The Origin of Stylistics

The Origin of
Stylistics
Made and presented by
Alisa Shevtsova and Maria Zubanova
STYLISTICS
Stylistics, a branch of applied linguistics, is
the study and interpretation of texts of all
types and/or spoken language in regard to
their linguistic and tonal style, where style is
the particular variety of language used by
different individuals and/or in different
situations or settings.
ANCIENT GREECE
Style, as we know it today, has its origins back to the ancient rhetoric which was called
"lexis" by the Greeks and "elocutio" by the Romans. The ancient rhetoric was divided
into five laws.
The first law was made by generating and discovering textual material. This led to some
arguments based on one of the Aristotelian proofs, logos, ethos, and pathos. The second
law was made by the use of that material for ideal impact in any circumstances. This led
to the constitution of the third law which stylized the textual material. Last but not least
the fourth and fifth laws were made by committing the material to memory and
delivering it, if it was in the form of speech.
ANCIENT GREECE
The third law of rhetoric was based on two
forms: the first form investigated the clarity,
accuracy, and appropriateness of the language.
The second form investigated the figures of
style in the language.
Style was also divided into three types: high,
middle, and low. The high style was dedicated
to literature and poetry. The low style was
dedicated to more common performances of
discourse communication. The middle style
was a mixture of both styles and was
dedicated to average situations.
RUSSIAN FORMALISM
Stylistics was influenced and guided by Russian Formalism and its scholars, especially
Roman Jakobson, Viktor Shklovsky, and Vladimir Prop. These scholars wanted to make
literary knowledge more scientific and to discover the things and mechanisms that make
poetic texts poetic.
The three scholars used their structuralist ideas to achieve their goal. Each one of them
concentrated on some specific areas. For example, Jakobson concentrated on the poetic
function of language, Prop on the elements that constitute stories and the universal and
repetitive elements that exist within stories, and Shklovsky on the defamiliarization theory of
literature and art.
Russian formalism eventually faded away in the 1930s but appeared in Prague under the
name Structuralism.
PRAGUE SCHOOL
Prague school shifted from formalism to functionalism. Jakobson worked with the
Prague school and became more interested in the idea of foregrounding. This idea
was developed by a Czech scholar, Jan Mukarovsky who was one of the important
figures in the school. The word Murkarovsky was employed for foregrounding and
was regarded as actualization. The term foregrounding was coined by Garvin when he
translated the works of the Prague school scholars. So foregrounding simply spots the
poetic functions of language. It is a process that deviates the linguistic norm and
makes textual patterns that are based on parallelism, deviations, or repetition.
PRAGUE SCHOOL
Prague school included the context in the

making of textual meaning which began
the era of modern stylistics. Thus, the
heart of modern stylistics now is the text,
the context, and the reader. The
contributions of Prague school made
stylistics today concerned in both
language and literary studies.
Jan Mukarovsky
AMERICAN NEW CRITICISM
Stylistics can be viewed as a legitimate expansion of moves within literary Criticism in
the twentieth century to focus on studying writings instead of writers.
Nineteenth-century literary criticism, on the other hand, focused on the writer, and in
Britain, the content-based criticism of the two critics, I. A. Richards and his student
William Empson, dismissed that approach to focus on the texts themselves, and how
readers were influenced by them. This approach is frequently called Practical Criticism,
and it is matched by a similar critical movement in the USA related with Cleanth Brooks,
René Wellek, Austin Warren, and others, called New Criticism. New Criticism was
constructed solely in light of the depiction of literary works as independent aesthetic
objects. However, Practical Criticism tended to pay careful attention to the psychological
facets associated with a reader who interacts with the text.
AMERICAN NEW CRITICISM
These critics did not analyze the

text language that much, but,
rather, focused on the language of
the texts when they read them and
afterward depicted how they
comprehended them and were
influenced by them.
I. A. Richards
THANKS FOR
YOUR TIME

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Prague school included the context in the

These critics did not analyze the

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