Topic 10 (session A) - Prose analysis > Prose Analysis Methodology

Prose Analysis Methodology

Most poems are short, and so it is possible to analyse a whole text. And when analysing poetry we noticed that we could get a long way by concentrating on foregrounded features: particularly deviation and parallelism.

On the other hand, for novels and short stories, because they are much longer, stylistic analysis can only be done on selected extracts which are representative or specially interesting for some reason. And one of the results of this extra length is that effects in prose are often spread through whole texts, or textual extracts, and so, just looking at foregrounded features will not necessarily reveal enough of what we need to show. This is why we have developed a prose methodology checksheet to use for prose analysis, and which we will use when discussing the passage from Bilgewater, which you have just done some initial work on.

The complete methodology checksheet can be found further down the menu of this topic, and we suggest that you have a quick look through it after you have read this page and before you do the rest of the 'Bilgewatery' work. First, though, it will be helpful if we say a little about the purpose and structure of the checksheet.

The checksheet, like the other checksheets we have provided so far, is meant to help you be systematic in your work and not miss important 'hidden' linguistic features and patterns. But it is essential to notice that not everything you systematically examine will turn out to be important interpretatively. When we write up stylistic analyses for essay, articles or books, not surprisingly, the areas which turned out not to be very revealing are omitted from discussion. But you still need to do the initial systematic work in order to find out what the most relevant aspects of analysis are.

The checksheet you can find on the Methodology Checksheet page has four general sections:

I. LEXIS
II. GRAMMAR
III. FOREGROUNDED FEATURES (INCLUDING FIGURES OF SPEECH)
IV. COHESION AND CONTEXT

In fact you have already done some work on each of the above sections. The poetry section of the course covered a lot of what appears in section (iii), and we have done various bits of work on lexis and grammar (sections (i) and (ii)) as we have worked through the poetry and prose sections of the course (cf. the work on word structure and neologism in the poetry section of the course and the work on lexis (vocabulary) and grammar when we looked at authorial style and style variation. Section (iv), 'cohesion and context' includes the areas we have recently covered in topics 8 and 9: viewpoint analysis and speech and thought presentation.

All of the earlier checksheets you have been through look at their particular areas in more detail than you will find on this more general checksheet. The general Methodology Checksheet does ask some questions in each of its four main areas which we have not had time to cover on this course, however, and so it makes sense, when doing general analyses and writing essays, to used this general checksheet in conjunction with the other, more detailed checksheets.

In the following exercises on the Bilgewater passage, we will look at a section of the checksheet in turn, concentrating on the most revealing aspects of each section. However, we will go through the sections of the checksheet in a different order than the order above, in order to help reveal the salient features of the passage more easily. You should also note that we can't possibly cover every single aspect of the checksheet and the passage without boring you to tears, so we will just look at a few relevant aspects from each part of the checksheet, to help you build up a reasonable idea of how to use it when doing your own stylistic analyses for essays.

Note that although we are showing the use of this methodology checksheet on the analysis of prose, it could also be usefully used when analysing texts from other literary genres and non-literary texts too.

If you want to see this kind of checksheet in action in books, look at:

Short, Mick (1996) Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose (Longman), chapter 12.
Leech, Geoffrey and Mick Short (1981) Style in Fiction(Longman), chapter 3.

The latter compares three passages from short stories by three different authors Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence and Henry James). Interestingly, another stylistician, Bill Nash, analysed the Lawrence passage (plus a little bit more) independently and came to very similar analytical conclusions. If you want to compare the two accounts, Nash's article is:

Nash, W. (1982) 'On a passage from Lawrence's Odour of Chrysanthemums'. In R. Carter (ed.) Langauge and Literature: An introductory reader (Allen & Unwin), pp.101-20.

There is also an article which includes a discussion of the Bilgewater passage (based on work done when preparing an analysis of the passage for the Language and Style course):

Short, Mick, Jonathan Culpeper and Elena Semino (2000) 'Language and context in Jane Gardam's Bilgewater'. In Tony Bex, Michael Burke and Peter Stockwell (eds) Contextualized Stylistics (Amsterdam: Rodopi Press), pp.131-51.

Home ¦ Outline ¦ Contents ¦ Glossary