Literature and Stylistics for Language Learners Theory and Practice Edited by Greg Watson and Sonia Zyngier Literature and Stylistics for Language Learners Also by Greg Watson DOIN’ MUDROOROO: Elements of Style and Involvement in the Early Prose Fiction of Mudrooroo FINNO-UGRIC LANGUAGE CONTACTS (co-editor) Also by Sonia Zyngier AT THE CROSSROADS OF LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE: Literary Awareness, Stylistics, and the Acquisition of Literary Skills in an EFLit Context DEVELOPING AWARENESS IN LITERATURE Literature and Stylistics for Language Learners Theory and Practice Edited by Greg Watson University of Joensuu, Finland and Sonia Zyngier Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Foreword by Ronald Carter Selection and editorial matter © Greg Watson and Sonia Zyngier 2007 Foreword © Ronald Carter 2007 Individual chapters © the contributors 2007 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN–13: 978–1–4039–8799–0 ISBN–10: 1–4039–8799–8 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Literature and stylistics for language learners : theory and practice / edited by Greg Watson and Sonia Zyngier ; foreword by Ronald Carter. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–8799–8 (cloth) 1. Language and languages–Study and teaching. 2. Style, Literary–Study and teaching. I. Watson, Greg (Greg J.) II. Zyngier, Sonia. P53.L538 2007 418′.0071–dc22 20006045538 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne Contents Foreword by Ronald Carter vii Preface xii Notes on the Contributors xvii Part I Theoretical Perspectives 1 Stylistics in Second Language Contexts: A Critical 3 Perspective Geoff Hall 2 On Teaching Literature Itself 15 Peter Stockwell Part II New Approaches 3 When the Students Become the Teachers: A Practical 27 Pedagogy Joanne Gavins and Jane Hodson 4 ‘The Shudder of the Dying Day in Every Blade of Grass’: 37 Whose Words? Voice, Veracity and the Representation of Memory John McRae 5 Analysing Literature Through Films 48 Rocio Montoro 6 Discourse Stylistics and Detective Fiction: A Case Study 60 Urszula Clark Part III Corpus Stylistics 7 Corpus Stylistics as a Discovery Procedure 79 Donald E. Hardy 8 Literary Worlds as Collocation 91 Bill Louw 9 Investigating Student Reactions to a Web-Based Stylistics 106 Course in Different National and Educational Settings Mick Short, Beatrix Busse and Patricia Plummer v vi Contents Part IV Stylistics, Grammar and Discourse 10 From Syntax to Schema: Teaching Flannery O’Connor in 129 the Persian Gulf David L. Gugin 11 Non-Standard Grammar in the Teaching of Language 140 and Style Paul Simpson 12 Language Teaching Through Gricean Glasses 155 Judit Zerkowitz Part V Awareness and Cognition 13 Attention-directed Literary Education: An Empirical 169 Investigation David Ian Hanauer 14 What Reading Does to Readers: Stereotypes, Foregrounding 181 and Language Learning Willie van Peer and Aikaterini Nousi 15 Revisiting Literary Awareness 194 Sonia Zyngier, Olivia Fialho and Patricia Andréa do Prado Rios Index 211 Foreword ‘A hard coming we had of it.’ —T.S. Eliot, Journey of the Magi Stylistics has always had a hard time of it. As an academic discipline it has always been seen, pretty much throughout the twentieth century, as neither one thing nor the other, or, much worse, as all things to all men and women, as sitting uncomfortably on the fence between the linguistic and the literary, and as a bit uneasy within either domain, building bridges that never quite stretch far enough across dividing waters and always, as here, resorting to retreat, repair and reconciliation metaphors of bridges, unfilled gaps and spaces, crossing contested terri- tories, unhappy marriages and paths not taken. In the 1960s and 1970s this was in part to be expected for an essentially inchoate interdiscipli- nary endeavour. Linguists felt stylistics was too soft to be taken too seri- ously and tended to introduce irrelevant notions such as performance data and interpretation; literature specialists felt that stylistics was too hard, too mechanistic and too reductive, saying nothing significant about historical context or aesthetic theory, eschewing evaluation for the most part in the interests of a naïve scientism and claiming too much for interpretations that were at best merely text-immanent. And many linguists and literary critics continue to this day to give stylistics a hard time. But, for better or for worse, stylisticians have stayed together. There have been few divorces or major disagreements within the family. More recently, however, in the 1980s and 1990s the offence mecha- nisms have become stronger as traditional linguists began to feel threat- ened by developments in discourse and pragmatics that (augmented by the dialogic philosophies of Bakhtin and Vygotsky) generated fuller accounts of language in use and in context and as traditional literary critics began to feel threatened by the linguistic turn in the humanities and social sciences. There has been, often in response to demands to make courses accessible and ‘relevant’ to high-fee paying international students, a growth in ESOL, significant developments in classroom research in second and foreign language studies, and a not unsurprising growth in pedagogic stylistics. The pedagogic turn has also given buoy- ancy to the language dimension of English studies, accelerating under the impetus of (mainly) sociolinguistic studies in World Englishes and vii viii Foreword debates concerning the ownership of English. The growth of stylistic studies of literatures in English, often within a classroom research per- spective, is especially marked. The two decades saw a growth in volumes dedicated to these broad pedagogic perspectives (Brumfit and Carter 1986; Short 1988; Durant and Fabb 1990; Widdowson 1975, 1992; Carter and McRae 1996) and a simultaneous growth in classroom-ready text- books in stylistics (Leech and Short 1981; Short 1996; Simpson 1997; Wales 1990), the latter of which have often exerted real influence in schools where a new generation of teachers of English have embraced the possibilities offered. This is not to say that the developments have not been problematic, as applied, classroom-based pedagogic research has always to some degree been seen (universally) as inferior to ‘pure’ research. But the two decades saw increasing confidence in the field of stylistics, alongside institutional power shifts, and an altogether less defensive stance. The first decade of the twenty-first century is witnessing less concern with bridges and dividing lines and more a sense that there is much to be done within the interdisciplinary field of stylistics in and for itself with no longer any overriding need to explain or to attack or to defend. The intellectual excitement of cognitive poetics (with its re-tuning of the significance of language processing), the awesome power of corpus lin- guistics, the depth and richness of studies in narrative analysis, the ever new angles on the literariness of language – all now take place routinely alongside developing opportunities for web-based teaching and learning, the pedagogic possibilities afforded by hypertexts, more refined rhetor- ical-analytical tools, enhanced paradigms for greater empirical investiga- tion, more and more successful integration of quantitative and qualita- tive methodologies. An ever-greater variety of texts and genres and reg- isters is studied stylistically with increasing numbers now feeling more comfortable than ever before, as a series of books ranging from mono- graphs to dedicated textbooks, internationally refereed journals and new courses are established, increased research grants are secured and inter- national conferences are hosted by a growing body of national associ- ations. It may have been hard but it is no longer as hard as it was. Stylistics people are together and together in larger numbers. They have a sense, like never before, that they are here to stay and it is no big deal now to worry about what part of the linguistic, literary or pedagogic ter- ritory they occupy. Although this does not mean that clear orientations are not given, it is up to others to worry about where they stand in rela- tion to stylistics. Foreword ix This volume exhibits much of this new-found confidence. Before reading the papers contained here I had doubts and worries, as I always do when picking up new books in the field. I asked myself if there is the danger that stylistics has become a bit complacent. Should we be hard- er on ourselves? Should we be picking more fights with others outside the field – and with each other? In terms of the above vastly over- simplified history, would there be any significant difference between this volume and other pedagogic volumes from the last decade or two? With a first word of ‘Literature’ in the title of the book would there be enough here of the literary or would the contributions be open to a charge of a lack of criticality and reflexivity of the kind that can some- times come with an increased strength of identity? What I have found both challenging (and reassuring because it is challenging) is that this book does not rest on any assumed disciplinary or interdisciplinary laurels, be they methodological, ideological, theo- retical or epistemological. Collectively, the authors of the chapter in this book very clearly manifest a continuing endeavour to address and re-address issues surrounding the study of literature and its teaching from a language-based perspective. Some key questions are asked about the relevance of literary stylistics to the literature classroom and new and fresh examples introduced that provide a real stimulus to thinking about textual history in relation to textual stylistics; aesthetic questions are posed alongside the role of critical linguistics in language and liter- ary studies; and the student-centred focus does not eschew difficult questions (questions dear to the heart of teachers of literature), concern- ing value(s), socio-historical cultures, the student experience of texts and the kinds of personal growth made possible by this engagement. Throughout, there is a steady focus on the kinds of meanings released by careful, systematic and retrievable description of language functions and on the classroom practices, both new and tried and tested, that can help to foster such releases of meaning. Going back to re-read some of the volumes from earlier decades, what strikes me here is a quieter, soft- er confidence in the range of available methods, a trust in the analytical equipment and a hard-edged belief in the importance of continuing to make analysis open, usable and contestable (because retrievable) by others. Above all, though, there is also a collective feeling that more still needs to be done. More needs to be invested in new textual theories and ana- lytical frameworks to help us to begin to address the more elusive, even harder questions which are still discussed in relatively loose and un- inspected ways by all concerned with text and discourse – literary