referencebooks (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} referencebooks) wrote,@ 2005-10-11 18:02:00 |
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| Entry tags: | language, literature, stylistics |
A Dictionary of Stylistics
A Dictionary of Stylistics
By Katie Wales
Published by Longman, 1990.
This is a 6" by 9" paperback book running to 504 pages including the bibliography, plus a brief introduction.
Stylistics is a relatively new area of linguistics having to do with analysis of style in texts. According to this book's introduction, it's a cross-disciplinary field, incorporating vocabulary from discourse analysis, text linguistics, contemporary literary theory, communication theory, as well as traditional linguistics and literary theory and other related fields. The introduction says, "This book is ... designed both as a dictionary and as a guide-book: not only to explain the meaning of terms, but also overall to give a general picture of the nature and aims of stylistics, its approaches, methodologies and insights, its historical origins and potential developments, in the hopes of facilitating and stimulating further study." It is primarily aimed at undergraduates in introductory courses in stylistics or literary studies; for grad students; and for foreign students and English teachers engaged in the analysis of written and spoken language.
For a sense of what's included, the first fifteen entries in the dictionary, which cover eight pages, are:
- a-verse
- aberrant decoding
- absence
- absolute clause
- abstract nouns
- absurd, theatre of the
- accent; accentuation
- acceptability
- acronym
- act
- actant
- actant
- action; actional code
- active
- actualiztion
The entry for "act" runs to just over a half a page and gives four separate meanings: the division of a play or opera; the smallest unit of conversational behavior (in discourse analysis); the idea of a deed in narratology; and the activity of producing utterances within the context of teller, tale and reader in narration. In the introduction, the author points out that one purpose of the book is to help readers who encounter terms that are used in different ways in the different disciplines on which the study of stylistics relies. Giving multiple definitions of terms to show how they can be used differently in stylistics is a useful feature of the book.
As you can see, the book covers an extremely wide territory. Considering the breadth of its subject matter the book seems woefully incomplete in terms of the vocabulary that it includes and doesn't include. Why include just some grammatical terms and just some ideas from deconstruction theory, when many more could be relevant to the study of stylistics? To be fair to the author, her field of study is stylistics and she no doubt selected terms that were the most likely to be encountered.
Incomplete as the book may be, its entries are written well, illuminating subjects that often suffer from obscurity. Not much theoretical background is assumed.
This is a useful book for someone interested in stylistics or the study of texts in general.
