Communication and Literary Style: The Principle of Inter-Subjectivity

Abstract

To study literary style is to study an aspect of verbal communication. Stylistics, the study of style, has far too long been guided by a theory of communication imported from linguistics. This situation has provided many benefits for linguistics such as making possible the self-definintion of its boundaries. But, at the same time, it has had disastrous consequences for stylistics. From Bally to the new wave of processing stylistics, each new theory of style has been forced to adopt the same explanatory model, a model whose intrinsic flaws have given rise to its own instability and, eventually, to the inevitable overthrow of every one of the new theories. In addition, this situation has produced the dissatisfaction of literary critics who complain that each new stylistic theory only offers a priori, inhouse answers to the question of how readers experience literature. This dissatisfaction, the stylisticians have replied, is due to the unjustified expectations of literary critics and to the foundation of literary criticism on subjectivity and intuition. The result is that, in literary critical talk about the reading experience, anything goes. On the other hand, stylistics-so the story goes-is an attempt to explain what literary texts actually can communicate and how. Stylistics claims that it would be useless to attempt to answer the questions posed by literary critics for the questions themselves presuppose facts about literary communication that are unsupportable, unobservable, and entirely dependent on an unprincipled interpretation of personal experience. I will argue in this paper that the dissatisfaction of literary critics with the explanations offered by stylisticians is not in fact due to the subjective nature of the questions criticism asks of stylistics. Rather it is due to the theory of communication adopted by stylistics, a theory which inevitably leads to conclusions in stylistics which ironically can themselves only appeal to ungrounded assumptions and intuitions for support. The shoe is on the other foot. The model of communication which stylistics has inherited from linguistics (a model which I will call the bi-planar model of communica-