Language in Literature: Style and Foregrounding

by Leech; Geoffrey

• ISBN13: 9780582051096
• ISBN10: 0582051096
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2008-08-15
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

"Over a period of more than forty years, Geoffrey Leech has made notable contributions to the field of literary stylistics, using the interplay between linguistic form and literary function as a key to the 'mystery' of how a text comes to be invested with artistic potential. In this book, seven earlier papers and articles have been brought together with four new chapters, the whole volume showing a continuity of approach across a period when all too often literary and linguistic studies have appeared to drift further apart. Leech sets the concept of 'foregrounding' at the heart of the interplay between form and interpretation. Through practical and insightful examination of how poems, plays and prose works produce special meaning, he counteracts the 'flight from the text' that has characterized thinking about language and literature in the last thirty years, when the response of the reader, rather than the characteristics and meaningful potential of the text itself, have been given undue prominence. The book provides an enlightening analysis of well-known (as well as less-known) texts of great writers of the past, including Keats, Shelley, Samuel Johnson, Shaw, Dylan Thomas, and Virginia Woolf."--BOOK JACKET.

Author Biography

Geoffrey Leech is Emeritus Professor of English Linguistics at Lancaster University.

Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction: about this book, its content and its viewpoint

Stylistics as an 'interdiscipline'

The chapter-by-Chapter progression of this book

A digression on 'literariness'

A list of texts examined

Notes

Linguistics and the figures of rhetoric

Introduction

A linguistic perspective on literary language

Figures of speech as deviant or foregrounded phenomena in language

Classifying figures of speech

Linguistic analysis and critical appreciation

Notes

'This Bread I Break' language and interpretation

Cohesion in a text

Foregrounding

Cohesion of foregrounding

Implications of context

Conclusion: interpretation

Notes

Literary criticism and linguistic description

The nature of critical statements

The nature of linguistic statements

The relation between critical and linguistic statements

Leavis on Keats' 'Ode to a Nightingale'

Linguistic support for Leavis's account

Conclusion

Notes

Stylistics

Introduction

The text: 'Ode to the West Wind'

Stylistic analysis: deviation and foregrounding

Secondary and tertiary deviation

Coherence of foregrounding

The poem's interpretation

Conclusion

Notes

Music and metre: 'sprung rhythm' in Victorian poetry

Introduction

A multi-levelled account of metre: four levels of metrical form

Why we need an extra layer of musical scansion

Sprung rhythm

Conclusion

Appendix: Further examples of musical scansion

Notes

Pragmatics, discourse analysis, stylistics and 'The Celebrated Letter'

The close affinity between pragmatics, discourse analysis and stylistics: a goal-oriented framework

Politeness and irony in a multi-goaled view of communication

Samuel Johnson's 'Celebrated Letter' as a demonstration text

Conclusion: there is no dichotomy between literary and non-literary texts

Notes

Stylistics and functionalism

Roman Jakobson: a formalistic functionalist

A goal-oriented multifunctionalism

Typologies of language function and kinds of meaning

Functionalism in terms of a threefold hierarchy

Applications to literature

Jakobson's poetic function revisited: autotelism

Conclusion

Notes

Pragmatic principles in Shaw's You Never Can Tell

Introduction

The plot of Shaw's You Never Can Tell

Pragmatic principles and pragmatic deviation

(Un)cooperative and (im)polite behaviour in the play

Quality and quantity: rights and obligations

Pragmatic abnormalities of character

A system of pragmatic contrasts

'You never can tell'

Notes

Style in interior monologue: Virginia Woolf's 'The Mark on the Wall'

Introduction

The formal levels of phonology, lexigrammar and semantics

A digression on the stream of consciousness

The textual function

The ideational function: representation of (mock) reality

The interpersonal function

Conclusion

Notes

Work in progress in corpus stylistics: a method of finding 'deviant' or 'key' features of texts, and its application to 'The Mark on the Wall'

A method in corpus stylistics: WMatrix

The results

Conclusion

Notes

Closing statement: text, interpretation, history and education

The book's relation to other work

What is a text?

Ambiguity and interpretation

Historical and educational viewpoints

Conclusion

Notes

References

Index

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.