Stylistics routledge English Language Introductions

Activity
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Activity

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What other areas of discourse (outside ‘literary’ writing) do you know of which
make use of similar techniques in linguistic creativity?
TEACHING GRAMMAR AND STYLE
In this reading, comprising an article written by Ronald Carter, two important issues
in stylistics are raised. The first is to do with the development of a stylistics of poetry,
which Carter addresses by offering a detailed lexico-grammatical analysis of a
‘concrete’ poem written by Edwin Morgan. The second issue concerns pedagogical
stylistics, in respect of which Carter elaborates a programme for teaching about
grammar in the narrower context and for teaching about language and style in the
wider context. Carter’s article makes a number of useful proposals for language
teaching, emphasising further the importance of pedagogical issues and methods in
contemporary stylistics.
A more localised point to note as you read through Carter’s article is that he draws
on the term 
nominal group
in his study. This structure, which is heavily foregrounded
in the poem he analyses, is a cluster of words that has a noun has its main element.
To all intents and purposes, then, it means the same thing as 
noun phrase
, which is
the term that we have been using across the strand to refer to this grammatical feature.
What is stylistics and why can we teach it in different
ways?
Ronald Carter
(reprinted from Mick Short (ed.) 
Reading, Analysing and Teaching Literature
Harlow: Longman, 1989: 161–77).
The nature of stylistics
Given that stylistics is essentially a bridge discipline between linguistics and litera-
ture it is inevitable that there will be arguments about the design of the bridge, its
purpose, the nature of the materials and about the side it should be built from. Some
would even claim it is unnecessary to build the bridge at all. In such a situation there
is always a danger that stylistics can become blinkered by too close an affiliation to
a single mode of operation or to any one ideological position. There is already a
considerable division in the subject between literary stylistics (which is in many
respects an extension of practical criticism) and linguistic stylistics (which seeks the
creation of linguistic models for the analysis of texts – including those convention-
ally thought ‘literary’ and ‘non-literary’). Such divisions can be valuable in the process
of clarifying objectives as well as related analytical and pedagogic strategies, but one
result can be the narrowing of classroom options and/or the consequent reduction
in the number and kinds of academic levels at which stylistics to literature students
can operate. For example, literary stylistics can be more accessible to literature
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T E A C H I N G G R A M M A R A N D S T Y L E
161
D3
Ronald
Carter

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students because it models itself on critical assumptions and procedures already 
fairly well established in the literature classes of upper forms in schools, whereas the
practice of linguistic stylistics tends to require a more thorough acquaintance with
linguistic methodology and argumentation. [. . .]
Off Course
[1]
the golden flood
the weightless seat
the cabin song
the pitch black
the growing beard
the floating crumb
the shining rendezvous
the orbit wisecrack
[5]
the hot spacesuit
the smuggled mouth-organ
the imaginary somersault
the visionary sunrise
the turning continents
the space debris
the golden lifeline
the space walk
the crawling deltas
the camera moon
[10]
the pitch velvet
the rough sleep
the crackling headphone
the space silence
the turning earth
the lifeline continents
the cabin sunrise
the hot flood
the shining spacesuit
the growing moon
[15]
the crackling somersault
the smuggled orbit
the rough moon
the visionary rendezvous
the weightless headphone
the cabin debris
the floating lifeline
the pitch sleep
the crawling camera
the turning silence
[20]
the space crumb
the crackling beard
the orbit mouth-organ
the floating song
Edwin Morgan (1966)
I shall now work through this short text and point to some ways in which it might be
explored in the classroom from within an expanded framework for stylistics. [. . .]