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Modern Stylistics and the Novel summary
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A summary of the article Modern Stylistics and the Novel by Bahktin
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Modern Stylistics and the Novel For a long time, treatment of the novel was limited to little more than abstract ideological
examination and publicistic commentary
Towards the end of the 19th century interest began to grow in the concrete problems of
artistic craftsmanship in prose, in the problems of the novel and short story techniques, but
in questions of stylistics nothing changed
In the 1920’s the situation did change: the novelistic prose began to win a place for itself in
stylistics
o All the categories of traditional stylistics, however, were not applicable to novelistic
discourse
The novel is a phenomenon multiform in style and variform in speech and voice
Compositional stylistic unities
1. Direct authorial literary-artistic narration (in all its diverse variants)
2. Stylization of the various forms of oral everyday narration (skaz)
3. stylization of the various forms of semiliterary (written) everyday narration (letters, diaries,
etc.)
4. various forms of literary but extra-artistic authorial speech (moral, philosophical or scientific
statements, oratory, ethnographic descriptions, memoranda, etc.)
5. the stylistically individualized speech of characters
The stylistic uniqueness of the novel as a genre consists precisely in the combination of these
subordinated, yet still relatively autonomous, unities into the higher unity of the work as a
whole: the style of a novel is to be found in the combination of its styles; the language of a
novel is the system of its “languages”
The novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types and a diversity of individual
voices, artistically organized
The substitution of the individualized language of the novelist for the style of the novel itself
is doubly imprecise: it distorts the very essence of a stylistics of the novel
o This inevitably leads to the selection from the novel of only those elements that can
be fitted within the framework of a single language system and that expresses,
directly and without mediation, an authorial individuality of language
The second type of substitution is characterized not by an orientation toward the language of
the author, but rather towards the style of the novel itself – although style thus understood
is narrowed down to mean the style of merely one out of the several subordinated unities
within the novel
o In the majority of cases, the style of the novel is subsumed under the concept of
“epic style” and the appropriate categories of traditional stylistics are applied to it;
the profound difference between novelistic and purely epic modes of expression is
ignored
o In other instances, different aspects of novelistic style are selected out as most
characteristic of one or another concrete literary work
All these types of analysis are inadequate to the style not only of the novelistic whole, but
even of that element isolated as fundamental for a given novel
We need to consider oft-neglected rhetoric, which for centuries has included artistic prose in
its purview; in this way, we may adhere to the old concept of poetic discourse, relegating to
“rhetorical forms” everything in novelistic prose that does not fit the Procrustean bed of
traditional stylistic categories
Novelistic discourse is poetic discourse, but one that does not fit within the frame provided
by the concept of poetic discourse as it now exists
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