Content area
Full Text
Simpson, Paul. Language Through Literature: An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.
Stylistics is a subject inherently difficult to teach. It applies linguistics to literary criticism, and yet the two are distinct disciplines. The primary justification for bringing them together is that literature uses systematic as well as unconventional ways to express itself, and linguistics is uniquely suited to discover how those ways convey meaning. But subsumed under linguistics is a complex of inter-related areas of enquiry. To teach stylistics, one therefore needs to set priorities with respect to significance and sequencing. An introductory text which defines those priorities well would allow the fundamentals to be imparted in an orderly fashion, and would therefore be more than welcome. Language Through Literature: An Introduction is no doubt written with that objective in mind. As there are linguistic models aplenty vying for the attention of even the beginner, the author of this text is thoughtful enough to stage their appearance in such a way that each chapter only "addresses a key aspect of English language" (xi). This is no mean task since each model selected must be "appropriate to the task in hand" (3). Care has also been taken for each chapter to be "relatively self-contained" (19), so as to avoid the overlapping of concepts, likely a source of confusion. At the same time, the reader is properly cautioned that a chapter does not end with its last word, and that each model is "replicable" (25), i.e., applicable to the analyses of the texts studied in other chapters.
Chapter 1, entitled "Introduction: Studying Language and Literature," begins with some thought-provoking points, among them a heuristic issue basic to textual interpretation: there is no one "correct" reading of a given text (3). But it goes so far as to declare that "[t]here is no such thing as a 'literary language"' (7). It is quite similar to ordinary language, the author argues, the only differentiating factor being that the former "derives its effectiveness from its exploitation of the entire linguistic repertoire" and that "[l]iterary communication thrives not on the presence of a clearly defined linguistic code but on the very absence of such a code" (8). This triggers immediate questions that hinge on theoretical perspectives, questions certain to...