The blomsbury companiion to stylistics

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The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

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Bloomsbury Companions
Bloomsbury Companion to Cognitive Linguistics, edited by Jeannette Littlemore
and John R. Taylor
Bloomsbury Companion to Lexicography, edited by Howard Jackson
Bloomsbury Companion to, M.A.K. Halliday, edited by Jonathan J. Webster
Bloomsbury Companion to Phonetics, edited by Mark J. Jones and
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Bloomsbury Companion to Syntax, edited by Silvia Luraghi and Claudia Parodi
Continuum Companion to Discourse Analysis, edited by Ken Hyland and
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Continuum Companion to Historical Linguistics, edited by Silvia Luraghi and
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The Bloomsbury
­Companion to
Stylistics
Edited by

Violeta Sotirova

Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY


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Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc





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BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published 2016
© Violeta Sotirova and Contributors, 2016
Chapter 17, Defamiliarization and Foregrounding © Catherine Emmott and Marc Alexander, 2015
Violeta Sotirova has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988,
to be identified as the Editor of this work.
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-6005-8
ePDF: 978-1-4411-4320-4
ePub: 978-1-4411-4325-9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics / edited by Violeta Sotirova.
pages cm. – (Bloomsbury companions)

ISBN 978-1-4411-4325-9 (epub) – ISBN 978-1-4411-6005-8 (hardback) –
ISBN 978-1-4411-4320-4 (epdf) 1. English language–Style. 2. English language–Versification.
3. Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.) 4. Style, Literary. I. Sotirova, Violeta, editor.
PE1421.B56 2015
808’.042–dc23
2015010278

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Contents
Part I The Discipline of Stylistics
1

Introduction
Violeta Sotirova

3

Part II Theoretical Approaches and Research Methods
2

Structuralism and Stylistics
Linda Pillière

21

3

Generative Grammar and Stylistics
Andrew Caink

37

4

Functional Stylistics
Benedict Lin

57

5

Pragmatics and Stylistics
Siobhan Chapman

78

6

Discourse Stylistics
Marina Lambrou

92

7

Cognitive Stylistics
David West

109

8

Feminist Stylistics
Clare Walsh

122

9

Corpus Stylistics
Michaela Mahlberg

139

10

Critical Stylistics
Lesley Jeffries

157

11

New Historical Stylistics
Beatrix Busse

177

12

Empirical Stylistics
Frank Hakemulder and Willie van Peer

189

13

Pedagogical Stylistics: Charting Outcomes
Sonia Zyngier and Olivia Fialho

208


Contents

14

Stylistics and Translation
Jean Boase-Beier

231

15

Stylistics and Literary Theory

Geoff Hall

244

16

Sociolinguistics and Stylistics
Sylvia Adamson

263

Part III Current Areas of Research
17Defamiliarization and Foregrounding
Catherine Emmott and Marc Alexander

289

18

Metaphor
Gerard Steen

308

19

Mind-Style
David L. Hoover

325

20

Narrative Point of View
Joe Bray

341

21

Speech and Thought Presentation
Reiko Ikeo

356

22

Consciousness
Eric Rundquist

380

23

Deixis in Literature
Keith Green

400

24

Dialect in Literature
Jane Hodson

416

25

Dialogue
Dan McIntyre

430

26

Text-Worlds
Joanna Gavins

444

27

Texture
Peter Stockwell

458

28

Iconicity

Christina Ljungberg

474

29

Narrativity
Yanna Popova

488

vi


Contents

30

Emotion
Sara Whiteley

507

31

Verse
Nigel Fabb

523

32

Odd Pronominal Narratives
Manuel Jobert

537

33

Irony
Massimiliano Morini

553

Part IV Genres and Periods
34

Old English Style
Sara M. Pons-Sanz

569

35

Middle English Style
Louise Sylvester

583

36

Early Modern Style
Sylvia Adamson

607

37

The Poetics of Everyday Discourse
Jessica Mason and Ronald Carter

631

38

Dramatic Discourse
Sarah Grandage

646

39

Style in Popular Literature
Rocío Montoro

671

40

Style in World Englishes Literature

E. Dawson Varughese

688

Author Index
Subject Index
Literary Writers and Texts

703
715
726

vii


viii


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Part I
The Discipline of Stylistics

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1

Introduction

The Discipline of Stylistics
Violeta Sotirova, University of Nottingham

Stylistics as a movement within linguistics was the product of a number of
­intellectual pursuits which converged in Middle- and Eastern-European
philological circles in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The Jena
School of Romance Philology, led by Meyer-Lübke, trained two of the finest
philologists involved in inaugurating the discipline of stylistics in Germany:
Leo Spitzer (1948) and Karl Vossler (1932). The French linguist and student of
Saussure, Charles Bally, extended Saussurean Structuralism to include in it
a theory of style (1909). But by far the most significant influence on modern
­stylistics is the work of the Russian Formalists.
The theoretical foundations of modern stylistics were laid by the Russian
Formalists and Czech Structuralists, working at a time, at the beginning of
the twentieth century, marked by incredible intellectual activity. Although
Erlich deems ‘the beginnings of Russian Formalism’ to have been ‘anything
but spectacular’ (1980: 63), the ideas of these young scholars about the nature
of literature were subsequently exported to America and Western Europe by
Roman Jakobson, and they formed the basis of such influential movements as
French Structuralism. Moreover, these ideas still underlie much of the theoretical discourse of those disciplines concerned with the study of literature. The
non-spectacular character of the two circles in which Russian Formalism originates – the Moscow Linguistic Circle, founded in 1915 with Jakobson as its most
prominent junior member, and the Petersburg Opojaz (Obščestvo izučenija
poetičeskogo jazyka [Society for the study of poetic language]), founded in 1914
with Šklovsky, Èjxenbaum and Tynjanov as most prominent members – was
due to the fact that they ‘were at first simply small discussion groups, where
young philologists exchanged ideas on fundamental problems of literary
­theory’ (Erlich 1980: 63–4).
The question that prompted the stirring up of activity, the theoretical articles
and debates that occupied these scholars, was the question of what literature
was, or rather, as redefined by Jakobson, the question of what ‘literariness’ was:

‘The object of study in literary science is not literature but “literariness,” that is
what makes a given work a literary work’ (Jakobson 1921; cited in Èjxenbaum
3


The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

2002[1927]: 36). The characteristic aim from the very start was ‘to create an
autonomous discipline of literary studies based on the specific properties of
literary material’ (Èjxenbaum 2002[1927]: 4).
And the answer to the question of ‘literariness’ that led to the foundation
of the discipline of stylistics (or, as the Formalists called it, poetics) was that
literature could not be defined in any other way but by its linguistic make-up.
Literature, for the Russian Formalists, was made of language, and this claim
remained influential for decades to come: ‘[t]he novelist’s medium is language:
whatever he does, qua novelist, he does in and through language’ (Lodge 1984:
ix). Its definition, therefore, had to focus, first of all, on what literary language
was. This, of course, could only be done in relation to other kinds of language,
or in Èjxenbaum’s words, as a sort of ‘methodological procedure’ during which
‘the opposition between “poetic” language and “practical” language’ had to be
established (Èjxenbaum 2002[1927]: 8).
Thus, the distinctiveness of literary language became the essence of a theory
of literature. To this day, stylistics is concerned with the study of literary language, and for some stylisticians this, as opposed to literary criticism, is the
study proper of literature:
Literary criticism has settled recently into a paradigm which is improper
and marginalising. … literary scholarship has become an arid landscape of
cultural history. Contexts and biographies, influences and allusions, multiple
edited textual variants of literary works and their place in social history have
become the focus of concern. … engagement with text, textuality and texture
has largely disappeared from the profession. … Rational thought, discipline,

systematicity, clarity of expression, transparency of argument, evidentiality
and analytical knowledge have become the preserve of the few. (Stockwell
2009: 1)
In fact, when making this provocative declaration, Stockwell seems to be echoing the sentiments expressed almost a century earlier by Jakobson:
The historians of literature have helped themselves to everything –
environment, psychology, politics, philosophy. Instead of a science of
literature, they have worked up a concoction of home-made disciplines.
They seem to have forgotten that those subjects pertain to their own fields of
study – to the history of philosophy, the history of culture, psychology, and
so on. … (Jakobson 1921; cited in Èjxenbaum 2002[1927]: 8)
What Jakobson also advocated at this early stage in the formation of the discipline was that ‘[b]ecause the main subject of poetics is the differentia specifica of verbal art in relation to other arts and in relation to other kinds of
4


Introduction

verbal behaviour, poetics is entitled to the leading place in literary studies’
(1996[1960]: 10).
But modern stylisticians have felt somewhat uneasy in acknowledging the
influence of Russian Formalism and have felt the need to disassociate themselves from anything too ‘formalist’: ‘Of course’, write Carter and Stockwell,
‘the notion of literariness makes no sense within a Formalist or Structuralist
paradigm, since a large part of what is literary depends on the social, institutional and ideological conditions of production and interpretation’ (2008: 293).
Jeffries and McIntyre also point out that the Formalist attempt to establish a
division between literary language and ‘practical’ language was ‘misconstrued’
and argue a similar point that ‘[l]iterariness … is not a quality of a text, rather
it is a concept belonging to a specific genre’ and that it involves ‘contextual
(social and cultural) aspects’ (2010: 2). Some of this uneasiness, I believe, stems
from the pressure that more critically-minded literary scholars have exerted on
stylistics when claiming that Jakobson, and by extension the whole Formalist
and Structuralist movement, excludes a major component of the interpretative

and analytical process of reading literature – the reader – and that this is ‘part of
a wider elision of the cultural determination of literature itself’ (Attridge 1996:
40–1; see also Fish 1980).
It is not clear, however, how an analysis of literary language can be
‘un-Formalist’, no matter how rich the cultural, historical, readerly contexts that
are evoked might be, given that one of the primary disciplines informing this
analysis is the scientific discipline of linguistics. And it is also the case that some
of the best examples of stylistic scholarship remain the ones that are linguistically most rigorous. So, the renunciation of the formal method might appear at
times to be an expression of an anxiety of influence and an attempt to address
literary critical attacks rather than a true dissociation of theory and method.
While Formalist poetics has produced some very descriptive linguistic analyses of literary works, its theoretical legacy is wider than the strict linguistic
focus of some of its practical applications. The wider and richer scope of modern stylistics, therefore, has exceeded the practical applications of Formalism,
but its theoretical foundations are nevertheless rooted in the ideas of Russian
Formalism, which was anything but ahistorical or lacking in cultural awareness.
In the remainder of this introduction, I will chart some of these theoretical
ideas and concepts that remain fundamental to the discipline of stylistics, in
both its past and present developments.
The name Formalism signifies for the Formalists not a preoccupation with
the text as an artefact. Its significance is historically and culturally contingent; as
Èjxenbaum points out, it arises out of a need to make it clear that the Formalists
no longer believe in a separation of form from content, but rather want ‘to foster
the analysis of form itself – form understood as content’ (2002[1927]: 13). This
belief that form is central to the understanding of content – or in its extreme
5


The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

version that form is content – is what still underlies the endeavours of presentday stylistics.
Literature is precisely that use of language that makes form palpable, that

forces us to focus on the verbal texture and structure of the literary work as
much as on the meanings expressed through its language, that prolongs the
act of perception and interpretation through its difficult forms. In Šklovsky’s
famous dictum:
Habitualisation devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of
war. … And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to
make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart
the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.
The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult,
to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process
of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a
way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.
(Šklovsky 1965[1917]: 12)
As a theory of literature, Formalism promotes the belief that literature is unlike
any other form of language precisely because it defamiliarizes the familiar –
it ‘make[s] the stone stony’. Although the criticism levelled at the Formalists’
belief of a separation between literary language and ‘practical’ language is valid
and well founded (Simpson 1993) and the evidence pointing to the creative and
poetic resources of spoken language is incontestable (Carter 2004), the power
of literary language cannot be explained away too easily with its institutional
sanctioning alone, nor can it be captured fully by alluding to models of the
common cognitive processing of language, such as schema theory. Šklovsky’s
concept of defamiliarization, therefore, remains at the core of any stylistic endeavour, because stylistics is concerned with the palpability and unfamiliarity of the
language of the literary text which makes the reality portrayed in it palpable
and unfamiliar. By this I do not mean that outlandish experiences are described
in the text, or that the plot contains unexpected twists, or even that the text
abounds in unusual images. Reality and our experience of it is made palpable
and unfamiliar through particular verbal patterning, which may sometimes
manifest itself as the opposite of metaphorical and rhetorical flourishes. Or, as
Šklovsky asserts:

Many still believe, then, that thinking in images – thinking in specific
scenes of ‘roads and landscape’ and ‘furrows and boundaries’ – is the chief
characteristic of poetry. … Images are given to poets; the ability to remember
them is far more important than the ability to create them. (Šklovsky
1965[1917]: 7)
6


Introduction

Thus, even a sophisticated use of metaphor is not a prerequisite for the power
of literature. Rather, it resides, as Šklovsky and the Formalists tried to show,
in the artful use of language in any of its forms and on any of its levels. Such
artful use of language may involve simple repetition or the challenging of an
established norm in the form of plain language resembling ‘ordinary’ speech.
The study of a particular device was not conducted in isolation by describing
the device alone. It was done against the background of generic and historic
norms in order to gauge its full significance.
The awareness of literary history that the Formalists demonstrate in their
writings is something that is not just typically overlooked by modern commentators, but is also completely glossed over to the extent that the Formalists
are frequently accused of being ahistorical. However, the fact remains that the
Formalists engage with issues of historicism just as prominently as they engage
with issues of form. This engagement is not done as a purposeless widening of
the scope of literary scholarship, but out of necessity. As Èjxenbaum explains:
‘The transition to the history of literature had come about, not by way of simply
expanding the range of topics for investigation, but as the result of an evolution in the concept of form,’ an evolution that had made it clear that ‘a literary
work is not perceived in isolation’ and that ‘its form produces an impression
against the background of other works, and not on its own’ (2002[1927]: 18). Put
succinctly, ‘Theory itself required our branching out into history’ (Èjxenbaum
2002[1927]: 30). Indeed, modern stylistics can usefully learn to practise a better

awareness of history.
By historicism, the Formalists do not mean the study of biographical detail
or simply situating the work in terms of major historical events of the time
when it was written. This is the kind of historicism that Jakobson and later
Stockwell condemn (see earlier quotes). But for modern stylistics, the history of
form, as the type of historicism advocated by Formalism, often gets lost from
view once a break with historical criticism is established. This is the kind of
historicism that is important in gauging the significance of stylistic forms and
techniques: ‘History gives us what the contemporary situation cannot – a full
measure of material’ (Èjxenbaum 2002[1927]: 33).
The branching into a history of literary style, as early as 1925, when Šklovsky
wrote his essay on Rozanov in О теории прозы [Theory of Prose], also presents
us with a profoundly radical understanding of the historical development of
literature, based on stylistic development. Literary history is not viewed as ‘a
steady advancement toward perfection, like human progress’ (Šklovsky 1925;
cited in Èjxenbaum 2002[1927]: 30), which is what the Formalists deem ‘primitive historicism’ (Èjxenbaum 2002[1927]: 30). It is instead characterized as
‘a struggle involving a destruction of the old unity and new construction out
of the old elements’ (Šklovsky 1925; cited in Èjxenbaum 2002[1927]: 31). For
Šklovsky, ‘literature moves ahead in a broken line’ (Èjxenbaum 2002[1927]:
7


The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

32). Thus, the study of literary history is now announced as the study of ‘the
very process of evolution, the very dynamics of literary forms’, the study of
‘literature as a social phenomenon sui generis’ and not as ‘dependent on other
orders of culture’ (Èjxenbaum 2002[1927]: 33). To fully understand the significance of a stylistic form, one must have an understanding of the historical process of the appropriation and rejection of older forms. In Šklovsky’s
famous words:
Each new school of literature is a revolution – something like the emergence

of a new class. … The defeated line is not annihilated, it does not cease to
exist. It only topples from the crest, drops below for a time of lying fallow,
and may again rise as an ever present pretender to the throne … the new
hegemony is usually not a pure instance of a restoration of earlier form,
but one involving the presence of features from other junior schools, even
features (but now in a subordinate role) inherited from its predecessor on the
throne. (Šklovsky 1925; cited in Èjxenbaum 2002[1927]: 32)
An understanding of the history of literary style is important, as Adamson has
shown (1999a, b), in order to illuminate the fact that Modernist practices of linguistic innovation, for instance, do not occur ex nihilo, but are inherited, albeit
pushed to an extreme, from Romantic attempts to transform literary language
into something that resembles common speech. Or in other words: ‘Modernist
writing typically works by radicalising the techniques of Romantic orality’
(Adamson 1999b: 599). Situating a literary work in a particular historical period
is not enough; the work has to be simultaneously analysed vis-à-vis similar
forms from other periods and also simultaneously assessed in terms of its cultural significance and interaction with wider cultural trends of the period. All
these are difficult to do at once, but stylisticians typically do engage with at
least one of these aspects of analysis. Most often this is the situating of the work
within a particular period. Truly historical approaches that take into account
cultural situatedness and ways of breaking with a tradition are rare (Sotirova
2013; Hodson 2007; Bray 2001), thus pointing to the need of reviving the historicist legacy of Formalism.
As a movement, Formalism is so versatile that apart from its theoretical definitions of literariness and its programmatic statements on literary history, it has
also charted the territory of some of the most important analytical concepts of
modern stylistics: foregrounding, which is especially important in the study of
poetry; and fabula and sjužet, which shape the study of narrative.
Foregrounding is strictly a concept that originates in the Prague School
of Structuralism. Prague Structuralism, however, has a direct link with
Russian Formalism, since one of its central members, Roman Jakobson, had
been a member of the Moscow Linguistic Circle. The term foregrounding is a
8

Introduction

translation of the Czech aktualisace, defined by Jan Mukařovský as ‘the opposite
of automatization’:
Foregrounding is the opposite of automatization, that is the deautomatisation
of an act; the more an act is automatized, the less it is consciously executed;
the more it is foregrounded, the more completely conscious does it become.
Objectively speaking: automatization schematizes an event; foregrounding
means the violation of the scheme. (Mukařovský 2001[1932]: 226)
The comparison that Mukařovský establishes between automatization and
foregrounding is reminiscent of Šklovsky’s opposition between defamiliarization and habitualization. In a similar vein, Mukařovský’s statement contrasts
the automatic processing of what he calls ‘standard language’ with the prolonged and more consciously palpable act of perception triggered by poetic
language. But Mukařovský can also be credited with acknowledging the difficulty of a straightforward division between poetic language and ‘everyday’
language, something that stylisticians have later come to question in Formalist
theories. The difference between the two, he argues, is not quantitative, but
one that consists in ‘the consistency and systematic character of foregrounding’
(Mukařovský 2001[1932]: 227). Thus, standard language for him also makes
use of foregrounding; it also uses forms of repetition and parallelism and violates norms, but it quickly assimilates those forms and automatizes them, in
order to retain focus on the content of the message. In contrast, poetic language
deliberately ‘push[es] communication into the background as the objective of
expression’ and ‘place[s] in the foreground the act of expression’ (Mukařovský
2001[1932]: 227).
This analysis of poetic language as one that foregrounds the palpability of
its linguistic make-up is also echoed by Jakobson when he defines the poetic
function of language as the ‘focus on the message for its own sake’ (Jakobson
1996[1960]: 15), as opposed to the other functions of language – the emotive,
the referential, the conative, the phatic and the metalingual – each of which corresponds to one of the other ‘constitutive factors’ (Jakobson 1996[1960]: 12) in a
speech event: the addresser, the context, the addressee, the contact and the code.
Although Jakobson’s model of communication and his definition of the

poetic function have received heavy criticism (Attridge 1996; Toolan 2010),
Mukařovský’s concept of foregrounding has remained at the centre of stylistic investigation (Leech 1969, 2008; Leech and Short 2004; van Peer 2007; Miall
2007). It has produced some very interesting empirical findings which prove
its validity, that is, its measurable effect on readers (van Peer 1986; Miall and
Kuiken 1994). The fundamental significance of the theory of foregrounding for
stylistics is not just witnessed in the proliferation of studies relating to foregrounding; it forms the very essence of stylistic study per se, because in a
9


The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

sense, all stylistic investigation is concerned with showing what is prominent
or remarkable in the language of a literary work – that is, with foregrounding.
This is also the primary focus of the cognitive concern with texture, albeit from
an angle that considers it as a readerly response rather than a textual pattern
(Stockwell 2009).
Two of the most fundamental concepts in the study of narrative – story and
discourse – also originate in the thought of the Russian Formalists. In a series of
studies, Šklovsky works out a theory of prose that allows him to scrutinise narrative texts in terms of their construction. The theoretical angle that he takes is
closely linked to generic and historic norms and discards the notion of content
as unimportant in the study of narrative texts:
A work of art is perceived against a background of and by association with
other works of art. The form of a work of art is determined by its relationship
with other pre-existing forms. The content of a work of art is invariably
manipulated, it is isolated, ‘silenced’. All works of art, and not only parodies,
are created either as a parallel or an antithesis to some model. The new form
makes its appearance not in order to express a new content, but rather, to replace an
old form that has already outlived its artistic usefulness. (2009[1925]: 20)
It is much more tempting to put content at the forefront of discussion in the case
of narrative than it is in that of poetry. Poetry is more densely patterned to the

extent that its language cannot be lost from view. But for prose, the development of a storyline is something that can easily obscure the construction of the
text, especially since this construction is more difficult to keep in focus over
long stretches of text. The theoretical awareness of form that Šklovsky brings to
the study of narrative has been fundamental to the establishment and development of narratology as a sub-discipline of stylistics. In the words of Scholes:
‘Formalism and Structuralism have indeed made significant contributions to
the poetics of fiction’ (1973: 134).
The distinction between content and construction in narrative texts is defined
by Šklovsky as a distinction between storyline and plot, in the famous concepts
of fabula and sjužet:
The concept of plot (sjužet) is too often confused with a description of the
events in the novel, with what I’d tentatively call the story line (fabula). As a
matter of fact, though, the story line is nothing more than material for plot
formation. In this way, the plot of Eugene Onegin is not the love between
Eugene and Tatiana but the appropriation of that story line in the form of
digressions that interrupt the text. …
The forms of art are explained by the artistic laws that govern them and
not by comparisons with actual life. In order to impede the action of the
10


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Introduction

novel, the artist resorts not to witches and magic potions but to a simple
transposition of its parts. He thereby reveals to us the aesthetic laws that
underlie both of these compositional devices. (Šklovsky 2009[1925]: 170)
Here, again, we see Šklovsky’s characteristic distrust of convoluted or striking
content and of attempts to seek the connections between reality and the text.
Just as he dismisses the poetic image as the defining feature of verbal art, he
rejects the thesis that the power of a narrative text may lie in its twists of content

and in its choice of shocking events. Again, the artistic technique is what defines
the narrative text, and this technique is located in the ‘transposition’ of basic
story events, so much so that he declares a novel like Tristram Shandy to be ‘the
most typical novel in world literature’ (Šklovsky 2009[1925]: 170). The whole of
Structuralist narratology is built around this idea: that narrative is transformed
experience (Genette 1983; Rimmon-Kenan 1983; Toolan 2001).
Although the more recently developed discipline of cognitive narratology
has shifted the focus to ‘the study of mind-relevant aspects of storytelling practices’ (Herman, [2]), that is, to how stories are processed and tracked, to how
story worlds are mentally represented, etc., its reader processing orientation
is still dependent on the basic classifications of text construction put forward
by classical narratology and originating largely in the thought of Russian
Formalism. Some of these new developments, as Herman points out, ‘were
unavailable to story analysts such as Barthes, Genette, Greimas, and Todorov
during the heyday of the structuralist revolution’ (Herman, [4]), but some of
the concerns of cognitive narratology fall outside of the remit of a Formalist
Poetics or clash outright with the theoretical assumptions of the Formalist and
Structuralist schools of thought. Thus, any attempt to relate story worlds to the
real world is not a concern of classical narratology, which focuses on the poetics
of the text itself rather than on the understanding of questions such as ‘when
in history did these events occur, and where geographically?; an inventory of
the characters involved; and a working model of what it was like for these characters to experience the more or less disruptive or non-canonical events that
constitute a core feature of narrative representations’ (Herman, [6]).
Rather than deem Structuralist narratology inadequate in addressing these
issues, it seems to me that there is a fundamental difference in the aesthetic
theories that underpin these two approaches and make them more or less
incompatible. For one of them, the primary concern of an aesthetic theory of
narrative is the cognitive processes that make understanding possible. For the
other, an aesthetic theory proper should account for the palpability of the textual construction. In other words, what is of value is not the extraordinariness
of the image itself or the events of the story and how they may be naturalized by the reader, but the way they are made palpable to the reader through
language.

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The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

There is also a fundamental philosophical difference between these different schools of thought in the understanding of how meaning is interpreted in
language. For Russian Formalism, as for Structuralism, meaning is not gauged
by a mapping of word to world but is based on difference: on how a particular linguistic sign differs from other signs in the system. As Pomorska states:
‘the Opojaz scholars were often attacked for having (allegedly) neglected or
rejected [the problem of meaning in verbal art’ (2002: 278). This attack seems
to have continued throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But as
Pomorska further explains, the Formalists approached this problem not ‘in a
traditional way’, whereby ‘every separate signans was supposed to fit some
signatum, and in which such unity was regarded as steady and universal’;
rather, they approached the problem of meaning ‘in a new and different way’,
whereby ‘the sign acquired meaning only within the system in which it played a
part’ (2002: 278). This understanding of meaning as being based on difference
and opposition with other elements of the text has informed stylistic analysis throughout the decades, not least in the understanding that the text posits its own text-internal norms. The concern with readerly processing or with
mappings between text and reality thus falls outside of the scope of Formalist
Poetics.
Modern stylistics, even when embracing the more interesting aspects of cognitive theory, such as viewing narrative as ‘a sense-making instrument in its
own right, a way of structuring and understanding situations and events’ and
as a ‘tool[.] for thinking’ (Herman, [6]), retains a theoretical and practical focus
on the structural and linguistic artfulness of the text.
Another important narratological concept inherited from Formalist Poetics is
the concept of skaz, first addressed by Èjxenbaum (1978[1918]) and later included
by Mikhail Bakhtin in his typology of prose genres (1984[1929]). Skaz is defined
by Èjxenbaum ‘as the constructional principle of the plotless story’ (2002[1927]:

21). Wolf Schmid relates its definition in The Living Handbook of Narratology to its
etymology. Derived from ‘Russian skazat’ ‘to say, to tell’, skaz ‘is a special type
of narration … characterized by a personal narrator, a simple man of the people
with restricted intellectual horizons and linguistic competence, addressing listeners from his own social milieu in a markedly oral speech’ (Schmid, [2]). This
kind of personalized narrator makes the narrative akin to oral narrative and
the narration becomes a form of stylization whereby elements of orality mimic
the spontaneous and naturally-occurring situation of story-telling. The classic
examples of skaz in Western literature, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and J. D.
Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, adopt the non-standard and very colloquial
variety of a first-person narrator whose voice is made clearly distinct from the
voice of the author. In this way, they dispose of the normally present educated
and standard variety of the authorial narrator, which, in a hierarchy of narrative voices, occupies the supreme position (Adamson 1999b). The identification
12


Introduction

and definition of the concept is thus important for distinguishing between the
different types of narrators and narrative positions that narratology has subsequently gone into investigating.
The crucial significance of the Formalist legacy for modern stylistics can still
be felt, in spite of the limited account of its concepts and theoretical positions
offered here. Modern stylistics is indebted to Formalism both for its theoretical outlook on literature and for its most central concepts shaping the study of
poetic language and narrative structure. Two other Russian thinkers, Bakhtin
(1981[1934–5]; 1984[1963]) and Vološinov (1973[1929]), with their work on novelistic discourse, have also exerted a fundamental influence on the theory of the
novel as a polyphonic genre.
That these new ideas of how to study literature arose at that particular time
is no coincidence, according to some historians of Formalism. As Erlich points
out, the Futurist movement in Russia, with its poetry characterized by extreme
verbal dexterity, ‘was to become one of the main factors behind the emergence
of Russian Formalism’ with its insistence on ‘the need for an adequate system of scientific poetics’ (Erlich 1980: 49). Erlich also reports a striking parallel between Šklovsky’s theory of defamiliarization as the distinctive feature of

art and a statement that Jean Cocteau, a central representative of the Surrealist
movement in France, makes when ‘describ[ing] the mission of poetry’ (Erlich
1980: 179):
‘Suddenly’, wrote Cocteau, ‘as if in a flash, we see the dog, the coach, the
house for the first time. Shortly afterwards habit erases again this potent
image. We pet the dog, we call the coach, we live in a house; we do not see
them anymore’. (Cocteau 1926; cited in Erlich 1980: 179–80)
Erlich goes on to clarify that ‘the striking similarity between the two pronouncements is not to be ascribed to Šklovsky’s influence’ (Erlich 1980: 180), because
there is no evidence that Cocteau would have been familiar with the work of
Šklovsky or any member of Opojaz. But what has to be acknowledged is the fact
that ‘this virtual identity of formulation’ cannot be ‘merely a matter of convergence of views between two essayists who wrote about poetry lovingly and
imaginatively’ (Erlich 1980: 180). And Erlich concludes that:
It is certainly no accident that a statement which sounds at times like a French
rendition of the Opojaz manifesto was made by one who, like Šklovsky,
carried the torch for the literary avant-garde. (Erlich 1980: 180)
The idea that it is not coincidental that Formalism emerges as a literary theory
in what is broadly known as the Modernist period is plausible, because as a
theory of literature that focuses exclusively on language, it coincides with a
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The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

time of most radical experimentation in literary language and all the arts. The
cultural confluence of the two movements thus has to be acknowledged, but
not to the extent that Formalism should be criticized for serving the interests of
a particular literary movement, or, as Erlich puts it, for having an ‘improvised
philosophy of art’ that was ‘as much of a paean for the Russian Futurist movement as it was a contribution to the theory of literature’ (1980: 180). That the
extreme linguistic experimentation laid bare the need for a disassociation of
literary scholarship from biographical and historical criticism, that it exposed

the centrality of language in the construction of a literary work more patently,
is not necessarily a reason for declaring the cultural contingency of Formalist
literary theory. All that this historical coincidence points to is the dependence of
abstract theoretical scholarship on actual artistic manifestation, but it does not
invalidate the relevance of the linguistic turn in literary scholarship to earlier
or later periods.
My final note of homage to Formalism is the mention of Jakobson’s theory
of metaphor and metonymy. Based on Saussure’s theory of the two axes of
language, Jakobson distinguishes between the axis of selection, which he also
calls the metaphoric axis, and the axis of combination, which can be called the
metonymic axis (Jakobson 1987[1956]). This fundamental distinction is unique
to language as a semiotic system and plays an important role as a structuring
principle of the human linguistic ability. Because any linguistic utterance is the
result of the intersection of the two axes, or of both the selection from an appropriate set and its combination into an appropriate sequence, Jakobson claims
that any speech disturbance, as for instance any aphasiac disorder, should affect
one of these two structuring principles. He goes on to show persuasively that
this is indeed the case and that patients with aphasia exhibit either a selectional
disturbance or a combinational disturbance. The similarity disorder would thus
manifest itself in a patient’s inability to select the correct item from a paradigmatic set and may produce sequences that contain only function words signalling syntactic relations, or substitute ‘fork’ for ‘knife’, ‘smoke’ for ‘pipe’, etc.,
based on their contiguous or metonymic relation. A contiguity disorder, on the
other hand, can manifest itself in the dismissal of correct inflections which signal syntactic relationships: for instance, in the use of infinitives instead of the
finite forms of verbs.
This venture into speech disorders is important for Jakobson as it demonstrates that the principle of selection and the principle of combination are both
structuring principles of the brain and of the organisation of discourse. Thus,
he goes on to argue:
The development of a discourse may take place along two different semantic
lines: one topic may lead to another either through their similarity or through
their contiguity. The metaphoric way would be the most appropriate term
14

Introduction

for the first case and the metonymic way for the second, since they find
their most condensed expression in metaphor and metonymy respectively.
(Jakobson 1987[1956]: 110)
But beyond the individual characteristic of a person’s style, the interaction of the
two structuring principles of discourse can characterize a literary work either as
predominantly metaphoric or predominantly metonymic. This does not imply
the surface presence of concrete metaphors or metonymies, although they may
be an effect of the principle that dominates the discourse; it implies that the
structure of the discourse is based on the metaphoric or metonymic principle.
The repetition of a structure, for example, operates along the metaphoric axis,
as the equivalence between parallel lines in verse invites an associative link of
some kind – either of semantic equivalence or of semantic contrast. The drawing
of attention to ‘the heroine’s handbag’ ‘in the scene of Anna Karenina’s suicide’
is a metonymic mode of arrangement, according to Jakobson (1987[1956]: 111).
The significance of the metaphoric or metonymic structuring of a literary
work is then extended from the individual work to the historical periodization
of literature and to the distinctions between different genres. For Jakobson, the
metaphoric process is predominant in poetry and the metonymic in prose. Film
as a genre is predominantly structured according to the metonymic principle.
But these broad-brush generalizations have to be historically nuanced. Thus,
Romanticism and Symbolism as distinct literary movements can be characterized by ‘the primacy of the metaphoric process’, and what Jakobson claims is
‘insufficiently realised’ is also the fact that Realism, ‘which belongs to an intermediary stage between the decline of Romanticism and the rise of Symbolism
and is opposed to both’, is marked by the predominance of the metonymic
principle (Jakobson 1987[1956]: 111). In painting, Cubism is a predominantly
metonymic form and Surrealism is metaphoric. In film, the work of Charlie
Chaplin or the metaphoric montage of Eisenstein are structured according to
the metaphoric principle, albeit the genre in which they work is predominantly

metonymic. The storm scene in King Lear, in spite of belonging to a predominantly metonymic genre, is classed as structured according to the metaphoric
principle by Lodge (1977: 82). Indeed, Lodge (1977) takes up Jakobson’s historical and generic mappings of the metaphoric and metonymic principles to show
how Modernist writers are predominantly metaphoric and how the novel of
consciousness, with its associative links, operates along the metaphoric pole of
representation.
What is important in this historical analysis of literary movements is the conclusion that the metaphoric versus metonymic distinction allows us to reach:
namely, that there is an ‘alternative predominance of one or the other of these
two processes’, ‘an oscillation’ (Jakobson 1987[1956]: 111) that manifests in different literary periods as a pendulum effect, as Lodge describes it (1977: 212),
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The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

with each subsequent generation of writers rejecting the stylistic norms of the
previous one and reversing the mode of discourse organization as one measure
of the shift in taste. This oscillation between two alternatives is, of course, an
oversimplification that does not take into account other distinguishing features
of the style of a period, but it does chime in with Šklovsky’s analysis of literary
history as moving ahead ‘in a broken line’ and as bringing about a revolution
with each new period or movement.
Jakobson should be credited with being the first to extend metaphor and
metonymy from surface tropes to structuring principles, something that
becomes especially important in the treatment of conceptual metaphors proposed by cognitive poetics (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). As ChrzanowskaKluczewska states:
It is to Jakobson (1956) that we owe the idea that figuration can extend far
beyond a phrase, a sentence, a sequence of sentences, or even a short text,
though such a proposal has distant roots in the tropi sermonis of ancient
rhetoric. A ‘large figure’ of traditional and structural stylistics and criticism,
in Jakobson’s understanding of this term, becomes a device for the construal
of entire discourses and especially of narrative (contrary to micro- and
macrofiguration typically associated with poetry). … Thus metafigures are

not only covert but also largely dissociated from overt figuration. (2011: 47)
The legacy of Formalism thus manifests itself in almost every field of presentday stylistic enquiry. The developments, refinements and revisions to Formalist
theories and concepts have been inevitable and will be felt in the course of this
book in almost all its chapters, but so will also their powerful presence. In spite
of the incompatibility between aesthetic principles and beliefs that some stylisticians might feel with Formalism, narratologists and stylisticians of either a
cognitive or a formalist bent often practise a truly interdisciplinary and eclectic
approach. Or, as Jeffries and McIntyre assert, ‘Stylistics … is eclectic in its use
of theory, though it originated in literary theories of Formalism and took on the
theory of Structuralism as developed by Saussure’ (2010: 10) and ‘in addition
to drawing upon a wide range of theories about the nature of language and
particularly the nature of reading, stylistics is eclectic in its use of methodologies’ (2010: 11). Amidst this eclecticism, however, the dominant question that
continues to shape any stylistic enquiry, as formulated by two of the founding
fathers of stylistics in the United Kingdom, is ‘not so much what, as why and
how’ (Leech and Short 1981: 13). This sounds strikingly similar to Pomorska’s
formulation of ‘the question posed’ by the Formalists in relation to literature:
‘not “What is it about?” or “Why and how did it appear?” but “How is it made?”’
(Pomorska 2002: 274).

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