- •After working through these parts, students will be able to start their independent stylistic analysis. Chapter I guide to stylistic devices
- •Lexical stylistic devices
- •Stylistic Devices Based on the Interaction between the Logical and Nominal Meanings of a Word Antonomasia
- •Stylistic Devices Based on the Interaction between Two Logical Meanings of a Word
- •Stylistic Devices Based on the Interaction between the Logical and Emotive Meanings of a Word
- •Exercises
- •Syntactical stylistic devices
- •Exercises
- •Lexico-syntactical stylistic devices
- •Exercises
- •Graphical and phonetic expressive means
- •Exercises
- •List of abbreviated names
- •Chapter II samples of stylistic analysis of poetry and prose pieces sample I
- •Sonnet XXVII
- •Sonnet lxv
- •Sample II the bells
- •Sample III
- •Sample IV Chapter XIX “Ahab” (1) from moby dick
- •Find all examples of simile in the text.Comment upon the structure and size of the similes.
- •Read attentively the description of a great tree. What means make this description realistic? Comment upon the meaning of the verbs used in this description. Sample V the picture of dorian grey
- •Chapter III on stylistic register
- •1.Read the following and see what differences you notice between them in form, vocabulary, structure. Then read the notes.
- •2. Similar to the above-given example change the following sentences for as many various registers as possible:
- •1) He ran quickly into the shop, knocking over an old woman. 2) She drove angrily up the hill, shouting through the window.
- •Chapter IV
- •Coupling
- •Defeated Expectancy
- •Convergence
- •Salient Feature
- •Part II. Theory of Information
- •The Process of Communication
- •Basic Terms
- •Adaptation of Shannon’s Model
- •The Interaction of Various Codes
- •Anthem for Doomed Youth
- •Part III. Norm and Deviation Preliminaries
- •Ozimandias*
- •Список литературы
- •Оглавление
Ozimandias*
I met a traveler from an antique land.
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone,
Stand in the desert… Near them on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that the sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozimandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains”. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
* Greek name for the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II (13th century B.C.) who is said to have erected a huge statue of himself.
Thus, we have the general rule, the norm (the regular plural in –s), a constraint on this norm (no plural for mass nouns) and a meaningful deviation from this (reclassification) enhancing the impression produced by the picture of decay and loneliness presented in this sonnet. All three stages belong to the language and may be regarded as usual but very different in frequency.
This may be compared with the case where a proper name has only the plural form: the Alps, the Andes, the Himalayas, the Rockies. The break of this constraint is occasional and sounds funny in the following: “… being a stranger in the place I did not know one Alp from another. I Alped my way for some weary hours, till the sun went down”. (Brendan Behan).
The violation of one rule may be individual, occasional, creating an unorthodox meaning of a word or a whole sentence. This brings us to the so-called semi-marked structures.
The following example is a famous case of linguistic deviation in poetry “a grief ago”(Dylan Thomas). The normal combination would be a minute, day, year ago. The poet, as G. Leech puts it, has gone beyond the normal range of choice. The word “grief”, being placed in a position normally taken by nouns denoting time, receives itself a temporal expressive meaning (compare: a few cigarettes ago, two wives ago). Two more examples by the same poet are: “all the sun long and all the moon long”. Here the words “sun” and “moon” acquire the additional meaning of “time full of light”.
A code, therefore, consists of rules that may be kept and may be broken. When the breaking of rules results in the appearance of a new meaning and/or additional expressiveness we shall call that deviation, whereas the main rules and restrictions of arranging the code constitute its norm.
On the other hand there are some rules which are rigid and if they are not observed the result is not a change of meaning but nonsense. For example, some types of inversion are emphatic others impossible as the following examples show.
The head that wears a crown lies uneasy. – neutral
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. – emphatic
Head the that wears crown a lies uneasy. – impossible
The importance of deviation lies in compelling the reader’s attention and helping him to see what is or is not important in the text. Everybody knows that it is possible from part of a sequence (a sentence, a line, a paragraph, etc) to predict with greater or lesser accuracy the succeeding features and this is what makes elliptic decoding sufficient for the reader. M. Riffaterre points out that it is natural for the decoder to disregard a high percentage of what the text contains and reconstruct the whole from the few words he actually perceives. To be noticed by the reader the important elements have to be either repeated or unpredictable.
The unpredictability may result from breaking the norms of linguistic code. It is not usual for the personal pronouns to be modified by adjectives and articles as in “a sadder he”. The other deviation is “sobra” instead of “more sober”.
He who attempts to tease the cobra
Is soon a sadder he and sobra.
Ogden Nash
Logical expectations also may be violated: in the sentence “Get a house and a wife and a fire to put her in.” the last verbal phrase breaks the expectation of marital bliss established by the previous enumeration of nouns after a sort of norm has been created within this very short space.