Michael Toolan
Stylistics is the linguistic analysis of texts, literary or otherwise, which is also concerned with those texts as author–reader communications. Thus it assumes that the descriptive and explanatory systems of linguistics enhance the understanding of how texts work, but also wishes to address how and what texts mean for real, historically embedded readers. The origins of Western stylistics lie in the poetics and rhetorical studies of the ancient Greeks (see Burke 2014, for a brief discussion), but it has reinvented itself many times over to suit changing times. Within the English literary tradition, for example, the Renaissance period saw the emergence of handbooks of elegant and “cultured” style. Then in the Augustan and Classical period, writers like Pope, Dryden, and Johnson continually commented on the writing of the time in ways that were covertly stylistic, expressing censure or approval of writers’ grammar and usage on the assumption that alternative choices of grammar and phrasing would be demonstrably better (or worse). Beyond promoting their subjective opinions on matters of effective writing, they sought arguments and evidence to support their judgements, as stylisticians do. In the twentieth century, Wales (2011) suggests, stylistics displaced older studies of elocutio in rhetorical studies to some extent but never entirely. Charles Bally—Saussure’s contemporary and one of the editors of his posthumously published Cours de linguistique generale—wrote an influential study of French stylistics (but his focus of attention was emphatically not the literary‐aesthetic dimension of texts). Quite separately, Russian formalists (and, later, Bakhtin) made important contributions to literary theory and criticism of a broadly stylistic kind, and influenced scholars of poetics such as Shklovsky, Mukařovsky, and Jakobson. Other early twentieth‐century stylisticians of note include Karl Vossler and Leo Spitzer, both interested in how the stylistic traits of a text might be revealing of the personality or psychology of the author. It was Spitzer in 1948 who proposed the analytical circle or cycle—echoing others who have also talked of the hermeneutic circle of interpretation—in which a “literary” observation in the course of reading draws the analyst to examine the language of the text more closely, and this particularizing of the analysis or description of the text will usually lead to an adjusted formulation of what the essence of the literary observation or response was. So an interpretive‐analytic cycle or dialectic proceeds.
There has been a steady growth of interest in literary linguistics since the 1960s, and there are now many hyphenated sub‐types of stylistics: cognitive stylistics or poetics, corpus stylistics, pragmatic stylistics, (critical) discourse stylistics, ecolinguistic stylistics, and several more, including multimodal stylistics (Norgaard 2014). More unites these than separates them; from different angles, all of them study the language of literature, so linguistic categories and methods take pride of place in their approaches. But they are often the categories of a significantly contextualised linguistics, one that recognises that form, meaning, value, and interpretation are open to change with the reader, despite the degree of convergence or similarity of reported views among diverse readers’ readings of a single text. This convergence makes the idea of a shared language and textual analysis possible.
Since literary texts are such exceptionally considered and designed uses of linguistic forms, structures and effects, stylisticians believe they are justified in attending to them very closely in accounting for what those texts mean, to readers. At the heart of these texts’ power, they contend, is an exceptionally sophisticated deployment of linguistic resources, still only incompletely understood. Analyses frequently refer to this as a matter of choice, and sometimes find it useful to compare what is written with what might have been written but would have been less original, creative, moving, or beautiful.
Additionally, even enthusiastic readers, such as committed members of reading groups or students taking literature degrees, may struggle to find a way of talking about these texts that is comprehensible to others and advances their own insight into the writing. For these reasons—to advance our understanding of literary linguistic phenomena primarily, and to share this understanding with readers of literature (a very large constituency, potentially)—stylisticians select texts or extracts as examples, test cases, and forms of linguistic challenge. They do so, focusing on a text’s craft and whatever seems original in its design, very much as musicologists and art critics develop systematic analyses of symphonies and paintings. And like the work of musicologists and critic‐researchers generally, stylisticians’ labors have no logical endpoint: in future decades, new audiences or readers living in a different world will respond differently to Shakespeare (or to the poetry Sinéad Morrissey writes next year) than today’s readers; and the intellectual traditions, theories and practices available to contribute to or interpret those responses will also be changed.
Stylisticians readily acknowledge that the meanings readers derive from a literary text are not sourced in that single text alone, despite the comparatively determinate boundedness or clear “edges” of most literary texts. We have a comparatively strong sense of what is within Keats’s “Ode to Autumn” and what is not, but this does not license fully autonomous interpretation: also involved are intertextuality and the reader’s recognition of alluded‐to texts and events, and their familiarity with different genres and conventions, and with literary history more generally. A reader’s familiarity (or otherwise) with all these will affect their response to, and interpretation of, literary texts; as will their own “position”: their age, gender, sexuality, bodily affordances, education, work, affluence, and so on, to levels of particularity usually overlooked, such as whether they have perfect pitch, or are tone deaf, or color blind. Stylistics “acknowledges that utterances (literary or otherwise) are produced in a time, a place, and in a cultural and cognitive context” (Simpson 2004: 3); and received in equally particular contexts. These varied contexts interact with the text, so a grammar of literary texts always needs to be integrated with consideration of the former. But this grammar of the language of literary texts is what stylisticians aim to contribute to, prioritizing text (or the triad of author‐text‐reader) over other variable contexts of reception.
Whom does stylistics “help”? Most would agree that its target audience is rarely composed of writers themselves. The chief audience comprises students of literature (whether “professional” in the sense that they are taking a degree for credit, or “amateur” in the sense that they read for pleasure, or intellectual stimulation, or therapy and self‐knowledge, or all three). It doesn’t seem to matter much whether the students are native speakers of the language in which the literature is written, or are coming to the texts as second‐ or foreign‐language learners of the language of composition. Readers from both these constituencies have expressed appreciation of the ways stylistic analysis has helped to focus their reactions to a text and, despite the burden of the technicality deployed, helped them to better understand what a text is doing. Students of literature find stylistics is clear and orderly in whatever it says about a text, supporting modest claims with arguments based on evidence about the language in use. Stylistics has been performing that service for many decades; a few of the earliest and still useful studies include Leech (1969), Nowottny (1962), and Cluysenaar (1976); numerous publications since then have continued this work. As Lambrou and Stockwell (2007: 4) note, over and above the detailed grammatical descriptions based on explicit criteria afforded by stylistics, doing stylistics (or thinking about texts stylistically) can produce “startling, pleasurable and perspective‐changing moments in reading.” It can also prompt startling adjustments to the way you conceptualize reading more generally, and writing, and language. As for whether readers need stylistics, then, the answer must be that some may find it useful and some may not, just as some music‐lovers may find musicologists helpful while others will not. But even if all lay music‐lovers found musicology of no use to them, this would be no compelling argument for abandoning such studies. Cultures need to understand their own practices, and not just do them, and as the most language‐focused of reflexive discourses on literature, the emergence of stylistics was an inevitable corollary of the emergence of artistic writing.
Stylistic explanation of the relations between textual form and literary function is a specialist grammatical commentary. Accordingly, a theory of literary stylistics is at core a theory of grammar, where “grammar” is intended in a broad sense, to include synoptic description of the prominent licensed patterns of phrasal and clausal structuring or sequencing of words in the language, but also incorporating an account of genre‐ and register‐sensitive norms and patterns. The bases of the more interpretive categories that any particular stylistic study invokes are at least implicitly sourced in an encompassing grammar of texts.
At least from the time of Thorne (1965, 1970), Ohmann (1964), Chatman (1971), and Fowler (1986), stylistics has had a clear core objective: that of uncovering and bringing to attention the most significant linguistic patterns in a text (or disruptions of norms or patterns) that give the text its style, to which readers in turn respond. Stylistics is therefore a form of raising to the reader’s (or analyst’s) fuller awareness those underlying or integrated textual phenomena that are instrumental in its projected meanings and effects. Much the same position is to be found in Ronald Carter’s short article on Hemingway’s story “Cat in the Rain” (Carter 1982), an exemplary demonstration of the stylistic approach, and frequently used in teaching for that reason. Much as Thorne did, Carter argues that our intuitions about the opening paragraphs of the story are guided or conditioned by linguistic patterns, and proceeds to describe the most noticeable of these patterns or trends. The cycle of interpretation and verification proceeds, arriving at a precise statement of what it is in the text’s patterns (its form) that causes or at least encourages the impressions first noted; these are then incorporated into an evaluation and interpretation that others might agree with. These form‐interpretation relations will rarely be expressible as absolute free‐standing rules, but a generalizable descriptive grammar of literary texts remains the long‐term goal of stylistics. Attempts may be made to confirm the plausibility of the form‐interpretation conjunctive statements via controlled testing of reader‐subjects; but even when it is not, the stylistician’s very act of presenting or publishing their analysis puts it in a public domain where every reader/listener can assay its claims.
Comprehensive stylistic analysis of any text is impossible, although Jakobson’s triumphalism about the power of linguistics once implied otherwise. Selectivity and sampling are always involved, and are as much driven by the simple realities of finite resources of time and energy as by any more robust theoretical principle. Thus, on the one hand, every stylistic description and commentary has to make decisions about what to talk about and what not to address, like every other form of textual criticism. But on the other hand, some further linguistic observation can always be found, and found to be worth making, with regard to a particular literary text, just as analytical explanation of major paintings or classical music continues without end.
What is the particular basis of stylistic selective attention? It is something (claimed to be) distinctive in the linguistic form of the text, something that is argued to be striking and “foregrounded” against an encompassing texture—the rest of the literary text—which may contain other kinds of complexity and effectiveness, but not the specific effect sourced in the specific form selected here for detailed discussion. It assumes that reader‐attention will be oriented to textual patterns, including noticeably repeated forms or noticeable “gaps” or absences. These are the basis of effects of foregrounding, a key term in stylistics; often it is expected that there will be a special appropriateness or “fit” between foregrounded forms and textual meanings, to the point where “iconicity” can be claimed.
What constitutes a linguistic pattern? Here stylisticians are not as far removed from intuition and subjectivity as they might like to be. Any kind of recurrence (of rhyme, or grammatical construction, or multi‐word phrase, or semantic scheme or trope, and so on), or any kind of absence where some degree of recurrence would be normal, can constitute a noticeable sameness, and therefore a pattern. The occurrence of determiners like a and the once or twice per sentence would in themselves be an unremarkable “pattern”; but what of a long text without a single the in it? These days, with widespread availability of genre‐specific digital corpora of English, the stylistician is able to state with more confidence whether certain kinds of pattern (e.g. certain lexical phrases) are rare or have been oft repeated in a large sample of recent English. But earlier stylisticians (and some still today) relied on their own sense of what was “most striking.” This was the essence of Thorne’s answer too, in his 1970 article, on the shifting style (from conveyed angry restlessness to calm) in a passage from Raymond Chandler: Thorne was “struck” by the frequency of a recurrent “restless” I VP‐ed and (I) VP‐ed sentential pattern (e.g., “I looked at the dust on my finger and wiped that off”), and relied on reader assent to his identification as a prominent one that defined the local style.
The conventional metaphor of “strikingness” is often used in this phase of the stylistic analysis; it is more abstractly formulated as a process of “foregrounding.” or “prominence,” or “markedness,” but they amount to the same move in the argument, which is subjective at source, even if the analysts can persuade their readers of the reasonableness of their identification of what is striking or foregrounded. Strangeness, or defamiliarization, has long been a touchstone of formalist criticism. Slightly more detached or abstract are formulations in terms of what is statistically or situationally prominent (a speech in which every other word is like), or disproportionate in frequency (a paragraph in which every verb is in the progressive), or situationally non‐congruent (an insurance policy which uses slang). Jeffries and McIntyre (2010: 5) proceed similarly in their first brief demonstration of stylistic method. They notice, as strange, collocationally unexpected and foregrounded, the word forget, in these lines from a James Fenton poem: “How comforting it is, once or twice a year,// To get together and forget the old times.” Getting together to forget the past is norm‐breaking both linguistically and as a description of reasonable behavior, since we usually get together to remember the old times, and say so too; the foregrounded collocation therefore prompts many implicatures as to what the speaker might be obliquely suggesting.
If the subjectivity of foregrounding selections has been a weakness in stylistic studies, it is one that cognitive poetics (Stockwell 2002) may help address. The kinds of phenomena that cognitive poetics centrally draws on in its explanations include ideas about figure and ground, prototypicality, deixis or perspective, script and schema, metaphor, text worlds and mental spaces. Many of these phenomena reflect forms of selective and discriminating attention, our making sense of the world and its signs. They address the fact that whatever object or scene we contemplate, there are always a great many more differences we could attend to than is useful or appropriate in the circumstances. Any signifying complex, including a literary text, may make prominent (or foreground) some features rather than others, to direct the recipient’s attention. As a result, the reader must always calculate what kind of attention to which distinguishable phenomena is merited (or relevant). Cognitive poetics undertakes to explain some of the fundamental principles underlying this calculation. Many of them are universal rather than being specific to particular languages or cultures; indeed, they work in oral cultures as well as literate ones. And so they underpin the sense‐making faculties of human beings in their embodied existence. These principles may in time put stylisticians’ decisions regarding the striking patterns and foregrounding in a text on a much firmer footing.
The kind of linguistic evidence analysts choose to focus on is varied, and the precise relation between the evidence and the claimed effect occasions debate. Among those that have been extensively examined in texts are modality, transitivity, cohesion (anaphora), deixis, options in the representation of characters’ speech, thought and writing (Leech and Short 2007), options in sentence construction (hypotaxis vs. parataxis, clause‐embedding preferences, clefting, thematic fronting of clause elements), the prominence of specific conceptual metaphors (Semino 2008), strategic use of marked semantic prosodies (Louw and Mikhailovic 2016), text world theory (Gavins 2007), recurrent lexical clusters in characterization (Mahlberg 2013), and exploitations of Gricean cooperativeness norms or relevance‐theoretical principles (Chapman and Clark 2014). In all these analyses the question arises as to whether the linguistic feature is the cause of the meaning‐effect, or simply a correlation with it. Although a correlation claim is weaker, and can even reduce to mere coincidence, in stronger cases it can denote a necessary but not sufficient condition. And the line between cause and mere correlation is arguably less clear in linguistic matters than in other more stable fields of inquiry. Many stylisticians would wish to assert more than that a given identified pattern “helps create” a particular effect or meaning; nor have many agreed with Attridge’s suggestion that they are not doing anything fundamentally different from literary analysts after all (see Attridge 1996: 44–5, who characterizes Jakobson’s “empirical” studies as ultimately aiming, like the critic, to persuade the reader).
Distinct from both a causal relation and a correlative one is an iconic one, and the idea of the iconicity of aspects of the poetic text is one that has attracted many stylisticians. Ordinarily, language is regarded as symbolic, an arbitrary matching of forms or signifiers with meanings. No particular attention is paid to the form qua form. But when the language is felt to be partly iconic, the signs seem partly to embody or perform the ideas and entities expressed, and the addressee is less impelled to “look past” the form, to some “form‐transcending” meaning. The iconic form that stays our attention may concern the text’s implied sounds, or graphology, or grammar, or semantics, or some combination of these. Some instances still have an instructive function, as when Pope in his Essay on Criticism criticizes the poet who ends their song with a needless Alexandrine (exceptional, 12‐syllable line), “That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.”
Others are more complex, a more cerebral but still textually experienced complexity, such as is found in the linguistic form of Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man,” where we are repeatedly led astray not least by the counter‐intuitive use of behold: “One must have a mind of winter ….// And have been cold a long time// To behold the junipers shagged with ice,// The spruces rough in the distant glitter// Of the January sun; and not to think // Of any misery in the sound of the wind,// In the sound of a few leaves.” Only someone thoroughly mentally frozen would encounter the icebound junipers and spruces without feeling an enfolding misery, the speaker says, among other things using behold in a strange way that is at odds with our usual expectation that something beheld will be uplifting (such as the Lamb of God, or a rainbow in the sky). Stevens implies there are two types of people here. There are those who think and feel the “misery,” and those who are too cold and wintry even to do that: cold comfort! The speaker uses the same word behold in a reversing or defying of our complacent expectations a second time at the close of the poem, inviting us to empathize with “the listener, who listens in the snow,// And, nothing himself, beholds// Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”
Iconic text invites the reader/addressee to focus on the text for its own sake, to gloss—approximately—one of Jakobson’s ideas in his famous article of 1960 (Toolan 2010, 2011). As invoked by stylisticians, iconicity is the re‐asserting of some degree of “natural” or experiential connection between the form and meaning of signs (Toolan 2015). Stylisticians say there is iconicity, or that the language is iconic, where they can see and demonstrate a degree of calculated “fit” between the sounds or written shapes used, or the sequences of words used, or the grammar of a whole line or sentence—in short, the form—and the meaning we believe the poet or writer wanted at that point to convey (i.e., wanted the reader to experience). Analogy or resemblance is invoked: the linguistic form is said to reflect, match, enact, perform, or mime the meaning. Jeffries (2010) suggests that iconic text has an “experiential” effect: the effect of the iconic properties of the language of a poem is that the reader experiences the meaning rather than simply understanding it.
While stylistics, no more than linguistics, can lay claims to absolute truths about something as contextually determined as literary communication, it would be perverse to conclude that its descriptive categories and principles were arbitrary and meaningless beyond the descriptive system in which they arise. The categories come with a rich history and, although used in accounts of the texture of texts, are themselves metonyms of complex accounts of the workings of language. That is why Stanley Fish’s famous critique of stylistics (1980 [1973]), still worth reading, in the long run did not prompt the abandonment of literary linguistics but instead assisted stylisticians to think through their assumptions, and take care as to what they could and could not claim without disabling circularity of argument. But at the time of its original publication it caused turmoil in stylistic circles: among its targets was an article by Halliday (1971) which for many stylisticians has remained inspirational. Fish complained that the stylistic analyses of the 1960s leapt from description of forms to attribution of value (i.e. meaning) that were arbitrary and, contrary to conventional stylistic wisdom, unfalsifiable:
While the distinctions one can make with the grammar are minute and infinite, they are also meaningless, for they refer to nothing except the categories of the system that produced them, categories which are themselves unrelated to anything outside their circle except by an arbitrary act of assertion.
(Fish 1973: 100)
Writing in the early 1970s, Fish was obliquely challenging Chomskyan generative linguistics which—hard though it is for us to understand at this distance—appeared in some influential circles to be on the point of “cracking” the linguistic code, and laying bare the very cognitive DNA of all languages.
Nearly fifty years later, even with the rise of cognitive linguistics and its selective applications to literary poetics, there is little evidence of literary studies being superseded by such activity. A stylistician of today would not understand Fish’s reference to “the grammar,” as if there were a universally accepted description of a unified language. Nor would they understand the contention that grammatical distinctions (tense, aspect, number, cases, word‐classes, types of phrase and sentence/clause, etc.) are “meaningless,” referring only to categories produced within “the system,” any more than a language teacher or language learner would. Contrary to Fish’s declaration, in the grammatical distinctions used by stylisticians and other linguists the everyday world of embodied human interaction is a permanent foundation—interaction that is integrated with the help of Gricean cooperativeness norms and politeness considerations (giving “positive face” and minimizing “negative face” impositions where possible). A bi‐directional words‐to‐world engagement is always proceeding. The grammatical distinctions of interest to stylisticians are those that language‐users themselves deploy meaningfully; and they are legion, and diverse. Reflecting this, stylisticians have tended to be quite eclectic in their incorporation of different but compatible linguistic descriptions into their analyses. Jeffries and McIntyre (2010: 4), for example, report that stylisticians draw on both context‐free formal descriptions and the contextualized linguistic descriptions found in such distinct traditions as pragmatics, sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, and corpus linguistics, and are often willing to explore whether these can be used in combination. In this they are reflecting new trends within non‐literary linguistic studies where, for example, extensive corpus evidence is mined with a view to testing and strengthening a cognitive linguistic hypothesis.
Another developing sub‐field focuses on situated readers’ responses to literary texts, in more controlled and broadly experimental conditions or in quite natural and everyday situations (e.g., the discourse of an established book club or reading group, and their free‐flowing comments on a text). Here the stylistician’s own judgments of the text may be suppressed in favor of those of informants—but, if the study is to remain stylistic, there will still be an effort to trace readers’ reactions to linguistic patterns and cues in the text.
By virtue of attempting an analysis, stylistics can often be regarded as “taking a poem to pieces”; this is done not to “destroy” the poem, but to pay the closest attention to the compositional steps that the poet may have implicitly taken in the original creative synthesis. So while there is respect for the author, there is no appetite for leaving their work unexamined. Notwithstanding their “literariness,” comparative originality, and creativity, literary texts are in broad terms just as amenable to analysis and explanation as any other texts. Relatedly, the subscriber to the New Yorker who turns the page on a long article about Trump vs Clinton to read a new poem by Jorie Graham does not suddenly switch off one reading “device” and switch on another—they remain the same person, in the same café, with the same language‐processing resources.
One of the most even‐handed commentators, a stylistics practitioner for forty years and more, was the late Geoffrey Leech. In his Language in Literature (2008), he suggests that stylistics may be thought of as an inter‐discipline, forging an alliance or bond between linguistic description of text and literary interpretation. Critical to this alliance and powerfully guiding of stylistic practice, he suggests, is the idea of foregrounding, discussed earlier. In the final chapter, Leech is eloquent about “the negative effects of dichotomies” (2008: 180), and argues that a joint accommodation of formalism (oriented to the linguistic properties of the text) and functionalism (extending beyond the forms to their contextually and intertextually conditioned effects and meanings) is not only possible but beneficial. He describes his own position as formalist functionalism. He is critical of the rampant contextualism of such analytical traditions as Critical Discourse Analysis (where he sees a danger of extreme determinism, tracing all meanings and effects back to veiled power and ideology shaping the text from outside, as if the specificities of the text were of little relevance), and sees in the “cognitive turn” a welcome renewed attention to the psychological processing we can ascribe to a text’s author and readers (although he also expresses concern about another kind of potential neglect of the text, if all the focus is on “unobservable cognitive structures” (Leech 2008: 183).
In the 1970s and 1980s stylistics used to emphasize the falsifiability of its claims, in a Popperian scientific tradition: not simply that its claims were vaguely “testable”, but that they could possibly be proven wrong. In that tradition, only descriptions that could be shown to be wrong are of scientific merit, until such disproof occurs. But since stylistics typically involves a hermeneutic spiral of grammatical description and textual interpretation, it will also involve commentary that is not open to falsification. In practice, falsifiability is more alluded to than attempted by stylisticians, who would rather advance constructive contributions to the illumination of a text, and of readers’ readings of that text. More recent contributors, whether endorsing cognitive stylistics, corpus stylistics, or some other hybrid theory and method, simply argue that their way of proceeding is methodical, and as systematic as the limits of language’s systematicity allows. Analyses are often too limited, a selective sampling that is forced to leave many confounding variables in place, for a controlled falsification to be possible. In these circumstances, claims cannot reach the standard of scientific proof or even that of the criminal law (of “being sure”, beyond a reasonable doubt). The phrasing of the civil law standard of proof is usually more relevant, with regard to the claims about the effects of form on meaning: the stylistician hopes to have shown that, on the balance of probabilities, those linguistic characteristics have, in the given context, created these readerly meanings.
As Stockwell comments in the course of a stylistic exploration of the linguistic basis of a poem’s “ambience,” the stylistician’s task is “to explore this feature and offer an account of it in systematic and principled terms, and in a way that does not simply appeal to shared implicit intuitions” (Stockwell 2014: 373). A systematic description and explanation, where every move in the analysis is inspectable, is the essence of stylistics. It is then for others to decide whether the stylistician’s account of ambience (or whatever other textual characteristic is being addressed) is more effective, economical, perspicuous, and generalizable than other approaches. Whatever the topic or feature of interest may be, stylisticians seek to pinpoint the linguistic conditions necessary for its textual instantiation, sometimes referring to aspects of the linguistic form in a text as constituting “cues” or “triggers” for specific literary effects (or meanings for the reader). At the same time such analysts are wary of being naively instrumentalist, or ignoring the way change of context can change meaning and value, or of misrepresenting what is really a many:many relation (many formal factors integrated to achieve a multifaceted literary effect) as if it were a simple form:meaning relation. Stylisticians undertake to be precise, analytical, and verifiable about the grammar that underlies and creates the literariness effects which, in turn, induce readers to reach for such complex evaluative terms as shambling, strident, alienated, terse, passionate, and placid. But they are not dismissive of these powerfully synthesizing evaluative terms—their existence makes stylistics possible, and wide agreement that a particular passage is strident or shambling helps allay anxieties about conflictingly various textual interpretation. They have an important place in literary reading, but one that stylistics endeavors to keep distinct from that of analysis.
Is stylistics a science, with a method; or is it so compelled to adjust to changes in language and literature relative to time, place, and other contextual factors that thinking of it as science would be as mistaken as conceiving of jurisprudence or musicology as science? Are literature and language such humanistic and creative cultural practices that a scientific approach is only of limited application? Different views are taken on these questions, although it is hard to see in the nature of language and in literary production the kind of progress that is so evident in fields like medicine or physics. If stylistics is not strictly a science, then rather less in the way of definitive explanation should be expected from its methods. Arguably, even in its use of recognized categories and stepwise argumentation it is not itself strictly a “method,” but a practice or activity, a way of describing and explaining the linguistics of texts and their meanings for readers (Toolan 1990: 28 and passim). Doing stylistics may be better understood as primarily participating in an ongoing discourse that reflects on the multiple functions of language in our cultures and seeks to revise and renew our shared understanding of language forms and functions (cf. Simpson 2004, who emphasizes the “reflexive capacity” of stylistics to shed light on the language system it derives from). A similar point is made in Jeffries and McIntyre’s (2010) overview. For them, stylistics is needed to provide an angle on language study which places the text (literary or otherwise) at the centre of its concern (2010: 4). Here stylistics is intended to redefine linguistics in a more text‐oriented direction. As the inter‐discipline of stylistics has evolved, it has perhaps inevitably developed this Janus‐faced character, being both a commentary on the text and a commentary on the language.
Where should the stylistician’s attention to textual “choices” end—at what fineness of granularity? Is there a point at which the tiniest details of word‐choice and phrasing cease to be of real significance, and are not perceptible as details at all? The makers of variorum editions of texts resist this skepticism, and are unmoved by psycholinguistic evidence that “most readers” will remain unaware of small textual changes. To give one example of stylistically significant detail in the work of Alice Munro, consider the story called “Passion”, first published in The New Yorker magazine in March 2004, and then included in her collection Runaway (Knopf), which appeared later the same year. Before its publication in The New Yorker, the story will have gone through multiple drafts, with comments and critique from her agent, and then from her editor at the magazine, so that the version published there was unquestionably a carefully prepared one. It turned out not to be the final version, however. In the book‐published version, more than two hundred changes can be found, made by Munro to the story published just a few months earlier in The New Yorker. The final change occurs at the close of the story and concerns the dollar value of a cheque given to the story’s heroine, Grace, by a family who want to minimize their shame and want her to “go away.” The sentence, clearly focalized from Grace’s point of view, is changed from “It was a cheque for a thousand dollars” to “It was a cheque for one thousand dollars.”
What’s the difference? A thousand is one thousand, and one dozen is a dozen. But Munro is subtly exploiting a linguistic difference where grammar overlaps with pragmatics, that is, with meaning in context. Saying “a thousand” of anything simply reports a quantity, but does not focus on the completeness or the precise amount of the quantity. Viewed in written form or spoken aloud, “a cheque for one thousand dollars” cannot be read or said without paying some extra attention to the “one,” beyond what you would pay to the indefinite article, “a.” The use of “one thousand” implies that the cheque is for a whole thousand dollars, or as much as a thousand dollars; without some other emphasis, a thousand does not. The altered choice better captures the point of view of the impecunious young woman (whom the story focalizer, now forty years older, remembers herself once to have been): at that earlier time, for that young woman, a thousand dollars was ONE thousand dollars, a life‐changing amount of money. This a/one change of article is one more confirmation of Munro’s stylistic perfectionism, symptomatic of the linguistic meticulousness of literary writing, and the best reason for affording them a thorough linguistic analysis.