Course Description
Study of the patterns of literary style, including language and literary stylistics, genre, and cognition and perception.
Athena Title
Style Language Genre Cognition
Prerequisite
Two 2000-level ENGL courses or (one 2000-level ENGL course and one 3000-level ENGL course) or (one 2000-level ENGL course and one 2000-level CMLT course)
Semester Course Offered
Offered every odd-numbered year.
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
Style is a word to conjure with in literary analysis and criticism, and yet at the same time it is often not clearly defined. Style in general is 'a way of doing something.' In literature it is constituted by the author's choices in language and form, whether conscious or unconscious, or at a higher level constituted by the collective choices made by authors of a period, nation, or other grouping. Readers, too, contribute to meaningful interaction in literature through their perception of patterns in language and literature. The first goal of this course will be to teach literary stylistics, which includes the means to identify and describe the language characteristics that we might recognize as style. Students will be introduced to computational tools that help to identify and characterize patterns in language. Another goal of the course is to introduce students to larger literary patterns, genres, through which authors mediate their relationship with readers, especially as this activity can be understood as an aesthetic process. The final goal of the course is to introduce students to cognitive issues related to literature that mediate our perception of patterns in language and literature (e.g., in the approach of Lakoff and Johnson). The central idea of style, then, is patterns, both for the creation and the reception of language and literature, through the relative contributions of authors, readers, and their social milieu to the creation of meaning in literary texts. Students will be expected to understand and contrast different patterns that together create our notion of style. At the end of the course, students should be able to describe the linguistic, generic, and cognitive patterns that obtain in any text, especially in literary texts, using terminology and methods appropriate to patterns at each level of analysis. In order to make an adequate description, students should recognize that their individual perspective on style, developed out of their own unique experience, needs to be supplemented by systematic study of the language, genres, and cognitive setting (communicative competence) in conjunction with which any specific text was created. The major paper at the end of the term will provide evidence that students have attained competence with these descriptive skills.
Topical Outline
Particular sub-topics will vary from semester to semester, especially to keep pace with emerging new research on different aspects of style. 1. Introduction. The course will begin with discussion of the perennial interest of readers in literary style, and how discussion of style most often comes down to the perception and description of patterns that a literary work follows or enhances. 2. Literary Stylistics. The lowest level of patterning in texts is in the language itself. Traditional grammar does not provide a sufficient description of such patterns. Students will be reminded about terms and concepts that they should already know about language patterns, and will be introduced to additional ideas, e.g., from discourse analysis, systemic functional linguistics, and corpus linguistics. Students will be introduced to elementary computational methods for text analysis, which help to identify and characterize patterns in language beyond simple grammar. 3. Genre. Students will be introduced to contemporary genre theory as it has developed in concert with narratology and phenomenology, from formalism (Jolles) to reception theory (Jauss), with commentary by thinkers like Derrida. Generic patterns are not separate from the aesthetics of texts, and so some treatment of literary aesthetics will be included. 4. Cognition and Perception. This section will address the findings of perceptual language variationists, such as Preston and Tamasi. Perceptual factors will be related to the power-law model, to suggest that what people perceive as "normal" corresponds to their experience with language and literature at different levels of scale within different kinds of local organization of literary production. The work of Lakoff and Johnson on cognitive metaphor and more recent developments in cognition and metaphor, e.g., by Steen and others, will connect research on the cognition and perception of language more generally to more specifically literary topics. 5. Applications. The course will conclude with a particular study of the style of a literary work, according to the language, genre, and cognitive and perceptual issues studied in earlier parts of the course. Periodically during the semester, students will perform a number of graded tasks, including some combination of tests, computer tasks, and out-of-class papers. In-class exams and the final exam will require essays as well as objective questions and problems. Substantial out-of-class writing will be required, including at least one short paper (c. 5 pages), and a prospectus (c. 3-5 pages) that proposes an idea for a major paper due at the end of the term (c. 20 pages).
Syllabus