This is educational input related to Stylistics course in Graduate Studies.

1. HI
STORY / HI
STORI
CAL
ANNALS OF
STYLISTICS
ADELIO I.ANGHAG JR.
Discussant
March 1
1
,
, 2023

2. TODAY'S
DISCUSSION
The Origin of Stylistics
1
2
3
The Traditional Stylistics
The Modern
(Contemporary) Stylistics

3. INTRODUCTION
Stylistics is a branch of applied
linguistics, focuses on 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylistics

4. ORI
GI
N OF
STYLI
STI
CS Historically, it arose from
the late-1
9th- and
century Russian
early-20th-
formalist
approach to literary meaning,
which endeavored to identify
the textual triggers of certain
literary effects from their
structures.
Stylistics is the study
of textual meaning.

5. As a result, for much of its history, stylistics has
been concerned with the style, and consequent
meaning, of literary works. However, the burgeoning
of modern linguistics in the early part of the 20th
century and the simultaneous rise of mass media
(newspapers, radio, and television in the first instance)
led stylisticians toward two new concerns.
First, they wanted to establish whether there was
anything unique about the language of literature that
differentiated it absolutely from other language use.

6. New insights from descriptive linguistics were crucial
as an objective and rigorous way of describing—and
comparing—texts in terms of their style. The eventual
consensus that developed from such work was that
there is no absolute division, in linguistic usage,
between literary and nonliterary texts, though genres of
all kinds (including nonliterary genres) may have stylistic
preferences that help to identify them.

7. Second, stylisticians wanted to find out how
style affected such important issues as political and
social change, through the texts encountered by
citizens in their daily lives. The result was the
adaptation and application of stylistic analysis to
nonliterary texts for the purpose of highlighting
ideology—particularly hidden ideology—rather
than for the purpose of explaining aesthetic effects.

8. This development ultimately gave rise to what
is now called “critical discourse analysis,” though
this term now encompasses many studies that are
minimally linguistic in their concerns. The initial
enthusiasm for the insights that linguistics could
bring to literary study, together with some of the
principal notions from Russian formalism, such as
“defamiliarization,” produced stylistics’ early
theoretical core notions, such as foregrounding,
external and internal deviation, and parallelism.

9. Meanwhile, stylistics has continued to follow
the “new” subdisciplines of the field
(sociolinguistics, pragmatics, psycholinguistics,
etc.), as well as developing connections with
other disciplines, notably psychology, to develop
a range of more subtle tools of analysis to
understand how the texts that are its central
concern make meaning.

10. CRITICAL
DI
SCOURSE
ANALYSIS
Critical discourse
analysis (or discourse
analysis) is a research
method for studying
written
language
or spoken
in relation
to its social context. It
aims to understand
how language is used
in real life situations.

11. The Russian Formalists’ concept of “Defamiliarization”,
proposed by Viktor Shklovsky in his Art as Technique, refers to
the literary device whereby language is used in such a way that
ordinary and familiar objects are made to look different
It is a process of transformation where
language asserts its power to affect our
perception. It is that aspect which differentiates
between ordinary usage and poetic usage of
language, and imparts a uniqueness to a literary
work.

12. Although the concept of defamiliarization was
earlier advocated by the Romantic critic Coleridge in
his Biographia Literaria (1817), it was conceived in
terms of subject matter and in novelty of expression.
The formalists, however, endorse defamiliarization
effected by novelty in the usage of formal linguistic
devices in poetry, such as rhyme, metre, metaphor,
image and symbol.

13. Thus literary language is ordinary language deformed
and made strange. Literature, by forcing us into a dramatic
awareness of language, refreshes our habitual perceptions
and renders objects more perceptible.