Abstract
… Which incidentally brings me to the delicate and important distinction between the words with and from. Suppose you are advertising … perry. If you say ‘our perry is made … from pears’ … the betting is that it is probably made chiefly from pears; but if you say ‘made with pears’ you generally mean that you use a peck of pears to a ton of turnips, and the law cannot touch you – such are the niceties of our English tongue.
I am obviously very pleased to have been associated with Language and Literature since its very beginning, first as Assistant Editor and then as Editor from 1996 to 2004, and now as a member of the editorial board. In 1992 the Poetics and Linguistics Association, which the journal represents to this day (although contributions, I hasten to add, are not confined to the membership) was already 10 years old and spreading internationally. A survey of the nearly 70 issues in the past 20 years provides an interesting record of the development of stylistics and related fields, and confirms the need for celebration, but without complacency or self-congratulation. That many of the contributors are working in the UK might be partly explained by the fact that the journal, like PALA, was founded in the UK, and is the only stylistics journal to be published in Britain; but the increasing popularity of stylistics as a component in tertiary, and even secondary, education courses particularly in English studies, is also a factor. Overall, contributions have come from over 25 countries around the world (the USA next in frequency to the UK), although very few from eastern Europe, Arabic-speaking regions and, somewhat surprisingly perhaps, Australasia.
By 1992 the predominantly formalist trend in stylistics had been overtaken by the functional and contextual, helped by developments in pragmatics and reader response theory. There was a burgeoning interest in those cognitive elements involved in the processing of texts (see further Busse and McIntyre, 2010: 9). The year 1989 had seen the birth of critical discourse analysis (CDA) with the publication of the now classic Language and Power by Norman Fairclough: bringing to the forefront of attention not only Foucauldian ideas on discourse, but also once again the Hallidayan systemic-functional apparatus. Whilst the Hallidayan framework continues to be popular, particularly in relation to transitivity, the journal itself, again somewhat surprisingly, has not published many articles with a CDA agenda. It is to be hoped, however, that the current interest in a critical stylistics (Jeffries, 2010) on the one hand, and eco-criticism on the other, will lead to meaningful interrogations of the burgeoning public documents relating to science, the environment and consumerism. Consistently popular in the journal have been articles that can be covered under a broad cognitive stylistics heading: including schema theory, mental spaces, blending, conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) and text world theory (TWT). The past 20 years has seen the dramatic rise in computer-assisted, large-scale corpora analysis, and this is reflected in many contributions also. Stylometric analyses seem no longer fashionable; but it is to be hoped that in future more diachronic studies will be published in the journal from the corpus stylistic perspective, as indeed more forensic linguistic studies.
It is the characteristic of stylistics overall to be open to a variety of methodologies and approaches, theory and practice interpenetrating, and at any one moment in time. Each issue of the journal in any and every year has nicely illustrated this. Philosophies of language are matched by theories of literature; feminist stylistics sits alongside classical rhetoric and politeness theory; translation theory alongside Bakhtin and relevance theory. It is also the characteristic of stylistics to resurrect, reappraise and re-apply frameworks of analysis. So the journal has witnessed on-going refinements in foregrounding theory and speech and thought presentation, for example. But if, as John Douthwaite and I have written elsewhere, there is no single method of approach, there is always a single-minded ‘strategic and scrupulous focus on close analysis’, as the means to an ‘illumination of textual interpretation or function’ (2010: 3). A fresh look at methodologies or frameworks leads inevitably to a pleasurably productive reappraisal of well-known texts, a de-familiarisation in Formalist terms.
At the heart of stylistics, and at the heart of the journal, is the ‘text’, and its ‘style’, however broadly and variously these significant terms are defined. In the new (3rd) edition of my Dictionary of Stylistics (2011) my sub-headings for style have increased to 10, but I am not sure even now that I have captured its essence: motivated choice, perhaps? As Ron Carter rightly notes (this issue) style is essentially unstable, dynamic (styling), as well as static. The journal itself can be seen as a celebration of text types and of style in all their polyphonic, Bakhtinian diversity and richness. Poetry from the medieval period to the present is well represented; and the novel most popularly of all the prime literary genres, if predominantly focused on the 20th century: reflecting current trends in tertiary education no doubt. Similarly, studies of dramatists jump from Shakespeare to the present day: there is an unfortunate lacuna between. But the rise of postcolonialism in the past 20 years means that there is a wide range of anglophone writings now being explored, with a parallel interest in code-switching, creolism, diasporas and bilingualism. Attention, however, is not only paid to English literature: 23 different languages have been represented in the journal so far, including Galician, Norse, Luxembourgish, Flemish and Afrikaans. A surprising omission, however, in literary genres so far analysed is writing for children. Non-literary texts, or literature with a small ‘l’, reveal a similar variety: manga comics, adverts, pop music, scientific discourse, camp talk, political writings, the Bible and spiritual mediumship; a variety intensified in recent years by articles reflecting the rise of computer-mediated types of communication (CMC). In the next 20 years multi-modality is likely to feature prominently in stylistic analysis, with the ever-increasing popularity of e-discourses, and also of cultural and media studies in higher education. Particular aspects or stylistic features recur frequently as objects of analysis: point of view, narrative devices and metaphor. There have been very precise foci on pronouns, pseudo-clefts, apposition, irony, presupposition, stance, adverbs, deixis, negation and cohesion; on formulaic language and lexical morphology; on rhythm and metre.
What joins all the contributions together, and will continue to do so in the future, is a fascination, even obsession, with distinctions of meaning and with language in use. As Ron Carter and Peter Stockwell state in their own ‘retrospect and prospect’ (2008: 299), stylisticians are ‘engaged and passionate’ about verbal art of all kinds; and they strive continually to improve their knowledge of how language works in texts (my italics). Etymologically, style (stylus) was an instrument for writing, a kind of pen, and came to mean ‘manner of writing’ by metonymic change. I would like to think that the incisiveness of that instrument still reverberates, and that as stylisticians we remain sharp to the weighty implications of any choice of features for the framing of different realities in literary text worlds and everyday life. Eighty years on, my epigraph from Dorothy L Sayers is still relevant.