Friday, February 3, 2012

Do u know the inherncy stylistics approach --how do u apply it to these texts?

William Shakespeare - Sonnet 18

Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer's Day?



Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? a

Thou art more lovely and more temperate: b

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, a

And summer's lease hath all too short a date: b



Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, c

And often is his gold complexion dimm'd; d

And every fair from fair sometime declines, c

By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd; d



But thy eternal summer shall not fade e

Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest; f

Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade, e

When in eternal lines to time thou growest: f



So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, g

So long lives this and this gives life to thee. g





Oscar Wilde's novel the Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 1 – ‘the studio was filled with the rich odour of roses’.



The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.



From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flame like as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion. The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive. The dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ.



In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty, and in front of it, some little distance away, was sitting the artist himself, Basil Hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years ago caused, at the time, such public excitement and gave rise to so many strange conjectures.

Do u know the inherncy stylistics approach --how do u apply it to these texts?
Read this closely and open the link below for more. This is all what stylistic approaches and criticism means.

Try to read in light of Shakespeare and Wilde's texts:



Stylistics is a valuable if long-winded approach to criticism, and compels attention to the poem's details. Two of the three simple exercises performed here show that the poem is deficient in structure, and needs to be radically recast. The third sheds light on its content.



Introduction

Stylistics applies linguistics to literature in the hope of arriving at analyses which are more broadly based, rigorous and objective. {1} The pioneers were the Prague and Russian schools, but their approaches have been appropriated and extended in recent years by radical theory. Stylistics can be evaluative (i.e. judge the literary worth on stylistic criteria), but more commonly attempts to simply analyze and describe the workings of texts which have already been selected as noteworthy on other grounds.



Analyses can appear objective, detailed and technical, even requiring computer assistance, but some caution is needed. Linguistics is currently a battlefield of contending theories, with no settlement in sight. Many critics have no formal training in linguistics, or even proper reading, and are apt to build on theories (commonly those of Saussure or Jacobson) that are inappropriate and/or no longer accepted. Some of the commonest terms, e.g. deep structure, foregrounding, have little or no experimental support. {2} Linguistics has rather different objectives, moreover: to study languages in their entirety and generality, not their use in art forms. Stylistic excellence — intelligence, originality, density and variety of verbal devices — play their part in literature, but aesthetics has long recognized that other aspects are equally important: fidelity to experience, emotional shaping, significant content. Stylistics may well be popular because it regards literature as simply part of language and therefore (neglecting the aesthetic dimension) without a privileged status, which allows the literary canon to be replaced by one more politically or sociologically acceptable. {3}



Why then employ stylistics at all? Because form is important in poetry, and stylistics has the largest armoury of analytical weapons. Moreover, stylistics need not be reductive and simplistic. There is no need to embrace Jacobson's theory that poetry is characterized by the projection of the paradigmatic axis onto the syntagmatic one. {4} Nor accept Bradford's theory of a double spiral: {5} literature has too richly varied a history to be fitted into such a straitjacket. Stylistics suggests why certain devices are effective, but does not offer recipes, any more than theories of musical harmony explains away the gifts of individual composers.









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