Stylistics routledge English Language Introductions

Bleak House
[see unit B3 – P.S.] and the opening to Isherwood’s 
Goodbye to Berlin
. We should
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explore here the similar and different effects produced in different literary contexts
by the same linguistic procedures. [. . .]
Comparative textology moves the focus more centrally on to the essentially literary
nature of the text (though the underpinning is consistently by linguistic means) and
allows questions concerning differences between prose and poetry, between writers
from the same period writing in similar ways, about literary movements, etc., and
allows these questions to be generated at an appropriate level of abstractness. One
seminal insight students should derive is that the same linguistic forms can function
in different ways to produce different meanings according to context and according
to the nature of the overlay of effects at other levels of language organisation. As 
we shall see in the next section, interpreting such ‘meanings’ is no simple matter of
one-for-one correlation between form and function.
STUDYING THE ‘NATURE’ OF LITERARINESS
[. . .]
Two basic questions are: what is it in the organisation of the language of a text which
makes it a literary text? how and why does it differ from other discourse types?
Comparative textological investigation is going to be primary here and in its relation
to the poem ‘Off Course’ we should want to return here to such features of the text
as the way punctuation is used, the nature and function of the repetitions and paral-
lelisms, the role of the title and of typography, the way it displays its own language,
the interpenetration or convergence of different linguistic levels in the creation or
constitution of meanings. This may lead to further exploration of plurality of meaning
in literary discourse (the hyperactivity of the signifier), of how different literary
discourses and kinds of reading are socially constituted and of how different cultures
can impose different kinds of ‘reading’. [. . .]
ISSUES TO CONSIDER
Carter sets considerable store by the notion of ‘literariness’ as a concept in and for 
stylistic investigation. Although not attempting to distinguish literature from non-
literature on purely linguistic grounds, Carter, like Jakobson (see B1 and C1), argues
for the existence of a type of linguistic praxis which links and underpins various
creative uses of language, of which literature is (uncontroversially) a preeminent
example. This model of ‘literariness’, and the stylistic theory which informs it, is
fleshed out in the second chapter of Carter and Nash (1990) and this makes for useful
follow-up reading.
Carter flags up many other areas for further study throughout his article. In partic-
ular, or additionally, consider the following suggestions:
❏
With respect to Carter’s call for a ‘comparative textology’, the structures which
make up the poem ‘Off Course’ are like a number of the ‘verb-less’ patterns
observed across this unit which might be classed as 
minor clauses
(A3). That is
not to say that the stylistic effect of these patterns will always be the same, nor
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