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 relationships 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. Students must be able to integrate particular research
findings with basic assumptions in order to construct a
theoretical model of style based on such different patterns. 
Students are expected to describe their own work (as for a
thesis, dissertation, conference paper, or article) with the
terms and concepts adduced for the description of style.

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.

Students in this course are expected to be familiar with and
adhere to the University of Georgia policy on academic honesty,
according to which all violations of academic honesty will be
handled.  Students may participate in graded group projects at
the instructor's discretion.