Researching Language in Literature

Abstract

The language of literary texts has often been argued to be a reason for using literary texts in education (expanding vocabulary, challenging horizons, promoting pleasure and creativity in natural ways) but also for not using it (difficulty, ambiguity, obscurity, old-fashioned, non-standard, unrepresentative). Again, some educationists have advocated the conscious and deliberate exploration of the language of literary texts in class (‘stylistics’ broadly conceived), while others denounce the withering touch of the intellect on more unmediated ‘natural’ ‘responses’ to stories and poems, though language is particularly difficult to take for granted in foreign language learning contexts. In Chapter 4 I examine some empirical studies of the language of some literary texts or ‘literary language’, and how such studies have informed or could inform teaching and learning activities. A basic position, already established in discussing literature as discourse (Chapter 1), is that literary texts can be best understood in comparison with non-literary texts, because there are different tendencies, but they are subtle and not dichotomous differences. Rather a discourse-based approach to literature looks for continuities as well as differences between the language of literary and less obviously literary texts (contrary positions are argued in Cook 1986 and Miall 2006).