Stylistics

The module is concerned with the linguistic analysis of literary texts, and particularly with the relationship between linguistic choices on the one hand and readers’ interpretations on the other. It deals with all three main literary genres: poetry, prose fiction and drama. Topics typically include:

• Foregrounding in language: deviation
• Foregrounding in language: parallelism
• Figurative language and thought
• Metaphor, metonymy and pain in verbal and visual art
• Narrative and point of view
• Fictional minds 1: point of view and mind style
• Speech and thought presentation
• Fictional conversations and characterisation
• Fictional minds 2: conversation and autistic characters
• Demonstration stylistic analysis: flash fiction