A Stylistics of Drama


Book Description

"This study looks at how stylistic methods apply to drama texts, and focuses its attention on Stoppard's Traversties, which, by its parodic nature, compels an investigation of literary parody as an intertextual mode." "The author first seeks to place stylistics within a historical and procedural framework and considers ideological and procedural impasses that have bedevilled stylistic analyses. Detailed analyses of passages from Travesties in the light of what has been discussed then follows."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved




Travesties


Book Description

Satire on politics, literature and art. James Joyce, Lenin, and Dadaist Tristan Tzara come together in the memories of an obscure English diplomat (Henry Wilfred Carr) in Zürich. (Song and dance routines. Prologue, 2 acts, 5 men, 3 women, 2 interiors).




Exploring the Language of Drama


Book Description

Exploring the Language of Drama introduces students to the stylistic analysis of drama. Written in an engaging and accessible style, the contributors use techniques of language analysis, particularly from discourse analysis, cognitive linguistics and pragmatics, to explore the language of plays. The contributors demonstrate the validity of analysing the text of a play, as opposed to focusing on performance. Divided into four broad, yet interconnecting groups, the chapters: open up some of the basic mechanisms of conversation and show how they are used in dramatic dialogue look at how discourse analysis and pragmatic theories can be used to help us understand characterization in dialogue consider some of the cognitive patterns underlying dramatic discourse focus on the notion of speech as action there is also a chapter on how to analyse an extract from a play and write up an assignment




Storytelling and Drama


Book Description

How do characters tell stories in plays and for what dramatic purpose? This volume provides the first systematic analysis of narrative episodes in drama from an interactional perspective, applying sociolinguistic theories of narrative and insights from conversation analysis to literary dialogue. The aim of the book is to show how narration can become drama and how analysis of the way a character tells a story can be the key to understanding its role in the unfolding action. The book s interactional approach, which analyses the way in which the characteristic features of everyday conversational stories are used by dramatists to create literary effects, offers an additional tool for dramatic criticism. The book should be of interest to scholars and students of narrative research, conversation and discourse analysis, stylistics, dramatic discourse and theatre studies. Winner of 2012 Esse Book Award for Language and Linguistics"




Dramatic Discourse


Book Description

Whilst poetry and fiction have been subjected to extensive linguistic analysis, drama has long remained a neglected field for detailed study. Vimala Herman argues that drama should be of particular interest to linguists because of its form, dialogue and subsequent translation into performance. The subsequent interaction that occurs on stage is a rich and fruitful source of analysis and can be studied by using discourse methods that linguists employ for real-life interaction. Shakespeare, Pinter, Osborne, Beckett, Chekhov, and Shaw are just some of the dramatists whose material is drawn upon. Each chapter contains a theoretical section in which major concepts of each framework are explained before the relevance of the framework to dramatic discourse is analyzed and explored using textual examples. This book will be of interest to undergraduates and postgraduates studying in the areas of literary linguistics and stylistics, or anyone specialising in the relationship between the text and performance.




Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose


Book Description

Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose examines how readers interact with literary works, how they understand and are moved by them. Mick Short considers how meanings and effects are generated in the three major literary genres, carying out stylistic analysis of poetry, drama and prose fiction in turn. He analyses a wide range of extracts from English literature, adopting an accessible approach to the analysis of literary texts which can be applied easily to other texts in English and in other languages.




Point of View in Plays


Book Description

This is the first book-length study of how point of view is manifested linguistically in dramatic texts. It examines such issues as how readers process the shifts in viewpoint that can occur within such texts. Using insights from cognitive linguistics, the book aims to explain how the analysis of point of view in drama can be undertaken, and how this is fruitful for understanding textual and discoursal effects in this genre. Following on from a consideration of existing frameworks for the analysis of point of view, a cognitive approach to deixis is suggested as being particularly profitable for explaining the viewpoint effects that can arise in dramatic texts. To expand on the large number of examples discussed throughout the book, the penultimate chapter consists of an extended analysis of a single play. This book is relevant to scholars in a range of areas, including linguistics, literary studies and cognitive science.




Dialogue and Discourse


Book Description

This book is based on a close study of modern drama texts. In the first section – Dialogue – it studies specific drama texts. Drama has been neglected by linguistic studies of literature, and this book develops a new area of literary-linguistic stylistics. It demonstrates how recent advances in the sociolinguistic analysis of conversation (discourse analysis) can account for readers' and audiences' intuitions about dramatic dialogue. The second section – Discourse – uses these studies to develop a powerful and general model of spoken discourse. As well as accounting for the utterance-by-utterance organization of dramatic texts, it provides a descriptive model for the analysis of naturally occurring conversation. Literary texts and natural conversation are used to illustrate each other.




Stylistics and the Teaching of Literature


Book Description

This volume forms part of the Applied Linguistics and Language Study collection that looks at the field of analysing and appreciating literary texts. First published in 1975, this text makes a considerable contribution to extending our view of the principles underlying language teaching and curriculum design. The author begins by distinguishing the idea that discipline from the pedagogic subject in order to demonstrate that stylistics is Janus like in the way it can be treated, for example, at school or university, as a way from linguistics to literary study or the reverse. To understand this bidirectionality he explains distinctions between the linguist’s text and the critic’s messages by introducing the concept of discourse as a means through which to understand the communicative value of passages of language.




The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics


Book Description

This second edition of The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics provides a comprehensive introduction and reference point to key areas in the field of stylistics. The four sections of the volume encompass a wide range of approaches from classical rhetoric to cognitive neuroscience. Issues that are covered include: historical perspectives, centring on rhetoric, formalism and functionalism. the elements of stylistic analysis, including foregrounding, relevance theory, conversation analysis, narrative, metaphor, speech and thought presentation and point of view. current areas of influential research such as cognitive poetics, corpus stylistics, critical stylistics, multimodality, creative writing and reader response. four newly commissioned chapters in the emerging fields of cognitive grammar, forensic linguistics, the stylistics of children’s literature and a corpus stylistic study of mental health issues. All of these new chapters are written by leading researchers in their respective fields. Each of the 33 chapters in this volume is written by a specialist. Each chapter provides an introduction to the subject, an overview of its history, an instructive example of how to conduct a stylistic analysis, a section with recommendations for practice and a discussion of possible future developments in the area for readers to follow up on. The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics, second edition is essential reading for researchers, postgraduates and undergraduate students working in this area.