Types of Stylistics

Textualist Stylistics (Textlinguistics):

• Textualist Stylistics (Textlinguistics):
•  This approach was popular at the early stages of the evolution of stylistics as a discipline where linguists viewed literary texts merely as linguistic events and felt literary interpretation, involving thematic concerns or artistic significance, were not of concern to them as linguists, especially as they involved an understanding of the artist’s intention which was hardly subject to the objective verifiability emphasized by the scientific claim of modern linguistics.

Interpretative Stylistics:

• Interpretative Stylistics:
•  This is the practice engaged in by most stylisticians nowadays.
• It involves the analysis of the linguistic data in a (literary) text, the unraveling of the content or artistic value of the text and the marrying of these two.
• As depicted in Leo Spitzer’s philological circle, the interpretative stylistician relates linguistic description to literary appreciation by seeking artistic function and relating it to the linguistic evidence or first seeking the linguistic features in the text and relating it to the artistic motivation. 

Interpretative Stylistics:

• Interpretative Stylistics:
• The belief is that the linguistic patterns are chosen deliberately to express certain artistic or literary goals and that the two can hardly be divorced.
• Interpretative stylisticians see themselves as both linguists and literary critics and integrate the roles of the two scholars.
• This may be seen as the more holistic approach to literary stylistics or the analysis of literary texts in general.

Formalist and Functional Stylistics:

• Formalist and Functional Stylistics:
•  These terms may be viewed as alternatives for textualist stylistics and interpretative stylistics respectively as discussed above.
• Formalist stylistics concentrates on the linguistic forms in the texts, paying little attention to the function of these forms in relation to the overall content of the text.
• Conversely, functional stylistics emphasizes the contextual function that the linguistic elements are used to perform.