Stylistics: The End of a Tradition

Abstract

THE ANALYSIS Of literary style, stylistics, is essentially the attempt to characterize a work of literature by examining its syntax and vocabulary linguistically and correlating the results of such an examination with something else: the meaning of the work, the nature of its author, the history of the era it was composed in, examples of other kinds of art from the same era. Despite grave disputes about what the language of a work exemplifies and how analyses are to be conducted so that they will be conclusive, verifiable, and cumulative,1 common to all efforts to do stylistics is the basic premise that literature as a phenomenon is by definition a particular kind or special use of language. However, since this premise has never been satisfactorily established, the aim of stylistic analyses is not simply to characterize certain works, authors, periods, etc., but at the same time by this means to discover what particular kind or use of language literature is. Understandably, then, stylistics looms large in modern literary scholarship, for it promises to provide both an inductively established conception of the nature of literature and a means by which literature can be studied as literature. These promises, however, in spite of the enormous effort that has gone into stylistics, particularly since the turn of the century, have not been fulfilled, and in the monograph, Style: The Problem and Its Solution,2 I attempt to