Topic 6 (session A) - Style and Style variation > Reregistration

Reregistration

Introduction

'Reregistration', or 'register borrowing' is the term used by some stylisticians to refer to register variation and its effects inside literary texts. This idea can involve not just marked switches (see also Style Variation in USA and Style variation in a poem) from one variety of language to another within a text, but also more subtle effects. For example, the miserable description of Coketown in Hard Times by Charles Dickens gets some of its ironic effect from style borrowing from the rhetorical and painterly descriptions of places being produced at the time by the first travel writers (e.g. Cobbett's Rural Rides). Coketown is a town worthy of note, but for all the wrong reasons:

Let us strike the key-note, Coketown, before pursuing our tune:
     It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage.
     It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled.
     It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another . . .

(Charles Dickens , Hard Times, Chapter 5)

Reading:

The term 'reregistration' was first introduced by Carter and Nash. See:
Carter, R.and Nash, W (1990) Seeing Through Language, Oxford: Blackwell.pp. x-y

Paul Simpson suggests that John Le Carré uses more modern travelogue descriptions in The Little Drummer Girl as the register backdrop to his description of the town of Bad Godesberg just before a terrorist bomb explodes. See:
Simpson, Paul (1988) 'Access Through Application, Parlance 1, 2, 5-28. [pp. 11-14 are the pages relevant to reregistration]

See also Short, M. (1993) 'To analyse a poem stylistically: "To Paint a Water Lily" by Ted Hughes' in P. Verdonk (ed.) Twentieth-Century Poetry: from text to Context, London: Routledge, pp. 7-20. The poem analysed in this article borrows from the register of instruction (cf. also Task A below).

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