Reader response research in stylistics

Language and Emotion. An International Handbook. Volume 3, 2023

Based on current research on the triad of language, literature, and emotion in cognitive linguistics, (neuro-)psychology, and cognitive poetics and stylistics, the present chapter sheds light on specific stylistic strategies and their potential emotive qualities. The chapter focuses on how stylistic devices such as patterns of rhythm and sound in literature are functionalized to evoke emotional responses in readers. It thus deals only indirectly with questions of (mimetic) representations of emotion and emotionality in literature. The chapter outlines the theoretical discussion and current state of debate in the interdisciplinary field of emotion research and stylistics and argues for a stronger consideration of mood as an emotive reader response in its own right. As point of departure for an analytical framework, it takes up a gestalt theoretical framework of poetic rhythm. Drawing on a conceptualization of rhythm as a perceptional category rather than a property of a text as well as an embodied cognition model of reader engagement in literature, the chapter proposes a phonostylistic approach. This means to understand a written text as a potential phonotext whose stylistic features of rhythm, accentuation, sound and tone can be seen as crucial with regard to the textual evocation of emotive reader responses.

Poetics, 1991

Style, 1976

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the English at Digital Commons @ Loyola Marymount University and Loyola Law School. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons@Loyola Marymount University and Loyola Law School. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Repository Citation Mailloux, Steven J., "Evaluation and Reader Response Criticism: Values Implicit in Affective Stylistics" (1976). English Faculty Works. 34. https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/engl_fac/34

Book History, 2006

2019

A linguistic analysis of literature has caused debates among linguists and between linguists and literary critics. The debate among linguists occurs because they have different opinions regarding the nature of literary language, while the debate between linguists and literary scholars arises as literary scholars question the authority of linguistics to study literary writings. Therefore, in this paper I argue that the language of literature is similar to that of non-literary texts, and I also believe that because the centrality of language in literary writings, linguistics, as the study of language, has the authority to study literature. One linguistic approach to literature is stylistics, which studies the forms, functions, and meanings of literary language in a detailed and systematic way.

IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Science, 2013

A literary work used to be looked at and received as the product of the writer's own horizon, imagination and aesthetic creativity. This conception of the text focused on and tried to understand a single meaning allocated to the text and that fixed and final meaning is nothing but the intention of the author of the text. It was claimed that responses to the same text would necessarily have to be the same albeit at different times and by different readers. The text was doomed to a pregiven and single meaning and unchangeable reality prior to it. Yet, twentieth century criticism has drawn a considerable attention and critical importance to the possibility that responses and interpretations to a given text evolve and develop from time to time and from reader to another reader. The approach of this theory which is called reader response theory in the phenomenology of reading revolves around the text and the reader and argues that the relationship between them is ontological in its nature. Ontological in the sense that a written text must have a reader and that the reader lends genuine value to the text. This paper is going to explore how, according to this theory, a text is open to meanings and is capable of producing different responses.

VEDA PUBLICATIONS, 2018

Language as we all know is an important or should I say an indispensable tool for human communication as it is through language that knowledge is transferred, meaning is created and understood ensuring social as well as scientific development of human society. It’s true not only for speech but also in writing, both being two of the most potential uses of language. After becoming a university subject in 1960s English language has being the target of literary critics. They have accused the linguists for being too dry when it comes to analysis of a piece of writing. And the linguists have accused the literary scholars for being to subjective, imaginative unambiguous for the same task. To bridge the differences or the gap between the two, stylistics a branch of applied linguistics functions to analyse the use of language literary texts. However it's not limited to the study of literature alone but is also stretched to varieties of writings like texts related to media and journalism, the advertisements etc. This paper is an attempt to explore the link between language and its most creative use that is Literature. Through this paper I aim to show the features of language and creative uses under which these forms are put to appeal to human senses and make a piece of literature alive whether it's romance, tragedy or comedy.

Language and Literature, 2018

A tendency by literary stylisticians to overlook the role of the author in the generation of literary meaning has been a significant source of tension between linguistic approaches to literariness and other practices in the discipline, such as text-editing and literary biography. Recently, however, efforts have been made to close this gap, with a branch of stylistics, cognitive poetics, claiming to have developed a new and empirical method of integrating an appreciation of authorial imagination and creativity into the study of readers’ responses to the language of literary texts. We examine these claims critically, testing the grounds of assertions about scientific rigour in relation to demands about model testing and falsifiability associated with the scientific study of literature more generally. We then explore how some other methodologies, technologies and insights associated with this last branch of the discipline might be brought to bear on the topic of authorial intention, wi...

Critical Quarterly, 1988

Conference proceedings, 4th International Conference of Language, Literature and Linu, 2015

Stylistics, at its early stage of development, had gone through a number of controversies. The arguments as to whether it was a linguistic or literary phenomenon provided the platform for these controversies. Literary critics were sceptical about the utility of linguistic methods to literary interpretation and criticised the so called ‘objective’ and ‘scientific’ approach employed by linguists in their analysis of literary texts. The linguists, on the other hand, had accused the literary critics of being too vague and subjective in their interpretation and analysis; an issue which has since been seriously debated by both the stylisticians and literary critics. Efforts to bring such a dispute to terms had culminated into the convergence of different theories and approaches, which also marked the development of modern stylistics as an interdisciplinary field. This paper attempts to review the various developments that have taken place in the field of stylistics, as well as the sub-disciplines that have evolved as a result of its eclecticism, and argues that stylistics is indeed an essential tool for literary analysis.

Critical Quarterly, 1988

Journal of Fine Arts Volume 1, Issue 1, PP 1-3, 2017

As students of Contemporary literary criticism all of us have studied Stanley Fish's famous essay "Is there a text in the Class?" and the possible responses that one could possibly elicit to it. In fact, Stanley's arguments in the essay are primarily based on the premise that the text is not a stable thing with a determinate meaning. Accordingly, a proposal is being made to reinterpret the Scheherazade story from Richard Burton's "The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night" from a contemporary perspective and thereby list out the multiplicity of views that a single story could evoke.

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