Difference between literary and stylistic study in literature
In stylistic study a stylistician studies the style and method that an author uses in his artistic creation. It applies the amplification of linguistics to approach literary texts – to identify the choices and ways a writer uses in weaving a text. It is always a matter of discussion what profit can be gained from linguistic study. A literary work is built up on verbal structures and even a critic much interested in social background and history of literature can scarcely proceed in his study without paying attention to the way in which words are organized. The literature depends on language though the reverse is not necessary just as childhood in absence of manhood may be possible but manhood without childhood is unthinkable. Every literary form is a combination of syntactic units. There may be language without literature but there can be no literature without language.
The main difference between literary and stylistic study is that while literary criticism is an orgy of opinion, stylistic analysis is a submission to the work itself. Literary criticism starts with prefabricated judgments about the author. It provides no accurate description in support of ideas. Long quotations are offered but without proving their significance. The norm of comparison leads nowhere. Except this, literary studies are largely concerned with literary history, incidents of an author’s personal life, sources of his inspiration, political, social and economic history of the age and only at the end arrived at the close considerations of literary work itself. After having a sharp eye on a literary text, literary critic selects features from it to analyze it or to connect it to particular genre or period. It involves explicit value judgments of an individual critic that may be quite different from another literary critic. The stylistic study starts from a positive and identifiable point – the precise verbal manifestation. Graham Hough comments that for a literary critic, “the consideration of a writer’s language frequently comes as a sort of icing on the cake after every other aspect of his work has been dealt with. The claim of stylistics rests essentially on the proposition that the farthest ranges of a writer’s art, the depth of his emotional experience, and the heights of his spiritual insight are expressed only through an examination of his verbal art.” (39)
Stylistic study rescues from mere impressionism and subjectivity by being objective in its orientation. It processes a less intuitive and impersonal method of interpreting a text than a literary critic, based on the language of the text – a scientific discipline. The concentration on linguistic method results in impersonal reproducible truth. At any time, a person can approach the text applying the identical stylistic procedure, or to arrive at the same results. A stylistic critic shows dissatisfaction with what Halliday calls “amateur psychology, armchair philosophy or fictitious social history.” (70) He argues against the philosophical level of how text should be analyzed and for what purpose. A text is an open entity; anyone can approach it without having an eye on the prospect and level of analysis criteria lined-up by critics or writer himself. His main concern is actual verbal texture. The flying of imaginative world is checked and footing is always on the grass root level.
A literary critic aims to construct a model or searches a moral which explains an individual text, while a stylistic critic points out the way language performs in any text. So, the interpretation offered by stylistic analysis is authentic because it is related to the facts of the texts, not to the judgement of general kind like – Milton was a great poet and only next to Shakespeare. A stylistician jots down the data of the texts (language) to analyze it on the basis of linguistic categories and theories. A linguist would acknowledge that he should not pay preference to some categories at the cost of other because it would not lead to entirely objective purpose. He also stresses on the aesthetic proprieties of language like rhythm, use of figures of speeches and so forth. Katie Wales opines, “the goal of the most stylistics is not simply to describe the formal features of text for their own sake, but in order to show their functional significance for the interpretation of text; or in order to relate literary effects to linguistic ‘causes’ where these are felt to be relevant…” (453) Thus he would have to co-relate all the sections of stylistic devices to reach a cohesive interpretation of the text.
Some critics object that evaluation of grammar in a text destroys its aesthetic level of viewing a text as a complete entity. But the question is raised – Is really the acquisition of how something is manufactured entail to lose pleasure in it? No, it does not happen every time. Imagine a well crafted ship and its adjoining parts. Would the knowledge of how all the parts are interconnected leads to the damage of its aesthetic pleasure? No, it enhances the enjoyment of viewing the ship with the proper knowledge of its parts and their functions. Same happens with text it seems more enjoyable and intelligible with the acquisition of co-relation of its manufacturing parts. The breaking down of text into component parts provides opportunity to evolve each component on its own basic and its relation with other components. It reveals how each sentence is weaved out so cleverly that its changing in position destroys the beauty and rhythm of a text. Leonard B. Meyer interprets:
Style is a replication of patterning whether in human behaviour that results from a series of choices made within some sets of constraints…An individual’s style of speaking and writing for instance, results in large part from lexical, grammatical and syntactical choices made within the constraints of the language and dialect he has learned to use but does not himself create. (21)
Thus, to make his investigations within the text, a stylistic critic has comprehensive methodology and descriptive tools at his disposal. He moves through lexical to grammatical to semantic realm of a literary text.
Works cited
Halliday, M. A. K. “Descriptive Linguistics in Literary Studies.” Linguistic and Literary Style. ed. Donald C Freeman. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston Inc., 1970. 65-80.
Hough, Graham. Style and Stylistics. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972.
Meyer, Leonard B. Towards a Theory of Style. ed. Berel Lang, The Concept of Style Cornell: Cornell, 1979.
Wales, Katie. A Dictionary of Stylistics. London: Longman Inc., 1989.
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