STYLISTICS

Style in Literature

The language of the poetry have the following characteristics:

*Its meaning is often ambiguous and elusive.

*It may flout the conventional rules of grammar.

*It has a peculiar sound structure .

*It is spatially arranged in metrical lines and stanzas.

*It also reveals foregrounded patterns in its sounds,

vocabulary ,grammar ,or syntax.

*It frequently contain indirect references to other texts.

  

     

Text type and style

*There is not always a one-to-one correspondence between text

type and style.

*The best illustration of this overlapping of different styles is the

language of advertising ,political manifestos, slogans, or graffiti.

*What helps us recognize the purpose and the effect of a text?

• The majority of the texts can be related to the real world

around us:

• A headline encourages us to read a news story.

• A publisher's blurb encourages us to buy a book.

• An advertisement is designed to promote a product.

•What might the function be of text types or genres like poetry

and , by extension, of novels and plays, all of which are designated

as literary texts?

We stood by a pond that winter day,

And the sun was white, as though shien of God,

And a few leaves lay in the straving sod;

-They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.

Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove

Over tedious riddles of years ago;

And some words played between us to and fro

On which lost the more by our love.

The smile in your mouth was the deadest thing

Alive enough to have strength to die;

And a grin of bitterness to swept thereby

Like an ominous bird a-wing

Since then ,keen lessons that love deceives,

And wrings with wrong , have shaped to me

Your face ,and the God- curst sun, and a tree,

And a pond edged with grayish leaves.

The most obviously literary text is poetry:

The main features of poetry:

•It bears no relation to our socially established needs and

conventions,because unlike non-literary texts poetry is detached from

the ordinary contexts of ordinary life

•It does not make direct reference to the world of phenomena.

•It provides a representation of it through its peculiar and

unconventional uses of language which invite and motivate ,and

sometimes evoke readers to create an imaginary alternative world.

The main requirements of analyzing a literary text:

•Our awareness and perception has to be more astute (power of

judgment) than in ordinary communication.

•We experience the verbal structure of a literary text as elements

of a dynamic communicative interaction between writer and reader

•The responses to the incentives of the literary text and there by

our expectation of the text as a whole, are bound to differ from one

reader to another, and may include total rejection.

Its essential function is :

∞ to enable us to satisfy our needs as individuals,

∞ to escape from our humdrum socialized

existence,

∞ to feel reassured about the disorder and

confusion in our minds, and

∞ to find a reflection to our conflicting emotions.

So the language of literature is not socializing but

individualizing.

The main features of Neutral tones by Thomas Hardy:

•The occurrence of personification:

•Attaching metaphoric animacy to an unanimate grammatical

subjects:

all the grammatical subjects in the poem refer to unanimate entities

except 'We'. This forms a grounded pattern :

'The sun was white', 'a few leaves lay',' They [the leaves ]had

fallen'….

and they were gray', Your eyes on me ……. eyes that rove' ,

'some words played‘, 'the smile on your mouth ….was…..

a grin of bitterness swept…', 'keen lessons ….have shaped' 'love

deceives'.

•This prominent pattern has a psychological effect on readers ;

• it invites the readers‘ interpretation

• these two people are inherently powerless to deal with

relationship.

• The use of 'We' among the unanimate entities represent the

utter loneliness of these two people

•and their futile struggle against the indifferent ,mechanic

forces which rule their world.

•The use of a chain of images which reflect the desolate state

of their love:

'a pond on a winter 's day', 'a pale sun',' a few gray leaves…..

which has fallen from an ash tree'.•The word 'ash' reinforces the pervasive grayness of the scenery and seems to hit at the extinguished fire of their love.•The word 'ash' reinforces the pervasive grayness of the scenery and seems to hit at the extinguished fire of their love.•The verbal elements indicating a series of fateful happenings: 'chidden of God' .'starving sod', 'fallen from', 'eyes that rove', a grin of bitterness swept…‘

•The emphatic repetition of the nature image: 'Alive enough to have strengthen to die‘

•The use of different tenses started by using the past

tense in the first three stanzas to the present perfect

in the final one indicates the transmutation from the

particular to the universal.

•The title' Neutral tones' refers to the neutral colours

' white and gray', 'indifferent tones of voices' with an

obvious allusion to the lovelessness between these

two people