First published in 1992, Political Stylistics draws together ideas about society and language from a range of theorists including Pratt, Bourdieu, Goody and Watt, and Bakhtin, to establish a political stylistics: a way of studying the formal properties of texts based on the principle that all linguistic production operates within the intricate network of power relations that structure the social realm. On a practical level, this methodology is used to analyse the representation of popular French and argot in three literary works where it extends beyond the speech of the characters and enters the narrative. The book is articulated along three axes: the trajectory of the French working class from mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century; the trajectory of popular language from social margin to literary centre; and the evolution of the novel from naturalism to modernism, to post-modernism. This book will be of interest to students of literature, linguistics, literary theory, and cultural studies.

First published in 1992, Political Stylistics is a way of studying the formal properties of texts based on the principle that all linguistic production operates within the intricate network of power relations that structure the social realm.

Stylistics has become the most common name for a discipline which at various times has been termed 'literary linguistics', 'rhetoric', 'poetics', 'literary philology' and 'close textual reading'. This Handbook is the definitive account of the field, drawing on linguistics and related subject areas such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, educational pedagogy, computational methods, literary criticism and critical theory. Placing stylistics in its intellectual and international context, each chapter includes a detailed illustrative example and case study of stylistic practice, with arguments and methods open to examination, replication and constructive critical discussion. As an accessible guide to the theory and practice of stylistics, it will equip the reader with a clear understanding of the ethos and principles of the discipline, as well as with the capacity and confidence to engage in stylistic analysis.

In this book, Robert Hariman demonstrates how matters of style—of diction, manners, sensibility, decor, and charisma—influence politics. In critical studies of classic texts, Hariman identifies four dominant political styles. The realist style, as found in Machiavelli's The Prince, creates a world of sheer power, constant calculation, and emotional control; this style is the common sense of modern political science. The courtly style, depicted in Kapuscinski's The Emperor, is characterized by high decorousness, hierarchies, and fixation on the body of the sovereign; this style infuses mass media coverage of the American presidency. The republican style, reflected in Cicero's letters to Atticus, promotes the art of oratory, consensus, and civility; it informs our ideal of democratic conversation. The bureaucratic style, as captured in Kafka's The Castle, emphasizes institutional procedures, official character, and the priority of writing; this style structures everday life. Hariman looks at effective political artistry in figures from antiquity to modern politicians such as Vaclav Havel, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. He discusses the crises to which each style is susceptible, as well as the social and moral consequences of each style's success.

Understanding style as the intersection of communication, culture, commodification, and aesthetics, The Politics of Style and the Style of Politics focuses on the numerous connections between style and politics. In the first section of the book, the contributors reflect on style in the rhetoric of politics. In today's political arena, commentaries on the styles of political candidates seem to outpace serious discussions of policy and credentials: For example, politicians and commentators alike parse Barack Obama's ability to manipulate stylistic dimensions of race, class, and national origin. Elsewhere, many critics debate about whether a ôfeminine styleö can ever carry a national election. The book's second section focuses on style in the politics of culture. These chapters consider politics in the sense of everyday struggles over power, as exemplified in situations such as France's political battles regarding whether Islamic women may wear head coverings. Overall, The Politics of Style and the Style of Politics makes a powerful argument for the strong connection between style and politics in all of its forms. Book jacket.

This book develops a Marxist theory of literary style. The first part explains why Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson came to see style as central to political criticism. It delineates the historical and conceptual preconditions for the emergence of a ‘politics of style’, and uncovers an underground current of stylistics within the Marxist tradition from Marx to Barthes. The second part sets out precisely what each thinker has written on style and demonstrates how this came to figure in their overall intellectual and political projects, focusing above all on a detailed reconstruction of Williams’s best-known concept, the ‘structure of feeling’. Finally, the third part sets out an independent theory of style and makes an ambitious attempt to establish it as a foundational element of a new Marxist poetics.

This edited book provides cutting edge contributions from an international array of prominent experts who discuss the relevance of pedagogical stylistics in relation to diverse contexts and areas, including empirical approaches, corpus stylistics, creative writing, literary-linguistic criticism, students as researchers, critical discourse, academic register, text-world pedagogy, cognitive stylistics, classroom discourse, language of literary texts, L1/L2 education, EFL learners, and multimodal stylistics. Intended as a follow-up to Watson and Zyngier (2007), this volume situates the reader by offering a broad assessment of how the field has developed during the past 15 years and where it stands now. By examining both contemporary research and future challenges, it should be regarded as essential reading for all teachers, researchers, scholars, and students interested in understanding language and how to apply stylistics in educational settings. This book will be of interest to students and scholars working in stylistics, cognitive linguistics, language teaching, applied linguistics, literary studies, and materials development.

Talking Donald Trump examines the language of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign from the perspective of sociocultural linguistics. This book offers an insight into the many stages of Trump’s political career, from his initial campaign for the Republican nomination, up to his presidency. Drawing from speeches, debates, and interviews, as well as parodies and public reactions to his language, Sclafani explores how Trump’s language has produced such polarized reactions among the electorate. In analysing the linguistic construction of Donald Trump’s political identity, Sclafani’s incisive study sheds light on the discursive construction of political identity and the conflicting language ideologies associated with the discourse of leadership in modern US society. Talking Donald Trump provides a crucial contemporary example of the interaction between sociolinguistics and political science, and is key reading for advanced students and researchers in the fields of sociolinguistics, language and politics, communication studies and rhetoric.

This book analyzes how news discourse was shaped over time by external factors, such as the historical context, news production, technological innovation and current affairs, and as such both conformed to and deviated from generic conventions. Using data from a newspaper corpus, it offers the first empirical study into the development of style in early mass media. In this analysis, media style appears as a dynamic concept which is highly sensitive to innovative approaches towards making news not only informative but also entertaining to read. This cutting-edge survey will be of interest to academics researching corpus linguistics, media discourse and stylistics.

This book focuses on ideology and its function in fictional discourse, exploring the link between textual ideologies and real ideologies in text-production environments. It attempts this through a specific focus on the social and linguistic elements that control the presence, the use, and the presentation of ideology, and also the way in which linguistic elements are controlled and manipulated by the collective consciousness of the text producer. This correlation between fictional discourse and ideology is revealed through a series of chapters that cover four closely interrelated areas, focusing specifically on Malaysian and Singaporean fiction. Firstly, the positioning of Malaysian and Singaporean literatures in English as individual literary traditions. This is to counter the non-recognition of Malaysian and Singaporean literatures as individual traditions in spite of five decades of independence. Secondly, establishing a contextual (socio-cultural and political) framework as a basis for discussion on real ideology, arguing that Malaysian and Singaporean writers have moved beyond the anti-western nationalistic stage and on to more personal and communal concerns such as race relations, identity and a sense of belonging. Thirdly, rationalising the social structures of ideology that are likely to be found in the Malaysian and Singaporean social milieus, especially location and text-specific social variables of ideology. Lastly, it seeks to reveal a linguistic-oriented approach for the study of textual ideologies and for linking textual ideologies to ideologies in the overall text production environment. The book ultimately shows the significant possibilities of systematic links between textual ideology, and the real ideology in the text production environment, through what can best be termed as ideological stylistics. In doing so, it aims to contribute significantly to studies of ideology in general and more specifically on ideology on Malaysian and Singaporean literatures in English.