Proposed Course Outline "Introduction to Stylistics"

College of Education, Arts and Sciences

English Language Area

Course Outline on Introduction to Stylistics

 

Brief Description:

Introduction to Stylistics is a language and style course that will help the students in exploring (primarily literary) texts. This course looks at the language of texts and tries to explain how that language creates meaning, style and effect.

Introduction to Stylistics covers all three major literary genres (poetry, prose and drama), and also other text-types e.g. advertisements (which, interestingly, share some of the characteristics of poetry).

Course Aim:

The fundamental philosophy of the course is twofold:

(1) To teach you a set of analytical TOOLS from the "stylistician's tool kit" that you can use to examine texts (for example, their words, sounds, structures, or interactive aspects).

(2) To encourage you to use those tools on additional texts, both during and after the sessions, so that you learn by doing.

Objectives:

Throughout the course, the students will learn different aspects of how to:

1.      Analyze the language of texts.

2.      Learn about particular aspects of the structure of English (e.g. grammatical, sound and conversational structure), at points where it is of particular relevance to the texts you happen to be studying at the time.

Teacher’s Role:

Teachers expected to be an active participant, preferably working alongside other students, especially when it comes to analyzing text extracts. S/he will also experiment the tools you learn each session, by practicing on additional texts.

Course Plan:

The course consists of ten topics (sub-divided into sessions), which represent three distinct blocks of poetry, prose fiction and drama:

Topics:

MAINLY POETRY

1. Levels of language. Linguistic choice, style and meaning

2. Being creative with words and phrases

3. Patterns, deviations, style and meaning

4. The grammar of simple sentences

5. Sound

MAINLY PROSE

6. Style and style variation

7. The grammar of complex sentences

8. Discourse structure and point of view

9. Speech presentation

10. Prose analysis

MAINLY DRAMA

11. Conversational structure and character

12. Meaning between the lines

13. Shared knowledge and absurdist drama

Supplementary Reading/s:

SHORT, Mick (1996) Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose, (Longman).
LEECH, G.N. & SHORT, M.H. (1981) Style in Fiction, (Longman).

FOWLER, R. (1996 [1986])) Linguistic Criticism, (OUP)

Reference: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/stylistics/introduction/outline.htm