Basic notions of stylistics.
Any literary work of irrespective of its genre (poem, short story, novel, etc.), or its literary trend (realistic, naturalistic, romantic, etc.) is a unique and complete world, created by the author in precisely the way his imagination has urged him to create. Though it is a product of the author's imagination, it is always based upon objective reality. A literary work is thus a fragment of objective reality arranged in accordance with the vision of the author and permeated by his idea of the world.
The Theme of a literary work may be understood to be an interaction of human characters under certain circumstances, such as some social or psychological conflict (war and peace, clash of ideologies and the like).
Within a single work the basic thememay alternate with rival themesand their relationship may be very complex.
Thus, for example, the basic theme of «The Forsyte Saga» may be defined as the life of the English middle class at the end of and after Victorian epoch. The by-themes in saga are numerous: the Boer and the 1st World War, the first Labour Government, the postwar generation, the arts and artists, etc.
The idea of a literary work can be defined as the underlying thought and emotional attitude transmitted to the reader by the whole poetic structure of the literary text.
Plot is a sequence of events in which the characters are involved, the theme and idea revealed. Each event that represents a conflict (the gist of the plot) has a beginning, a development and an end.
The plotaccordingly consists of exposition, story, climax and denouement.
In the exposition the time, the place and the subject of the actionare laid out. Some light may be shed on the circumstances that will influence the development of the action.
Storyis that part of the plot which represents the beginning of the collision and the collision itself.
Climaxis the highest point of the action.
Denouementis the event or events that bring the action to an end.
There is no uniformity as far as the above mentioned components of the plot and their sequence in the text are concerned. Some short stories may begin straight with the conflict without any exposition, while others have no denouement in the conventional sense of the word (E. Hemingway’s stories).
A work of narrative prose that has all the components mentioned above (exposition, story, climax and denouement)is said to have a closed plot structure.
A literary work in which the action is represented without an obvious culmination, which does not contain all the above mentioned components, is said to have an open plot structure.
Literary imageis one of the fundamental notions both in literary and linguostylistics. It may refer a) to the way of reflecting the objective reality (text serves as the image of reality); b) to characters; c) to any meaningful unit (word, phrase, detail).
We should distinguish: 1) macroimage - the literary work itself understood as an image of life, visioned and depicted by the author; 2) character image; 3) event image; 4) landscape; 5) microimages - words within the poetic structure - which serve to build images of a higher level.
Literature is a medium for transmitting aesthetic information. To be operative, it must, like any other kind of communication, involve not only the addresser (the author) but also the addressee (the reader). Indeed, a literary work is always written for an audience. Whether the author admits it or not, he is urged on by a desire to impart his vision of the world, his attitude towards it, to someone, i.e. to an addressee. His attitude may be quite obviously expressed, or, on the contrary, be presented in a non-committal, impersonal way. Thus, the literary workis an act of communication of the authorwith the reader.
Languageis the medium of literature, itis capable of transmitting practically any kind of information. It has names for all things, phenomena and relations of objective reality. It is so close to life that an illusion of their almost complete identity is created, for man lives, works and thinks in the medium of language; his behaviour finds an important means of expression primarily in language.
Language is closely connected with nationality. And even when a person speaks a language foreign to him, his own nationality can be clearly identified. Language is constantly changing. Changes in language are brought about by external, i.e. social causes (for language develops simultaneously with the culture of the people that speaks it) as well as by internal causes. The results of all these changes remain in the language.
2. The problem of narrator’s relationship to the story.
There is a standard structure of fictional narrative communication:
- the level of non-fictional communication (author and reader) – extratextual level
- the level of fictional mediation and discourse (narrator and addressee(s)) – intertextual level
- the level of action (characters) – intertextual level
Narrator types
An “Overt” narrator is one who refers to him/her in the first person (I, we), one who directly or indirectly addressees the narrator, one who offers readers friendly exposition whenever it is needed, one who exhibits a discoursal stand towards characters and events, especially in his/her use of rhetorical figures, imagery.
A “Covert” narrator – he/she is one who neither refers to him or herself nor addressees any narrates, one who has a more/less “neutral” (non-distinctive) voice and style, one who is sexually indeterminate, one who does not provide exposition even when it is urgently needed. One who doesn’t interfere, one who lets the story events unfold in their natural sequence and tempo, one whose discourse fulfils no obvious phatic, appellative or expressive functions.
Lanser’s rule
In the absence of any text-internal clues as to the narrator’s sex, use the pronoun appropriate to the author’s sex; i.e. assume that the narrator is male if the author is male, and that the narrator is female if the author is female respectively.