Interview: Talking with Michael Toolan about stylistics, coherence, and language teaching

Abstract

Michael Toolan is a stylistician with a particular interest in narrative analysis, creativity, and language in literature. In this interview he talks about his teaching and research, some aspects of narrative studies, and how stylistics research makes increasing use of corpus linguistics and often features multimodality. His single-authored books include The Stylistics of Fiction (1988), Total Speech (1996), Language in Literature (1998) and Narrative (2nd ed., 2001). Much of his work is supervising masters and PhD research at the University of Birmingham, UK, in the areas of corpus linguistic and critical discourse analysis of mass media, stylistic analysis of poetry (especially 20th/21st century), linguistic analysis of literary narratives, and integrational linguistic theory. He was a visiting consultant at Kanda University of International Studies in December 2013.