Stylistics versus close-reading:
- Close reading emphasizes the difference.
- Stylistics emphasizes the connections.
- Stylistics makes a greater claim to scientific objectivity than does close reading.
Terms & technicalities of both Stylistics and close-reading.
- Close reading uses lay-person terms like:
“Irony”
“Paradox”
“Ambiguity”
- Stylistics use specialized technical terms like:
“Under-Lexicalisation” Lack of an adequate set of words to express specific concepts.
“Collocation” A term which refers to the habitual or expected co-occurrence of words.
“Cohesion” It’s about ‘Lexical items’ (words) which cross the boundaries between sentences, binding them together into one single continuous utterance.
The ambitions of Stylistics:
- Stylisticians try to provide “hard” data to support existing “intuitions”.
- Stylisticians suggest new interpretations of literary works based on linguistic evidence.
- Stylisticians attempt to establish general points about how literary meanings are made.
What Stylistic critics do:
- Describing technical aspects of language in the text.
- The purpose of that description.
- The goal of these technical accounts.
- Other uses of Stylistic.