Stylistics

Stylistics is a field of linguistics that studies the artistic or aesthetic use of language in plays and in common language, in its individual and collective forms.

Concept

Analyzes all the elements of a work or of spoken language, the effect that the writer or speaker wants to communicate to the reader or receiver of the spoken discourse, and the terms, phrases, or complex structures that make those effects more or less effective. It tries to establish principles capable of explaining the reasons that lead an individual or a social group to select particular expressions in their use of language, the socialization of those uses and the production and reception of meanings. Includes literary criticism and critical discourse analysis.

A literary genre can be seen as a group of characteristics that mark the style and differentiate it; for example, prose and poetry. Other aspects considered by stylistics are dialogue, the description of scenes, the use of passive or active voice, the distribution and length of sentences, the use of dialectal registers, figures of speech and figures of thought, the predominance of a morphological category or word class, the use of similes or comparisons, the selection or predominance of certain tropes, metaphors or images.

History

Aristotle dealt with the analysis of figurative language in his Rhetoric and also in part in his Poetics. The Hellenistic scholars gathered in Alexandria had to study figurative language in order to understand and comment well on Homer's poems that they intended to publish. On the other hand, the Romans also studied literary language in the Rhetoric to Herennius, and Quintilian devoted some space to it in his Oratory Institutions. Stylistics was initially considered a branch of Rhetoric and Literary Criticism. During the Middle Ages, a stylistic model was established that reflected the tripartite division of the estates into commoners, nobles and clergy: the "Virgil's Wheel" or Rota Virgilii , so called because the Roman poet cultivated all three in his poetry ( Bucolic , Georgic , epic Aeneid )

1. Sublime style:
   1. Social status of the characters: military, warlords.
   2. Typical heroic characters: Hector, Ayax.
   3. Animal associated with such characters: the horse.
   4. Gun: the sword.
   5. Radio of its sphere of action: the city or the camp.
   6. Symbolic or significant tree: laurel or cedar.
2. Humble style:
   1. Social state: lazy shepherd (pastor leisuresus).
   2. Representative Characters: Títiro, Melibeo.
   3. Animal associated with them: the sheep.
   4. Gun or utensil: the cayado.
   5. Place: the dehesa.
   6. Tree: the beech.

In the 18th century, the French Enlightenment artist Buffon affirmed that «the style is the man»: that is, what that individual, personal or subjective remains in his literary writing. In the 19th century this subjective vision of style was developed through Romanticism. An existential and historicist vision of this affirmed that the literary work had to reflect the vital experience of individuals and that the work could not be perfect or finished, but open to evolution in order to be truly alive: Humboldt affirmed that the inner and creative world, ergon, manifested itself through language, energeia; German linguistic idealism was fed by this postulate, and its authors —Wundt, Hugo Schuchardt, Benedetto Croce, Karl Vossler and Leo Spitzer— defended a purely individual conception of language centered on the analysis of energeia or creative power crystallized in the particular literary language of an author or an era.

However, what prevailed in academic teaching was to analyze the style in a general and fragmented way, not very unitary, due to the great influence that classical rhetoric still exerted. The development of the theories of Russian Formalism (among whose contributions the notion of deautomatization stands out) and the discovery of the poetic function by Roman Jakobson and the theory of deviation were very important in this regard. Great rhetorical theorists made important advances by collecting and codifying all the material of classical rhetoric, as Heinrich Lausberg did for example. In the XX century three major currents dominated Stylistics:

• Descriptive style, mainly French, inspired by the Structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure and developed by Charles Bally.
• Genetic or generative stylewhich prolongs the stylist of German idealism and derives from Benedetto Croce. In the centuryXX. He continued to develop with the work of Dámaso Alonso and Amado Alonso, heirs also of the philological tradition of Ramón Menéndez Pidal; some call it "Stylist of the individual" or "Styletic Criticism" or "Cience of Literature", according to Dámaso Alonso.
• Functional style or structural stylistic. The Eugenio Coseriu poses by adding the concept of rule to the Saussure dichotomy between language and speech and introducing the operational role of the poetic function according to Roman Jakobson. The deviation of the norm has a creative role in literaryity and, in fact, considers style as a deviation from a norm in what is of a creative aspect. It develops in the United States and counts among its scholars Michel Riffaterre and S. P. Levin.

Style

Language is, in full terms, the material of the literary artist. And it can be said that every author chooses the components and features that will serve his purpose, just as the sculptor chooses the marble in which he is going to sculpt his statue. The author's printing or stamp constitutes the style.

The word style comes from the Latin. The voice from which it is derived, in such a classical language, is equivalent to chisel (stilus, 'awl to write').

Style, as a concept, refers to a set of specific features of any artistic composition, determined by the union of different forms that together provide the work of art. In literary works —which is what is of interest now— style is related to the richness and precision of the lexicon, as well as its adequacy or inadequacy; It also refers to the structure of sentences, to idiomatic expressions, to the rhythm of language...

The concept of style was used primarily for literary art, and from the 18th century it moved towards the plastic arts.

In the early days, style was considered as something objective, characterized or shaped by the chosen literary genre. Within these limits a certain margin of individual variation was possible.

The "ways of saying" or classes of style originating from ancient or medieval rhetoric were basically three: the "sublime" style, the "median"; and the "bass". Each of them had specific contents or topics assigned to them.

Currently, the objective or prescriptive context gravitates less. The stylistic analysis is oriented in a preferential way towards the knowledge of the personal characters of the author. In Friedrich Schiller, style was still the repository of the represented object, and every "personal" of an artist was esteemed as a "mannerist" peculiarity.

There is often talk of "rupture of style" when from one level or structure the author suddenly slips into another. Sometimes this can be due to the author's lack of stylistic ability, but in other cases it is a procedure followed deliberately in the pursuit of certain effects of the literary work.

By "stylistic means" each of the elements that make up a totality of style is understood. This is the name given to rhetorical figures and any peculiarity of written speech pursued and not obtained by chance.

Among the different modalities of style, a "nominal" style can be highlighted, in which nouns predominate; and one "verbal", with a predominance of actions or verbs.

Also "interlocked" and not "ridden on"; in these cases, the use of "overriding" Define the features.

The laconic, concise style has traditionally been known as telegraphic: most links are suppressed, and it occurred in expressionism.

The "hieratic" it is the excessively rigid, closely linked to archaic structures: it is the style that is not very spontaneous and lively.

Regarding the relationship with time, we speak of individual style when what predominates are the characteristics of a certain author; in the period style what counts is supra-individual, typical of a time in the history of art and of literary art in particular.

Style and history of art

Art history has systematized a succession of global artistic styles, which enjoys great acceptance. Let us cite: classic, gothic, renaissance, baroque style...

It is easy and attractive to transfer these periods or these terms to the history of literature, but this parallelism cannot be made without further ado: a thorough clarification of the relationship between the other arts and literature is required, a scientific examination and differentiator, if necessary, of such a link.