theory  143, 148 the reader’s paradox  3, 45–56 readerly imposition  47 readerly text  203 Reah, D.  59 reference  12, 16–17, 24, 29–30, 39, 119, 150, 201, 204 register  27, 99, 151, 180 relevance theory  128–30, 140, 151 remembering  3–4, 81–2, 86 replicable  113, 120, 123, 194 representation  12, 16–17, 35, 129, 153 reproduction  84, 147 rhetoric  2–3, 11, 23n. 2, 77, 79–84, 86–7, 92–4, 95nn. 4, 5, 8, 195 rhetorical-stylistic analysis  83 Rice, J.  158 Rimmon-Kenan, Sh.  204 Rios, P. A. P.  60 Rodriguez, A.  107–8, 110n. 6 Rosenblatt, L.  59, 62, 143–4 Sanger, K.  59 scaffolding  137–8 Scardmalia, M.  130 schema  17–18, 150 refreshment  17, 161–2, 164, 170–2, 175 reinforcement  161–2, 164, 170–2 theory  161 Scollon, R.  55 Scott, J.  96–110 see-saw metaphor  103–4 Sell, R.  145

Index

217

semantic, domain  28–9, 121 elaboration  189 fields  26, 31–2, 39–41, 119, 121 framework  27, 29, 32 processing  189 prosody  116, 121, 149 Semino, E.  183 sequential scanning  48 Short, M.  1, 59, 82, 94n. 3, 96, 110n. 1, 113–14, 120, 158, 198, 204–5 showing  19, 98, 107, 165, 187 Sikora, S.  61 silence  44, 118, 207 Simpson, P.  24–42, 99, 158, 161, 194, 205 Simpson-Vlach, R.  180, 186 Sinclair, J.  65 situational meaning  19 skills  3, 78–82, 84, 86–7, 92, 94n. 1, 95n. 4, 98, 100, 107–9, 116, 123, 159, 194, 203 Smith-Sherwood, D.  99 Snyder, I.  162 social linguistics  51 sociolinguistics  51, 182 Sollosy, J.  200–2 Sopcak, P.  64 spatial deictics  19 speech act  204, 206 speech and thought presentation  204 speech presentation  115 Sperber, D.  126, 128–9 stages of writing, planning  130 revising  130 translating  130 Stainton, C.  130 Steen, G.  179 Stegner, W.  100 Stockwell, P.  45–56, 144–5, 148, 161–2, 172, 205 story  4–6, 48, 63, 68, 71, 86, 88, 90, 99, 105, 110n. 3, 120–2, 140, 148, 160–7, 169–72, 174–5, 194, 196–200, 202, 204, 207 Stubbs, M.  120

218 Sturm und Drang movement  142–3 stylistic balance  103 stylization  3, 95n. 5 subjectivity  101, 106–8 sub-world  170–2 summary  48, 118, 142, 165, 184 summary scanning  48 Swaffar, J.  150 Swann, J.  29, 55 Swales, J. M.  130 syntax  15, 40, 82, 97, 118 synthesis  4, 80–1, 84, 101 systemic stylistics  3, 77–95 Szirák, P.  196–7 Taylor, H. A.  72 teaching environments  24 teaching strategy  11 teaching-driven research  1 Teubert, W.  117 text  2–3, 5–6, 11–12, 14–16, 24–5, 38–41, 45, 47, 51–4, 56, 60–6, 68, 70–1, 83–6, 88, 90, 99, 101, 103, 105–6, 113, 116, 120, 122–3, 127, 130–2, 134–6, 142–4, 150–4, 159, 161–6, 170–2, 175, 180, 185, 188, 193–6, 198–205, 207 text type  15, 113, 175 text lisible  203 text scriptible  203 text-world  101, 103, 105–6, 154, 161–2, 164, 170–2 text world analysis  171 textual, evidence  13, 46, 196, 208 imposition  47 intervention  40, 84, 106 organization  48 production  98–9 texture  56, 71, 148, 162 theory of conversation (Grice)  128 Thorne, J. P.  25, 33, 35, 37, 40 time deictics  19 Tognini-Bonelli, E.  117 Toolan, M.  103, 122, 159 top-down reference  5–6, 195–8 Torrance, M.  126, 130

Index transformational generative linguistics  25 translingual literacy  145–51 translinguality  147 triangulation  55 Trimarco, P.  158–75 Trodd, Z.  118–20 turn  17, 22, 50, 81, 92, 99, 116, 136, 147, 149–50, 161, 181, 197, 204, 206 Turner, M.  33, 35–6, 42n. 5 understanding  2–6, 24–5, 33, 39, 45, 55–6, 63, 68, 81–2, 86, 88–90, 98–100, 102, 108, 114, 126–7, 130–1, 133–5, 140, 143–5, 151, 159, 164, 166, 171–2, 181–2, 184, 187–8 Van Loon, J.  108 van Peer, W.  39 Vande Kopple, W.  130 variable focalization  99, 105 verbal patterns  15 Verdonk, P.  11–23, 58, 152 Verspoor, M.  184–5, 189 viewpoint shifts  50 vital relations between mental spaces, analogy  35 category  36 cause–effect  35 change  35 disanalogy  36 identity  35 intentionality  36 part–whole  35–6 property  36 representation  35 role  36 similarity  36 space  35 time  35 uniqueness  36 vocabulary learning  189 Wales, K.  82, 205 Walker, B.  115 Warner, C.  142–55, 155n. 1 Watson, G.  59, 114 Werth, P.  14, 162

Whiteley, S.  55 Widdowson, H. G.  16, 179, 189 Wilson, D.  126, 128–9 Wmatrix (a web-based corpus analysis tool)  119, 121 Woolf, V.  83–4

Index

219

Wordsmith Tools  65 Wright, L.  132 writerly texts  145, 203 Zerkowitz, J.  148, 193–208 Zyngier, S.  1, 58–72, 114, 144–5, 147–8, 152

220



221

222



223

224



225

226



227

228