The language and literature reader

The language and literature reader. Ed. by Ronald Carter and Peter Stockwell. New York: Routledge, 2008. Pp. 308. ISBN 9780415410038. $42.95.

Reviewed by Iain Mobbs, University of Cambridge

This volume brings together twenty-seven papers (or extracts) in literary linguistics. The editors Ronald Carter and Peter Stockwell have chosen pieces to demonstrate how texts may be productively analyzed by using the range of tools made available by theoretical linguistics, be it phonology, syntax, cognitive linguistics, or corpus linguistics. The book is organized to reflect the history of this enterprise and to develop the argument that particular linguistic texture is necessary for the interpretation of a literary text.

In Part 1, ‘Foundations’, the first eight papers comprise seminal framings of the interface between literary studies and the different areas of linguistics. For instance, John Sinclair’s paper deals with syntax, and both Roger Fowler’s and Mick Short’s are with respect to discourse analysis. However, it is surprising to find no mention of Halle and Keyser’s (1966) influential work on prosody.

Part 2, ‘Developments’, begins to put the tools introduced in Part 1 to work towards informing the interpretation of literary texts. Some of these papers are strongly interpretive, focusing more on a sensitive reading of the text and less on how linguistics helps inform this, as in Walter Nash’s pragmatic analysis of the opening dialogue to Hamlet. Others are more purely descriptive, closely analyzing a particular linguistic aspect of the text, but paying less attention to how it informs our interpretation, as in Keith Green’s discussion of deixis in Henry Vaughan’s The Retreate.

In keeping with the editors’ expository aims, the final section, Part 3 ‘New directions’, comprises ten more completely realized stylistic analyses. The most successful of them focus on the role of the reader and his or her linguistic ability. The best examples are Peter Stockwell’s own discussion of a surrealist poem in terms of its lexical semantics and Raymond Gibbs’ assessment of the affective values associated with literary texts by metaphorical usage.

The volume closes with an illuminating postscript where the editors argue the case for stylistics as a distinct field, which offers privileged insight into our interpretations of literary texts through detailed and eclectic analysis of their linguistic content. The evidence of the preceding sections largely bears out this conclusion. Indeed, the postscript is so helpful in understanding the unity of what comes before, one wonders whether some part of it could not have been featured in the brief preface.

As a whole, the book is rather heavy on discourse and pragmatic studies and lighter on more structural approaches. This perhaps reflects a failure on the part of structural and psycho- linguists to pursue the implication of their work for literary studies. Neurolinguistic approaches, for instance, are entirely absent (although Philip Davis (2008) has recently made interesting first steps in investigating neural response in readers of Shakespeare). These are avenues that will no doubt be pursued further in due course.

That said, this volume is a successful realization of its stated aims and will now serve as the most complete expression of an increasingly well-defined and fruitful stylistics.

References

DAVIS, PHILLIP. 2008. Syntax and pathways. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews. 33.265–77.

HALLE, MORRIS, and SAMUEL J. KEYSER. 1966. Chaucer and the study of prosody. College English. 28.187–219.