EL3221: LITERARY STYLISTICS

Hi students,

There is a new more advanced book on stylistics which has already been placed in the RBR:

Elizabeth Black, Pragmatic Stylistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006.

Although it has 'Pragmatics' in the title, you will notice that it covers much of the ground that we have covered in this module. You may find the book interesting because it offers further or different perspectives on what I have discussed in my lectures. There are also additional material on ideas or concepts that we were not able to cover for this module, given the time constraint and the fact that our course is more elementary than what the book covers. Here are the chapters of the book in relation to our lecture notes:

One question you may want to ask is whether pragmatics is actually this wide. In our module, pragmatics is confined to the study of speech acts, the cooperative principle, and politeness (the first two are dealt with in chapter 2 of Black's book, and politeness in chapter 6). So, for the purpose of this module, we assume by default that we are referring to the narrower definition of pragmatics, unless we are told otherwise.

Best wishes,

A/P Talib 

Hi everyone,

Don't worry. Nothing to do with your essays here! But I cannot help wanting to suggest that you read the following blog entry. It's cut-and-paste plagiarism of the worst kind. So badly done in fact (a little too witty to be done entirely by a computer), that it becomes pretty amusing. Anyway, it's likely that it's done just for fun, by a fan of the pop group, so nothing serious here.

http://songsinthecity.blogspot.com/2005/08/abusing-google-part-one-stylistics.html

Enjoy yourself,

A/P Talib

Hi

There is some discussion on Eminem in the forum. Many of you appreciate his rap, and there was some good discussion on the extract from 'Mockingbird' that I played in class. You are, of course not alone in this, even when one looks at academia. Here is the Nobel prize winning poet and former Professor of poetry at Oxford University, Seamus Heaney, on Eminem:

"There is this guy Eminem. He has created a sense of what is possible.

"He has sent a voltage around a generation.

"He has done this not just through his subversive attitude but also his verbal energy."

The rest of the BBC report on the above is still available online. Heaney's interest in Eminem was brought to my attention by one of my MA students, who studied with Heaney when he was doing creative writing at the University of East Anglia. What he says here indicates that Heaney's interest in Eminem is genuine and the BBC reporter was not merely sensationalising it:

When one of my mentors at UEA, Nobel Laurete Seamus Heaney, first suggested that I listen to Eminem to find my "voice", I almost fainted... Huh? Why the angsty "trailer-trash" with a dysfunctional life and not some other more talented poets like Keats and Pushkin who were more "sophisticated", though they led similar dysfunctional lives? Puzzling... I did watch "8 Mile" and found urban ghetto poetry rather interesting, though I am still unable to incorporate that "fury" into my writings.

Just a penny for your thoughts,

A/P Talib

I have been going through the submissions for the e-quiz. Just in case you are wondering about the marking criteria for the short answers that analyse a linguistic feature or features of the given text, here are some pointers:

• is to the point
• deals with the given passage and does not merely engage in generalisations
• shows a generally correct usage of English
• shows accuracy in the linguistic analysis
• does not merely list the linguistic features, but also engages in stylistic/literary interpretation of the given text
• engages in an interesting, thoughtful, original or unique (but convincing) interpretation of the text

I hope the above will be helpful to you.

Best wishes,

A/P Talib

One of the favourite student questions for a course like this is: well, it's fine for us to analyse this text in this way, but does the author know about what we claim to be in the text? Well, it depends: the author may not know it, may be semi-conscious of it, or may know it very well indeed, better than us! Well, even if the author does not know about it, this does not preclude a linguistic analysis of the text, unless we believe that the author's intention, whether realised or unrealised, is all that matters. Rhyme is one area where the author may know about the devices that he uses very well, even if the terms used are different, and this becomes apparent when the device is used persistently in the text. I was looking at the Wikipedia entry on rapping and this is what it says about rhyme styles in rap:

In classical poetry, rhymes that span many syllables are often considered whimsical, but in hip hop the ability to construct raps with large sets of rhyming syllables is valued. Rap can contain any and all forms of rhyme found in classical poetry such as consonance, assonance, half rhyme, or internal rhyme.

Well, another favourite question (perhaps more a comment), but this time more specific to the learning of the more technical features of poetry, is why study them at all, when we are not going to teach them to kids? You see (the reasoning goes!), kids don't like the technicalities of poetry writing, such as rhyme -- they prefer the barren joy (sans technicalities) of poetry as it is! Hmm! Anyway, I am still annoyed by my secondary school teachers for not teaching me what rhyme was, or not bothering about what it was, even when it appeared, in patterned persistence, in the poetry they taught. Well I eventually learned about it outside school, and a whole load of other technical devices as well. I don't think the attitude of some secondary teachers towards the technicalities of poetry has changed.

Thank God we have rap and hip-hop today, where rhyme and other technicalities are exploited to the hilt. Where else can you find people bothering about mosaic rhymes, making triple rhymes (which were previously thought to be silly) serious, or even, to resort to multi-syllable rhymes to make the meaning of their words more memorable? Yes, they do take poetic tongue twisters seriously. And rhyme is so important to Eminem, for instance, that he makes changes to his English to make words that don't rhyme, rhyme. Outside rap, not all songs rhyme perfectly of course, but their authors still resort to other technicalities of poetry writing, including, well, imperfect rhymes. So the technicalities are still alive in the lyrics of popular music today. Maybe that's why some secondary teachers find they shouldn't be dealing with them, as they have an innate fear of the popular, thinking that students should instead grab the naked content of poetry without knowing about the technicalities that poetry is clothed in. To me, this is not a good way of teaching and learning the language of poetry. Indeed, learning the technicalities will make poetry more relevant to students' everyday lives, when they realise that they could apply some of the concepts to the songs they listen to on the radio or on their mp3 players. A content only approach to poetry will result in an unnecessary and unnatural split in the students' minds between the poetry they learn at school and the lyrics of the songs they listen to or sing.