Stylistics routledge English Language Introductions

Activity

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The general tenor of the third stanza is a long way indeed from the discourse of the
seventeenth- or eighteenth-century love poem, although it does create a humorous
play on that discourse frame. In fact, the poem was written in 1926 by the American
wit and socialite Dorothy Parker. What Parker does is to use a kind of style-shift for
comic effect where the echoes of the lyric genre in stanzas one and two give way in
the third stanza to an altogether more prosaic style of language. Constructions like
‘Ah no’, ‘just my luck’ and ‘do you suppose’ signal an informal register of discourse
while in grammar the Subject is brought back to its more common first position in
the clause (‘. . . no one ever sent me yet . . .’).
But the heart of the issue, as far as present discussion is concerned, is that it is
simply not feasible to say that, in comparison with the third, the first two stanzas
are ‘literary language’. It is more the case that a convention of writing is echoed, 
and then is ultimately brought into collision with, the more contemporary idiom
projected in the third verse. If asked outside this context which of the words ‘flow-
eret’ or ‘limousine’ you considered to be ‘literary’, you would have probably opted
for the first one, but as we have just seen both words are perfectly capable of being
pressed into service in a poem. It is a question therefore of how these words func-
tion in context, not of how this or that word sounds in isolation, which is important.
By exploiting a formal convention of writing of the sort mentioned upon earlier,
Parker sets up a twist in expectation that works for comic effect. Echoing other
discourses in new contexts is an important way of generating irony, but here the
echo only becomes clear when the shift in style is delivered in the third stanza.
Parker’s poem is a good illustration, then, of how discourse is open to constant rein-
vigoration and transformation over time. Highlighting this principle, the theoretician
Michel Foucault develops the term 
transdiscursivity
to describe how the rules of
discourse formation in one era become detached from its ‘ulterior transformations’
in later developments (Foucault 1986: 145–6).
Summary
A position which regards literary discourse as impervious to or resistant to linguistic
analysis is utterly at odds with the rationale of modern stylistics. Stylistics is about
interrogating texts, about seeing a text in the context of its other stylistic possibili-
ties. One of the most effective ways of understanding how a text works, as Pope notes
(1995: 1–2), is to challenge it, to play around with it or to intervene in its stylistic
make-up in some way. Upholding the view that ‘literary language’ is somehow outside
the boundaries of the overall language system does little to enable or facilitate this
sort of textual intervention.
It makes sense therefore to treat the concept of ‘literary language’ with a healthy
degree of scepticism. Indeed, a somewhat more useful way of approaching the issue
of stylistic creativity, whether it be found in literature or in other types of discourse,
is through the concept of 
literariness
, a term first coined by Roman Jakobson.
Literariness is a property of texts and contexts and it inheres in patterns of language
in use as opposed to patterns of language in isolation. Crucially, in keeping with
Jakobson’s other important term, the poetic function (B1), literariness is not exclu-
sive to literature. It is instead a principle of expressiveness that transcends literature
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I S T H E R E A ‘ L I T E R A R Y L A N G U A G E ’ ?
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into many types of discourse contexts of which journalism and advertising discourse
are just two preeminent examples. Literariness also accommodates a text’s capacity
to absorb other voices and styles, the sorts of textual techniques witnessed in the
example from Dorothy Parker. This particular theme, the ‘multivoicedness’ of literary
discourse, is the main focus in the following unit.
STYLE, REGISTER AND DIALECT
This unit explores a passage from Irvine Welsh’s controversial novel 
Trainspotting
and develops a sociolinguistically orientated activity based around variations in
dialect, register and style. In order to help focus that analysis, the following sub-unit
introduces some general categories of language variation.
Varieties of language
One of the six components of the model of narrative introduced in A5, 
sociolinguistic
code
is a term referring to the pool of linguistic varieties that both derive from and
shape the social and cultural backdrop to a text. Sociolinguistic code is a key organis-
ing resource not just for narrative but for all types of literary discourse. In the case of
monolingual writing in English, that code will remain largely within the parameters 
of a single language and its subvarieties, although in bilingual writing it is common
for any number of indigenous language varieties to intermix, and often alongside a
‘superstrate’ language like English. Chicano literature, from the border regions of
Mexico and the USA, draws on a sociolinguistic code which combines Spanish,
English and localised American-Indian forms, while in the Nigerian literary context
(embodied in the work of Wole Soyinka, for example), Standard English is mixed with
West African Pidgin English and the indigenous African language, Yoruba. The term
code-switching
is normally used to explain transitions between distinct languages in a
text, and literary code-switching is a sophisticated technique which signals movement
between different spheres of reference and has important consequences for a range of
thematic intentions (see further Hess 1996: 6 and Pratt 1993: 177).
Literary works which remain within the compass of a single language may still
exhibit marked variation in terms of their use of sociolinguistic code. What follows
is a summary of a number of key dimensions of such intra-lingual variation.