University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

An Inquiry Into The Problem Of Style: A Negative Experiment

(USC Thesis Other)

An Inquiry Into The Problem Of Style: A Negative Experiment

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content T his d isse r ta tio n has been 65— 3104
m icr o film ed ex a ctly a s r e c e iv e d
GRAY, B arbara B enn ison, 1 9 3 7 -
AN INQUIRY INTO THE PRO BLEM O F STYLE:
A NEGATIVE EXPERIM ENT.
U n iv e r sity of Southern C aliforn ia, P h .D ., 1964
Language and L itera tu re, g en era l
U niversity Microfilms, Inc., A nn A rbor, M ichigan
AN INQUIRY INTO THE PROBLEM OF STYLE
A NEGATIVE EXPERIMENT
by
Barbara Bennison Gray
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
August 1964
UNIVERSITY O F SO U T H E R N CALIFORNIA
GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES 7. CALIFORNIA
This di ssertation, written by
...................Barbara. Be.nnisoii.Gray....................
under the direction of hex. .Dissertation Com
mittee, and approved by all its members, has
been presented to and accepted by the Graduate
School, m partial fulfillment of requirements
for the degree of
D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y
Date... August, I 964
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
Chairman
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter Page
I. THE PROBLEM OF STYLE........................ 1
II. AIMS AND HYPOTHESES......................... 22
III. STYLE AS BEHAVIOR........................... 44
IV. STYLE AS THE SPEAKER......................... 72
V. STYLE AS THE L A T E N T ......................... 96
VI. STYLE AS THE INDIVIDUAL.................... 123
VII. STYLE AS THE IMPLICIT SPEAKER............... 146
VIII. STYLE AS LANGUAGE........................... 180
APPENDIX.................................................. 219
BIBLIOGRAPHY.............................................. 224
CHAPTER I
THE PROBLEM OF STYLE
In the past sixty years the crucial problems of liter
ary scholarship have come more and more to be seen as prob
lems of definition. Thus, not only has the terminology of
literary study come under question but also the subject of
literary study— the nature of literature itself. Less and
less do theorists and critics ask of literature , iat is or
should be its use. More and more the crucial, the critical,
question has come to be: What is literature? The concerns
of literary theory have gradually shifted from the teleo-
logical— catharsis and imitation, pleasure and instruction,
and even self-expression— through Kant's Zweckm&ssiqkeit
ohne Zweck, to disregard of purpose, to emphasis instead on
nature and function, on the ontological. And more and more
the result of such concerns, the answer to such a question
has come to be, "Literature is language which ..."
Elder Olson, who as a Chicago Neo-Aristotelian dissents
1
2
from such definitions, nevertheless recognizes their preva
lence .
Nowadays when the nature of poetry has become so uncer
tain that everyone is trying to define it, definitions
usually begin: "Poetry is words which, or language
which, or discourse which," and so forth.^
"As a matter of fact," he adds dogmatically, "it is nothing
of the kind." Yet logically as well as empirically it seems
impossible to agree with such a conclusion, to go along, for
example, with Olson's most recent statement, that "the
greater, and the chief part, of playwriting has nothing to
2
do with words." As a matter of fact, Olson's critical
practice actually refutes these theoretical pronouncements.
One example from his analysis of Dylan Thomas should suffice.
We depend upon diction first of all to get at the poem;
unless we can grasp its meaning, we can hardly penetrate
to character or activity or situation or anything else.
• • •
No New Critic would disagree with this. If we cannot under
stand a poem or a novel or a play without understanding the
words which constitute it, words must have something
1
"An Outline of Poetic Theory," in R. S. Crane, ed.,
Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern (Chicago, 1952),
p. 564.
^Tragedy and the Theory of Drama (Detroit, 1961), p. 9.
3The Poetry of Dylan Thomas (Chicago, 1954), p. 53.
3
important to do with the writing, and surely the reading, of
a poem or any other piece of literature. It may be that
literature cannot be defined as "language which," but there
is no getting around the fact that literature is linguistic--
whatever else it might be as well.
On the other hand, to accept a definition of literature
as "language which— " seems equally impossible, simply be
cause no one has yet been able to fill in the blank with a
predication which actually does comprise the distinctive
function or attribute necessary to an adequate definition.
Literature may indeed be "language which--" but which does
or is or has what? Murray Krieger, in describing the theo
ries of the critics whom he calls the new apologists for
poetry, admits
it is true that from their science-poetry distinction
onward, our critics have tried to show, even in their
most esoteric interpretations of complexities, that the
language of poetry is the key to everything else.^
These new apologists include the major British and American
critics of the past half century. Yet if language is the
key, these men of keen intelligence and vast experience with
literature have yet to unlock an adequate definition with
it. The language of literature often is ambiguous or
^The New Apologists for Poetry (Minneapolis, 1956),
p. 94.
4
metaphorical or elliptical or deviational simply because
language often is such, whether literary or otherwise. No
difference of degree can be consistently distinguished, and
no difference of kind has been demonstrated.
Take, for example, the current contention that litera
ture may somehow be defined as metaphor. "The essence of
poetry," declares Cleanth Brooks, "is metaphor,"^ and W. K.
Wimsatt, Jr., in his epilogue to Literary Criticism: A Short
History, written with some assistance from Brooks, also pro-
nounces metaphor "the principle of all poetry." Such a
conception of the defining feature of poetry is the pivotal
point of the work of a critic like Philip Wheelwright, and
it inevitably involves, as in Wheelwright, a distinction be
tween literary and other "kinds" of language— notably
7
"scientific"--and something of a retreat towards mysticism.
Q
That Brooks' most recent work is entitled The Hidden God
comes finally as no surprise. Yet such contentions must
yield to the fact that metaphor is a prevalent feature of
^The Well-Wrought Urn (New York, 1947), p. 223.
^(New York, 1957), p. 750.
^The Burning Fountain (Bloomington, 1954), p. 61. Cf.
also Metaphor and Reality (Bloomington, 1962).
®New Haven, 1963.
5
much non-literary discourse, and even of so-called non-
poetic instances of language, the scientific and the philo
sophical. The density of metaphors in various parts of a
work which is generally not classified as literature, Kant's
Critique of Pure Reason, has been successfully used to help
determine the irregular sequence of the composition of the
Critique. The use of metaphor and other "figures" was one
way in which Kant apparently hoped to make his work clear to
Q
the general public. Recognition of the fact that such fea
tures as metaphor are an integral part of much more than
strictly poetic or literary discourse has led some critics
to assert that "metaphor is the omnipresent principle of
language,"^ in which case it can scarcely be the essence or
the principle of literature. On the other hand, some critics
are forced to admit that there are genuine poems, as well as
parts of genuine poems, which are not metaphorical at all or
even, more broadly speaking, "figurative."^
Q
S. Morris Engel, "On the Composition of the Critique,"
forthcoming in Ratio. Cf. also Max Black’s analysis of
metaphor as a tool of philosophical inquiry in Models and
Metaphors (Cornell, 1962), pp. 25-47.
■^1. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (New York,
1936), p. 92.
^Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the
Philosophy of Criticism (New York, 1958) , p. 154.
6
A peculiar consequence, however, of this urge for defi
nition, and particularly of these resultant definitions of
literature, or poetry, as metaphor is the insistence that
criticism, both in theory and practice, is and should be
metaphoric too. "It is true,” Wimsatt admits,
that metaphor in poetry is not the same thing as meta
phor in poetic theory. Yet a metaphorical theory of
poetry is almost necessarily a theory of multiple fo
cuses and hence a historic theory and a perspective
theory. . . . It seems to us, finally, that metaphor is
not only in a broad sense the principle of all poetry
but is also inevitable in practical criticism and will
be active there in proportion as criticism moves beyond
the historical report or the academic exercise.^
In The Mirror and the Lamp M. H. Abrams distinguishes "the
role in the history of criticism of certain more or less
submerged conceptual models— what we may call 'archetypal
analogies'— in helping to select, interpret, systematize,
and evaluate the facts of art." There is no doubt that
metaphors and analogies do form an integral part of the
language of criticism. But whether or not they can be taken
as the defining feature of all practical criticism that
moves beyond the historical report or the academic exercise,
1 9
^Literary Criticism, p. 750. Cf. also Richard Foster,
"Criticism as Poetry," The New Romantics: A Reappraisal of
the New Criticism (Bloomington, 1962).
(New York, 1953), p. 31.
7
any more than they can be taken as the defining feature of
the language of literature, is the crucial question. What
is important to decide is whether or not criticism ought to
be metaphorical and analogical. Does there not come a time
in literary criticism and scholarship when "the exploration
of serviceable analogues, whose properties" are "by meta
phorical transfer, predicated of a work of art" ceases to be
helpful, when the study of literature falls victim to what
Abrams has further called "the endemic disease of analogical
thinking"— "hardening of the categories" (pp. vi, 34-35)?
Such times must always come in philosophy and science, if
these disciplines are to maintain intimate and precise
understanding and control of their speculations, and, even
more importantly, of the actual objects of their investiga
tion. Metaphors and analogies are not arguments or proofs;
it is not possible to agree or disagree with them in the
agreed upon ways of intellectual discourse. The insistence
that criticism should be metaphorical would inevitably re-
14
suit, perhaps already has resulted, in a Tower of Babel.
l^This epithet is a recurrent one in Rene Wellek's Con
cepts of Criticism (New Haven, 1963). Cf. pp. ix, 2, 54,
with p. 311. Olson also uses the epithet and expands upon
it in "An Outline of Poetic Theory," p. 546. But as a Neo-
Aristotelian, who denies a basic unity in literature and
literary studies, Olson finds no cause for alarm in such a
situation.
8
Kant does not attempt to prove anything with analogy and
metaphor— only to explain and illuminate. Literature may be
analogical and metaphorical, but surely criticism, if it is
really going to be about literature, and not flights of
fancy inspired by it, ought to be subject to the same re
quirements of rigor and responsibility that attend upon
other scholarly discourse.
Of late some effort has been made to retrieve the vo
cabulary of literary criticism and scholarship from the
ethereal heights of metaphor and analogy and to reduce the
confusion of tongues by rigorous terminological analysis and
evaluation. Wellek's latest work, Concepts of Criticism, is
one man's effort in this direction. Moreover, interdisci
plinary groups have shown increasing interest in trying to
clarify terminology used across disciplines. A notable
recent example was the conference held under the joint aus
pices of the Social Science Research Council and Indiana
University
to explore the possibility of finding a common basis for
discussing and, hopefully, understanding, particularly
among linguists, psychologists, and literary critics,
the characteristics of style in language. Out of such
discussions, it was hoped, might come a clearer percep
tion of what literature is and what the constituent ele
ments of style are. If literature is an aspect of be
havior, is there any way in which these groups can reach
a meeting of minds on the nature of this behavior and
its place in human culture? How can the understandings
9
of one group be used to shed light on those of other
groups and on the whole problem of style in literature?^
Attendance at the conference comprised a cross-section of
leaders in a wide variety of disciplines, literary scholars
and critics such as Wellek, I. A. Richards, Wimsatt; the
philosopher Monroe C. Beardsley and the philosopher and
linguist Rulon Wells; folklore scholars such as Richard M.
Dorson; psychologists such as George A. Miller of Harvard
and C. E. Osgood of Illinois; the secretary of the Linguis
tic Society of America, Archibald A. Hill; the internation
ally famous scholar with a record of significant contribu
tions in general linguistics, poetics, Slavic philology,
literary history, folklore, and Paleosiberian languages,
Roman Jakobson. Yet despite the diversity and erudition of
this array and the laudable aims of the conference, one
would have, on reading the published record, to agree with
Wellek's closing statement that the conference
has not been a success . . . if its purpose was to estab
lish a common language and to throw light on its pro
fessed central topic, the problem of style and particu
larly of style in literature and methods of analyzing
style.^
15John w. Ashton, Foreword, in Thomas A. Sebeok, ed.,
Style in Language (New York, 1960), pp. v-vi.
l^In Sebeok, ed., p. 408.
10
Anything which the conference did succeed in accomplishing
must be considered incidental to this central failure.
No doubt a number of things might account for this
failure. Wellek was particularly struck by the fact that
the question of style has not been discussed at all in
terms of the enormous labor which has gone into it for
centuries or in terms even of the theories and methods
of the many contemporary practitioners of stylistics who
come to the mind of every student of literature.(p. 408)
Only one passing, and disparaging, reference was made to
"the studies produced by the adherents of the so-called
Neo-Idealistic school (of the Croce, Vossler, Spitzer
brand)," by the linguist Edward Stankiewicz, who claimed
that this "school" has not "contributed significantly to the
exploration of style problems because of their programmatic
disinterest in theoretical concepts and in a strict method-
17
ology." No mention at all was made of Erich Auerbach,
Damaso Alonso, Amado Alonso, for example, or of the very ac
tive French school of stylistics inspired by Ferdinand de
Saussure's pupil, Charles Bally, which supposedly models its
investigations on the "structural" conception of language
developed by Saussure and promulgated by Leonard Bloomfield.
Another notable omission was that of detailed analyses of
literary texts, something that might reasonably be expected
17
In Sebeok, ed., p. 96.
11
from a conference proposing to examine the concept of style
in literature. Only Fred H. Higginson's paper on "Style in
Finnegans Wake" could qualify as one, and it is primarily a
chronological comparison of numerous manuscript versions, a
kind of analysis not often available to students of style,
who are usually confronted with the one and final text.
Thus it was in fact not a practical application of any par
ticular conception of style, and Higginson need not have
used the term at all. Finally, one of the chief inhibitions
to communication and agreement which arose during the con
ference and which seems to arise nowadays whenever scholars
in the "social sciences" and the "humanities" meet was the
peculiar and disturbing issue that can only be called
"scientism." In his foreword Ashton noted that there had
emerged during the conference
a clear difference in method and understanding in the
treatment of the questions whether problems of style
(however it might be defined) might be treated quanti
tatively like problems of social behavior, whether lit
erature is amenable to truly scientific analysis, whether
the scientific analyses proposed were really meaningful
to the literary critic. (p. vi)
When the poltergeist of the quantitative, "the truly scien
tific," is called up, the social "scientist" becomes aggres
sively statistical and the literary scholar is thrown into
12
1 ft
the defensive posture of unscientific humanist.
Yet surely this whole difference over "scientific anal
ysis" is a smoke screen obscuring the real aims and needs in
the study of language and literature. Insistence upon quan
tification is about as useful as the critic's insistence
upon metaphor. The assertion that nothing is amenable to
rigorous investigation which cannot be counted makes about
as much sense as the assertion that literature is not amen
able to rigorous investigation. Both assertions ignore what
should be, must be, the first and fundamental question:
What is it? What is it you are counting? What is it you
are being metaphorical about? Critics of the metaphorical
persuasion such as Wimsatt insist upon the reality of style
as dogmatically as the psychologists who think it can be
quantified. "There are certain kinds of contentual [sic]
meaning,” says Wimsatt, "which can scarcely be discussed
except under the aspect of technique, style, 'form.' These
19
meanings are pre-eminently the ironic-metaphoric."
"Form," he further explains, "is technique and style" (p.
748). The psychologist John B. Carroll in his paper on
18
Cf. e.g. Miller, pp. 392-393, and Wellek, p. 409.
^ Literary Criticism, p. 747.
13
"Vectors of Prose Style" would seem to be in agreement with
such an assertion, for he begins
It takes little argument or evidence to secure agreement
that there are different manners of writing, and that
these differ among themselves not only by virtue of the
content or the subject matter treated but also by virtue
of a host of "stylistic" elements which are present in
varying degrees of samples of prose.^
The improbability of ever coming to a "clearer perception of
what literature is and what the constituent elements of
style are," indeed, of ever coming to a clearer perception
of whether or not there even is such an entity or quality as
"style," seems patent in the glare of these refusals to de
fine terms, to submit conceptions to the test of practical
application, and to benefit from the experience of other
scholars who have come to grips with the problem of style
and learned something from the encounter.
The irony of this "scientistic" discussion and dis
agreement about how style can be studied is threefold. In
the first place, beneath the disputes over approaches and
the proliferation of secondary terminology— "ironic-
metaphoric," "vector"— lurks an unacknowledged agreement.
The psychologist, the linguist, the aesthetician, and the
literary scholar all share basic preconceptions about the
20
In Sebeok, ed., p. 283.
14
nature of "style.” In the second place, this irony is com
pounded by the fact that, no matter who uses it, the term is
and continues to function, regardless of the coining of the
scientific-sounding term "stylistics," as a metaphor. Fin
ally, it must be recognized that insofar as the conception
of style entailed by the psychologist's, the linguist's, the
aesthetician’s, and the literary scholar's use of the term
has been applied to literary analysis it has shown itself in
practice unworkable. It has proven unworkable precisely be
cause it is a metaphor, a term and conception borrowed from
another area of human experience than the one to which it
has now been transferred, and one to which the term and the
conception are not only alien but also severely distorting.
That the term "style" was originally a metaphor every
one seems to know, for almost every book on it begins with a
reference to its metaphorical etymology. "Style is primar
ily a quality of writing," begins a recent work on Style in
the French Novel; "it comes from the Latin stilus, the name
of the writing rod, and it is only by metaphor that it came
21
to be applied to other activities." But such an appeal to
21
Stephen Ullmann (Cambridge, 1957), p. 1. Cf. for
example the beginnings of works on style as far apart in
time as Sir Walter Raleigh, Style (London, 2nd ed., 1897),
pp. 1-2, and F. L. Lucas, Style (London, 1955), pp. 3-4. It
15
etymology is extremely misleading. A great many changes
have occurred in the use of the word since it originally
applied to a quality of writing, for the writing then re
ferred to was not composition but handwriting, script.
"Style" is still used to refer to a quality of writing, but
writing in a considerably different sense than how letters
are shaped by the pen or stilus— to writing as language, as
literature. In the meantime, as early as Cicero, the term
was adopted— not by poets— but by orators and rhetoricians,
and it is in their sense, as a quality or attribute of
speech that the term still functions. Thus, "style" is ap
plied to literature only by extension. For literature dif
fers sharply in several important ways from oratory and even
from speech. Insofar as style in literature is still con
ceived of as an attribute of language which can be analyzed
and treated in relation to but distinguishable from the
meaning of the individual work of literature, "style" func
tions as a metaphor. Furthermore, it is used to designate
is important, however, to remember that the word "style"
came from Latin, not from Greek. Aristotle, for example,
uses lexis (as opposed to taxis) for what is usually trans
lated as "style" or "diction." The Greek stylos means "pil
lar," as in the name of the ascetic Simon Stylites. The
spelling "styl-" instead of "stil-" is based upon false
Greek etymologizing. Cf. Oxford English Dictionary under
"Style."
16
in literary works an entity or attribute which does not and
cannot even metaphorically be said to exist.
Etymology, of course, is not proof, any more than meta
phor and analogy are. What is necessary is to show, by a
logical analysis of its use in current literary discussion,
that the term is inappropriate and inadaptable to literature.
"Style" could serve someone some day as an interesting sub
ject for a study in the history of ideas, but such a study
will not help clarify the terminological and practical dif
ficulties of its present use. The participants in the
Indiana conference had expected that a solution to the prob
lem of style would yield "a clearer perception of what lit
erature is" and in what way it can be considered, to use
Ashton's phrase, "an aspect of behavior." Yet, it is my
contention, that social scientists and literary scholars who
conceive of literature as behavior seriously misunderstand
its nature, so that, on the contrary, a solution to the
problem of style actually waits upon an adequate conception
of what literature is. If one continues to think of litera
ture itself as a kind of human behavior— that is, as speech—
then one can scarcely achieve an adequate conception of lit
erature, an adequate comprehension of the term "style" and
what it entails, and quite possibly not even a workable
17
conception of the nature of language, whether in literary or
any other kind of discourse. A final reason for investigat
ing the logical function in current discussion of a term
such as "style" is that use of the term frequently entails
the use of a number of other terms which are also metaphor
ical when applied to literature and sometimes even when ap
plied to language. The logical function of these terms
would thus also be clarified through an examination of
"style." What do such terms as "expression," "choice,"
"saying," "rhythm," "individual," "trait," mean when applied
to style in language and to literature as a linguistic phe
nomenon? If literature is not speech, then perhaps such
terms as "tone" and "irony" also need analysis and recon
sideration for their value in describing the individual work
of literature. This should not be a reconsideration of what
in rhetoric and other literary theories they have meant, but
what in view of the nature of literature they could possibly
mean now.
What I should like to do in this dissertation is to see
how the concept of style functions in relation to the indi
vidual literary work. Can it be said that a work has style
or a style? If so, what is this attribute, how does it
work, can it be studied and analyzed in itself? By doing so
18
I hope to throw some light on the problem of critical termi
nology, on the nature and function of literature, and per
haps even on the nature of language, at least insofar as
literary works are linguistic. But in doing so I have to
begin with some conception of the nature of literature in
order to see whether or not the concept of style is appli
cable to it. This procedure is not really circular, any
more than the scientist's knowing what he hopes to prove by
an experiment before he has conducted it is circular. Some
conception of the nature of literature is a fundamental pre
supposition from which all literary studies actually are
conducted. What I want to do here is to translate my pre
supposition into an hypothesis, to bring it out in the open
as a tool of my analysis rather than leave it as a hidden
determinant. One of the chief contributions of the Chicago
Neo-Aristotelians has been the stressing of the need for
scrutinizing the assumptions of a critic in order to assess
2 2
the value of his criticism. Perhaps it might also be
stressed that the critic should examine his own assumptions
before presuming to offer criticism or terminology derived
22See R. S. Crane, The Languages of Criticism and the
Structure of Poetry (Toronto, 1953), and Critics and Criti
cism, especially Richard McKeon, "The Philosophic Bases of
Art and Criticism."
19
from them. One may then disagree with this analysis of
style and related terms because the conception of literature
on which it is based is faulty; one may disagree with it be
cause, although the conception of literature is sound, the
application of "style" to it is faulty; one may agree with
the analysis of "style" and yet disagree with the conception
of literature. But one will then at least be able to pin
point his agreement or disagreement. My premises, hopefully,
are on the table. I contend that the application of "style"
to literature is based on a false analogy of literature with
speech; I contend that the language of criticism ought not
to be metaphorical and analogical; I contend that literature
is language, not "language which--," however, but "state
ments which--," statements which function not metaphorically
but analogously, and that it is to the work of literature
and not to critical and scholarly statements about litera
ture that the concept of analogy most fruitfully applies.
Thus I will begin by presenting my hypothesis of the
nature and function of literature. Secondly, by analyzing
a social scientist's conception of the kind of entity style
is and the kind of entity to which it applies, I hope to re
veal not only the metaphorical and analogical assumptions of
even the outspokenly "scientific" proponents of style
20
analysis, but also the basic metaphorical nature of the con
cept itself when applied to literature. Next I should like
to sketch briefly the background of the confusion between
rhetoric and poetic, writing and speech, out of which the
concept of style as a quality of literature has arisen and
to point out the identity of the earliest and the most cur
rent assumptions about the existence of style. Next I
should like to examine the practical applications of the
concept of style to literary analysis as exhibited in one of
the most prolific and erudite students of literary style in
the twentieth century, the linguist and Romance philologist,
Leo Spitzer. Next I should like to show that this concept
of style used and rejected by Spitzer flourishes in contem
porary European and American stylistics because of a mis
understanding of the concept of individuality and what it
logically entails. Then I should like to show that even
when applied by current important American critics such as
Wimsatt and analyzed at length by contemporary philosophers
such as Beardsley, the concept of style still requires the
erroneous conception of literature revealed in its use by
the contemporary psychologist, the Renaissance rhetorician,
the Romantic poet and critic, and the Romance philologist.
Thus I hope to have exhibited the basic though unrecognized
21
identity of conception among those present at the Indiana
conference as well as their identity with those whom they
did not deign to mention but from whose experiences with the
concept they might have profited. Finally, I should like to
show that because of the basic analogical error of the con
cept of style when applied to the individual work of litera
ture, the about-to-be-established "new science of style,"
23
stylistics, envisioned by American and French linguists
alike is a chimera. But some idea of what literature actu
ally is must of course come first.
2 * 3
Cf. e.g. Ullman's preface to Style in the French
Novel, p. vii, and the text, p. 10.
CHAPTER II
AIMS AND HYPOTHESES
The ensuing definition of literature, here to be pre
sented ex cathedra, is being treated in full with the com
plete apparatus of argument, exposition, and substantiation
elsewhere.^- Here it is to be taken as a working hypothesis
rather than a theory; the latter calls for argument, the
former for explanation. This is the first preliminary point
needing mention: the explanation of the definition will
lack examples, for it is simply at the moment a way to
start. The second preliminary point, to be developed more
fully after the definition has been presented, but which is
mentioned here as a guide, is that the definition contains
nothing really new. Critics heretofore have either stopped
short of propounding a^ theory of literature— like Wellek
and Warren or Northrop Frye— or they have pursued a theory
as far as they could and— like Murray Krieger— ended in a
" ' ’ In a projected doctoral dissertation by J. M. Gray,
University of Southern California.
22
23
o . ,
paradox. The following definition derives from what we all
recognize about literature and the way it functions. What
is new about it is that all that is commonly recognized
about literature has been combined into an explicit state
ment that is neither paradox nor metaphor.
To take an example which will lead directly into the
business of defining: as was pointed out earlier, litera
ture has for some time been considered definable as a spe
cial kind of language or at least according to a special in
tensity of linguistic devices. As we have seen, even those
who would deny the importance of language in literature run
aground on the brute fact that, to begin with at any rate,
all we have of a literary work is its language. Until we
break that code we cannot decide whether or not any given
piece of discourse is literary. On the other hand, no set
of linguistic elements yields a definitively literary com
plex which would furnish us with even a degree, much less a
kind, of literary discourse. This difficulty can be solved
not by distinguishing between literature and other kinds of
language but between literature and other kinds of meaning
ful utterances. Language, considered not as la langue--the
^Theory of Literature {New York, 2nd ed., 1956); Anat
omy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957); The New Apologists for
Poetry.
24
linguist's abstraction of words, phonemes, morphemes, and
sentence patterns— but as la parole— speakers’ and writers'
unique and meaningful utterances--yields most importantly
differences not of kinds of linguistic elements or devices
but of kinds of statements. Every meaningful human utter
ance can be designated a statement, as opposed to non
language utterances, such as cries, laughter, nonsense. A
work of literature is a meaningful human utterance; there
fore a work of literature is a statement. The propadeutic
question then becomes not how the language of literature
differs from other language but how literary statements dif
fer from other statements.
Students of language have for some time been able to
distinguish a good many kinds of statements, such as ques
tions, commands, propositions. Perhaps the way to begin
differentiating between literary works and other statements
is by seeing which kind of statement a literary work most
resembles. A specific proposition, as opposed to a general
proposition or a question or a command, makes a referential
statement about a space-time event. "The cat is on the
table in the kitchen." "The salt dissolved in the glass of
water." "Sigmund Freud died in 1939." These statements are
referential, and we can verify them by looking at the table,
25
tasting the water, checking the records. Sometimes, how
ever, a statement purporting to be about an event (i.e. a
specific proposition) cannot be verified. "There is human
life on a planet in the orbit of the star Sirius." Even if
a speculative astronomer were to make this statement, we
would have to shrug our shoulders. Such a statement, al
though it clearly resembles that of the-cat-is-on-the-table
sort, differs in the important respect that it is not veri
fiable; that is, it cannot be proven true (or false) in any
way that we know. A proposition purports to be true; a ref
erential proposition purports to be about an event; a refer
ential proposition which is verifiable ia_ about an event. A
referential proposition which is not verifiable is simply an
unverifiable proposition, for its reference is inaccessible
to proof. What is important about unverifiable propositions
here is that they are the kind of statement most closely re
sembling works of literature.
Literary works are like unverifiable specific proposi
tions. They purport to concern space-time events, but in
fact do not. The following constitutes the opening lines of
a literary statement:
Dans une de ces planetes qui tournent autour de l'etoile
nommee Sirius il y avait un jeune homme de beaucoup d'es
prit, que j’ai eu l'honneur de connaitre dans le dernier
26
voyage qu'il fit sur notre petite fourmili&re; il s'ap-
pelait Microm^gas. . . .
Like the sample unverifiable proposition stated above, the
beginning of this statement concerns an event, the existence
of human life ("un jeune homme") on a planet in the orbit of
Sirius. And also like the sample proposition, it is unveri
fiable according to the canon of inaccessibility. But here
similarities end. To be sure, the quotation is just the be
ginning of a literary statement. A proposition is re
stricted to a single sentence, but a statement can, like
H. C. Lea's A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages,
consist of a series of related propositions. Both Lea's
history and Micromegas concern unique events. Lea's state
ment is about the ascendancy and decline of the Inquisition
in the Middle Ages. It can be proven true or false, ade
quate or inadequate, repetitive or original, by reference to
historical documents, artifacts, and other histories.
Micromegas concerns the experience of a young man from
another planet on his visit to earth. The entire statement
is unverifiable not only because we have no way of knowing
whether or not there are inhabited planets in the orbit of
Sirius, but also because we have no way of knowing whether
there is or ever was such a young man as Micromegas either
in heaven or on earth who experienced precisely the adven
27
tures Micromegas experienced and with whom Voltaire himself
became acquainted when Micromegas last visited "notre petite
fourmiliere." A work of literature is like a referential
statement in that it purports to be about an event. A work
of literature is like an unverifiable referential statement
in that it is not accessible to proof. A work of literature
may contain some propositions about events or refer to ac
tual historical figures, as Micromegas refers to "le docteur
Swift" and Maupertuis’ expedition, but the work as a whole,
the entire statement, is not a proposition and not subject
to verification. For although works of literature, histor
ies, and propositions all concern events, they differ from
each other in important ways.
Though unverifiable, a literary work is not an unveri
fiable proposition, because it is never a proposition— that
is, an assertion that consists of a subject and predicate
and can be judged true or false. The difference between the
two becomes readily apparent when we compare a proposition
such as "There is human life on a planet in the orbit of the
star Sirius" and a one-sentence poem such as Ezra Pound's
"In a Station of the Metro."
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
28
"These faces in the crowd are petals on a wet, black bough"
is a metaphor but not a work of literature. Pound's poem,
however, does not state a metaphor; it presents an event— a
unique act of perception. At a specific instant these faces
in the crowd are an apparition, that is, are to someone the
sudden vision of petals on a wet, black bough. The use of
the definite ("the") rather than indefinite ("a/an") noun
determiners and the absence of predication signal the speci
ficity rather than generality of the statement which is
Pound's poem. In addition, the preposition "in” and the
noun-determiner "the" of the title serve to specify a par
ticular place as the scene— that is, to make an apparition.
This poem is not the statement then of a generally appropri
ate metaphor for crowds in railway stations or a specifi
cally appropriate metaphor for a particular crowd in a par
ticular station. It is the presentation of a uniquely oc-
curing reaction which constitutes a specific situation. Al
though it is an unverifiable statement, it is not a proposi
tion but a work of literature. A literary work does not
predicate something; it is^ something.
Lea's and other histories, while not propositions, also
resemble literary works in being statements about events.
Yet a work of literature is never a history, because a
29
history is a verifiable statement about an event, and a lit
erary work is an unverifiable statement about an event.
Micromegas, for example, is simply not subject to proof. We
have no way of ascertaining whether or not the event de
picted in it actually occurred. The existence of the insti
tution and proceedings of the Inquisition, however, is com
mon knowledge. Lea's specific details and general interpre
tation may be disputed, but the occurrence of the Inquisi
tion in the Middle Ages readily lends itself to corrobora
tion. There are at least four ways in which we can recog
nize that a particular work is unverifiable. First of all,
the statement may be by nature unverifiable by being a sub
jective reaction, such as the cry of longing which consti
tutes "0 Western Wind" or the unique perception presented in
Pound's "In a Station of the Metro." Second, the statement
may be accompanied by or contain incidental signals that it
is not subject to verification: for instance, labels such
as "novel" or "romance",* difference between the name of the
author and that of the ostensible narrator— e.g. Daniel
Defoe and Moll Flanders; reminders in the text that one is
just reading a story— e.g. the famous "intrusions" of Trol
lope and Thackeray and the indefiniteness about names and
details of Cervantes. This latter device leads to consider-
30
ation of a third kind of indication of unverifiability, the
obvious lack of any precise information to aid verification.
Moll Flanders, for instance, appears to be documentary with
out in fact presenting any documentation, and the narrator
at once declares her pseudonymity. Finally, the obvious
fantasticality of a work will indicate its unverifiability.
Gulliver's Travels, like Moll Flanders, appears to be docu
mentary, but Gulliver's "facts" resist any incorporation
into the established body of verifiable human knowledge. In
order to distinguish such non-propositional, unverifiable
statements about events from any other kinds of statements
about events, we will call them statements of events. Works
of literature, as distinct from all other kinds of state
ments, are statements o_f events. This defining character
istic of literary works constitutes the first half of my
definition of literature.
"Event" as I use it here simply designates any space
time occurrence, whether the mere existence of an object or
situation, or a change, a transaction. As a matter of fact,
literary works can be distinguished among themselves accord
ing to the two kinds of events they may present: events
which are utterances and events which are actions. A liter
ary work which is an utterance is usually, of course, a
31
subjective reaction, such as "0 Western Wind" or "Let Me Not
to the Marriage of True Minds." "0 Western Wind" is the
statement of longing for a lover; "Let Me Not to the Marri
age of True Minds” is the protestation of steadfastness in
true love. Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts" is also an utter
ance, the musings of someone at an art exhibit as he moves
from picture to picture by the "old masters." But an event
which is an act of presentation is not confined to lyric
poetry. Moll Flanders is not as an event a story about the
adventures of a female rake in seventeenth century England;
as an event it is an utterance, Moll Flanders in the process
of relating her memoirs. Often an utterance is also the
mode of narration. The mode of narration in Conrad's
"Youth," for example, is "first-person," though this first-
person can be identified only by inference as a man of some
success in the world who had been present when Marlow told
his story. The particular occasion of his recounting of
Marlow's recounting of his adventure is not given. The
event in "Youth" is actually someone telling about Marlow's
telling of his adventure and is an utterance. A literary
work in which the event is an action is often a statement in
the third-person-omniscient mode of narration: e.g. An
American Tragedy, where the event is not an utterance but
32
the social rise and fall of the protagonist, its causes and
its effects on the people around him. A literary work which
is the statement of an action may also be one written in the
"objective" stream-of-consciousness technique: e.g. Ulysses,
where the action " takes place" often in the minds of various
characters, but the work itself is not an utterance.
Now it may be noticed that in all the examples of
events I have given, the event consists of the depiction of
a human experience, either an utterance or an action, always
involving a person, persons, or human-like creatures, how
ever anonymous they may be. This derives from the fact
that, although an event is defined as any space-time occur
rence, the literary event is by the nature of its "literari
ness" more restricted than that. The nature of a work of
literature is by definition the statement of an event; but
the function of works of literature is reflected in and re
stricts the kind of event a work depicts. Events in litera
ture turn out always to be human experiences, because a work
of literature always functions as an analogue in an implied
analogy with an aspect of human experience.
Analogy is the traditional term for a mode of reasoning
in which from the similarity of two things in certain par
ticulars or relationships their similarity in other particu
33
lars or relationships is inferred. "As the acorn eventually
grows into the oak, so the boy eventually grows into the
man." Analogy differs from simple comparison, simile, or
metaphor in that more than one particular characteristic is
compared and further similarities are inferred. The acorn
and the boy resemble each other in their initial smallness
and in their potential for growth; oaks and men resemble
each other in being considered large and full-grown. By
recognizing the relationship between the acorn and the oak,
a boy may vividly recognize the difference between himself
now and what he will become and thus will have inferred the
relationship between boy and man. "Big oaks from little
acorns grow," on the other hand, is simply a proposition,
which may, however, in a given situation be considered one
analogue in an implied analogy. In an implied analogy one
relationship is stated, and this becomes an analogue only
when a listener or reader provides another relationship
which is analogous to the first.
Although a work of literature is not a general proposi
tion like "Big oaks from little acorns grow" but the state
ment o_f an event, it too can and does function as an ana
logue, an analogue in an implied analogy with an aspect of
human experience. As the character or characters of a
34
literary work are to the event which it states, so are a
person or persons to some aspect of human experience. From
the number of similarities we detect between literary char
acters and events and human beings and occurrences in "life"
we infer the relationship that holds for both the literary
work and that aspect of human experience to which it is
analogous. That relationship between the character or char
acters and the event of a literary work and therefore that
human experience to which the work is analogous we will call
the theme. As differentiated from the utterance or action
which is the event, the theme is the pattern of action of
the work, what has often been called the controlling idea.
The theme is the statement about that aspect of human expe
rience to which the literary work is analogous. For each
literary work there is one most adequate statement of the
theme, although on any given reading we may not be able to
state it. The Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle has empha
sized the useful distinction between "knowing how" and
"knowing that."^ We may understand and appreciate a work
long before we are able to articulate its analogous meaning,
i.e. its theme. We know how to read the work— to recognize
that it is a statement of an event which functions analo-
^The Concept of Mind (Oxford, 1949), esp. pp. 25-61.
35
gously with an aspect of human experience. But this is dif
ferent from knowing that the theme of the work is such-and-
such. The knowing how is an absolute preliminary require
ment for every reader; the knowing that— the stating of the
theme— is the task of literary criticism.
Perhaps I can clarify the nature of the theme and
therefore the analogousness of the literary work by distin
guishing between themes, paraphrases, and implications. A
paraphrase is a summary, with more or less detail, of the
event depicted in the literary work: for example, a para
phrase of Pride and Prejudice would cover the action of
Elizabeth Bennet1s changing relationship with Darcy and how
it affects all the other man-woman relationships in the
novel— Charlotte and Mr. Collins, Jane and Bingley, Lydia
and Wickham, and even to some extent Mr. and Mrs. Bennet. A
paraphrase would include specific characters, incidents, how
the novel began and how it ended. There are any number of
possible paraphrases, which would contain the same kind of
information, including some statement about the event, but
differ in length and abundance of detail. When we ask for a
paraphrase we want to know specifically what happens in the
work. The event is conceived as simply the basic unit of
action. There is only one event per work of literature,
36
though any number of paraphrases. The implications of a
literary work are also practically limitless. The statement
of an implication is not an account of the specific literary
work but a generalization about life, drawn from the work
though not necessarily stated in it, which the work can be
taken to corroborate. Implications may be of many different
kinds— sociological, psychological, ethical, political, etc.
An implication of Pride and Prejudice could concern the in
tense social pressures on eighteenth century English women
to marry. Another implication could be that women, in any
age, ought not to sacrifice their principles to this pres
sure by marrying the only and perhaps quite undesirable man
who asks. Such generalizations are implied by the action of
the novel, though not necessarily stated in it. The theme,
finally, is a kind of middle ground between implications and
paraphrases. There is only one most adequate conception of
the theme, and it will be stated in terms of persons, rather
than of the characters, and of life, rather than of the spe
cific incidents of the work. The theme of Pride and Preju
dice might be tentatively stated as the effect of the im
pulse of pride and prejudice, for better and for worse, on
the social relationships between men and women. Here the
title itself furnishes a useful expression of the theme.
37
The theme is not "the moral” but the subject. It is not an
ethical proposition but a statement which identifies what
the work is about. It is prior to any implications which
the work may have for morality. The simplicity of the theme
derives from the attempt to reduce the complex world of a
work of literature and of human experience to a concise
statement that will cover both. An important implication of
Pride and Prejudice is the interdependence and inter
relatedness of all social behavior, an implication common to
several of Jane Austen's novels. But this is too broad an
idea to distinguish each of those novels from the others.
The event of which Pride and Prejudice is a statement deals
chiefly and consistently with only one specific kind of af
fective human behavior, pride and its negative side preju
dice, largely as it affects heterosexual relationships.
Of course the one most adequate statement of the theme
of any given work is contingent for adequate substantiation
upon a thorough analysis of that particular work, a task for
which we will not have the opportunity here. But as a con
venient reference during the ensuing discussion of "style" I
have added a brief appendix defining the four critical terms
which arise out of the preceding definition of the nature
and function of literature. Sample critical statements
38
based on a single literary work will be given after each to
illustrate that stage of criticism which it covers.
Now it must suffice to summarize briefly some of the
advantages of this theory of literature and its implications
for criticism. The definition stated in full is: A work of
literature is a statement of an event which functions as an
analogue in an implied analogy with an aspect of human expe
rience . First, as was suggested earlier, it is to be
pointed out that the terms in and auxiliary to the defini
tion are common coin. They have been systematized and made
perhaps more precise than they were formerly, but they are
terms already firmly established in the critical vocabulary.
The definition of event used here, for example, was adapted
from Whitehead by Susanne Langer and applied to literature
in Feeling and Form.4 "Analogy” and "analogousness," impor
tant concepts in Scholasticism, have been widely, although
not systematically, applied to literature, perhaps most not
ably in A. C. Bradley's famous lecture on "Poetry for Po
etry's Sake."-’ Francis Fergusson uses them, too, in The
Idea of a Theater,^ but to refer to relations between the
4(New York, 1953), esp. pp. 208-325.
^Oxford Lectures on Poetry (New York, 1909) , pp. 4-32.
6 (Princeton, 1949), esp. appendix.
39
parts of the work rather than of the entire work to "life."
And of course the essential "dramatic" character of all lit
erature, what I have treated as its "eventness," has in the
last twenty years become a critical commonplace and well-
established pedagogical principle, as we see in this state
ment from an enormously popular textbook and anthology of
poetry:
. . . all poetry, including even short lyrics or descrip
tive pieces, involves a dramatic organization. This is
clear when we reflect that every poem implies a speaker
of the poem . . . and that the poem represents the reac
tion of such a person to a situation, a scene, or an
idea.?
My disagreement with this observation will become apparent
later. Nevertheless, it is important to point out here that
my conception of the nature of literature arises out of con
temporary critical observations and not from some prior and
personal metaphysics.
Brooks and Warren's use of the term "poetry" throws
into relief the fact that the preceding definition has been
of literature rather than of poetry and has involved no dis
tinctions of poetry, prose, drama, and other generic and
quasi-generic terms. "Poetry" seems to have such a variety
of kinds of meanings that the term "literature," which
^Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding
Poetry (New York, 2nd ed., 1950), p. liv.
40
alternates only between "anything written" and "imaginative
literature," is preferable. Conversely, "poetry" is some
times laudative, sometimes generic, sometimes formal. It
seems ultimately definable only as something which purports,
usually according to typographical conventions, to be
poetry. Many non-literary works are certainly poetry ac
cording to this description, and of course prose would ex
tend far beyond literature. The term "non-fiction prose"
does not really convey much, since it would include all
writing which is not literature and not poetry, a rather
large area of human communication. Drama, on the other
hand, refers essentially to produced or producible plays,
works "acted out" in the theater. But it fulfills all the
requirements for definition as literature, as the phenomenon
of closet drama would indicate, and, at least in its written
form, must be considered as literature.
While the definition of literature I have presented
does not cover all things that have been called literature,
it does cover all the major kinds of things— lyric, drama,
epic, novel— and almost all of the individual works that
have been traditionally considered literature. A definition
by common characteristic, as this one is, does not permit
designating a work as literature before examining it; one
has to examine each object for the presence of the common
characteristic which will classify it as literature- Some
poems by great poets will not contain this characteristic,
and a great deal of literature not studied academically will.
But a definition is not a value judgment. It is assumed
here that we will ultimately find out more about literature
as a human phenomenon if we study instances of it before
rather than after evaluating them. As for the mode of ex
istence of the literary work, this must be considered to be
the same as that of any statement, whether a father's extem
poraneous, never-repeated, and unrecorded bed-time story or
a written work which can be duplicated verbatim again and
again. In the case of varying versions of, say, a ballad,
the point at which one ballad text differs sufficiently as a
statement from another to constitute a different literary-
work must always be a matter of personal judgment. In the
case of folk tales, although different tales treat of the
same event, insofar as they are different statements of it,
they are different literary works, even though the action,
characters, details are very similar. The folklorist's con
cern is with recurring motifs and events,- the student of
literature's is with uniquely occurring statements of events.
That is the way in which language is a prime of literature,
42
and that is how literature differs from and is not reducible
to myth.
This definition of literature enables us to slip freely
through the terminological wilderness, even to avoid onto
logical swamps, such as that of the mode of existence of
literary works. Finally, it helps us to escape the paradox
of autonomy-versus-referentiality that has haunted the New
Critics and was Krieger's despair. The notion of autonomy
is found to be essentially a misconception, because by defi
nition no meaningful human utterance can be autonomous. A
meaningful utterance means— but not necessarily "referenti-
ally.” Referentiality is a rather narrow, positivistic, and
inadequate notion of meaningfulness. Commands, questions,
general propositions are not referential, nor is literature.
Literature is neither autonomous nor referential; it is
meaningful analogously. The language of a work of litera
ture, that is, the particular statement, is all that we have
of a work from which to construe the event that will be
meaningful to us as an analogue of an aspect of human expe
rience. The statement is all that we have, so that the in
terpretation of it becomes the primary task of reading and
of criticism. Only after this interpreting of the statement
can we talk about literature and life, for only then will we
43
be in possession of both analogues. The question now will
be: How does the concept of style (and stylistics) function
in the interpretation of literary statements?
CHAPTER III
STYLE AS BEHAVIOR
The question of quantification has become a key issue
in stylistics, one over which the literary scholars and the
social scientists, particularly the psychologists and to
some extent the linguists, continually clash. The literary
scholars do not refuse to admit statistics, but they in ef
fect refuse to accept them, or rather they simply tend to
ignore them. "It is obvious that such a method," one liter
ary scholar has concluded, "will be too crude to catch the
finer nuances of style. Statistics can never be more than a
strictly ancillary technique in style studies."^ In giving
the "Closing Statement" from the viewpoint of psychology at
the Indiana conference on style, George A. Miller, professor
of psychology at Harvard, complained that the four statisti
cal papers presented were by and large ignored by the con-
2
ference. "This attitude puzzles me," he said, "because
^Ullmann, Style in the French Novel, p. 30.
2In Sebeok, ed., p. 392.
44
45
statistics is an old, traditional approach to problems of
style" (p. 392). He added, however, that "perhaps psycholo
gists tend to be a little more sophisticated about statis
tics than either linguists or critics." And, as if this
were not a highly questionable proposition in itself, he
went on to ask,
What are we trying to achieve with the statistical ap
proach? I could imagine that there is room for both a
science of style and an art of style, much as we have a
science of pigments and an art of applying pigments to
canvas. But I think it is not the intent of the present
work that the statistical analysis should be so periph
eral to the artistic essence as the chemistry of paint
is to great art.
Thus the psychologist, as well as the literary scholar,
takes back with the left hand what he grants with the right.
Statistics may be compared with chemistry, but it is ex
pected that, after all, it should have more to do with the
"artistic essence" than chemistry does.
Furthermore, it is not quite clear what Miller intends
should comprise the art of style, what the writer of litera
ture or what the literary critic does. It does seem clear
that he intends that statistics should comprise at least the
major part of any science of style. Yet it is not clear
that statistics has, thus far at least, contributed anything
positive to establishing the existence of such an entity.
The most ambitious and exhaustive study to date of the
46
application of statistical methods to the identification of
authorship through analysis of style seems to have proved
nothing more than that whatever individual style is, it is
not something subject to statistical proof. Miller admitted
that in an earlier discussion of individual style in his
Language and Communication-^ he had regarded style only as "a
problem in statistical inference" (p. 392), but that now he
realized there is "vastly more to style" than counting.
Still he would argue that counting has many positive virtues.
It would be interesting to see what counting has so far
proven, and so we will in Chapter IV, but it may be noted
now that the results have not so far been positive contribu
tions .
The reason that they have not may even be guessed
beforehand. The psychologist's complete reliance on quanti
fication as a guarantee of objectivity suggests a naive mis
understanding of scientific, indeed, of all intellectual
problem-solving. Quantification cannot in itself prove any
thing. The important matters, the matters that will lead to
objective proof or disproof, are the matters of deciding
what is to be counted, what is the nature of that which is
counted, and why it should be counted— what is intended to
3{New York, 1951), pp. 119-139.
47
be established by the statistics compiled. Miller was fur
ther puzzled that no one seemed to have commented on Car
roll ' s paper on "Vectors of Prose Style." Miller was par
ticularly interested in what the literary scholars might
have thought of Carroll's use of a spatial coordinate system.
In thinking about style Carroll assumed that he was ana
lyzing a set of points in a four-dimensional space.
These four dimensions characterize the stylistic space.
If we state the value that any particular passage has on
these four dimensions, we have placed it in the space of
different styles and we have stated its distance from
all other points in that space. This is a very powerful
tool, if it is appropriate. (p. 393)
Did the other members of the conference, Miller wanted to
know, think the spatial analogy is appropriate? No one said,
and, indeed, what could be said? What is the spatial anal
ogy supposed to be appropriate to? It may be remembered
that, as was mentioned in the introduction, Carroll did not
attempt a definition of style, even as a working hypothesis
for his experiment, but assumed "its" existence, although
under such circumstances, there is no way of knowing what
it, style, will be. Wellek's verdict on the paper was some
thing more to the point. "The laborious calculations based
on the opinions of 8 different judges about 150 passages of
300 words, according to 29 different criteria," Wellek
pointed out, led only "to such obvious results as that the
’humorous-serious' distinction is more reliable than the
48
’good-bad' or 'weak-strong' distinction" (p. 408). Whether
such distinctions and such conclusions, statistically com
puted or not, are appropriate to the problem of style, is
the basic question to ask, not whether some spatial analogy
is appropriate to the problem but whether prior assumptions
and subsequent conclusions are. The use of statistics does
not obviate the need for sound reasoning, for purposeful
planning, for, in short, relevant hypotheses.
To be sure, the literary scholar is often not familiar
with the actual techniques of statistical calculation. Yet
this should scarcely prevent him from being able to judge
whether or not the theoretical bases, the practical aims,
and the possible conclusions to be drawn from so-called
"statistical experiments" are sound, valid, and, furthermore,
applicable to the problem at hand. The question need not be
whether or not a statistical approach can establish facts
about art but whether or not it in fact has. The literary
scholar should, indeed, by virtue of his profession, be able
to recognize when terms used to designate or explain phenom
ena are not scientifically established at all but actually
metaphorical or analogical. This should be especially the
case if the term is one like "expression," a term which has
had in literary study a long and prominent history. From
49
the Romantics through Croce to a number of contemporary
philosophers such as Susanne Langer, the term "expression"
has had a lively career in the arts and particularly in lit
erature. Now when the psychologist introduces such a term
into the discussion of stylistics, it ought to be possible
to decide how precisely it is being used and whether or not
it applies to the literary fact. Perhaps the psychologist’s
conception of style is not applicable to literature, no mat
ter whether quantified or not.
For example, Miller conceives of his field, psychology,
as the study of behavior, but not just adult human behavior.
The proper area of psychology is all behavior, whether of
rats, children, or psychotics, a very large area, as Miller
admits. Now, he says,
When psychologists try to talk about stylistics, they
feel they should narrow it down to "expressive behavior,"
behavior which says something to another organism about
the state of the behaving organism. (p. 387)
Human language Miller then designates as "a subdivision of
this broad area of expressive behavior" (p. 387) , and "with
in the range of language behavior there is a domain that we
call literature" {p. 388). Is it not possible, however,
without recourse to or escape from questions of quantifica
tion to show that such a conception of language and particu
larly as applied to literature is not only irrelevant but
50
also misleading? Is language always behavior, and if so,
whose? Is it always expressive behavior? Does it always
"say" something to someone else about the state of the being
behaving? Does literature in fact ever do this? The liter
ary scholar cannot be considered scientific when speaking in
metaphors and analogies. How much less so can those who
claim to be working toward the establishment of an approach
which, if it does not replace that of the critic, will sup
posedly be the scientific as opposed to the "intuitive" (p.
395) analysis of style. By examining Miller's conception of
"expressive behavior" it may be possible to demonstrate its
irrelevance to most questions of style in language and to
all questions of style in literature and to indicate the
fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of language and
literature that is implicit in the entire concept of style.
The psychologist has on this point more in common with the
linguist and the literary scholar than he realizes, although
the "scientistic" dispute over statistics has obscured both
the similarity and the fact that it is a misconception.
Miller has defined expressive behavior as "behavior
which says something to another organism about the state of
the behaving organism." The first question which arises
from such a definition is: What does the term "says" mean
51
when applied to a linguistic utterance, i.e. to a statement,
as opposed to a cry or babbling? Or, to put the problem
more precisely: Can that aspect of a linguistic utterance
which "reveals" something about a speaker properly be said
to say something about him? Miller's definition of expres
sive behavior reveals an ambiguity which is a principal
source of confusion among students who apply the tools of
psychology to literature. It suggests that any linguistic
utterance which can be classified as expressive behavior
actually says two things, at once. It says (1) what the
statement "means,” and (2) what, intentionally or uninten
tionally (consciously or unconsciously) the speaker "means."
The first conception refers to the way in which language is
meaningful; the second refers--not to the way in which lan
guage is meaningful— but to the way in which an act of
utterance is meaningful.
Now, were someone to cry "Ouch!" he might be revealing
that he had been hurt. The cry would be symptomatic of his
condition, i.e. express his condition. But "ouch" is also
meaningful as a linguistic convention and as such differs
from other interjections, such as "alas," "hurray," and
"hello," and all other words. Although it can be used again
and again by many different speakers in many different
52
situations and may each time be symptomatic of each speak
er's condition in each situation, it is a meaningful lin
guistic element, a word. In a sentence such as "Ouch is an
interjection" the word "expresses" no symptom, gives no clue
whatsoever to the state of a speaker. The non-linguistic
"meaning"— what the speaker is expressing about his own
state— is dependent upon the act of utterance. In that
sense "ouch" may mean in a given instance something quite
different from or even contrary to its conventional use,
its meaning as an utterance interpretable approximately as
"I am in pain."
Interjections are a class of utterances which quite
frequently function as a speaker's "expression." But when
we turn to more complex utterances, the difference between
the meaning of the act of utterance and the meaning of the
utterance becomes readily apparent. If we were to say now,
"God's in his heaven,/All's right with the world," we might
"mean" it ironically, i.e. we might mean there is no God or
we think he is out; we might mean it seriously, i.e. that an
omniscient, omnipotent being is watching over us; or we
might simply be quoting a line of poetry, in which sense the
utterance would be quite different in meaning if the lis
tener knew that it was two lines from a particular poem.
53
Each one of these meanings, in order to qualify as expres
sive behavior, behavior which "says" something about the
speaker, would require knowledge of the act of utterance— of
the context, suprasegmental phonemes, gestures, facial ex
pressions, what the listener knew from past experience about
the speaker's beliefs, sincerity, intentions, etc. In short,
the expressive "meaning" would depend almost entirely on the
non-linguistic aspect of the statement as uttered in a spe
cific situation. Thus, if the psychologist defines "expres
sive behavior" as "behavior which says something to another
organism about the state of the behaving organism," he is
defining expressive behavior as symptomatic behavior. A
symptom is that which is indicative of the presence of a
particular condition. It differs from a sign
in that the entire object signified by a symptom is the
entire condition of which the symptom is a proper part;
e.g., red spots are a symptom of measles, and measles is
the entire condition begetting and including the red
spots. A sign, on the other hand, may be one part of a
total condition, which we associate with another sepa
rate part. Thus, a ring around the moon is part of a
weather condition, but what it signifies is rain—
another proper part— and not the entire state of 'low
pressure' weather.^
Inasmuch as a linguistic utterance reveals the condition of
the speaker by being part of and deriving from it, the
^Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge,
Mass., 1942), p. 57.
54
utterance is a symptom of his condition. If the utterance
does not derive from the condition of the speaker, it cannot
reveal anything about his condition. Unless an individual
cries "ouch" because he is in pain, his act of utterance
will not reveal that he is in pain. The word "ouch" will
still mean, roughly, "I am in pain," but the act of utter
ance will not mean that; it will "mean," or be symptomatic
of, whatever condition in the speaker gave rise to it. And
whether this "meaning" of the act of utterance is "under
stood" or not will, of course, depend upon the "other organ
ism" who is listening, and probably watching, at the moment.
The behavioral scientist, then, when he is talking
about language as expressive behavior is not talking about
language as language— a conventional system of human inter
course— but about language as symptomatic of psychological
or physiological conditions. In Miller's sense of the term
"expression," all utterances, linguistic and otherwise, as
well as facial "expressions," gestures, clothes, posture—
in short, all behavior and results of behavior— can be
interpreted as expressive. And what they will mean depends
solely upon who is listening— or watching. In his sense of
the term, "says" is really metaphorical, since what the be
having organism actually says and what his behavior, his
55
utterance, says to the other organism depends upon how the
other organism interprets it. This does not even simply re
sult in the age-old conception of style as a difference be
tween what is said (or done) and how it is said (or done) ,
but a confusion of what is said (or done) with how it is
taken.
This concept of expressive behavior seems to include so
much; yet, it actually includes relatively little that is
language. An utterance, as opposed to an act of utterance,
can be considered expressive only when the utterance means
the same thing that the act of utterance, of which it is a
part, reveals. Thus an utterance is expressive when someone
makes a statement about his own condition that does in fact
correspond to it. Such statements as "I am in pain" or "I
feel terrible" are expressive when they can be correlated by
an observer with other symptoms of pain or feeling bad on
the part of the speaker, so that the observer is relatively
sure the speaker does feel terrible or in pain. In this
kind of instance, what the statement "says" and what the act
of utterance— with the facial expressions, groans, and ges
tures of pain accompanying it— "says" are one. If the
speaker is not in pain, the statement "I am in pain," even
as a part of an act of utterance, is not an instance of
56
expressive behavior. When someone says, "I'm not prejudiced
against negroes, but it is a known fact they can't hold a
job," this act of utterance can readily be interpreted as
expressive. Unlike "I am in pain," however, what this act
of utterance expresses and what this statement means are not
the same. The statement means that the speaker disavows any
prejudice, but his act of saying it seems to express a
rather obvious prejudice against negroes. The psychoana
lyst's casebook abounds with examples of acts of utterance
in which what a patient says and what his "saying" it "says"
to the analyst are not only distinct but diametrically oppo
site. In common parlance we often speak of a person's hav
ing "expressed" his interest in something, poetry for exam
ple. But this does not necessarily mean that this person
has actually said, "I am interested in poetry," but only
that his behavior— his eager discussion of various poets,
his constant reading, etc.--can be interpreted as sympto
matic of his interest. Of course he might be doing this for
other reasons, in which case our diagnosis would be incor
rect. Interpretation of symptoms, as medical doctors are
well aware, is a very conjectural, complicated, and fallible
practice.
Thus we see that, while an instance of language, i.e. a
57
statement, may be symptomatic, it is always, by definition,
meaningful, whether or not it is in addition symptomatic.
Whether or not it is symptomatic and what it is symptomatic
of depend solely upon its occurrence and interpretation as
an act of utterance. A symptom is a symptom only by virtue
of its being interpreted as part of a condition which is its
cause. A quavery voice may be symptomatic of the speaker's
nervousness, but what he is saying in that voice— unless it
is "I'm nervous"— is not; while what the quaveriness is ac
tually symptomatic of, whether nervousness, deep grief, ex
citement, or strangulation, can be determined only from the
circumstances of the act of utterance. Language, then, is
really a rather small "subdivision of expressive behavior."
While acts of utterance with all their accompanying phenom
ena often "say" a great deal about us, what we are actually
saying is as likely as not to be about something quite other
than our own condition at the instant of utterance. Lin
guistic utterances are in themselves not behavior but only
the products of behavior. What utterances mean and what be
havior expresses are two different concepts and two differ
ent things.
It should clearly follow from the fact that only cer
tain kinds of utterances can be symptomatic and those only
58
in certain kinds of acts of utterance that the entire con
ception of expressive behavior with its concommitant con
ception of style as symptom is really irrelevant to any con
ception of style in literature. For what does the behav
ioral psychologist require a language utterance to be if it
is to be an instance of expressive behavior? First, as we
have seen, there must be a speaker, a behaving organism mak
ing the utterance; second, there must be "another organism"
to whom the utterance is symptomatic of the speaker. But is
there, in fact, such a state of affairs, such an act, in a
literary work or even in the reading or writing of a liter
ary work? In Chapter II we defined a literary work as a
statement of an event and distinguished the kinds of events
of which it may be a statement. Now the question is; Are
either or both of these kinds of events acts of utterance
according to the requirements of the psychological analyst
of style? Are they, in short, expressive behavior?
Those works which are statements of actions can
scarcely be acts of utterance, unless from the principle
that every statement necessarily presupposes the existence
of a speaker we deduce ones who must then be in these in
stances the authors. The "speaker" would have to be the
author; first, because the behaving organisms in the work
59
have no referents; what there is of them is in the work and
that is all there is. The work is not their "behavior" but
the result of someone else's behavior. Whatever we may pos
tulate of their behavior prior to the work or beyond it must
necessarily result from our own private imaginative behavior.
Second, the work simply cannot express something, unless we
take it to be the expression of the author,
For "express" is properly a relational term; it requires
an X that does the expressing and a Y that is expressed,
and X and Y must be distinct.-*
The X— the expresser— in the case of literature must be the
author and the Y--the expressed--the literary work, because
the literary work cannot express itself. If we say that a
rose is red, we do not mean that the rose expresses redness
but that it possesses the quality of redness. Similarly, if
we say that a work is ironic, we do not mean that the work
expresses irony but that it possesses the quality of irony.
Redness and irony are not distinct from the rose and the
literary work; they are in them. If we say that a literary
work expresses irony and mean that it is ironic, i.e. that
it possesses the quality of irony and do not mean that the
irony of the work is an expression of someone, then we ought
to say so.
^Beardsley, Aesthetics, p. 331.
60
It is not really a question of whether or not the work
was in fact expressive but only that the work is no evidence
in itself for establishing this. The work may purport to be
a writer's emotional response on a certain occasion. That
it was is unverifiable. Hence the event, even when it is an
emotional response, is literature. The student of biography
will of necessity be much interested in the works of his
subject. His subject may be a lyric poet, and there might
be a good deal of extra-literary evidence to indicate that
some personal experiences have been extensively used in the
poetry. But in any case, the event which is the poem is not
the poet in the act of composition. It can only purport to
be. All it is is a statement he has offered to the world.
As we have seen, expressive behavior requires an actor,
an act, and a witness to whom it expresses something. Ac
cording to the behavioral definition, the term "express" not
only relates an expresser to a statement but also to a sec
ond party to whom the statement must be expressive of the
expresser. Thus, no statement, literary or otherwise, can
properly be said to be expressive unless an individual
states it in the presence of another individual, unless, in
short, there is an act of utterance. A statement exists in
and of itself and is not expressive unless it occurs in that
61
triangular situation we have described as an act of utter
ance. If we read any statement divorced from an act of ut
terance, that statement is not, strictly speaking, expres
sive. In order to make it expressive we would have to pos
tulate a speaker; that speaker would have to be whoever
wrote the statement; and we would have to know something
about him and the situation— act of composition— in which he
made the statement. That is, we would have to determine
whom the statement was expressive of, so that we could de
termine what it expressed. In addition, we would have to
postulate ourselves, the readers, as the individuals in
whose presence the act became an expression. Yet, even if
we found out everything we possibly could about the author,
still we would never be able actually to determine what he
was doing, feeling, or thinking in the act of utterance, of
composition. The only evidence we have that there even was
such an act is the work itself and that was only one third
of such an act. The readers of the statement or even of the
literary work cannot be considered the other organism in
whose presence the statement is made because they are not,
quite literally, in the presence of the act but only of the
utterance. We must distinguish then between (1) an event
which is the existence of a statement and (2) an event which
62
is an act of utterance. A work of literature is always a
statement; it is never an act of utterance. It may contain
one or more such acts which are expressive of the characters
presented by the statement that is the work. But that is
quite a different matter.
Furthermore, this distinction holds for that first kind
of event which the literary work may be a statement of— an
utterance. Those who advocate the definition of style as
expression frequently regard a literary work which is a
statement of an utterance— for example, the lyric poem "0
Western Wind"— as an expressive act simply because it im
plies a speaker. We do and must, of course, infer a
"speaker" from certain attributes of the poem; indeed, if we
did not, the poem would not be the statement of an event.
And surely it is.
0 western wind, when wilt thou blow
That the small rain down can rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again I
In this case, there is apparent the apostrophe of the first
line, the exclamation of the third, the personal pronouns
"my" and "I" in the third and fourth lines. All of these
attributes give the poem the character of an utterance. But
still there is no speaker, in this instance not even a spe
cific author whom we could postulate as the speaker because
63
this poem is anonymous. There is simply the statement,
analogous perhaps to any and all lovers longing for a be
loved, but not expressive of any one lover. Regardless of
whether or not the poem has style, it certainly does not
have expression, nor is it an expression. We infer a
speaker because the statement resembles in numerous respects
expressions which frequently occur in acts of utterance.
Yet "0 Western Wind" is no more an expressive behavior than
"ouch" would be if recorded on an otherwise blank sheet of
paper. It will tell us nothing about who "said" it and "re
veals" only that it is the statement of_ an event which is an
utterance, but not an act of utterance. When we infer that
the poem is an utterance, we are inferring something about
the statement, i.e. it is an utterance. This is not the
same as accepting it as an utterance and inferring something
about its speaker.
The psychologist then if he is going to analyze a poem
as an expression, has to make two inferences. First, he has
to infer that the poem is an utterance, i.e. that there is a
speaker. This is where literary analysis begins. Second,
he has to infer a personality for the speaker, a personality
of whom this poem is just a symptom. Only here does psycho
logical analysis begin. Confronted with a "behaving
64
organism" in the laboratory or consulting room he has to
make only one inference, that the utterance is somehow ex
pressive of the organism, and he can verify this inference
by comparison with other actions and other acts of utter
ance. Confronted with a poem that is a statement of an
event which is an act of presentation, the psychologically-
oriented stylistician has to move away from the poem into
speculations about its origins: about the physical and
mental behavior that precipitated the poem and the physical
and mental state that precipitated the behavior that pre
cipitated the poem from which he is inferring that there was
such behavior and such a state. Such speculations, twice
removed from the object which stimulates them, can scarcely
be verified unless the stylistician reduces himself to the
absurd postulate that the poem is a verification of the
poem. That is indeed "the philological circle," from which
there is no way out and back to the literary work. To think
that "0 Western Wind" has style because it is expressive is
as absurd as thinking that it does not have style because it
cannot be identified as the expression of a particular per
sonality.^ Style is not the man— neither the implicit
£
Cf. Wolfgang Kayser: "Man hat zum Beispiel mittel-
alterlicher Lyrik jeglichen 'Stil' absprechen wollen, weil
65
speaker nor the poet nor the poet's complexes, style, if it
is to be anything at all, must be an attribute of the liter
ary work, something which it possesses, not what it ex
presses .
Miller himself recognized that his conception of ex
pressive behavior did not seem to coordinate very well with
"highly stylized, extremely noncasual utterances of the sort
that go into literature" (p. 387). But he failed to under
stand why. Rather he thought of the conflict between psy
chological and literary and linguistic conceptions as aris
ing out of the fact that, on the one hand, psychologists in
clude so much more behavior in their notion of style than
others want to include, and that, on the other hand, they
prefer to concentrate their attention on "spontaneous ex
pressive behavior" (p. 387), as opposed to "noncasual utter
ances" like literature. This is not, however, quite to the
point. For language is not primarily but only incidentally
and occasionally a "subdivision of expressive behavior," as
we have seen, and literature not at all. A literary work is
not a symptomatic instance of expressive behavior, spontan
eous or otherwise; it is not behavior at all.
ihr der Ausdruck der PersiJnlichkeit mangele," in Das sprach-
liche Kunstwerk (Bern, 7th ed., 1961), p. 289.
66
The psychologists, perhaps unfortunately, have made of
style a concept so sweeping as to be scarcely distinguish
able from the general concern of psychology. Another psy
chologist speaking at the Indiana conference, James J.
Jenkins, described style in psychology as a hierarchical
concept which might extend from an individual performance of
some common activity to the entire behavior pattern of an
individual.
In the most extreme view we might speak of the "life
style" of an individual— a personal mode of responding
which typifies all the behaviors of the person concerned.
In a more limited view we might regard style as a trait
that manifests itself in some particular set of behav
iors (e.g., social behaviors, athletic behaviors, prob
lem-solving behaviors). In a still more limited view
style might be thought of as a particular personal mod
ification of a single narrow behavior (e.g., handwriting,
dress, articulation), etc.^
Furthermore, the personal mode of responding, i.e. the "life
style," is assumed to be ultimately deducible from any "par
ticular modification of a single narrow behavior." Jenkins
attempted, for instance, in his paper on "Commonality of
Association as an Indicator of More General Patterns of
Verbal Behavior" to determine if what he knew about an in
dividual’s reactions in word-association tests would enable
Commonality of Association as an Indicator of More
General Patterns of Verbal Behavior," in Sebeok, ed., pp.
308-309.
67
him to predict the individual1s behavior and attitude in
general and vice versa. In fact, "Much of the work of dif
ferential psychologists," as Jenkins sees it, "is aimed at
finding specific, readily observable behaviors which index,
or predict, more general behaviors of greater importance"
(p. 309).
Now one may wonder why the psychologist needs the term
"style" for all this. It would seem that terms more common
to psychology, such as "character" or "personality" or even
simply "individual" might do as well or better as technical
terms for what the psychologist wishes to study here. After
all, the idea of "a personal mode of responding" would not
appear to be a concept readily distinguishable from "person
ality," nor the "life style" of the individual from his "in
dividuality." Be that as it may, one may grant the psychol
ogist his need for such a term and such a distinction. What
one cannot grant is that such a distinction and the aims and
methods contingent upon its application have anything what
soever to do with style in literature.
Simply take, for example, the notion of prediction,
which is fundamentally involved with the psychologist's con
ception of style. Psychology, whether behavioral or other
wise, is in many respects a science much like medicine; the
68
kinds of studies it undertakes and their achievements are
based largely on principles of diagnosis and prognosis.
Developing means of detecting symptoms, whether of disease,
frustration, patterns of thinking, or hidden motives, is a
diagnostic function, and this function often involves at
tempts to predict, even to modify "general behaviors of
greater importance" on the basis of such understanding.
This predictive aim of the psychologist leads him into deal
ing with concepts of probability. That fifty per cent, say,
of a certain kind of person will react in a certain predict
able way in a certain situation is a kind of conclusion often
sought by the psychologist. Yet all this is certainly alien
to the study of literature. A cultural "science" such as
the study of literature is by the very nature of its subject
matter an a posteriori science, devoted to describing, ana
lyzing, classifying objects. While Jenkins may talk about
"behaviors," pluralizing it as if it were an object, behav
ior is a process, and a process is not analyzable apart from
its occurring. Miller defined psychology as the study of
human behavior. But the study of literature has for its
data only a certain kind of product of human behavior.
Therefore, the concept of prediction does not apply. There
can be no prediction of products but only of occurrences.
69
One may be able some day to predict that, say, one tenth of
one per cent of a given population will be authors, but one
can never predict even the kind of thing they will write—
even by means of probability statistics derived from what
has been written. More than one person may behave the same
way more than once, but it does not follow that the products
of that behavior will be the same. Many people in the
course of history have written many poems many times. But
there are no two or more identical poems. The essential
difference between the discipline of psychology and that of
literary study is not a difference of "scientific" versus
"unscientific" but of behavior versus objects, a crucial
difference, that is, of kinds of subject matter. The study
of writing literature is a psychological study, but the
study of literature is not. Linguistics, too, as we shall
see, tries to impose predictive procedures upon the study of
products of human behavior--under the guise of stylistics.
I maintain and, hopefully, shall demonstrate that this sim
ply cannot be done. The study of literature is the study of
what is; in no way is it a study of what under given condi
tions will or even might be. Use of the term "style" has
served on this point as elsewhere only to obscure the essen
tial differences in the aims, methods, and subject matter of
70
the various disciplines. If literary works are not symptoms
or sets of symptoms then there is no psychological study of
style in literature.
This whole notion of style as symptom, as an index or
indices to "more general behaviors of greater importance,"
whether these are conceived of as personality or soul or id
or Weltanschauung, always leads away from, in fact can never
be the study of, literary works. Insofar as the style of an
object, whether or not a literary work, is conceived of as
an index or indices to any entity beyond the object, that
study cannot logically be considered a study of the object—
but of something else. Literature seems in retrospect quite
obviously not behavior or anything like it, and yet theories
of style which propose that the soul or id or Weltanschauung
or categories of perception of an author can be determined
through analysis of his literary works are just as misled
and precisely in the same way as the psychologists who think
that literary works can be analyzed in the same terms as be
havior. By exploring the psychologist's notion of expres
sive behavior we have shown at the simplest level that lit
erary works are not symptomatic of their authors, that lit
erature in fact is not expressive and not behavior but
rather the product of a behavior which can only be guessed
71
at from the existence of the literary work itself. Now,
with this understanding well in mind, I should like to take
the concept of style as symptom out of the test tube and ap
ply it to the practice of stylistics. By doing so I should
like to demonstrate that no theory of style which conceives
of it as caused by and therefore symptomatic of some entity
beyond the literary work can function adequately as a theory
of literary style simply because in practice such a theory
cannot be applied. Not only is it in theory invalid; it is
in practice unworkable.
CHAPTER IV
STYLE AS THE SPEAKER
Certainly there is no doubt that a relationship exists
between a literary work and its author, and certainly there
is no doubt that, given the work and some information about
the author, we can make some very interesting correlations
between the two, which may tell us a good deal about the
author. But it does not follow from these axioms that we
can go to the life and character of an author for an explan
ation of his literary works, nor that we can reconstruct the
life of the author through his works, nor that the attri
butes of a literary work are the attributes of the mind and
temper of the author. Yet, perhaps more keenly now than
ever, scholars and critics are promoting this kind of study,
often calling it now stylistics and talking about the "new
science of style," with no essential change in premises
from those of the sixteenth century rhetorician.
The historical sources of this widespread notion among
literary scholars, particularly those interested in lin-
72
73
guistics and stylistics, that they can with scientific as
surance interpret the author— whether his Weltanschauung or
id or psyche or background or categories of perception or
moral vision— through his work are doubtless manifold and
largely beyond our scope. The assumption is in part an in
heritance from Romanticism, as Abrams has so ably demon
strated in The Mirror and the Lamp.^ But Romanticism, as
Abrams also points out, brought to flower a plant already
growing at least as long ago as the Renaissance. George
Puttenham was well within the Renaissance critical tradition
when he defined style in his Arte of English Poesie (1589)
as the ornament and dress of poetry. According to the prin
ciple of decorum, style, as ornament, must be suited to the
"matter" and subject of the work and can be judged, by it
self, as appropriate or inappropriate. Yet Puttenham was
contradicting this notion of style as ornament when he also
held that, beyond this style adapted to the subject of the
work, is an individuality of language which expresses char
acter.
And because this continuall course and manner of writing
or speech sheweth the matter and disposition of the writ
ers minde more than one or few words or sentences can
^Esp. pp. 226-262. Cf. also Rene Wellek, A History of
Modern Criticism; 1750-1950, XI (New Haven, 1955).
74
shew, therefore, there be that have called stile the
image of man, mentis character. . . . For if the man be
grave, his speech and stile is grave; if lightheaded,
his stile and language also light; . . . if it be humble,
or base and meeke, so is also the language and stile.^
Puttenham never acknowledged the inherent contradiction in a
theory which defines style in terms of both the author and
the subject. His further suggestion that "Men doo chuse
their subjects according to the mettal of their minds . . ."
contained the germ of a solution, not, however, to the prob
lem of style, but to that of how much and in what ways an
author reveals himself in his work.
These ideas were, of course, not entirely new in the
Renaissance. There are several ancient statements of them,^
as well as the unique instance of Longinus Peri Hupsous,
which finds the main source of the sublime style in the
thoughts and emotions of the speaker.^ No doubt the popu
larity of Longinus during the eighteenth century attests to
the fact that it was during this period that the conception
^in G. Gregory Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays,
II (Oxford, 1937), 142-143, 153-154.
■^See A. Otto, Die SprichwSrter und sprichwortlichen
Redensarten der Rflmer (Leipzig, 1890), p. 257.
^See Dionysus or Longinus, "On Literary Excellence," in
Allan H. Gilbert, ed., Literary Criticism; Plato to Dryden
(New York, 1940), esp. pp. 170-171. Cf., however, Samuel H.
Monk, On the Sublime (2nd ed., Ann Arbor, 1960), pp. 12-14.
75
of style as ornament began to lose place to that of style as
"mentis character." The history of this change is an inte
gral part of the history of that Romantic revolution which
left us so much great literature, though not a very satis
factory theoretical framework for understanding and appreci
ating it, and as such it is part of a longer story which has
often been treated. What is important to show here is that
these two contradictory concepts have remained extant, often
side by side, throughout the last three hundred and fifty
years without any essential modification and that, despite
terminological and psychological sophistication, the concept
of style as the man, which gained ascendancy in the early
nineteenth century, retains even today in so-called scien
tific stylistics the same inconsistent and unprovable impli
cations it has always had.
In analyzing the premises implicit in Puttenham's dis
cussion as it epitomizes the ideas about style elaborated in
the eighteenth century, Abrams points out that Puttenham's
concept
contains two implicit assertions: (1) There is an indi
viduality about a man's writing which distinguishes his
work from that of other authors; we recognize a 'Virgil-
ian quality' or a 'Miltonic quality.' (2) This literary
trait is correlated with the character of the man him
self; the Virgilian quality of style is the equivalent
of some aspect of Virgil as he lived. (p. 230)
76
Now, it is illuminating to see the similarity between
Puttenham's premises and those of one of the two main
branches of contemporary stylistics. According to Ullmann,
stylistics itself is not "a branch of linguistics" but "a
parallel science which examines the same problems from a
different point of view" (p. 10). And this different point
of view may itself, according to Ullmann, be divided further
into two different approaches to style. The first approach
is that of investigating "the expressive qualities of style"
and defines style itself as "the means of formulating our
thoughts with the maximum effectiveness" (p. 2). This ap
proach, as we shall see later, can be most fruitfully
treated as a variant of the concept of style as choice, al
though it does have some faulty assumptions in common with
what Ullmann designates as the "second main branch of con
temporary stylistics" and considers as starting "from an en
tirely different point of view" (p. 25). The similarity be
tween the premises as Ullmann describes them of this second
branch and Abrams' description of those of Puttenham and
eighteenth century students of style should serve to under
score the continuity which exists between the earlier and
the contemporary concept of style as symptom. This second
branch, as Ullmann sees it,
77
limits its attention to the literary language and is
mainly concerned with individual style. At the root of
this approach there are two basic assumptions: (1) that
there is such a thing as 'individual style', a set of
linguistic habits peculiar to a given writer; and (2)
that this individual style is closely bound up with the
writer's mind and experience and bears the stamp of his
personality. (pp. 25-26)
Both of these assumptions we have met before, because
both of them are the foundation of the conception of style
as symptom and are based themselves on the false notion that
literature is expressive behavior, or, more simply, on the
age-old confusion of written language with speech. And this
confusion of two distinct orders of things— of utterances
and of behavior which includes utterances— is implicit even
in Puttenham's premises. Note that Puttenham makes no dis
tinction between speech and writing, rather lumps them to
gether, so that his comments on style refer to and are exem
plified by both. On the other hand, the crucial distinction
between speech and writing was recognized as long ago as
Aristotle's distinction between rhetoric and poetics. Aris
totle did not share Plato's notorious contempt for writing
in comparison with speech. As Gerald F. Else explains it in
his commentary and translation of the Poetics,
On the contrary, as we . . . see repeatedly in the
Poetics itself, he insists that what the poet writes can
be judged just as well as it is, through reading, as
through hearing the words spoken. The poetic
78
then, is something prior to and essentially independent
of the voice; being recited is accidental to it.
Aristotle was, in many, though not all, respects, the first
and for many centuries the last of the objective theorists
of literature, especially with this emphasis upon the text
as prior to and independent of performer or reciter. Rhet
oric and poetics, however, do touch, or, more precisely, the
poet does use rhetoric for one purpose: for presenting the
speeches of his characters.^ But there is nothing in Aris
totle about the poet's depiction of himself through his
work. Rhetorical considerations are not relevant to the
work as a whole but only to certain kinds of behavior of the
characters depicted within the work. It seems to me a seri
ous mistake to do as Wayne C. Booth, for example, does in
The Rhetoric of Fiction: apply the categories and consider
ations of rhetoric, particularly Aristotelian rhetoric, to
7
literary works. Booth is thus forced to ignore this
^Aristotle's Poetics: The Argument (Cambridge, Mass.,
1957), p. 25.
6Cf. Else, pp. 265-270, 562-566.
7Chicago, 1961. Although Booth is a disciple of the
Chicago Neo-Aristotelians, it is interesting to note that
the mentor of this group, the Aristotelian scholar Richard
McKeon, particularly emphasizes in his Introduction to Aris
totle (New York, 1947), pp. 620-621, Aristotle’s deliberate
separation of the Rhetoric and the Poetics.
79
crucial distinction between utterances and acts of utter
ance, between literature, even in the etymological sense of
whatever is written, and speech, and to have to postulate
mythical entities such as implied speakers with implied per
sonalities. The rhetoric of Aristotle is still very defi
nitely the craft of making speeches. The poet, too, "makes"
speeches, but not speeches alone and not his own.
The distinctions preserved by Aristotle were consider
ably blurred nevertheless in Roman antiquity. In the Middle
Ages, partly because the two most important rhetorical
genres, the judicial and political, disappeared from politi
cal reality with the extinction of the Greek city-states and
Roman Republic, rhetoric according to Ernst Robert Curtius,
lost its original meaning and purpose. Hence it pene
trated into all literary genres. Its elaborately devel
oped system became the common denominator of literature
in general. This is the most influential development in
the history of antique rhetoric.®
Furthermore, the whole apparatus of rhetoric developed under
the rubric of style— figures of speech and of thought, the
three levels and the four virtues of style, and the entire
Q
notion of style as ornament— went through this adaptation
Q
European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans.
Willard R. Trask (New York, 1953), p. 70.
9See Curtius, p. 71.
80
to literature and continued in full force as a literary
theory through the eighteenth century. Indeed, long before
the eighteenth century, style, although only one of five
parts into which rhetoric was traditionally divided, became
the dominant concern of the rhetorician. "No other aspect
of rhetoric or poetry in antiquity received so much atten
tion in surviving treatises," D. L. Clark points out, and
"by the late Middle Ages rhetoric had come to mean style
alone."
But the full import of this grafting of rhetorical
theory onto works of literature was not really apparent
until the advent of Romanticism. For up until approximately
the beginning of the nineteenth century the conception of
style as the ornament and dress of thought, as the "flowers
of rhetoric" adorning the "matter and subject" of poesy, had
firmly maintained the center of interest. But, as we have
seen, the full implications of the rhetorical "theory" of
literature were already apparent in such a standard Renais
sance handbook of rhetoric as Puttenham's. For if rhetori
cal theory has to account, according to its traditional
threefold sphere of application, for audience, subject, and
^ Rhetoric in Greco-Roman Education (New York, 1957),
p. 38, and Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance (New York,
1922), p. 47.
81
speaker, and if as Ben Jonson said, "Language most showeth a
man," then where for a literary work is one to find the
audience but in the reader, the matter but in the work as
its "content," and the speaker but "in" the work as the
source of its "form" or style? As the emphasis fell more
and more upon originality and individuality, on fresh and
unhackneyed diction rather than traditional matter and fig
ures, the latent and previously uninfluential assumption
that literature is the same as speech, which derived from
the imposition of rhetoric on literature, emerged full-blown
as the conception that literature is the expression of its
author. Upon the basis of a rhetorical conception of lit
erature what could be the relation of an author to his work
but that of "speaker" to "spoken"? And if every man "ex
presses" his true self when he speaks, if every man's speech
is his shibboleth, then certainly literature must express
its author and reveal, consciously or unconsciously, what
most showeth him.
Of course what a man expresses in his speech, as we
have seen, is rarely what he says but all that his looks,
his facial expression, dress, intonation, and circumstances
express— in short, all that is evident about the act of ut
terance. But no one since Aristotle has paid much attention
82
to the fact that literary works are not orations, and not
until quite recently have even the crucial structural dif
ferences between written and spoken language received their
proper attention. The scientific study of language was
seriously hampered until this distinction between writing
and language was recognized and its implications fully ex
plored. For linguistics the distinction was crucial insofar
as it enabled the linguist to give speech its logical and
genetic priority. For the study of literature, however, it
has now become crucial to recognize that literary works are
not acts of utterance and that to study their attributes as
the attributes of the author is to treat them as if they
were acts of utterance and thereby to prevent the under
standing, enjoyment, and use of literature for what it is.
The Romantics did not invent the idea that style is
the man. Indeed, it is the eighteenth century naturalist
Buffon who made that assertion famous, though, to be sure,
he did not mean precisely what the Romantics made of it—
that style is the attributes of the man. What he did mean
was that style is the individual contribution of the author
to the common property of knowledge and fact about which he
chose to write.^ This was simply an ingenious variation of
11Discours sur le style (1753, Paris, 1875), p. 25. Cf.
83
the traditional thesis that style is something added to the
matter, but certainly it was easy enough to mistake "le
style est l'homme m£me" as the original contribution of the
author for the contribution of the author as^ himself. The
Romantics did not invent even the conception; it was already
inherent in the medieval adaptation of rhetoric to litera
ture. As far as xxterary theory went, the Romantics did not
cast off the chains of a traditional but never adequate con
ception of literature. Instead of propounding a new, non
rhetor ical theory of literature, they emphasized an undevel
oped aspect of the old conception. In line with their whole
sale espousal of originality they found the uniqueness of a
poem in the individual personality of its speaker. And in
doing so, as we have demonstrated by examining the faulty
basic assumption of the whole post-Aristotelian literary
tradition, the Romantics were simply pushing to its ultimate
conclusion one of the implications of the traditional theory.
What was new was the fervor with which the Romantic poets
and critics adopted this conception to the exclusion of all
others and exploited it in its most extreme formulations.
One of these extreme formulations was and still is that the
also Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, I, 63-64.
84
author's personality is the only real attribute of and
1 9
source of interest in the work of literature. ^ And the
greatest complication of it has been the introduction of the
idea of latency, which since Freud has of course taken most
often the form of the concept of the unconscious. But, as
we shall see, it need not. Almost anything may be proposed
as latent, for there really is no way of proving it is not,
nor indeed that it is.
As may be recalled, Ullmann stated that the psychologi
cal approach to style is based on two assumptions: one,
that a given writer, no matter what he writes, exhibits a
set of linguistic traits peculiar to himself, and, two, that
this "individual style" is, to use Ullmann's words, "bound
up" with the writer's life and personality. The proof of
the first assumption, oddly enough, depends upon what one
proposes as the meaning of the "bound up" of the second as
sumption. For at no time has the first assumption been
argued and demonstrated by itself; it has always been as
sumed. That is, the investigator begins with a work or set
of works he knows to be by one or the same author and then
12
Cf. Edmund Wilson: "The real elements, of course, of
any work of fiction, are the elements of the author's per
sonality ..." Axel's Castle (New York, 1936), p. 176.
85
seeks to find the distinguishing traits of the author's
"style." In those cases where authorship is unknown or dis
puted or the possibility of interpolations has been proposed,
the existence of unique linguistic "traits" has never been
satisfactorily proven, and language alone has itself never
established the existence of interpolations or the identifi
cation of an author. As Kayser declares,
bei einem Werk, dessen Autor umstritten ist, hat es noch
nie einwandfrei gelingen wollen, aus rein stilistischen
Beobachtungen endgultige Schliisse auf die Autorschaft zu
ziehen.^
And he substantiates this declaration with a number of ex
amples of authorial collaborations which have never been
successfully distinguished: the common work of Goethe and
Schiller, the brothers Goncourt, and particularly the end
less collaborations in Elizabethan drama, Beaumont-Fletcher,
Massinger-Fletcher, and even Shakespeare-Fletcher, even
though we have available for comparison any number of works
by each of the authors alone.
Furthermore, in cases of unknown authorship, even when
the field has been narrowed down by numerous other means to
two possibilities and even when elaborate statistical meth
ods for determining only one linguistic element have been
13
Das sprachliche Kunstwerk, p. 287.
86
employed, nothing sufficiently conclusive has been estab
lished. Starting with a study of the frequency distribu
tions of nouns in the De Imitatione Christi, G. U. Yule
tried by using this index to determine which of the two can
didates for authorship, Thomas a Kempis or Jean Gerson, was
14
the likeliest. He was unable, however, to yield a deci
sive index, although he had available other works of both
authors to which to apply the same criteria. For the prob
lem lies as always in the selection and evaluation of the
particular "trait" to be used as an index and the possibil
ity of finding samples which will be sufficiently comparable
in length and subject matter to make the results decisive.
Yule did feel that he might have found a statistic which
would be independent of sample size— for homogeneous mate
rial. But, as Yule modestly admits himself and as one sym
pathetic commentator explained it,
Its chief drawback appears to lie in its [the statis
tic's] sensitivity to variations from work to work in
the style of a single author, which in some cases is
nearly as great as its sensitivity to the variations
among different authors.^
14
The Statistical Study of Literary Vocabulary (Cam
bridge, 1944) .
15
Warren Plath, "Mathematical Linguistics," m Chris
tine Mohrmann, et al.( eds., Trends in European and American
Linguistics; 1930-1960 (Utrecht and Antwerp, 1961), p. 28.
87
Even this statistic is applicable only to works "involving
very similar ranges of subject matter." In addition, it
cannot yet really be considered established because of the
lack of a sufficient number of control calculations. And in
any case it would only be valid for the number of nouns,
while the decision as to what constitutes a noun will need
to be based on more rigorous criteria— such as that avail
able to structural linguistics— than have heretofore been
applied even in Yule's experiments.
Distinctions of style which literary scholars and crit
ics make with great aplomb evaporate when touched by the
cold dead hand of statistics. No author has yet been shown
to yield "a set of linguistic habits peculiar" to him alone.
Whatever stylistic criteria are or may be, they are not nor
may they be solely linguistic. The number of nouns used is
simply the number of nouns used, in a language that uses
nouns. In order for it to be considered anything more than
an instance of language meaningful as such, the linguistic
datum must be related to, shown to indicate something beyond
its occurrence and meaningfulness as an instance of language,
whether this be the possible authorship of another work or
something more elaborate, such as the author's personality,
soul, Weltanschauung, etc. Thus the second assumption
88
stated by Ullmann and derived from the pronouncements of
several of the major European literary scholars devoted to
investigating style is the really basic one. Whether as a
matter of logic or as a matter of evidence, there simply
cannot be nor is there any such attribute as style nor any
stylistic trait as distinguishable from facts of language,
unless the facts of language are "bound up" with something
else. The relating of the author's language to his mind,
experience, personality, is in short, one kind of attempt to
establish the existence of "style" and "stylistic facts."
And the hypostatization of the "latent" or "unconscious" is
one means of relating the language of a work to something—
in this case and in a very special sense, to the author.
The kind of literature which is easiest to interpret as
"expressive" is of course lyric poetry. Here the frequently
recurring unspecified "I" can readily be identified with the
author whose name appears above the text, or the poem,
though not mentioning an "I," resembles an utterance in such
a way as to require the reader to infer a speaker, as we saw
was the case with "O Western Wind." Furthermore, the sub
jects and themes of much lyric poetry are often the states
of mind or immediate emotions of the unspecified speaker and
can therefore easily be thought of as the emotion or state
89
of mind of the nearest identifiable person, the author.
Finally, the poetic theory of several predominantly lyric
poets has fostered the notion of poetry as a "spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings" on the part of the poet. And
although Wordsworth, for example, very definitely specifies
that this is a remembered emotion— "recollected in tranquil
lity"— and not an "expression" of the moment at all, still
it is easy to forget this qualification in the light of the
first and more powerful statement, which Wordsworth thought
well enough of to use twice in the same essay. It is inter
esting to note that the rise of expressive theories of lit
erature was in fact accompanied by a shifting of the center
of the "poetical" from what had always been either tragedy
or epic to lyric poetry. Abrams points out this significant
fact repeatedly, although he does not recognize that the
Romantic theory is, as we have tried to show, simply the
ultimate development of a rhetorical conception of poetry in
which the "speaker" is an attribute of the utterance. Abrams
discusses John Stuart Mill's essays "What Is Poetry?" and
"The Two Kinds of Poetry" (1833) as particularly exemplary
evidence of this shift in the status of the literary genres.^
^For his discussion of Mill see esp. pp. 23-26, 148-
149, and for "The Lyric as Poetic Norm," pp. 84-88.
90
Such a shift was a necessary concommitant of the development
of expressive theories because the lyric was the only genre
which could be interpreted directly as expression. Mill, as
well as John Keble, as Abrams also notes, separated "poetry
from oratory on the grounds that a poet pours out his feel
ings without reference to an audience" (p. 148, italics
mine). So it seems that after rhetoric had dominated poetic
theory for centuries, a poetic theory evolved which found it
necessary to dispense with the audience— the major concern
and justification of rhetoric itself and a major concern and
justification of poetry in all post-Aristotelian "poetics."
The justification for poetry as the means of delight or in
struction or catharsis for the reader or audience gave way
to a theory of poetry for the poet alone— not poetry for the
sake of the audience or for the sake of the poem, but poetry
for the poet's sake.
Nevertheless, a major portion of the world's litera
ture, including a great deal that is indisputably its best,
is not lyrical at all. In the case of epics or romances or
novels the authorial or minstrel "I" might obviously inter
polate his commentary on the action, but this rarely amounts
to anything that can be taken as very revealing of the
author. We may have our own opinions about people who
91
interrupt their stories in order to moralize or to tell the
reader not to worry because everything comes out all right
in the end. But these are opinions about the author or min
strel as storyteller pure and simple, while dramatists offer
us nothing directly except perhaps a stock prologue or epi
logue. The amount and kind of information directly "ex
pressed," even in the simple sense of "uttered," by authors
in these genres is small and singularly unexciting and unre-
vealing of any "true self." On the other hand, a metaphor
ical use of the term "express" for these genres— that an
author expresses himself through his characters and action—
is enormously difficult in practice to apply. The differ
ence between what a work means and what the author means or
expresses, above and beyond the work, even in a metaphorical
sense, is a distinction apparently almost impossible to
make, if we are dealing with the work as literature. What
the author may be expressing through the actions and charac
ters and, indeed, which characters might really be the
spokesmen for his "true self" must remain in the realm of
the strictly conjectural and unprovable. A work of litera
ture says what it says, which in itself may in any given
case be difficult enough to determine. But if we postulate
that, in addition, the author is "saying" something himself,
92
the difficulties of interpreting this are enormous.
We may obviate some of these difficulties of interpret
ing the literary work as "saying" something of the author by
averring that there is a latent meaning in the work, so la
tent as even perhaps to be hidden from the author. We might
even go so far as to say that this latent or unconscious
meaning is the real one, that all which is obvious in the
work is mere surface and disguise. We need not, of course,
but if one will only admit the concept of latency, anything
may be admitted under its aegis. The idea of the uncon
scious, hidden, or latent stratum of the literary work need
not be based on and, indeed, historically precedes the
structural hypothesis of the mind proposed by Freud. It may
be only the simple assumption, for instance, that the theme
of Paradise Lost is not what Milton declared it— the justi
fication of the ways of God to man— but some other theme,
such as the conflict in man’s soul between the principles of
1 7
reason and unreason. ' A. J. A. Waldock in his penetrating
1 f t
essay on Paradise Lost and Its Critics- 10 takes to task
scholars as far apart in apparent aims and methods as Edwin
1 7
X/Cf. Edwin Greenlaw, "A Better Teacher than Aquinas,"
Studies in Philology, 14:200-214, April 1917.
l®Cambridge, 1947.
93
Greenlaw and Maud Bodkin for their application to literature
of the hypothesis of unstated or unconscious meanings. The
desire to produce such "real meanings" may stem from the
hope that the declining popularity of a work might be helped
if a meaning more congenial to the current temper were found
for it, while contemporary Jungian and other versions of
archetypal criticism seem to stem from a desire to add to
the "truth-value" of literature by finding in it strata more
profound than the obvious and specific meaning. Critics
vary too in the literalness with which they apply such an
assumption and the kind of proof they deem necessary to es
tablish this latent meaning. E. M. W. Tillyard, for example,
asserts outright that the real meaning of a poem is the
state of mind of the poet at the time he composed the poem
and that, if we are ever really to understand the poem, we
must bend every effort to reconstruct the specific histori-
1 Q
cal circumstances of that state. But this approach, even
though it uses the concept of "state of mind," involves
nothing really psychological. What Tillyard is actually in
sisting on is the absolute necessity of exhaustive historical
19
Tillyard and C. S. Lewis, The Personal Heresy: A Con
troversy (London, 1934); and Tillyard’s Milton (London,
1930). For a rigorous critique of this position see Waldock,
pp. 119-129.
94
scholarship, the function of which is to find out everything
that the poet could have had in his mind at the time he com
posed the poem, so that investigation leads, not to infer
ring from the poem the psychological processes which "caused'
it, but to studying the poet's biography, his geographical
and political situation, the "climate of ideas" by which he
must have been affected, his reading, etc.
On the other hand, those whom Ullmann designates as
scholars mainly concerned with investigating individual
style seek to discern the state of mind of the author on
the basis of a completely a-historical conception: that the
literary work is itself the datum and the only one for what
must have been in the mind of the author when he composed
it. Specifically how this state of mind can be discovered
in the work and precisely what sort of phenomenon it will
prove to be— temperament, soul, psyche, Weltanschauung— will
vary with which of two somewhat different but indiscrimi
nately mixed hypotheses is applied. The earlier and more
psychological assumption, which we see echoed in Puttenham's
kind of reasoning from humble style to humble man, is that
the language of a man bears a physiognomic relationship to
the man himself. The second assumption is that the author
is discernible in the work as its creator and that by
95
determining the creative principle which must have motivated
the artist one can discern his soul. This second assumption
is based of course on the age-old analogy between God as the
creator of the universe and the artist as the creator of the
literary work. The work functions as a sort of dual symbol-
system which points, on the one hand, as literature to the
world by means of story, characters, scenes, etc., and on
the other hand, to the act of creation and the existence of
the state of mind, soul, psyche, Weltanschauung, id, etc.,
of the author. This latter concept is, to be sure, simply
a more sophisticated development of the physiognomic hypoth
esis by such theorists as the Romantic Friedrich Schlegel on
the very theological analogy which we have noted and serves
especially to explain how non-lyrical works can be expres
sive of their authors. But particularly as a result of the
application of Freudian principles to stylistics both hy
potheses are often used indiscriminately even in a single
study to explain specifically how the by now "superficial"
literary work is symptomatic of its author. Whether the
creator or the man, style does reveal, so the assumption
goes, the individual.
CHAPTER V
STYLE AS THE LATENT
Particularly among Romance philologists the concept of
style as the latent has become the principal, and sometimes
the sole, basis of their definition of stylistics. As the
Spanish scholar Amado Alonso defines it,
el nombre estilistica denuncia que se quiere llegar al
conocimiento mtimo de una obra literaria o de un cre-
ador de literatura por el estudio de su estilo. El
principio en que se basa es que a toda particularidad
idiomatica en el estilo corresponde una particularidad
psiquica. Ya le adelanto que una mera lista de particu-
laridades estilxsticas no nos hace conocer y gozar la
indole de una obra ni de un autor: los rasgos difer-
entes tienen que componer una fisonomia.^
In order to explain why stylistic particularities have to
compose a physiognomy Alonso quotes the philologist who has
by now come to be the outstanding representative of this
mode of stylistic investigation, Leo Spitzer,
Ha de haber . . . en el escritor una como armonia pre-
establecida entre la expresion verbal y el todo de la
obra, una misteriosa correspondencia entre ambas. Nues-
tro sistema de investigaci^n se basa por entero en ese
axioma. (p. 96)
• ^ Materia y forma en poesia {Madrid, 1955), pp. 95-96.
96
97
Now Spitzer himself with great ingenuity in literally hun
dreds of papers and monographs published over a period of
fifty years has analyzed the "linguistic structure" of lit
erary works in half-a-dozen different languages on the basis
of the hypotheses described above. Would not the results of
such a vast amount of investigation prove a decisive test as
to whether or not there is such a relationship? Did Spitzer
in fact find the "mysterious correspondence" which he as
sumed must exist?
Over the years Spitzer developed a technique of style
analysis he called the "philological circle" by which he
worked
from the surface to the "inward life-center" of the work
of art; first observing details about the superficial
appearance of the particular work (and the "ideas" ex
pressed by the poet are, also, only one of the superfi
cial traits in a work of art); then, grouping these de
tails and seeking to integrate them into a creative
principle which may have been present in the soul of the
artist; and, finally, making the return trip to all the
other groups of observations in order to find whether the
"inward form" one has tentatively constructed gives an
account of the whole.^
Spitzer justified this technique as the basic procedure of
all the humanities, linked it with the Zirkel im Verstehen
of Dilthey, the tracing of etymologies, and the development
^Linguistics and Literary History; Essays in Stylistics
(Princeton, 1948), p. 19 (italics mine).
98
of the concept of language families. But it has come in for
the major part of the criticism leveled at Spitzer. The
complaint is that the method is not scientific but intuitive
and its results unverifiable.3 If, however, there is a cre
ative principle manifested in literary works, the procedure
ought to be capable of being duplicated and the results
ought to be capable of being verified by reference to the
works. Surely relating the parts of a work to each other
and the whole is what we must always do in literary analysis.
It little matters if we talk about the creative principle as
it "may have been present in the soul of the artist" or even
about the inward form and the superficial appearance, if we
are working from the details of the work to a view of the
whole work.
Now Spitzer defended himself against his critics, and
specifically Bruneau, by insisting that his method was sci
entific. Yet in restating it in defense of its "scientific"
nature he actually omitted the questionable phrases about
the literary work— the superficial appearance, the inward
form, the creative principle in the mind of the author— and
See especially Charles Bruneau, "La stylistique,"
Romance Philology, 5:1-14, August 1951. Cf. also Raphael
Levy, "A New Credo of Stylistics," Symposium, 3:321-334,
November 1949; and Jean Hytier, "La methode de M. L. Spitzer)'
Romanic Review, 41:42-59, February 1950.
99
offered instead what amounts to a technique of diagnosis,
which he did in fact liken to the procedure of the physician.
His method is now described as
partir dans 11 etude du style d 'une oeuvre, d'un auteur
ou d'un epoque, d'un detail bien observe, ensuite en in-
duire un vue d'ensemble hypothetique (d'ordre psycholo-
gique), qui ensuite devra §tre contr8lee par d'autres
observations de detail— au fond le procede de tout homme
de science (etymologiste, physicien— et, depuis des im-
memoriaux, du bon critique litteraire).
What could be more logical, more systematic, more reason
able, Spitzer asked, and, to be sure, as a scientific method
it now sounds irreproachable. Men of science, of course, at
least etymologists and physicians, are students of causes,
of sources, the origins of words, the origins of symptoms,
of diseases. Thus the style of a literary work now becomes
a symptom of something— "d'ordre psychologique." For is it
not inevitable that when we think to seek in a work for the
"inward life-center" or "form" we are actually looking
through the work at something else? Does a work of litera
ture really consist of a surface and some concealed inner
core? If the surface is all the traits of the work, what
could the inner core be but its source, in one or another
shape or form, the author? Indeed, in the essay "Linguistics
^"Les theories de la stylistique," Le frangais moderne,
20:165-168, July 1952.
100
and Literary History," already cited, Spitzer seemed to be
unable to decide what his method is designed to find. "Lan
guage is only one outward crystallization of the 'inward
form,'" he declared, "the life-blood of the poetic creation
is everywhere the same, whether we tap the organism at 'lan
guage' or 'ideas,' at 'plot' or at 'composition" (p. 18).
But what is this "inward form," this "life-blood" which "is
everywhere the same"? In the same essay he designates it by
half a dozen different and by no means synonymous labels:
"soul of a particular writer," "individual style," "common
spiritual etymon," "psychological root" (p. 11); "clue to
the Weltanschauung" (p. 13); "psychogram" (p. 15); "inward
life-center," "inward form," "creative principle which may
have been present in the soul of the artist" (p. 19); and
"ideological patterns" (p. 32). Finally, he concludes that
since
the author lends to an outward phenomenon of language an
inner significance . . . the reader must seek to place
himself in the creative center of the artist himself—
and recreate the artistic organism. (p. 29)
The "fisonomia" of the work must after all be related some
how to the author. That pre-established harmony between
verbal expression and the whole of a work seems accounted
for only when one returns to the "creative center of the
artist himself." Otherwise, how could verbal expression and
101
work be distinguishable? Unless the verbal expression is
related to something else, it is^ the work, and all there is
of it.
Yet the charge that Spitzer's method is unscientific
does not really touch the basic issue. If Spitzer does
demonstrate correspondences between the language of a work
and the nature of the author, the means by which he himself
was initially able to discern these correspondences is not
so important. The basic issue, as Ullmann has realized, is
that
As long as the demonstration is conclusive it surely does
not matter in what order the various steps were taken;
the main point is that a link has been established be
tween a stylistic peculiarity, its root in the author's
psyche, and other manifestations of the same mental fac
tor. The great merit of Spitzer's procedure is indeed
that it has lifted stylistic facts out of isolation and
has related them to other aspects of the writer's experi
ence and activity. (p. 29)
But what does Ullmann, indeed, what does Spitzer mean by re
lated? Is the "stylistic fact" caused by the author's psy
che or is it imitative of it, or is it imitative of the sub
ject of the work, and if so, how do we know this? Spitzer
claimed to demonstrate, for example, that a rhythmic pattern
occurring in the writings of Diderot "was conditioned by a
certain nervous temperament" grounded on the author's
102
"erotic Erlebnis." Yet he also claimed that this rhythmic
pattern is an effect which was achieved by Diderot, albeit
"half-consciously" (p. 162), and which is undeniably an ef
fect because it can be seen as appropriate to the subjects
of the works in which it appears. On the one hand, Diderot's
"style is an irruption of the physiological rhythm of speech
into writing" (p. 166, Spitzer's italics), and on the other
hand, this "feverish staccato style was invented by"
Diderot and made it possible for him to describe in a manner
unequaled before him "the sexual mechanism" and "the bodily,
physiological, mechanical side of thought," "a new achieve
ment" (p. 168). Now this rhythmic pattern of an Encyclo-
pedie article on the relationship between the sexes is "imi
tating" the sexual rhythm; then it is imitating the sexual
automatism of characters behaving automatically in sexual
situations; now simply "automatic" behavior; and, finally
Diderot is also able "to translate into language" rhythmi
cally "the 'vibrations' of the imagination— though here,
too, the sensuous origin, even the sexual origin, of the
emotional pattern, may be discerned" (p. 151). Furthermore,
that it is not the reverse process which has taken place
The Style of Diderot," Linguistics and Literary His
tory, pp. 135-191.
103
Spitzer infers
not only from the well-known sensualistic approach of
Diderot's philosophy, but also from the more general
consideration that, in linguistics, the concrete pre
cedes the abstract: the "etymology" of a stylistic pat
tern must be found in that situation which is closest to
concrete, to sensuous reality . . . whatever of similar
ity we may find in . . . less sensuous passages must be
considered as a secondary application of patterns based
primarily on the sexual. (p. 151)
The specific quality of a style seems to be derived here
from whatever was the most concrete subject the author wrote
about; in Diderot's case this subject seems to have been
sex. Therefore, so this line of reasoning appears to pro
ceed, the origin, nature, and significance of the "rhythmic
pattern" in the author's works must be sexual. Here is
where the genuine circularity of Spitzer's method appears
and of all methods which propose to relate the attributes of
an author to his writing or vice versa.
Consider what we know and what Spitzer, too, must have
known about Diderot's writings when he sat down to read the
Encyclopedie article— on the relation of the sexes— in which
he claims to have discovered the origin of Diderot's style.
We know that Diderot was an author who wrote very few
strictly literary works. We know that in one of the best
known of these few works, La Religieuse, he depicted the
compulsive behavior (sexual automatism) of a lesbian abbess.
We know that one of his early works, Les Bijoux indiscrets,
was considered so indecent that he later disavowed it. We
know that most of these few literary works are either plays
or largely in dialogue, dialogue in which one of the charac
ters is often a "moi." We know, too, that the major part of
Diderot’s writings were devoted to the Encyclop^die and to
journalism in which he espoused a philosophy which— while
not "sensualistic" (the wrong word)— was based on the sole
validity of the senses. Finally, we know that a consider
able part of the non-literary writing which he left behind
also consists of an extensive correspondence with one of a
series of mistresses. Diderot's case hardly offers a para
digm for penetrating the soul of an author through his style,
regardless of the fact that he is a modern author, who "en
joys the freedom permitted the conception of 'original
genius,"' which is how Spitzer justifies this physiognomic
approach. Spitzer claimed to be inferring, according to a
strictly scientific procedure, a linguistic trait from the
work or works in which it appeared and establishing it as a
"stylistic trait" only by correlating it with other passages
in the same work or other works by the same author. Yet not
only has he not done this, it is quite obvious that what he
has done is deduce this essentially Diderotian stylistic
105
trait not from Diderot's language, nor only from what he al
ready knew about Diderot as a historical personage and that
not so much as a writer of literature but as a philosophe
and an amoreux, but from the very subject matter of the
works themselves. No wonder that "in this writer, nervous
system, philosophic system, and 'stylistic system' are ex
ceptionally well-attuned" (p. 135).
It is not surprising to learn, then, that Spitzer has
shown that P^guy's style, for example, is derived from, or
based upon, or related to his Bergsonism, or Jules Romains',
author of La Vie unanime, to his Unanimism, or Rabelais'
word formations of known roots with fantastic suffixes to a
tension in him between the real and the unreal, Utopia
(think of the Abbey of Thelfeme) and naturalism (Rabelais'
fundamental details).^ Spitzer's article on Diderot is in
troduced by the statement: "I had often been struck, in
reading Diderot, by a rhythmic pattern in which I seemed to
hear the echo of Diderot's speaking voice . . (p. 135).
Style again is the speaker in the work, and this speaker is
6Cf. "Zu Charles Peguys Stil," Stilstudien (Munich,
1928), II, 301-364: "Der Unanimismus Jules Romains im Spie
gel seiner Sprache," Stilstudien, II, 208-300; and Die Wort-
bildung als stilistisches Mittel exemplifiziert an Rabelais,
Beihefte zur Zeitschrift fCtr romanische Philologie, No. 19
(Halle, 1910).
106
the author himself. But Diderot's best known literary works
are, we will remember, dialogues, and dialogues in which
Diderot often appears as himself, while his non-literary
works are often letters, including a great many personal
ones. Yet Spitzer does not relate the particular tremolo
which he hears in this "speaker's speech" to the author's
actual speech, which would have been a reasonable, though
not particularly significant, relation of linguistic facts
"to other aspects of the writer's experience and activity."
Instead, he relates it to what the author has all along been
"speaking" about. The sexual quality which is attributed to
the rhythmic pattern is really being derived from the sexual
subject matter of the works. It may be true that Diderot
was a particularly sensual man. Certainly he was interested
in the subject, for, as we see, he frequently wrote about
it. Spitzer has not established either a root or an ana
logue of a "stylistic pattern" in the author's psyche; he
has simply transformed the subject matter— sensuality--into
a "stylistic trait"— a sensual rhythm. The content has been
as it were "stylized," and not by the writer but in the per
ceptions of the critic.
Perhaps Spitzer already recognized in this very paper
the real circularity of his procedure, for the passage in
107
which he postulates Diderot's "erotic Erlebnis" as the source
of this "rhythmic pattern" follows close upon the analysis
of a section of La Reliqieuse to which he found it necessary
to attribute two rhythmical patterns, the one "mocking" the
other (p. 150). Of course it is not that the rhythms mock
each other, but that the sentences, or better still, the ac
tions described in them, contradict or are incongruous with
each other. And the automatism which he finds rhythmically
reproduced in the passage is the automatism which is in fact
being depicted in it. "In both examples above," he goes on
to say, "the emotion has been one of sexual passion; our
discussion so far may have given the impression that Diderot
is given mainly to such descriptions" (p. 151). But then it
is that he proposes that we recognize this rhythm as primar
ily sexual in quality— because that is the most concrete
"source" of it in Diderot's works and because in that case
it can also be attributed to his still more concrete nervous
system. For without the substantiation of the author's ner
vous system Spitzer would have been without a means of dis
tinguishing, of separating, the "rhythm" of the passage from
what it was about. By relating it to soul or Weltanschauung
or id or psyche of the author he is able to postulate as a
constant, a quality or attribute which recurs and is there-
108
fore distinguishable from the text in which it appears. The
sexual quality of the rhythm then has to be an attribute of
the text and an attribute of the author; unless it is both,
the "rhythm" is simply a linguistic feature, and linguistic
features do not reproduce the meaning— they are the source
of it. The existence of an attribute of style, a particular
style, or a stylistic "trait"— depends on whether or not the
linguistic feature— the particular sentence, paragraph, or
work, the recurrence of specific words or certain parts of
speech, etc.--can be made to indicate anything beyond it
self, beyond its meaning as a particular instance of lan
guage. If the stylistic "trait" is simply a "reproduction"
of the meaning of each passage in which it "occurs," then it
is not distinguishable from each meaning of each passage
which it supposedly "reproduces."
Like the term "express," which we discussed earlier,
"style" is used as a relational term. In any given instance
it means, points to, indicates something which includes but
goes beyond the specific meaning of the language. For X/
language or an instance of language, is proposed a specific
quality or attribute of X, style or a style, Y. But if we
say that a rose (X) is red (Y), we mean that the rose pos
sesses the quality or attribute of redness, not that it is
109
redness. There are roses which are not red and there are
red things which are not roses. If we say that every lit
erary work has a particular meaning and also has style, if
style is not the particular meaning, what is it? We could
disregard the meaning of an utterance by analyzing it into,
or rather abstracting, its linguistic units, putting all the
words of the utterance in a list, which we would call its
diction, and all the sentence patterns we have abstracted
into another list, which we would call the syntax of the ut
terance. Have we now isolated the style of the utterance?
But these words and these sentence patterns occur in dozens
of other utterances, which mean differently according to
their particular combination. That is what we mean by words
and sentence patterns; they are the abstractable elements of
any utterance, the recurrent features which give us to know
that the particular utterance functions by virtue of belong
ing to a particular system of conventions known as language
(le langacre) and a particular language (la langue) . ^ The
linguistic features— the aggregate of words and syntax by
themselves— may be abstracted again and again from infi
nitely diverse combinations of infinitely diverse meaning.
^Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linquistique generale,
(Paris, 1916; 4th ed., 1949), pp. 23-39. Cf. above, p. 20.
110
We may call them style if we like, although we already have
terms for them, syntax, grammar, words, or, if we make our
abstractions finer, morphemes, phonemes, phones.
Style is supposedly that and something more than that,
however. It is supposedly a particular quality of a partic
ular utterance or group of utterances (la parole) which may
be co-extensive with but is not the same as their meaning;
yet as we see, it is meaning which is the particularity of
the particular utterance or utterances. Diderot's La Reli-
gieuse, although it could be analyzed linguistically in
terms of the language of eighteenth century France (la
langue), is a unique, non-recurring meaning, which derives
from the unique, non-recurring combination of its "linguis
tic features." When La Reliqieuse recurs, it recurs as the
same work. Thus, if what we mean by "style" is the linguis
tic features of the work, so that an account of style is
simply a grammatical analysis, or again if what we mean by
style is the ostensible subject, theme, or more inclusively
the fullest and most adequate interpretation of the work,
which we can consider as its meaning, then the term is re
dundant and misleading. If we mean by style some attribute
which inheres in the particular work or works, then the term
must comprise more than the linguistic features, which of
Ill
themselves are not particulars but abstractions and some
thing more than the individual interpretation to which the
work is subject. Otherwise, style is simply the individual
work or works as they are being analyzed or explicated.
There is, indeed, one "mysterious correspondence between the
verbal expression and the whole of a work"--it is often
called the meaning.
In order to avoid such circularity in the application
of the concept of style the critic, in this case Spitzer,
proposed that the linguistic feature, in this case certain
syntactic structures, is a stylistic feature, a rhythm
which, while related to— "reproducing," "reinforcing"— the
meaning which the text obviously has, is distinguishable
from it as a symptom of the author, in this case of his
"erotic Erlebnis." The whole question of "rhythm" is of
course in itself highly complicated, especially in prose,
for which we have neither the conventional practice of
meter, nor the conventional signal of lines which do not ex
tend entirely across the page, nor other conventions which
often coordinate with meter, such as rhyme and alliteration.
One well-known book on English prose rhythm defines rhythm
as
a series of units or elements or groups which are simi
lar not necessarily in themselves or necessarily in their
112
duration, but the more alike they are in both character
istics the more obvious is the rhythm, and the more un
like they are in one characteristic or the other, pro
vided the impression of similarity is maintained or in
duced, the more interesting the rhythm is . . . for the
impression of similarity the idea of expectancy is para
mount. For if the expectancy is strong enough we may
readily assimilate or organize into similarity things
which are palpably unlike either in themselves or in
duration or even in both.®
Certainly this tortuous definition would suggest that the
concept of rhythm in prose is a highly complicated one. We
see that the author concludes after all that expectancy is
the decisive criterion, and expectancy does seem the likeli
est determinant of whether or not the observer will perceive
rhythm. Susanne Langer reminds us that it is we who hear in
the equal ticks of the clock the rhythm of the alternating
"ticks" and "tocks." And surely when we read poetry, as
®Paull F. Baum, The Other Harmony of Prose (Durham,
N.C., 1952), p. 24. Cf. also I. A. Richards, The Principles
of Literary Criticism (London, 1926), pp. 134-146.
^Feeling and Form, p. 126. Cf. also Marshall Stearns,
The Story of Jazz (Oxford, 1956), p. 13. "The outstanding
student of the subject, Richard A. Waterman of Northwestern
University, has a phrase for what it takes: 'metronome
sense' ["African Influence on the Music of the Americas," in
Acculturation in the Americas, ed. Sol Tax (Chicago, 1952),
pp. 207-218]. "If your metronome sense is highly developed,
you can feel a foundation rhythm when all you hear is a
shower of accents being superimposed upon it. The story of
the Congo natives being thrilled by the intermittent explo
sions of a one-cylinder gasoline engine may well be true.
Their highly conditioned ears supplied a rhythmic common
denominator."
113
opposed to hearing it recited, we expect at least some re
currence, if not a regular meter, in our own "reading," be
cause of the conventions, such as those mentioned above,
which are already in force when we recognize that we are
reading a poem. No doubt rhythm, or more precisely, recur
rence, had as meter and as recurring words and phrases a
very important function as an aid to composition and memory
when poetry went unrecorded and was handed on in a strictly
oral tradition.^-® On the other hand, "free verse" and other
kinds of condensation and elimination of repetition seem
reasonable developments now that rhythm is no longer func
tional. No doubt recurrence will remain a frequent feature
of poetry because it is enjoyable, like childhood nonsense
rhymes. But it is not a defining feature of literature, as
the existence of a literate audience and written dissemina
tion have revealed.H In French, the language, we will re
member, of Diderot, "rhythm" in poetry would be unthinkable
^®Cf. Albert Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge,
Mass., 1960).
Hit seems likely that the "free rhythms" which Benja
min Hrushovski sees as constituting much of modern poetry
and as needing analysis and description are, by the nature
of their being free, not rhythms at all, at least not in any
sense of recurrence, and therefore not analyzable like meter,
which is recurrent and conventional. See Hrushovski, "On
Free Rhythms in Modern Poetry," in Sebeok, ed., pp. 173-190.
114
without rhyme because there is so little difference in the
12
French language between accented and unaccented syllables.
Thus the idea of a rhythmic French prose— if it does not
rhyme, and Diderot's does not, of course— seems equally un
thinkable. And thus one would have to conclude that at
* 1 -3
least in modern "unrhymed prose,"whether French or Eng
lish, rhythm if it means recurrence is not only not expected
but, indeed, probably non-existent. One student of style
has concluded that insofar as prose is concerned rhythm can
only be a metaphor.^
Certainly Spitzer, as an erudite and imaginative lin
guist in Romance languages, must have known all the problems
involved with the concept of rhythm as a linguistic feature,
12
"Rhyme; Rime. Nature and function," in Joseph T.
Shipley, ed., Dictionary of World Literature (New York,
1953), p. 344. Cf. also William Beare, Latin Verse and
European Song; A Study in Accent and Rhythm (London, 1957).
l-^Curtius points out that during the Middle Ages poetry
was not recognized as an art separate from prose composition.
There was no word for it, and the conventions were freely
interchanged and combined, so that there existed such phe
nomena as rhymed prose, texts in which verse and prose al
ternate, etc. See European Literature and the Latin Middle
Ages, pp. 151-154. This would further support my contention
in Chapter II that the distinction between poetry and prose
is one of convention— not definition. Poetry is whatever is
presented as poetry.
^W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., The Prose Style of Samuel Johnson
(New Haven, 1941), p. 8.
115
particularly in French. But Spitzer as literary critic,
looking for the substratum of the literary work buried be
neath the language and ideas, plot and composition, could
be struck in Diderot's prose by a "rhythmic pattern" which
seemed to him "a self-accentuating rhythm, suggesting that
the 'speaker' is swept away by a wave of passion which tends
to flood all limits" (p. 135), while his very description of
the "pattern" is a hypostatization of the subject, theme,
meaning of the work in which it appears. At the same time
he is being struck by this rhythm oJE passion the critic is
reading about passion, and since Diderot wrote a good deal
about passion, the critic attributes the rhythm to passion
in Diderot himself. Diderot quite possibly was a sensual
man, but his style is not symptomatic of this sensuality,
this "erotic ErlebnisThe meaning, themes, subject matter
of the works themselves are evidence of Diderot's "erotic
Erlebnis," and almost the only evidence. Wellek notes that
although Spitzer strongly emphasized the influence of Freud
on his own work, his use of Freud seems simply "as a justi
fication of a search for 'latency,' for a hidden key, a re
current motif, a basic Erlebnis, and even the world view of
an author."^ Yet there is no "latency" in a literary work,
l^"Leo Spitzer (1887-1960)," Comparative Literature,
116
no hidden key. If there is a recurrent motif, a world view,
it is right there for everyone to see; it is what the author
is writing about. Peguy writes about his Bergsonism,
Romains about his unanimism, Rabelais about the real and the
unreal, Diderot about the erotic. If they did not, there
would be no way of finding them in the authors' psyches,
and we would have to relate the "stylistic facts" to what
ever else these authors wrote about. For when we propose
to be relating the attributes of a style to an author we
are still actually relating them to the work, although stat
ing the relation indirectly. This must always be the prob
lem which arises when the critic thinks to find the author's
state of mind through his works, whether the critic thinks
to use the key of style or the elaborate historical recon
structions proposed by Tillyard.
The problem of conceiving of style as symptom is not
that "the assumption of a necessary relationship between
certain stylistic devices and certain states of mind would
appear fallacious," if we mean by this that "the whole re
lationship between psyche and word is looser and more
12:310-334, Fall 1960.
1 6
Wellek and Warren, Theory of Literature, p. 173.
117
oblique than is usually assumed" (p. 17 3). What makes it
fallacious is that no relationship at all can be established
between the psyche and the word, or perhaps we should say
that the relationship between the psyche and the word is ab
solute; that is, it is a "relationship" of identity. One
does not demonstrate the existence of a psyche or a state of
mind; one assumes that such a phenomenon exists because such
things as works of literature exist. Works of literature
are necessarily the products of human minds. The critic in
fers from the existence of a literary work or works that
there must have existed a mind of which this work or works
are the product. Then in order to establish what must have
been in the mind when it produced the work the critic postu
lates the content of the work, sometimes of course under the
rubric of style, in which case the attributes of the mind
which produced the work are derived from the attributes of
the style, the existence of which style is inferred from the
assumption that the style of a work is due to the attributes
of the mind which produced it.
We see now how Puttenham could maintain both that style
is the language in relation to the subject of the work and
that at the same time style is also the language of the work
in relation to the mind of the author. Of course the more a
118
person speaks or writes the more he "sheweth the matter and
disposition" of his mind. It is from his speaking or writ
ing that we infer he has a mind, and it is from the content
and quality of his speech and writing that we postulate the
content and quality of his mind. The "mentis character" is
a causal hypothesis like that of the Unmoved Mover or the
First Cause, simply a postulate designed to halt the infi
nite regress of causal explanation. The problem of style,
in this phase at least, involves the same sort of reasoning
as the problem of intention, which is a problem because, as
Beardsley puts it, a general principle of philosophy "is
often not kept steadily in mind."
If two things are distinct, that is, if they are indeed
two, and not one thing under two names (like the Vice
President of the United States and the Presiding Officer
of the Senate), then the evidence for the existence and
nature of the one cannot be exactly the same as the evi
dence for the existence and nature of the other. Any
evidence, for example, that the Vice President is tall
will automatically be evidence that the Presiding Offi
cer of the Senate is tall, and vice versa. But evidence
that the Vice President is tall will have no bearing on
the height of the President.^
"This point is obscured," Beardsley goes on to show, "where
two things, though distinct, are causally connected," as
intention and art object are supposed to be. If the inten
tion is in the work, then how can it be distinguished from
17Aesthetics, p. 18.
119
the work itself? Only when we have the artist's statement
of intention outside of the work can we compare two things,
and then we must still decide if in fact the intention is
"in" the work insofar as the work fulfills the announced in
tention .
The same principle applies to style and the man,
whether the "man" in the case is a psyche, an id, a Weltan
schauung , or simply an individual "speaker." If the style
of a work reveals the character of its author or speaker,
and the character of its author or speaker is what consti
tutes, what enables us to distinguish, the style of the work,
then we do not have two distinct things, but one thing— the
work— under several nom de plumes, "style," "author,"
"speaker." Only if the attribute of the style exists also
outside the work can it be distinguished from it, like the
rose and redness. Defining the style of a writer is not
like diagnosing a disease, nor is it like tracing etymolo
gies. Presumably a disease is explicable apart from the
person who has it. If we are all ill, then none of us is
ill; illness is no longer a state distinguishable from
health, from existence. Presumably, too, words change, de
velop from other words or from situations requiring new
words, but etymological research presumes also that words
120
are distinguishable from each other, that we can tell at a
given point that we have a different word from the preceding
one. Literary works are also distinct from one another;
their language— words and combinations of words— are dis
tinct. Otherwise they are the same work. Authors as human
beings are distinct from their utterances, but their states
of mind, intentions, psyches, Weltanschauunqs are not; the
utterances themselves are our evidence for the existence of
all these "mental phenomena." A lightheaded man, as Putten-
ham would say, whom he knew, might write what we would char
acterize as a "lightheaded" work. But if this same light
headed man wrote a work we thought grimly serious, we would
change our minds, not about the grimness of the work, but
about the lightheadedness of the man.
Wellek and Warren complain that, for example, in the
discussion of the baroque,
most German scholars assume an inevitable correspondence
between dense, obscure, twisted language and a turbulent,
divided, and tormented soul.
"But," they counter, "an obscure twisted style can certainly
18
be cultivated by craftsmen and technicians." Yet the
counter here should not be an appeal to what the artist can
or cannot do but to what is actually being claimed by these
1 ft
Theory of Literature, p. 173.
121
scholars. They are simply characterizing works as twisted
and obscure, and then reasoning: twisted and obscure works
must have been produced by twisted and obscure souls. But
what evidence do we have for such a correlation; we have no
souls, only works. This fallacy is, precisely speaking, the
strict form of petitio principii: the proposition to be in
ferred is derived from itself or from an equivalent proposi
tion. A typical illustration of this reasoning, often given
in logic texts, is: "The order and design which we observe
in nature prove that God created the world; for there could
be no order and design in nature if God had not created the
19
world." And is this same theological argument not the
source of that whole Romantic modification of the rhetorical
theory of the speaker as the form of the work? One histor
ian thus describes how, proceeding from the proportion, "as
God is to His creation, so the great modern artist is to his
literary creation,"
Schlegel could conclude— and it is evident that he did so
— that just as God, despite his transcendence, is imma
nent in the world, showing "the invisible things of him
. . . by the things that are made," so also the typical
modern writer . . . despite his transcendence of his
works by virtue of his objectivity, is plainly immanent
19 . . .
In W. H. Werkmeister, An Introduction to Critical
Thinking (Lincoln, Nebraska, rev. ed., 1957), p. 40.
122
in them and reveals his invisible presence by the things
he has made.20
The reductio ad absurdum of this argument appears in Spit-
zer1 s essay on "Linguistic Perspectivism in the Don Quiiote, "
where, after showing that the novel "reveals" both in plot
and language a continual shifting of perspective, he con
cludes:
. . . let us not be mistaken: the real protagonist of
this novel is not Quijote, with his continual misrepre
sentation of reality . . . the hero is Cervantes, the
artist himself, who combines a critical and illusion-
istic art according to his free will. . . . High above
this world-wide cosmos of his making, in which hundreds
of characters, situations, vistas, themes, plots, and
subplots are merged, Cervantes' artistic self is en
throned, an all-embracing creative self, Nature-like,
Godlike, almighty, all-wise, all-good— and benign: this
visibly omnipresent Maker reveals to us the secrets of
his creation. . . ,2^
20A. E. Lussky, Tieck's Romantic Irony (Chapel Hill,
N.C., 1932), p. 69. Cf. also Abrams, pp. 235-241. For the
final redundancy cf. A. Alonso's rhythm of aesthetic pleas
ure in creation, "El artista nos transmite con su criatura
una palida sombra del placer estetico que el va teniendo al
hacerlo," Materia y forma en poesxa, p. 105.
2^-In Linguistics and Literary History, pp. 69, 72-73.
Cf. Dorothy Van Ghent, The English Novel: Form and Function
(New York, 1953), pp. 9-19, who is able to treat the per
spectivism of Don Quixote without arriving at such conclu
sions about the artist. See also Angel Flores and M. J.
Benardete, eds., Cervantes Across the Centuries (New York,
1947) .
CHAPTER VI
STYLE AS THE INDIVIDUAL
Leo Spitzer was, however, in many respects his own best
critic. During the last decade of his life, the years fol
lowing the publication of the essays on Diderot and Cervan
tes, he gradually abandoned all attempts to study style or
language or the author and concentrated on what had actually
been the object of his attention all along, the literary
work. In a review of Ullmann's book, which praises his es
say on Diderot, he declared that this essay was his "last in
the Freudian vein."
Precisely the insight that "psychological stylistics" is
not valid for earlier writers (Montaigne being one glar
ing exception) has reinforced in me another tendency
which was present in my work from the beginning, that of
applying to works of literary art a structural method
that seeks to define their unity without recourse to the
personality of the author.^
It is true, as Wellek points out^ and as this statement
^■(Rev. of Style in the French Novel) , Comparative Lit
erature, 10:368-371, Fall 1958.
^"Leo Spitzer," pp. 318-319.
123
124
indicates, that Spitzer remained ambivalent. Perhaps he
never quite realized why "psychological stylistics" did not
work, that what he had been doing all along was interpreting
literary works, and that the reference of his interpreta
tions to the author was what had really made his previous
approach "circular," but he ceased to practice psychological
approaches in general. In 1951 he delivered a telling blow
against his own previous theories by refuting George Boas'
contention that meaning in literature is problematic and
that a "personal" poem such as Milton's sonnet, "Methought I
saw my late espoused Saint," is not intelligible to anyone
who has not had, as Boas puts it, "a blind-man's-experience-
of~dreaming-of-his-dead-wife-whom-he-had-never-seen."^
Spitzer brilliantly demonstrates that this is not the mean
ing of Milton's sonnet and that such biographical reference
has distorted for Boas the actual and obvious interpretation
of this poem, and he asks in summing up:
. . . does Boas not confuse . . . the understanding of
the whole empirical psyche of the poet (as he recon
structs it) when he wrote the lines with the understand
ing of the lines themselves . . . ? The appreciation of
the work of art seems here to be drowned out by the
3"The Problem of Meaning in the Arts," in George P.
Adams, et al., eds., Meaning and Interpretation, University
of California Publications in Philosophy, Vol. 25 (Berkeley,
1950), p. 319.
125
interests of the psychologist interested in the biology
of the artist. An autonomous and self-sufficient artis
tic structure is subjected to an extraneous causal chain.4
This is not a formal renunciation of course, but it could
certainly serve as one.
Other evidence that the study of style strictly as an
attribute of the language of the literary work and of the
author cannot in practice be conducted is the phenomenon
Wellek terms "the imperialism of modern stylistics."^ This
tendency to extend style to the entire work and, indeed, to
the whole of literary study had appeared as early as 1915 in
D. W. Rannie's little book, The Elements of Style; An Intro
duction to Literary Criticism. "Style," Rannie announced,
"is the essential part of literature"; therefore, "criticism
£
of style is the essential part of literary criticism." In
his little book in 1942 on La poesia de San Juan de la Cruz
Damaso Alonso declared,
El estilo es el unico objeto de la critica literaria.
Y la mision verdadera de la historia de la literatura—
esa lamentable necropolis de nombres y de fechas—
4"Understanding Milton," Essays on English and American
Literature, ed. Anna Hatcher (Princeton, 1962), p. 130.
- ’"Leo Spitzer," p. 320.
^(London, 1915), pp. 8-9.
126
consiste en diferenciar, valorar, concatenar y seriar
7
los estilos particulares.
And in 1950 Alonso repeated, "El estilo es el unico objeto
de la investigacion cientifica de lo literario."® In this
country the German emigre scholar Helmut Hatzfeld has been
particularly vigorous in acclaiming and promoting the advent
of what he calls "the new stylistics" and defines as "art-
minded philology."^ Hatzfeld has established a sort of
school of stylistics at the Catholic University of America
in Washington, D.C., which produces dissertations annually
in the field, and he has compiled and is continually revis
ing an extensive bibliography of stylistics applied to
Romance literatures.^ Hatzfeld's definition of style is of
course familiar enough:
7(Madrid, 1942; 3rd ed., 1958), p. 124.
^Poesia espanola: Ensayo de metodos y limites estilrs-
ticos (Madrid, 1950; 3rd ed., 1957), p. 482.
Stylistic Criticism as Art-Minded Philology," Yale
French Studies, 2:62-70, Spring-Summer 1949.
l^A Critical Bibliography of the New Stylistics: Ap
plied to the Romance Literatures, 1900-1952 (Chapel Hill,
N.C., 1953). Significantly, Hatzfeld seems to have included
in his bibliography all critical works, regardless of
whether or not they use the term "stylistics" or even " style','
which deal with the text or "language" of the literary work.
Cf. his preface, p. xi.
127
. . . in any work of literature the author is expressing
an attitude in a personal language within the general
language, a procedure which everybody instinctively calls
style. . . . This language, in the widest sense compris
ing the whole structure of a work, is literary style.^
It is not surprising then to find that Hatzfeld finds "The
conclusion drawn by Karl Vossler, Amado Alonso, Ulrich Leo,
and others that style analysis coincides with literary crit
icism in its objective form is, therefore, absolutely con
vincing" (p. 63). If literary criticism is the interpreta
tion of literary works and if style is the whole work, so
the reasoning seems to go, then stylistics obviously coin
cides with literary criticism, at least insofar as it is
interpretation and not judgment.
Yet one may ask, why call this literary interpretation
stylistics? Use of the term "style" suggests, as I have at
tempted to show, that the language of the work has attri
butes above and beyond its meaning, that it does not coin
cide with "the whole structure of the work." If it does,
then it ought to be called "the whole structure of the work."
But Hatzfeld seems to wish to have it all ways, as the in
clusiveness of his bibliography might indicate and the in
clusiveness of his definition certainly does. For Hatzfeld
^"Stylistic Criticism as Art-Minded Philology," p. 62.
128
has also defined style as the author's personal language
within the general language. The author's language is of
course the language of his works, too, the only evidence, in
fact, that we usually have of his "language." The crux of
the problem here lies, I think, in the question of the "per
sonal" or as Damaso Alonso puts it in his definition, the
"individual": "Para mi, estilo es todo lo que individualiza
un ente literario: una obra, un escritor, una epoca, una
12
literatura." Even Wellek insists upon it. Although we
may know hardly anything about the private individual
Shakespeare, we do know, Wellek maintains, a great deal
about his "poetic personality."
We cannot dismiss this problem of personality in litera
ture even where there is no biographical evidence of any
kind. There is a quality which may be called "Shakes
pearian" or "Miltonic" or "Keatsian" in the work of these
authors, to be determined on the basis of the works them
selves, although it may not be ascertainable in their re
corded lives. There are, no doubt, connecting links,
parallelisms, oblique resemblances between life and art.
. . . Thus we can speak of "personal" style.^
Perhaps if we now pass in review some of the similar
opinions about individual or personal style which we have
encountered, and questioned, during the course of our
12La poesia de San Juan de la Cruz, p. 124. Cf. also
Poesia espafiola, p. 482.
13"Closing Statement," in Sebeok, ed., pp. 414-415.
129
discussion, we may be able to discern not only the basic as
sumption that lies behind Wellek's contention, but also just
how it is that life and art, in his sense of author and
works, do resemble each other. To begin with we saw how
contemporary psychologists, conceiving of style as an index
to personality, confused the products of behavior, utter
ances, with what their behavior or speaking says, that is,
indicates about them. It became clear that, at least in the
case of language and literature, products of human behavior
could in themselves be indices only to the behavior— speak
ing, writing, thinking— necessary to produce them, to behav
ior, in short, which could only be inferred from the exist
ence of its products. Since psychology is not our field, we
did not pursue, although we did raise, the question of whe
ther "style" was not in psychology a redundant term for what
was already and traditionally distinguished as "personality"
or "the individual."
Then, tracing the source of a typical Renaissance
rhetorician's conception of style as both appropriate to the
subject and indicative of the individual, we saw that it
stemmed from the confusion in late Latin antiquity and the
Middle Ages of writing with speech, owing to or at least co
incident with the superimposition of rhetorical theory upon
130
literature. We saw then too how Romantic poetic theory was
not actually a repudiation of traditional rhetoric but an
exaggeration of its confusion between writing and speech,
rhetoric and poetry, with the exaggeration taking more and
more the form that, while the speaker was in the work, the
audience could and should be dispensed with. That the older
theory of rhetoric and the newer theory of expression were
closely allied appeared quite evident in the easy misinter
pretation of a typical earlier statement like Buffon's "Le
style est l'homme meme." The idea of a common subject mat
ter adorned by the individual writer easily became the idea
of a common subject matter adorned with the individual.
We found, however, that the more prominent the speaker
or poet became in theory, the more difficult it was in prac
tice to find an unquestionable symptom or index of him. His
only "obvious" appearances were perhaps in an occasional
lyric poem or as authorial commentary in a narrative. Since
this included only a relatively small amount of literary
works and only the most uninteresting parts of some of them,
the critic in search of the style which was the man went
underground. We saw that the assumptions of a Puttenham and
of contemporary students of style remained identical, even
despite the contemporary experimental evidence which has
131
gone far to disprove or at least not to validate the assump
tion that each individual has a set of identifiable "lin
guistic habits." We saw that, on the contrary, the primary
modern modification of the Puttenham thesis was an absolute
exaggeration of it— the dichotomizing of the individual work
into a top layer that is the "matter" and the real, the
solid substratum or core that is the author. Thus the top
layer, the actual literary work became merely a set of symp
toms or indices to its character, the author. The whole
work itself was now style— the style of the individual
author who was himself the real work.
Fortunately no doubt for literary criticism, we found
that at this point a general intellectual "law" intervened:
that when one is examining one object, even under two dif
ferent names, one is still examining only one object. The
contemporary student of style can no more than the contempo
rary psychologist infer from a product of human behavior
anything more than that there must have been a human being
behaving to produce it. The qualities of mind and tempera
ment, the innermost secrets of the buried psyche, the invol
untary but inevitable manifestations of individuality which
close study of the literary work was supposed to reveal, re
vealed them indeed; they were the work, going as it were
132
under another name, but there for all to see, if examined.
No wonder stylistics came to be considered by these same
scholars the sole science of literature. If stylistics con
sists in differentiating, evaluating, arranging, and classi
fying particular styles, and particular styles are whatever
is individual about a work, and whatever is individual about
a work is the work itself, then the history of literature is
indeed the evaluation and classification of "the individual,"
but there is no need to call it style or this procedure
stylistics.
The concept of the individual, we find, is absolute,
still functioning conceptually with the force of its origi
nal meaning as that which is indivisible and thus distin
guishable from a group. One statement differs from another
statement if and because it is not the same statement. What
is individual about a work or a writer or a period is that
we can distinguish it from other works, other writers, other
periods. Its individuality is not a matter of style but a
matter of individuality, and this consists of everything
which makes the work what it is. This individuality its
language, that is, the meaning of this particular instance
of language, call it what you will— subject matter, content,
theme, referent. Comparison and differentiation, we find,
133
are acts of the human mind, not something implicit in things
themselves. Individuality and similarity are like rhythm,
they depend upon expectation. We find them because we look
for them. If we did not think that Shakespeare and not
Marlowe wrote Richard II, we would not compare Richard II
with Edward II for its respective "Shakespearian" as opposed
to "Marlovian" qualities of language. Late Marlowe may be
more similar to early Shakespeare than early Shakespeare is
similar to late Shakespeare. Richard II and Edward II are
two different plays; any other differences depend on differ
ences of attribution— not of attributes. Two odes by Keats
do not have some intrinsic Keatsian quality in common, al
though they may be quite similar in many respects. What
determines our attitudes in comparing them is that they have
Keats in common or rather our knowledge that they were both
written by Keats.
The tautology of "individual style" becomes abundantly
evident when one is forced, as Wellek is, to talk on the one
hand about "uniform styles" and "prevalent styles" caused by
imitation and vogue, and, on the other hand, about the vast
differences in the works of one individual writing in dif
ferent genres or about the diverse "styles" of an author
such as Goethe who had a long and varied career. If
134
Elizabethan dramatists "use a uniform style,is it not
ultimately because they all wrote Elizabethan drama— to
which they did not always sign their respective individual
names? Conversely, what reason is there for grouping to
gether, say, The Sorrows of Young Werther, Faust, and the
Elective Affinities? An intrinsic Goethean quality? Or the
fact that they were all avowedly written by the same author?
Establishing, for example, Chaucer's authentic "canon" is
extremely difficult because, while Chaucer may not have
written like his contemporaries, his contemporaries and many
of his successors wrote like him and apparently had no scru
ples about contributing their own or someone else's work to
his "canon." If the "style" of Paradise Lost appears to be
uniquely "Miltonic," we might remember that not only do we
know that Milton wrote it, we also know that no one else
wrote a Biblical epic about Satan, Adam and Eve, God and
Christ, the creation and expulsion, in blank verse in the
English language of the seventeenth century.
At the Indiana conference on style Robert Hoopes of
fered the familiar argument that style is an individual
quality of literary works, isolable in the works themselves,
14
Theory of Literature, pp. 170-171. Cf. "Closing
Statement," in Sebeok, ed., pp. 415-417.
135
and that even selected passages reveal symptomatic differ
ences, because works in the same genre but by different
writers can be distinguished from one another and because
students can identify the authors of passages cited in exam
inations .
If we were to place dramas, for example, by Shakespeare,
Marlowe, Webster, Tourneur, Etherege, Congreve, and
Ibsen before a person who had not studied them, it would
be quite possible to educate him to their stylistic dif
ferences. He might bring himself to such an awareness
without instruction.
Teachers of literature must believe that "The style is the
man," he declared, or else they would not request their stu
dents to identify passages on examinations,
. . . and not only passages that the students have read
but others that they have not read from the same authors.
The whole point is to see whether the students have de
veloped some sensitivity to the particularities of the
author's style. (p. 428)
It is true that teachers do give students passages to
identify, and it is true that students can identify them?
it is also true that the works by the various dramatists
mentioned could be distinguished from one another. But it
does not follow that what readers and students are distin
guishing, what they are developing a sensitivity to, are
"the particularities of an author's style." Hoopes even
15
In Sebeok, ed., p. 428.
136
admitted that some authors, such as Pinero and Henry Arthur
Jones, might be indistinguishable, but this is because they
are so banal, "because they are so bad . . . they are not
worth comparing" (pp. 429-430). The argument can readily be
seen to fail here. And in fact students of literature and
teachers alike have not developed a sensitivity to particu
larities of style but a knowledge of particularities of lan
guage and literature. Thus they will find it simple to dis
tinguish Shakespeare and Ibsen, even if they have not read
the works in question, because even if Ibsen were in English
translation, his work and Shakespeare's would be neither in
the same language nor in the same dramatic conventions.
This would hold also for differences between Etherege or
Congreve on the one hand and Ibsen (in English) or Shake
speare on the other. Elizabethan English is not precisely
the same language as that of the late seventeenth century or
of the late nineteenth or early twentieth century (Ibsen,
for example, in William Archer's translations), just as
Elizabethan or post-Restoration dramaturgical conventions
are not the same as the dramaturgical conventions of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. On the other hand, it
is quite likely that Etherege and Congreve would be con
siderably more difficult both in language and dramaturgy to
137
distinguish from each other. Webster and Tourneur might
well be indistinguishable, just as certain parts of Shake
speare might well be indistinguishable from certain parts of
Marlowe, unless of course we had read all the works before.
For it is our knowledge of the possibilities, based on
our familiarity with English linguistic and literary history,
which enables us to identify passages whose authorship is
not specified. Differences in language and subject matter
and convention will be immediately apparent, differences
which we can coordinate with our knowledge of various writ
ers and genres and when they flourished. A satire in heroic
couplets offered for identification in a course in English
literature immediately narrows the possibilities. But where
two authors are working in the same language, that is, a
specific language as it is spoken or written at a certain
period in history, and in the same literary genre, for exam
ple, the drama, as opposed to the lyric or the novel, and in
the same literary convention, such as the rhymed couplet or
blank verse or prose, and dealing with extremely similar
subjects, be it the witty rake, the avenger, the weak king,
or the bourgeois family, it will be impossible to conclu
sively distinguish them, as has been illustrated time and
time again with the unsuccessful efforts to conclusively
138
separate collaborators or, for example, in the case of
Chaucer, unidentified imitators.
Now when it is admitted, as in the case of Pinero and
Jones, that some authors, writing at the same time in the
same genre and in the same language, cannot easily be dis
tinguished, we need not conclude that it is because they are
"bad." Authenticity, uniqueness, and merit are concepts
which have been confused since the advent of Romanticism. A
pseudo-Chaucerian poem may be just as fine a literary work
as the work or works of Chaucer on which it was modeled.
Indeed, owing to the lack of specific dating and identifica
tion of much of Chaucer's work, we cannot be very sure that
he is really the author of all that we now attribute to him.
Concepts of identification, like individuality and style,
slip so easily in literary study into criteria of evaluation.
Good works should be good works regardless of whether or not
they are imitative. Bourgeois dramas which were beginning
to be written in the seventeenth century, such as Heywood's
"A Woman Killed with Kindness," were considerably more un
usual than another revenge tragedy by Tourneur or Webster.
Yet they hardly survive as the better plays or better even
than those by Pinero or Jones, while the bourgeois dramas of
Ibsen are distinguishable from those of Pinero and Jones
139
only as other dramas. They are also better, but that is a
mark of distinction, not a sign of distinctiveness. It is
hard to see how they would differ stylistically, as opposed
to totally. Can Pinero and Jones be distinguished from
Galsworthy? We may prefer Galsworthy's plays, but that is
because we like what is in them as opposed to what is in a
play by Pinero.
The development of the idea of style as the individual
man and, at the same time, the exaltation of originality in
literature did not coincide historically by accident. They
are so intimately involved that, as we see, even a contempo
rary student of literature cannot invoke the one without im
mediately bringing up the other. Yet both conceptions are
based entirely on matters external to literary works them
selves. Neither refers to qualities or attributes in the
work. Thus it happens that, even when the work is supposed
to derive its individuality from the "individualness" of its
author, this individuality is actually being determined by
its distinctiveness from the literary tradition and histori
cal situation in which it appears. The first conception is,
as we have seen, neither demonstrable nor applicable. But
the second is only applicable on the basis of extensive his
torical knowledge and always ends up being an evaluative
140
criterion, which in turn is entirely inadequate, for it
would make Marlowe a greater writer than Shakespeare,
Dorothy Richardson a greater writer than Tolstoy, and
Finnegans Wake a greater work than Ulysses. Having no pred
ecessors may be meritorious but having no successors is
scarcely so. Although it guarantees individuality, it miti
gates seriously against comprehension or enjoyment. Such a
conception fosters the logical error that individuality is a
quality in the work and obscures the fact that it can only
be recognized or determined by comparisons outside, the fact
that individuality is actually and only a historical con
cept .
"Individual" and "personal" are only a posteriori con
cepts; they are labels, not qualities. This difference be
tween classification and discovery, between description and
expectation enters the problem of style at a variety of
points. I have limited my attention in this work to the ap
plication of "style" to literary works, but this is not of
course the only application of style to literature. The
term is also used to distinguish and describe genres, peri
ods, movements. But such generalizations usually proceed in
a hierarchical fashion with the style of the work forming
the primary, the pivotal point on which all other conclu
141
sions about style rest. "If we can describe the style of a
work or of an author," Wellek has said, "there is no doubt
that we can also describe the style of a group of works or a
genre. . . . One can generalize even further and describe
1 fi
the style of a period or movement." The "if" of course is
crucial. But the question of these larger generalizations
of "style" is one too vast and complicated to be treated
here; it is rather a part of the whole problem of literary
classification and literary history.
Briefly it must be noted, however, that such phrases as
"the style of a genre," "the style of a period," "the style
of a movement" may designate one of two entirely different
concepts. On the one hand, the phrase, for example, "ba
roque style," may designate collectively the entire array of
characteristics which is meant by "baroque," so that "ba
roque," "baroque period," and "baroque style" are for all
practical purposes synonymous. In other words, "style"—
with its modifier— in this case simply serves as a classi-
ficatory term for a number of characteristics common to the
majority of art works of a given date or kind in history.
And these characteristics cover the entire range of the
works— subject matter, conventions, ideas, language, etc.
^ Theory of Literature, p. 174.
142
The phrase "baroque style" or "ballad style" or "Romantic
style" may then seem somewhat tautological and misleading.
But insofar as it is synonymous with "the ballad" or "the
baroque" or "the Romantic" that is all the term "style" is
in such a case— tautological and misleading. On the other
hand, "style" plus a modifier may be used to designate a
characteristic of the genre or period or movement which is
exhibited in the works along with other characteristics such
as subject matter, conventions, ideas, language, etc. In
this case "style" supposedly classifies certain traits
within the various works, and then the style of various
works constitutes one of the characteristics of the genre,
period or movement being delimited. When such a term as
"baroque style" or "ballad style" or "Romantic style" is
used in this second sense, it is subject to the same criti
cisms that have been directed against the use of the term
"style" throughout this dissertation. What is it? Can it
be found, pointed to, in the given work? Can it actually be
distinguished from the other characteristics supposedly com
prising the baroque, the ballad, or Romanticism? This use
of the term seems to be just another way of talking about
the style of the work.
There are no doubt, as Wellek asserted, "connecting
143
links, oblique resemblances between life and art" at the
personal level. For as Puttenham had declared almost four
centuries ago, "Men doo chuse their subjects according to
the mettal of their minds." Nothing in the language of a
literary work could be symptomatic of the author but what
the work is about, its subject, its matter, its theme, its
meaning. Those who would analyze the language of literature
under the rubric of individual style as if it were a surface
scum along with all the other superficial traits, like plot
and ideas, do not understand the nature of language: the
nature of language is to mean, to be about something. What
ever an author writes or says "reveals" whatever we can ever
know about what was in his mind at the time he wrote or said
it. Whatever the literary work may be about, it does not
say two different things at once or say the same thing in
two ways. Whatever it "reveals" about the mind of the au
thor is whatever it means as a literary work. What the lan
guage of the work means is what the work means, and what the
work means, as far as we can ever know, is what the author
means. The language of the work comprises its subject, its
plot, its ideas. If something is not in the language, it is
not in the work. Hamlet may have an Oedipus complex but
Hamlet does not. And whether Shakespeare did or not no one
144
can ever know, for no one knows of any instances of Shake
speare’s behavior from which to infer that he had an Oedipus
complex. No doubt he had a father. But his depiction of a
character whose behavior provides grounds for the inference
that the character "has" an Oedipus complex only reveals
that Shakespeare, or as Freud would have had it, the Earl of
Oxford, knew of and could depict a certain kind of behavior.
All that the language of a work "reveals" of its author
is the work. The work may be said to "reveal" what the au
thor knows about and is interested in, if we assume, reason
ably enough, that authors write about what they know and are
interested in. But how they came to know what they know and
why they are interested in what they are interested in is
another and considerably more difficult question to answer.
Given the existence of a number of works known to be by one
person and given extensive detailed information about that
person aside from his works and given works of sufficient
similarity to indicate recurrent interests and knowledge, we
can perhaps make some correlations between the two, and
these parallels may corroborate our speculations about the
author. But such correlations will tell us nothing about
the works as literature. Biographical data may be able to
explain the causes and sources of an interest or knowledge
145
on the part of the author for which the works are evidence
of the existence of such an interest or knowledge. But we
must have been able to understand, to interpret the work
before we can possibly say what the meaning of the work "re
veals" about the author--what must have been in his mind
when he wrote it— for what was in his mind was the work, the
impetus to write it, whatever he knew that he put into it.
The subjects and themes authors do write about do reveal
something about them, that they were sufficiently interested
in and knew enough about something to write about it. We
are not surprised to learn that Conrad had been to sea or
that Lawrence had a possessive and ambitious mother. We are
surprised to learn, however, that Conrad never lived or even
traveled in South America, although that is the detailed
setting of his longest and finest novel. We might be sur
prised too, if we did not already know before we began to
read The Rainbow or The Fox that Lawrence was not a woman.
Yet Shakespeare was not a woman either, though Lady Macbeth,
Cordelia, Cleopatra are, and by the same token neither was
he Hamlet, though he was a man.
CHAPTER VII
STYLE AS THE IMPLICIT SPEAKER
The conception of the relationship between author and
work stated in the previous chapter immediately raises the
problem of meaning. It is indeed a problem which we can
scarcely avoid in talking of literature. Literature is lan
guage, whatever else it might be as well, and the nature of
language is to mean, whatever that might be. What we decide
about meaning in language will thus considerably affect, it
would seem, what we decide about meaning in literature.
Though it is a favorite comparison with critics, aesthe-
ticians, and linguists, language is not a medium?^ it is not
like stone or oils or wood or even "C" sharp or red pigment.
It is not a neutral material out of which we carve our sta
tue or paint our picture? it does not in fact exist apart
^Cf. not only avowed Aristotelians like Elder Olson,
"William Empson, Contemporary Criticism, and Poetic Diction,"
Critics and Criticism, p. 69? but also Wellek and Warren,
Theory of Literature, p. 163? Susanne K. Langer, Problems of
Art (New York, 1957), p. 148? and Charles F. Hockett, A
Course in Modern Linguistics (New York, 1958), p. 553.
146
147
from its use, whether that use is in a work of literature, a
road sign, a matchbook cover, or the U. S. Constitution.
To be sure, language exists physically as sounds and some
times as marks on stone or paper or magnetic recording tape,
but there are sounds and marks which are not language. Lan
guage is not just sounds and marks but a systematic, conven
tional use of sounds and marks which mean. The problem of
meaning, however, is actually a basic, perhaps the only,
philosophical problem, and one which seems as far as ever
from being solved. That language is meaningful we all know,
or at least we all act as if we think it is. This meaning
fulness is not simply referentiality, for so many instances
of language are not referential at all, instances such as
commands and instances such as literary works. Must liter
ary studies then wait upon philosophy to solve the problem
of meaning? Are we prevented from saying what the meaning
of a literary work is because no one has quite agreed upon
what meaning is? On the contrary, the very activities of
criticism and scholarship presuppose, as Spitzer so con
vincingly argued in his refutation of Boas described above,
that literature is meaningful and can be interpreted as
such, that a thorough, fully adequate interpretation of
every text is possible, can be agreed upon, and constitutes
148
its meaning. The precise way in which we get from those
little sounds or marks on paper to understanding, comprehen
sion, communication of and with the world around us may
never be determined. But we can and do read literary works
and quarrel and agree about their meaning, because literary
works consist of language, of particular and non-recurring
statements in a particular system or convention of language.
And these statements, although they cannot be said to refer
directly to some state of affairs in the physical world,
present events analogous to human experience and are thereby
comprehensible to human beings. Given a text, a knowledge
of the language in which it was composed, be that Hungarian
or the English of the eighteenth century, and a common stock
of human experiences, the scholar or critic not only under
stands but also interprets and explains the literary work.
And that interpretation or explanation which appears to be
the most accurate and adequate in relation to the text which
is its object is what I have meant and shall continue to
mean in this work by the meaning.
Indeed, it might be the case that the scholars to whom
we have referred in the course of this work have so often
concluded that stylistics is the sole science of literature
simply because what they mean by "style" is what I have
149
called the particular meaning or interpretation of the work
of literature. In that case stylistics certainly would co
incide with at least a large part of what is considered lit
erary history and criticism. Although "style" would seem a
rather injudicious choice of a term, leading to considerable
confusion with older or different senses, it would then
scarcely be an erroneous conception. I might contend that
use of the term "style" to designate what I call the inter
pretation or meaning of literary works obscures the nature
of such studies. But I could not contend that literature
itself was being mistaken and misunderstood for something
else or that qualities which it could not possess were being
attributed to it. Nevertheless, that style is the meaning
of a work of literature does not seem to be what these
scholars have meant, for they have not said so and their
critical practice has not revealed it. On the contrary, my
whole purpose has been to show that what literary scholars
have shown themselves to mean by style is something differ
ent from, though perhaps co-extensive with, the meaning of
the work, that for them style functions as a relational
term, and that what it relates to the meaning of the work is
its author. Since students of style conceive of it as some
thing more than the meaning or interpretation of the
150
literary work, there seems nothing else for it to be but the
author.
The whole issue of style as ornament raised in the
nineteenth century against the previous rhetorical theory
has been in many respects a false one. The older rhetorical
theory sinned not so much in proposing a distinction between
form and content as in being unable to offer anything which
could be the form but the author. If we propose that every
literary work may be divided into form and content, we have
to say what the form as opposed to the content is. We may
say that the content is the common property of subject mat
ter, as Buffon did, to which the author contributes his
style, which is his particular version of the subject, but
then that is simply saying that the particular style or form
is the particular work as opposed to some other work on the
subject. That may not be a felicitous way of putting the
notion that the style is the meaning of that particular work
as opposed to some other work on the same subject, but it is
not crucial. The problem with such a conception arises, of
course, when one ceases to talk about style in natural his
tory and talks about it in literature, literature which not
only may not be about "a common subject matter," such as
natural history or even the fall of Troy, but also may not
151
be about anything which has been treated in literature be
fore or anything to which one can refer for external verifi
cation. The exaltation of originality in poetry, coupled
with the recognition that poetry does not seem to be about
things in precisely the same way as natural history, per
sonal letters, philosophy, sermons, geometry, or tracts are
about things makes the distinction between form and content
even more difficult to specify. If there is neither a com
mon subject matter nor a verifiable referent, and if the en
tire work is recognized as an original and non-recurrent
object, how can it be distinguished into form and content?
The only way that has yet been devised is by distinguishing
the author in. the work as its form and what the work says as
its content, by converting the work, in short, into an act
of utterance.
It may be wondered, of course, why it seems necessary
to critics to preserve a distinction between form and con
tent, and one often hears it declared now that form and con
tent are inseparable. This inseparability of form and con
tent, however, one finds if he looks more closely at such
declarations, is only contingent, contingent on whether or
not the literary work is "successful." It is only necessary
to talk about the inseparability of things or qualities when
152
it is thought that on occasion they can be or are separated.
Such declarations in fact usually come to something like
T. S. Eliot's statement that, "In the perfect poet form and
content fit and are the same thing; it is always true to say
that form and content are the same thing, and always true to
say that they are different things."^ in practice it be
comes necessary to maintain, if there is to be any practical
criticism, that form and content may be separated, in order
that the work may be discussed and in order that it may be
evaluated in terms of whether or not the form "cooperates"
with or is "harmonious" with or "achieves a union" with the
content. For it is feared that if one really identifies
form and content, or their synonyms, as Croce actually did,
criticism will cease to be possible. Wellek, for example,
rejects Croce's identifications on these very grounds and
insists instead that
It now seems clear that process and work, form and con
tent, expression and style, must be kept apart, provision
ally and in precarious suspense, till the final unity:
only thus are possible the whole translation and ration
alization which constitute the process of criticism.3
This contention recalls earlier Romantic attempts to heal
o
^Introd., Ezra Pound, Selected Poems (London, 1928),
p. x (italics mine).
3Theory of Literature, p. 174.
153
the breach between language and thought, style and truth,
implicit in the classical notion of style as ornament, by
distinguishing between "a mechanical device of style" and a
sincere expression.^ Yet the crucial questions are not
whether style is ornament or whether or not form and content,
style and expression, process and work are separable, but
that if we maintain that they are, what are they, how are
they distinguished, can we point to them, can we explain
them? Inevitably students of literature who want to deal
with literary works but also want to deal with something
more than their particular meaning or interpretation end up
talking about the "speaker" or author. And no scholars and
critics are more subject to this consequence than those who
think they are talking about the language of the work.
We have already seen this occur time and again. Every
literary theory which divides the work into a part which is
the meaning (or content) and a part which is the style (or
form) ends up talking about speakers and authors. If style
is not the meaning of the work but is still something in it,
^Cf. Abrams's discussion of Wordsworth's attempt, esp.
pp. 290-291; also Wellek's discussion and evaluation of A.
W. Schlegel's position on the inseparability of form and
content, A History of Modern Criticism, II, 49; and Spitzer
on when the term "style" would be meaningless, in a review
of Herbert Seidler's Allgemeine Stilistik, Comparative Lit
erature, 8:146-147, Spring 1956.
154
there is nothing else for it to be but the "speaker" or au
thor. And this is precisely the case even with those crit
ics who contend that style meaning. Wimsatt has declared
in the chapter on style as meaning appended to his study of
The Prose Style of Samuel Johnson that
It is hardly necessary to adduce proof that the doctrine
of identity of style and meaning is today firmly estab
lished. This doctrine is, I take it, one from which a
modern theorist hardly can escape, or hardly wishes to.
(p. 2)
This may be all very well, but does it solve the problem of
style, or does it not simply remove it one step backward?
If style and meaning are identical, then the question be
comes what is meaning. And, should we decide upon meaning,
there would still be the question of the need for a term
like "style." It is to be at once suspected that whatever
Wimsatt means by meaning he does not mean the particular
interpretation of the literary work, nor that he means that
style and meaning are really identical, at least not in the
logical sense of being indistinguishable from one another.
And so it turns out when he attempts to describe "bad style."
"Bad style is not a deviation of words from meaning, but a
deviation of meaning from meaning. . . . Of the actually
conveyed meaning (what a reader receives) from the meaning
an author intended or ought to have intended" (p. 10).
155
Once this is admitted it follows quite readily that "The
question what the author ought to have said is the true dif
ficulty in judging style."
It is the only difficulty, for it is the only question,
and it is one we implicitly answer every time we judge
style. We do it by our sense, more or less definite, of
what the author intends to say as a whole, of his cen
tral and presiding purpose. (pp. 10-11)
Four years, however, after writing his book on Johnson's
style, Wimsatt collaborated with Monroe C. Beardsley in an
C
article on "The Intentional Fallacy," in which they stated:
One must ask how a critic expects to get an answer to
the question about intention. How is he to find out
what the poet tried to do? If the poet succeeded in do
ing it, then the poem itself shows what he was trying
to do. And if the poet did not succeed, then the poem
is not adequate evidence of an intention that did not
become effective in the poem. . . . A poem can be only
through its meaning— since its medium is words— yet it
is, in the sense that we have no excuse for inquiring
what part is intended or meant. (p. 4)
Wimsatt continues to discuss and define style or styles,
but at the same time now trying to avoid the intentional
fallacy. And his principal method of doing so, as we might
have guessed by now, is by converting the poem into an act
and the poet into a "dramatic speaker." And he accomplishes
this by resorting to Aristotle, and, as might be expected,
^Originally published in the Sewanee Review, 14:468-
488, Summer 1946, but reprinted in Wimsatt's The Verbal Icon
(Lexington, Ky., 1954), pp. 3-18.
156
C.
not to his Poetics but to his Rhetoric.
Aristotle conceives verbal discourse as an act, compli
cated in itself, and having a personal context of two
main dimensions, the speaker and the audience. But he
looks on all the features of the verbal act in a prag
matic light. . . . That is what rhetoric in the full
classical sense means, a pragmatic act of discourse.
But there is nothing in the nature of the verbal act to
prevent us from looking at the same features not in a
pragmatic, but in a dramatic, light, and if we do this
we are looking at a given discourse as a literary work.
(p. xv)
Yet how is this speaker that is supposed to be "assimilated
into the implicit structure of the poem's meaning" (p. xvi)
to be distinguished from the author? For not only impli
citly is the poem an act, but also it is an act most expli
citly.
The poem conceived as a thing in between the poet and
the audience is of course an abstraction. The poem is
an act. The only substantive entities are the poet and
the audience. But if we are to lay hold of the poetic
act to comprehend and evaluate it, and if it is to pass
current as a critical object, it must be hypostatized.
(p. xvii)
What indeed is being hypostatized here? Surely it is the
poet and his "audience," and surely it is naive to continue
to maintain in a literate culture that literary works are
acts rather than products of acts.
A literary work is no more an act than is a railroad
timetable or a "no passing" sign. We infer, to be sure,
^The Verbal Icon, pp. xiv-xvii.
157
from all three that they must have been produced somewhere
along the line by human beings in an act which is uniquely
human, that of producing language. Not even IBM machines
can compose poems, although they may be able to print, en
code, or count them. The question of whether or not the
poem, the timetable, or the "no passing" sign continues to
exist while no one is reading it could lead us, of course,
into some heady metaphysical speculations. But if we have
to hypostatize the poem anyway, we might just as well do so
and leave the speaker and the audience out of it, since they
cannot really be said to be in the poem until we have hypos
tatized it and then assimilated them into its implicit
structure. A literary work is a statement. Naturally it is
not a statement like a bank statement where there is, or is
supposed to be, a one-to-one correspondence between certain
signs and certain objects, but it is language, and it is re
cordable, and if its language is not preserved, whether in
the memory or on paper, stone, clay tablets, tape, or disc,
neither is it. A literary work presents events, events
which can be interpreted, ignored, disliked, rejected,
understood, or misunderstood, as analogous, to a greater or
lesser degree, to the human experience within the comprehen
sion of its readers. But the literary work itself is not an
158
act? it is a product of an act. It may be about actions and
sometimes presents acts, and yet in themselves so are a
great many other things. We know that decorations on a pot
are the result of a human being's behavior, even though the
process of producing the pot and its decorations may have
been mechanized considerably, because nothing in the non
human world designs pots and decorates them. But scarcely
anyone maintains that we find potters implicit in their
pots. We may find their workmanship, a design they have
used before, or even their "trademark"--but not them.
But it is actually Wimsatt's collaborator, Beardsley,
who has worked out most rigorously the implications of the
concept of style as meaning or what he calls "the Semantic
Definition of Style," which is a corollary to his "Semantic
Definition of Literature." By following his presentation of
this definition we can see most vividly how the conception
of style as meaning leads inevitably to the conception of
style as symptom and literature as act of utterance. In his
Aesthetics Beardsley presents the fullest statement of this
7
semantic definition of style, which he develops in three
versions. Each version apparently incorporates the
^The following discussion will be based primarily on
pp. 114-164, 220-266.
159
preceding one until we arrive at the final definition. In
order to understand this final definition, then, we must
follow its development in each of the versions, for the
final version is supposedly not clear without a knowledge of
the first and second. The first tentative definition is:
"The style of a literary work consists of the recurrent fea
tures of its texture of meaning" (p. 222) . Naturally, it is
first necessary to know what the texture of a literary work
is. The texture of meaning is "the meanings of certain
paragraphs, sentences, phrases, or words" in contrast to the
structure of meaning, which consists of the "meanings that
depend upon, or are a function of, the whole discourse, or a
large section of it" (p. 221). There are, however, not just
textures and structures of meaning, but also two kinds of
textures, phonetic and semantic, or the sound-texture and
the meaning-texture. These two need not coincide, says
Beardsley, but in literature they generally do. Furthermore,
this sound-texture is divided into two kinds, but these can
be covered later. Already there appears to be something
disturbing about this definition. It is not really so suc
cinct as it appears, and this is, indeed, partly what is
wrong with it: there are so many distinctions, and they
seem to grow in direct proportion to the number of things
160
to be defined. Perhaps it is not really a definition at
all, since it furnishes no defining characteristic but only
characteristics; that is, perhaps it is actually a descrip
tion. But at any rate, it certainly does not function ac
cording to the Principle of Occam’s Razor, which Beardsley
discusses elsewhere in his Aesthetics. Entities certainly
have been multiplied here and, I think, unnecessarily.
What virtue is there, for example, in the distinction
between structural and textural meaning? Beardsley admits
that the grounds for this distinction may not be entirely
justified, but he continues with it because he finds it
"illuminating" (p. 2 21). This so-called structural meaning,
however, inevitably consists of the entire so-called tex
tural meaning. If there is not this explicit relationship
between the parts— even words and phrases, not to mention
sentences and paragraphs— and the whole, there is not likely
to be any whole. The whole of a literary work, indeed of
anything, is whatever its parts and their relationship to
each other constitute. To discuss the meaning of a word or
phrase without relating it to its context, the sentence, and
to discuss the sentence without relating it to the para
graph, and the paragraph without relating it to the chapter,
and the chapter without relating it to "the whole discourse,"
161
would surely be to invite serious misunderstanding of each
element and thus inevitably of the whole. Literary works do
not have some one-to-one, word-to-object correlation with a
verifiable and referential physical reality. Nor would
Beardsley maintain that they do. Therefore, the relation
ship of part to part and part to the whole statement be
comes in literary works the crux of understanding and inter
pretation. If one wants to talk about the way words or
phrases are being conventionally used in the language in
which the work is written, one needs no particular context
larger than a single sentence. But if one wants to do more
than that, in short, if one wants to know what the particu
lar instance of language which is this particular literary
work means, then he has to interpret this particular mean
ing from every part of the work as it functions in the work,
and thus the meaning of the particular whole as it is de
rived from the relation of the particular parts. If he does
not do this, quite likely he is not analyzing the work but
only language samples which happen to have appeared in a
literary work. The meaning of a literary work is not the
sum of its parts but the complex relationship of the parts
which constitutes the whole. Only by seeing the parts of a
literary work in relation to other parts and to the whole
162
can we understand that the work is a particular statement of
a particular event and thus that it is meaningful— not ref-
erentially— but analogously.
But this procedure, it might be objected, is explica-
O
tion? Beardsley is defining style. And indeed this objec
tion leads us to Beardsley's second set of unnecessarily
multiplied entities. What is the difference between the
study of style as the study of textural meanings and expli
cation? "To explicate a linguistic expression," says
Beardsley, "is to declare its meaning" (p. 129). Thus, both
stylistics and explication deal with meaning. Furthermore,
the meanings they both deal with are textural: "A critic is
explicating when he talks about relatively localized parts
of a poem, the meaning of a metaphor, the connotations of a
word, the implications of a fragment of ambiguous syntax"
®The two terms are frequently interchanged, especially
in European scholarship, where they coincide historically
and where the results of employing one "method" as opposed
to the other are indistinguishable. Such coincidence of
terminology and practice further suggests that there is sim
ply no applicable distinction between stylistics and the
interpretation of literary texts which is generally consid
ered the primary function of literary criticism. Cf. Leo
Spitzer, Essays on English and American Literature, pp. 193-
247, for an example of interchangeable use of the terms;
Erich Auerbach, Introduction aux Etudes de philologie ro
man e (Frankfurt am Main, 1949), pp. 33-37; Helmut Hatzfeld,
"Stylistic Criticism as Art-Minded Philology," for the his
torical and practical relationships.
163
(p. 130). These "localized parts" actually appear to coin
cide with the texture of meaning which Beardsley has dele
gated to stylistics. "The features of discourse that make
up style are conveniently divided into two parts, diction
and syntax (p. 225). Stylistics is co-extensive with the
study of figures, and as such is the study of "any devia
tion" of a discourse "from what is taken to be the norm of
diction and syntactical construction"; that is, it is "the
study of all identifiable textural features of a discourse"
(p. 222). Beardsley includes under this study metaphors,
connotations, and all other aspects of diction and, natur
ally, syntax, ambiguous or otherwise. Thus, both stylistics
and explication deal with the meanings of localized parts or
textures, that is, with diction and syntax, and furthermore
with deviations of such--ambiguities, obscurities, etc.,
purposeful or not (cf. pp. 226-227). The only discernible
differences between the two, although Beardsley never dis
cusses their differences or similarities at all, are (1)
that stylistics treats the recurrent features, while expli
cation treats one feature at a time; and (2) that stylistics
treats these as they appear in prose, while explication
deals with poetry. But the first distinction of a "local
ized meaning" has to take into consideration whether or not
164
it recurs and what its recurrence "means." Furthermore, how
do we decide when a given feature ceases being "localized"
and can be considered recurrent, i.e. how can we identify
it, and how can we decide that its recurrence is signifi
cant, much less what it signifies? Apparently the answer is,
according to the criterion of deviation. Yet a good many
features which recur in a work are not necessarily devia
tions, e.g. sentence structures, words, phrases, etc. In
deed, the whole problem is how we can decide that some fea
ture is a deviation from the norm— what is the norm? We
shall come back to that problem shortly. But the point to
note here is that the criterion of recurrence is a purely
arbitrary distinction. And this leads to a second objection
to Beardsley's multiplied categories: they are purely arbi
trary.
What is the virtue in having one term for the study of
meanings of a prose literary work, style study; and another
term for the study of the meanings of a poetic literary
work, explication? If one defines literature, as Beardsley
does, according to the criteria that: "A literary work is a
discourse in which an important part of the meaning is im
plicit" (p. 126) and that this is what certain prose works
and poems which are called literature have in common, then
165
there seems to be no virtue. And if it is a question of
poems having a greater ratio of implicit meanings than
prose— more figures, more ambiguous syntactical construc
tions, and other such "deviations"— there seems to be even
less virtue in this distinction. For that is simply not the
case. Joyce's Ulysses and Virginia Woolf's To the Light
house have much greater ratios of "deviations" than "0 West
ern Wind." In fact, as Beardsley himself admits, "O Western
Wind," among other "nonfigurative poems" as he calls them,
does not have any (p. 154). These confusions well exemplify
those which arise when one tries to define literature ac
cording to degrees or levels of meaning. Where does one
category, that of non-literary language, end and another,
that of literary language, begin? Beardsley himself admits
that it is not easy to decide (p. 126). How much less easy
and more arbitrary is it to decide, on the basis of degree
of language meaning, between poetry and prose. One of
Beardsley's problems is that he continually tries to retain
critical terminology merely because it has been used by
critics to say something significant about literary works.
Yet if critics are using different headings under which to
talk about the same phenomena, is it really fruitful to re
tain the headings and to try to distinguish the phenomena?
166
There often comes a time when it is necessary to ignore the
terminology, to find for one's self what the phenomena have
in common, and to define them according to this common char
acteristic. This is the principle of economy in literature,
in science, and in almost any other human activity; it is
the principle, in short, of Occam's Razor: do not multiply
entities unnecessarily.
The distinction between structure and texture is
equally arbitrary, as has already been indicated. Where
does texture leave off and structure begin? Take, for in
stance, the question of sound-texture. It merges impercept
ibly into sound-structure by virtue of recurrence: "When
certain types of texture are combined and maintained
throughout a poem, however, we get large patterns that may
be called sound-structures" (p. 221). One would suppose
that this happens, too, when certain types of meaning-tex-
ture are combined and maintained throughout a poem or a
prose literary work— that a larger pattern, a "meaning
structure," if you will, occurs, or in short, the work.
Then both stylistics and explication disappear and we get
what Beardsley calls "elucidation," determining the implicit
meanings of the explicit structure of the work.
But to return to Beardsley's definition of style, his
167
second version of this definition is: "Style is detail of
meaning or small-scale meaning" (p. 223). The first ques
tion is when or how is a detail meaningful? That question
has already been answered to some extent. A detail is im
plicitly meaningful if it deviates "from what is taken to be
the norm of diction and syntactical construction." The sec
ond question is what is deviation, indeed, what is normal?
"’I am here/ Here I am' differ in style," he says, "and this
difference is a difference in meaning— in what they suggest
about the situation and the speaker's relation to it" (p.
223). All of his examples consist, like this one, of small
differences of syntax or diction in two sentences. Thus
these differences are, in fact, not differences between lit
erary works but differences between two statements having a
high degree of referentiality and differing slightly in
their referents. The difference between "I am here" and
"Here I am," between whether the speaker says the one or the
other, depends not so much on his attitude necessarily as on
where he is, in short, upon the referent. Beardsley must
inevitably conclude, and he does, that
Where there is either no difference in meaning at all,
or else a gross difference, we do not say there is a dif
ference in style; where the difference in meaning is rel
atively subtle and is present along with some basic sim
ilarity on the primary level, we call the difference in
meaning a difference in style. (p. 224)
168
What this all amounts to is that statements differ in
style if they have the same referent but a somewhat differ
ent form. Yet this is precisely what never occurs in liter
ature. The literary statement as a whole does not have a
referent. Therefore, how can some basic similarity on the
"primary level" be compared with some subtle difference on
the "secondary level"?
How in fact can a literary work be divided into primary
and secondary levels at all? If by primary level is meant
the "subject" of the work, what does the subject constitute?
Wordsworth's twelve-line poem, "To a Sky-lark," surely dif
fers in more than style from Shelley's hundred-and-five-line
poem, "To a Skylark." It is no doubt interesting to compare
these two works, written in the same language about the same
time (182 5 and 1820 respectively) by poets familiar with
each other's work. Yet each poem consists of different
words in different syntactical constructions in different
literary conventions of meter and rhyme and with a different
meaning, or particular interpretation (what I have chosen to
call in its most condensed form the theme) . Is either of
these poems really about a skylark, in the sense that a de
scription of this bird is the interpretation of the particu
lar poem, and if not, in what way then are they basically
169
similar? Even when the ostensible "subjects" are exactly
the same object, not even differing as much as one skylark
from another, a basic similarity on some "primary level" is
very difficult to find. Conrad Ferdinand Meyer and Rainer
Maria Rilke have, for example, both written poems on the
Q
famous fountain in the park of the Villa Borghese in Rome.
Yet the differences between the two poems are clearly the
differences between two poems which are not the same poem.
They differ in language and therefore they differ in meaning.
In fact, although both are supposed to be describing the
same object, scarcely any of the same words, except those
such as "und," the definite articles, and a few other struc
ture words, only one noun, and no verbs are shared. Even
the titles, which ostensibly have the same meaning, "Der
romische Brunnen" of Meyer and "Rdmische FontSne" of Rilke,
differ in the presence of the definite article and the word
used for fountain. Furthermore, Rilke's poem has precisely
twice as many lines as Meyer's. Are the eight extra lines
to be accounted for as a difference of style or as a differ
ence of meaning? Even the poems of a writer like William
Blake who often uses the same or similar subjects and titles
over again differ not in "style" or "small scale meaning"
^Cf. Kayser, pp. 285-286.
170
but in total significance. The difference between "Chimney
Sweeper" in Songs of Innocence and "The Chimney Sweeper" in
Songs of Experience is scarcely a "relatively subtle" dif
ference in meaning which constitutes style but a severe and
explicit difference in meaning, a difference between the
meaning of innocence and that of experience.
Beardsley admits that with such examples as "I am here/
Here I am" and Go home/ Return to your abode" "We are not
able to explore the richness of larger stylistic differences
. . ." (p. 224), differences which, he suggests, exist be
tween the styles of such writers as Bertrand Russell and
William Faulkner, or Sir Thomas Browne and George Santayana,
or Karl Marx and Carlyle. Now three points are to be noted
about this list. The first point is that only one writer
out of the six mentioned is a writer of non-referential, not
to mention non-philosophical prose; or, more specifically,
only one is a writer of literature in the strict sense,
where basic similarities of meaning do not exist as they
perhaps may in economics, symbolic logic, history, or even
urn burials. Second, the differences between, for example,
the writings of Bertrand Russell and those of William
Faulkner simply cannot be reduced to comparisons between
small-scale meaning. On what grounds is it possible to
171
compare them? If we cannot even find similarities on the
primary level between two literary works on the same "sub
ject," how will it be possible to find them between works
which not only are not on the same ostensible subjects nor
either referentially or thematically about the same kind of
thing, but also are not even the same kind of works? The
significant and the obvious differences will occur precisely
at the primary level or at whatever level it is that exists
the difference between literature and philosophy, a differ
ence which can be safely called a major difference in mean
ing. Differences between the prose of two "philosophers,"
such as Browne and Santayana, would doubtless have a great
deal to do primarily with the fact that one of them wrote in
the English of the seventeenth, the other in that of the
twentieth, century, while the difference between Marx and
Carlyle must first of all be considered as a difference be
tween German and English, no matter how much Carlyle may
have tried to make his English like German or how much Marx
is translated into English.
Finally, and most importantly, it is to be pointed out
that even if such works, not to mention literary works, do
have similar referents, we could, according to Beardsley's
definition, only determine the style of one work by comparing
172
it with another work which had the same referent. We could
never discuss the style of a work in and of itself, apart
from other works. Style in this case might perhaps function
as a relational concept--but only between works, and non-
literary works at that. It could only be an applicable con
cept if and when there were two or more works referentially
and verifiably alike. Like individuality, "style" in this
case cannot be considered as an attribute at all, but simply
the comparison of two or more works for similarities and
differences. The similarities and differences are entirely
the result of the act of comparison, not of the objects com
pared. To be sure, "I am here" and "Here I am" do differ,
as Beardsley claims, and the difference between them is a
difference of meaning. Agreed. But where does the term
"style" become relevant? It simply becomes a word for dif
ference of meaning, a difference which occurs on only a
small scale only in small examples— like "I am here/ Here I
am"— examples which, furthermore, cannot be fully inter
preted in isolation but only according to the particular,
the referential situation to which they are being applied.
The meaning Beardsley interprets from "Here I am"— that it
"suggests that I have been long awaited or searched for"
(p. 223)— is not an adequate interpretation for every
173
occurrence of this statement. It is not applicable, for
example, to
Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain . . .
One might even say that this instance "meant" exactly the
opposite of Beardsley's interpretation. Trying to abstract
a definition of style which will apply to the differences
between Russell and Faulkner, Browne and Santayana, Marx and
Carlyle, from such minute examples is reminiscent of the
psychologist's attempt to define and explain verbal behavior
in terms of the behavior of rats, who, as everyone knows, do
not behave verbally at all.^
Beardsley recognizes these difficulties, I think, al
though he never mentions them, for he bypasses this second
definition in a third "version" of his conception of style,
which modifies the second definition out of existence.
Beardsley's third and final definition of style is: "Style
is detail, or texture, of secondary meaning plus general
purport" (p. 224). Yet secondary meaning is in essence much
the same as general purport. Both convey something about
the speaker. Secondary meaning is what a sentence suggests,
10Cf. e.g. B. F. skinner, Verbal Behavior (New York,
1957) and John B. Carroll, "The Critical Need in the Study
of Language," CCC, 13:23-26, October 1962.
174
"what we can infer that the speaker probably believes, be
yond what it states" (p. 123). General purport also conveys
something about the speaker beyond what he states, whatever
else there is about him besides his beliefs and feelings.
For the secondary meaning may also have emotive purport,
i.e. it can convey something about the speaker's feelings
over and above what he states. Also, what a statement
states explicitly gives "utterance to beliefs" (p. 123);
that is its primary meaning. The secondary meaning just
gives more information about the speaker's beliefs. The
meaning of a statement then is whatever it is capable of
conveying about the person who makes it, his beliefs, his
feelings, and any other of his "characteristics." The study
of the style of a statement then is the study of what it
conveys about the speaker, his beliefs, his feelings, and
anything else about him. Where the primary meaning ceases
and the secondary meaning or general purport begins is a
question left unanswered. But in any case, no matter where
we turn we are back at the speaker's beliefs, feelings, or
characteristics, explicit or otherwise. This system of
meaning which Beardsley has evolved is rather long and com
plicated, scarcely refutable in a single paragraph or two.
What it all amounts to, however, according to Beardsley
175
himself, is that "The meaning of a linguistic expression,
then, is its capacity to formulate, to give evidence of,
beliefs" (p. 118), and then he adds feelings and personal
characteristics as the secondary meaning and general purport.
Supposedly, however, "after we learn the meaning of a
sentence, we can speak of its meaning as independent of
what any particular speaker does with it" (p. 118). In
practice though and, it may be suspected, even in theory, we
cannot do this; at least in practice Beardsley does not.
For when discussing literary works, he makes this funda
mental distinction: "Whatever else it may be, a discourse
is a connected utterance in which something is being said by
somebody about something" (pp. 237-238). Therefore, every
literary work has "first of all an implicit speaker, or
voice: he whose words the work purports to be" (p. 238).
Apparently we cannot speak of the meaning of a literary work
apart from what any particular speaker does with it. The
speaker we have always with us. Yet a discourse need not be
an utterance; it can be a statement. And a work of litera
ture is a statement. A statement is a use of language which
can be abstracte from any particular space-time event, i.e.
any act of utterance. Beardsley, too, thinks that some
statements can be separated from their "pragmatic context of
176
utterance" (p. 239) and that, furthermore, a literary work
is separable from its pragmatic context, whatever gave rise
to it and whoever did. Then why does a literary work have
to have an implicit speaker, a speaker, furthermore, who
"reveals, advertises, or betrays himself partly through
those very features of purport and meaning that we call
'style'" (p. 225)? A literary work exists both apart from
and without reference to any actual space-time event, any
pragmatic context? therefore it should be a statement, even
according to Beardsley. But because the meaning of a liter
ary work is derived, according to Beardsley, from what it
says about the speaker, his attitude, his beliefs, his feel
ings, and his characteristics, it has to have a speaker.
But since the co-author of "The Intentional Fallacy" cannot
very well attribute these attitudes, beliefs, feelings, and
characteristics to the author of the literary work, he has
to invent a wholly imaginary, a non-existent, an unproved
and unprovable speaker.
Does every literary work have an implicit speaker?
Well, if it does, then some works have one implicit and one
explicit speaker, and some works have an implicit speaker
who "does not show any feelings or make any moral judgment
about the event" (p. 241), one, in short, who is rather
177
difficult to find. The one genre which enabled the Roman
tics to attest to the participation of the speaker in the
work and the one which no doubt caused Beardsley to incor
porate this speaker— plus a situation, and sometimes even a
receiver— into his definition of all literature is the
lyric. Except for quotations, there is only one kind of
statement which is like an utterance, and that is a lyric.
Even indirect discourse is not an utterance but about an act
of utterance. Yet a lyric, as we have seen, is not an ut
terance either. It frequently possesses characteristics
which are common to utterances made by particular persons in
particular situations— vagueness about a situation, indefi
niteness of speaker and receiver, i.e. use of personal pro
nouns and such space and time locutions as "here" and "now."
Yet it is not an utterance, only the statement of one; it
can be and is abstracted from any particular space-time
event, i.e. any act of utterance. It has no speaker and it
has no referent. When we describe it as having characteris
tics in common with utterances, we infer a speaker and we
infer a situation and sometimes we even infer a receiver,
but they are not there, neither implicitly nor explicitly.
And our inference contributes nothing except the recognition
that the poem resembles an utterance. In addition, some
170
literary works are statements of an act of narration; a par
ticular person tells about a particular action which he wit
nessed or in which he was involved, e.g. Lord Jim or The
Quiet American. In such a case the speaker is quite expli
cit. It is a Marlow or a Fowler or a bishop ordering his
tomb. Thus, if every work were to have an implicit speaker,
and we wanted to know about him, we would have to make in
ferences about him from what we infer about the explicit
speaker, and by that time we would be back at the author.
Are there two speakers in Lord Jim, Marlow and whoever
speaks the first five chapters of straight narrative and
then presents Marlow to tell the rest of the story? The
work has enough speakers without our finding another. More
over, some literary works are statements of an action, and
sometimes these actions are presented without any overt com
mentary. "But even here there is someone," says Beardsley,
"telling the story to us, and we know something about the
teller from the telling" (p. 238). For despite the admitted
fact that "sometimes the speaker withdraws almost completely"
(p. 241), he is still there, Beardsley insists, and appar
ently he determines that the speaker must be there, not by
inferences from the work, but by definition, the definition
that all discourses have speakers. "'Style is the man’ gets
179
us nowhere" (p. 225), he says, the style is that of the
speaker— but his discussion of style takes us remarkably
close sometimes to the author, that is, to the man. For in
stance, he says, regarding speakers who withdraw almost com
pletely, "The great French realists, for example, Balzac and
Flaubert, set their people and events before us like an im
presario, and leave the rest to us" (p. 241). That fine
line between the author's and the speaker's "styles" has
disappeared altogether here, and we are left with no dis
tinction at all. The "intentional fallacy" is not avoided
by calling the actual author the implicit speaker. Wimsatt
and Beardsley's "implicit speaker" is no different from
Booth's "implied author," both of which differ not at all
from Spitzer's "unconscious creator" in betraying or reveal
ing themselves through their style or, as Booth would have
it, their rhetoric.^
Hcf. above, p. 80.
CHAPTER VIII
STYLE AS LANGUAGE
Once again we have seen that what are actually meta
phorical transfers from the act of speech to the utterance
itself are used to define and explain style; once again that
style is defined as a feature of discourse which is sympto
matic of the speaker; and once again that such definitions
always involve dichotomizing the literary work. In Wimsatt
and Beardsley this dichotomizing takes the form of levels of
meaning— in Beardsley the "primary" and "secondary" levels,
while Wimsatt generally uses the "substantive level" and the
"strictly verbal level," to make the same distinctions. ■ * ■
But the term "level," which must certainly be considered a
metaphor when applied to language meaning, does not conceal
the fact that what is actually involved is a distinction be
tween, on the "primary" or "solid substantive level," the
literary work, and, on the "secondary" or "strictly verbal
level," the implicit speaker, who in this case, as in all
^•The Verbal Icon, esp. pp. 133-151, 201-217.
180
181
others we have examined, could be no one but the author, and
not the real but an inaccessible one at that. To define
style as meaning is scarcely to solve the problem of style;
it is only to complicate it with another term, upon the def
inition of which will then have to wait the meaning of
"style.” Despite the fact that Beardsley has in the course
of this dissertation furnished us with some very cogent
terminological distinctions, when it comes to "style," his
cogency escapes him. For even if we define meaning, and
then define style as meaning, we still have to define and to
justify the additional term "style." And even if we define
style as the implicit speaker or the implied author, we
still have to have some means for distinguishing "him" from
either the explicit work or the explicit author. Perhaps
the explanation of Hardy's rustic constable (in "The Three
Strangers") cited by Wimsatt and Beardsley in their article
on the intentional fallacy is more appropriate here. "He's
the man we were in search of, that's true," says the con
stable, "and yet he's not the man we were in search of. For
2
the man we were in search of was not the man we wanted."
During the course of this attempt at a radical analysis
of the concept of style we have seen, as was asserted in the
^cf. The Verbal Icon, p. 5.
182
introduction, that "style," despite the addition of the sci
entific-sounding suffix "-istics," continues to function
metaphorically. In fact the metaphorical nature of the term
has become patent in the attempt to stretch it to do duty as
a scientific concept in the study of language and litera
ture. And other terms clustered about "style" have, so we
have seen, suffered the same fate. "Style," as well as such
terms as "expression" and "trait," are metaphorical trans
fers from the area of human behavior to products of that be
havior. We saw that these metaphorical transfers not only
occurred historically in the application of rhetorical
theory to literature, but also recur contemporarily in the
study of style in literature and even in the use of the con
cept of style by the social scientist. We saw that such
transfers seem indeed to occur whenever "style" is applied
not just to literature but to language as well. The psy
chologist, for example, considers language a subdivision of
the area of specifically expressive behavior, whereas we saw
that not only is literature neither expressive nor behavior,
but also that language itself is only restrictedly expres
sive. "Expression," we saw, is a term applicable to lan
guage only in acts of utterance and then only in certain
kinds of these. "Express," in the sense of "utter" or
183
"say," has been applied by transfer not to what utterances
mean as language but to what they say or, more precisely, to
what they indicate, about the speaker to an observer. We
saw that, beginning with a basic confusion between written
language and speech, these metaphorical transfers occur at
every point, whether one is attributing the traits of the
speaker to what is spoken, the surface of the work to the
state of mind that must have produced it, the similarities
of a genre or period to the works or authors which collec
tively comprise those very similarities, or the secondary
meaning of the work to the implicit speaker.
These transfers, we saw, color the critic's entire ex
pectations not only as to what he will find in literary
works but even as to what sort of object he will think lit
erary works are. Not only will he endow the work with lin
guistic traits (like "character traits") which it cannot be
shown objectively to possess or with attributes which are
themselves metaphorical, such as rhythm, but also he will
see the work itself, whether he does this in full awareness
or not, as a sort of metaphor, as an entity primarily refer
ring to something beyond it. This "something" beyond it
usually turns out not to be the human experience which the
work can be said to be about, however. Rather the work
184
becomes an index of, a substitution for, a designation of, a
symbol of, the author, in one of his various manifestations,
state of mind, creative process, Weltanschauung, personality,
unconscious, mentis character, implicit speaker. The work
itself as a unique, meaningful utterance is seen as at least
a surface and in extreme instances of criticism as a blind
which covers and conceals its true meaning, the artist him
self.
The term I have used to designate this interpretation
of the language of the literary work— "symptom"— is not,
however, in itself a metaphor but hopefully an accurate de
scription of the basic premise which the various approaches
to style I have treated have in common: the premise that a
work of literature functions as an indicator of a condition
of which it is a proper part. This is a more precise term
for the way in which these scholars are interpreting the
work than, for example, "sign," because a sign is not neces
sarily caused by, but only associated with a condition which
it may indicate. Then again such a term as "symbol," be
sides being much too ambiguous and widely applied, is asso
ciated with other than linguistic analyses of the work as an
index of the unconscious,* for example, archetypal or ortho-
doxly Freudian interpretations, which raise interesting but
185
different problems than the problem of style. Critics do
themselves occasionally use the terms "symptom" or "sympto
matic" and in the way in which I have defined them, as for
example in the statement by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn
Warren that, "Individuality in style is important, then, not
because it is valuable in itself, but as a symptom of the
presence of something else: genuineness." Or they may, as
Spitzer did, describe their method of interpretation in
diagnostic terms and liken it to the procedure of the physi
cian.^ But such instances do not even suggest that critics
realize the implications of treating style as symptom, nor
that they recognize precisely that they are doing so. Iron
ically enough, "symptom" and "diagnosis" in these instances
appear to be simply explanatory metaphors. A literal grasp
of the term and its precise application to their interpre
tative procedures on the part of these critics and scholars
would have obviated much of their literary criticism.
Where does this leave us? Of the major groups of
scholars whose ideas about style have been discussed thus
^Fundamentals of Good Writing (New York, 1950), p. 439,
author's italics; Fundamentals of Good Writing was revised
and amplified as A Modern Rhetoric (New York, 1958).
4See above, pp. 99-101, and Spitzer, "Les theories de
la stylistique," pp. 166-167.
186
far— the social scientists, the philologists, the critics,
and the philosophers— only the philologists have done any
extensive practical application of the concept. Wimsatt,
for example, whom we may classify as a critic, has analyzed
extensively the style of the works of only one writer,
Samuel Johnson, and he a writer who composed only a handful
of works which are strictly definable as literature.^ On
the other hand, a linguist has chastised the philologists
for "their programmatic disinterest in theoretical concepts
and a strict methodology."^ An interest in theoretical con
cepts and a strict methodology seems to be present, however,
in direct ratio to the absence of detailed application to
the supposed object of the concepts and methodology— litera
ture .
Turning now to the linguists, who are supposedly devel
oping "a new science of style," we could expect and we do
find a predictable lack of any extensive practical applica
tion. The linguists are very much concerned with theory and
method but conduct few experiments or empirical verifica
tions of their theories or methods. In relation to
5The Prose style of Samuel Johnson (New Haven, 1941)
and Philosophic Words: A Study of Style and Meaning in the
Rambler and Dictionary of Samuel Johnson (New Haven, 1948).
C
°See above, p. 10, and Sebeok, ed., p. 96.
187
stylistics the linguists seem always to be working in the
realm of the about-to-be-established. For example, the edi
tor of a widely recommended anthology in linguistics con
fessed in his introduction to a section of essays on "Lin
guistics and the Study of Literature" that this section had
7
been "included three times and dropped twice." It was ul
timately included only because the editor
. . . yielded to the argument that since significant
work is surely to be done within a short time the stu
dent should acquire some awareness of the potential val
ue of linguistics in the teaching and understanding of
literature. (p. 393, italics mine)
The section alluded to contains "A Report on the Language-
Literature Seminar" at Indiana University in 1953 in which
the authors of the report, Harold Whitehall and Archibald
Hill, state their belief that literature cannot be studied
. . . with the fullest fruitfulness unless the student
is deeply versed in scientific linguistics, and is pre
pared to focus this knowledge on both the external and
internal characteristics of literature, in the hope of
finding, eventually, those particularly significant char
acteristics which define, in each culture, the differ
ence between literature and mere everyday use of lan
guage. (pp. 394-395, italics mine)
That was in 1953. Prior to 1953 Hill had tendered two
essays in the field of linguistic analysis of literature
bearing such modest titles as "Towards a Literary Analysis"
7
'Harold B. Allen, ed., Readings in Applied English Lin
guistics (New York, 1958), p. 393.
188
Q
and "A Sample Literary Analysis." Then in an article in
1955, "Linguistics since Bloomfield," after suggesting that
linguistics holds great promise for the solution of the
problem of meaning, Hill concluded that it also holds great
promise for
. . . the identification of the metalinguistic components
of literature which are peculiar to it, and which contri
bute to its total meaning in a way similar to the contri
bution of a smile to the total meaning of a non-literary
utterance.9
Precisely what is meant here is very difficult to determine.
Earlier in the article Hill had defined metalinguistics as
"the area beyond, consisting ultimately of the non-linguis-
tic objects and behavior with which language corresponds"
(p. 18). The examples of metalinguistic entities in poetry
which he gives are not meanings, however— what one would ex
pect from the definition of metalinguistics— but meter and
rhyme. Yet Hill admits that meter and rhyme are not in
themselves meaningful, but "do, however, contribute to the
total aesthetic impression, which is the meaning of the
poem" (p. 20).
O
English Studies in Honor of James Southall Wilson
(Charlottesville, Va., 1951); Fourth Annual Round Table
Meeting on Linguistics and Language Teaching (Washington,
D.C., 1953).
^Quarterly Journal of Speech, 41:253-260, October 1955;
reprinted in Allen, ed., p. 19.
189
Hill goes on to say,
I am extremely hesitant to dogmatize at this point, but
such work as I have lately been doing in the analysis of
poetry leads me to hazard the guess that in lyric poetry
words, phrases, and sentences are typically cast into
statements of four basic shapes (there may, of course,
be others). . . . (p. 21)
These four basic shapes are equations, analogies, sums, and
affects and can contain and be contained in one another.
Why these are shapes and in what way they are the same or
differ from traditional rhetorical categories Hill does not
say, but he concludes that
Investigation of this type is certainly in its infancy,
and you may not think it is very promising. Yet since
literature is the use of language most characterized by
special structural characteristics of its own, it prom
ises a way of investigating structure which should be
extremely repaying for linguistics. At the same time we
can say that linguistics, which has been amply rewarding
in the investigation of other types of utterance, holds
some hope of illuminating the area of language in which
man's values are most deeply embedded, the literature
which has been the constant creation, companion, and
model of his spirit. (p. 23, italics mine)
The dependent clause, "since literature is the use of lan
guage most characterized by special structural characteris
tics of its own," seems to be an instance of question-beg
ging, since what the investigator is supposed to be investi
gating is whether or not literature i_s such a use of lan
guage so characterized. Then in the concluding sentence
Hill seems to be defining literature in still another way—
190
as "the area of language in which man's values are most
deeply embedded," while this definition seems furthermore to
be restricted to a special kind of literature, that kind
which has been "the constant creation, companion, and model"
of man's spirit. Does the structural definition bear any
relation whatsoever to the moral one? Certainly one is not
derivable from the other.
Yet after two more tentative and inconclusive essays in
"structural analysis"^® Hill presented "A Program for the
Definition of Literature" in which he declared,
The burden of this paper has been to insist that litera
ture has its being in the area of stylistics and the
• 11
definition of literature must be sought in stylistics.
Be that as it may, Hill's conception is only a program and
not, as the title states, a program for the definition of
literature, but a program for the definition of the various
species of literature, later to be classified into genera,
and eventually into orders. Furthermore, this or rather
these definitions will be derived from "a corpus for study"
established on the basis of permanence, a basis which has no
^-®"An Analysis of 'The Windhover': An Experiment in
Structural Method," PMLA, 70:968-978, December 1955; and
"'Pippa's Song': Two Attempts at Structural Criticism," Uni
versity of Texas Studies in English, 35, 1956, pp. 51-56.
^ University of Texas Studies in English, 37, 1958, p.
52. An abstract appears in Sebeok, ed., pp. 94-95.
191
"bearing on the kind of defining characteristics to be sought,
for these will be formal or "stylistic" characteristics. On
such a basis Hill has no hesitation in saying that "Thirty
days hath September" is an example of both poetry and liter
ature. But this is scarcely much of an admission, since
Hill's program would also stipulate as literature all the—
in his phrase— "institutionalized great books" of Western
Europe. Thus literature would presumably include Aris
totle's Physics and, because modern works would be included
on the basis of formal similarity to the great books, modern
works on physics insofar as they formally resemble Aris
totle' s. The program does not, after all, seem very promis
ing. Not only do we still have all the things which have
been called literature, we have a great many more which have
not. And no defining characteristic of literature has yet
been unearthed by Hill, much less a conception of style,
which is supposed to be the key to all this. It may be that
"the definition of literature must be sought in stylistics,"
but such an assumption does not help at all unless one knows
what stylistics is. In any case, whatever it is, it still
exists only in the realm of "must be," of the "promising."
There must be such stylistic features, it is argued, al
though they have not yet been found.
192
Hill's promissory notes are characteristic of the
American linguist's position on stylistics. His program
matic statements almost always include, for support, refer
ence to the as yet only partially published work of Zellig
S. Harris in stylistics. Harris prefers to call his work
"discourse analysis" but offers it as a method for determin
ing style. Yet Harris’s contributions scarcely constitute
support, for they too are largely programmatic. In 1952 he
declared,
It remains to be shown as a matter of empirical fact that
such formal correlations do exist, that the discourses of
a particular person, social group, style, or subject-
matter exhibit not only particular meanings (in their
selection of morphemes) but also characteristic formal
features.
Twelve years later this matter of empirical fact is still
wanting.
These promissory notes are not, however, restricted to
American linguists interested in style. About the same time
that Harris and Hill began making their programmatic pro
nouncements, a disciple of Charles Bally's at the Sorbonne,
Charles Bruneau, was calling in Romance Philology for a
^ " D i s c o u r s e Analysis," Language, 28:1-30, January-
March 1952. Cf. "Discourse Analysis: A Sample Text," Lan
guage, 28:474-494, October-December 1952, and "Co-occurrence
and Transformations in Linguistic Structure," Language, 33:
283-340, July-September 1957.
193
clarification of the concept of stylistics so that work in
the field might be carried on. He ominously noted at the
beginning, however, that
Si l'on se rappelle ce qu'il advint jadis de la Tour de
Babel, qui ne put £tre achev^e par suite de la confusion
des langues, on peut concevoir des craintes serieuses au
sujet de l'avenir de cette science encore au berceau.^
Moreover, not only is this "science" still in the cradle, it
has been there for all of its relatively long existence.
II semble done qu'aprfes un demi-si&cle environ d'exist
ence le mot de stylistique ne pr^sente plus un sens
aussi precis que les mots de phonetique, de morphologie
et de syntaxe. (p. 1)
It did not occur to Bruneau, however, that possibly the term
"stylistics" does not have as precise a meaning as "phonet
ics," "morphology," and "syntax" precisely because there is
nothing for it to mean. That utterances may be fruitfully
analyzed phonetically, morphologically, or syntactically but
not stylistically never occurs to him. Rather than discard
a term for which there seems to be no meaning, he chooses to
"clarify" the term by giving it a definition, equally impre
cise, of his own. Apparently, if there exists a term, there
must exist a precise concept which it designates and
^"La stylistique," Romance Philology, 5:1-14, August
1951. For other instances of the use of the epithet "Tower
of Babel" in describing the state of current terminology see
above, p . 7.
194
furthermore a "science" based on this concept, even though
during the course of fifty years none has been found. In
view of the history of this term Bruneau has very good rea
sons for worrying about its future.
Nevertheless, it is to the future stylistics, the fu
ture science, that Bruneau appeals in his efforts at clari
fication. And he admits from the very beginning that his
motives are directed toward it.
J'essaierai, en me placant a un point de vue strictement
linguistique, de d^finir exactement le champ d'etudes de
la stylistique. Avouerai-je qu'en me risquant a tracer
un programme de recherches, j'espfere recruter une £quipe
de jeunes "stylisticiens"; cette science r^cente, dont
les possibilites sont immenses, a un besoin urgent de
nombreux travailleurs. (p. 1)
Why a science which has yet to be established should be in
urgent need of workers is a puzzle. The best thing to at
tract recruits with, of course, would be not a program but a
successful achievement, a demonstration— not an announce
ment— of the possibilities. But there seem to exist no dem
onstrations. During his twenty-odd years at the Sorbonne
Bruneau has accepted or stimulated a number of studies of
"the language and style" of individual authors. Yet Bruneau
has a justifiably quite modest view of these studies: "Dans
ma pens^e, ces travaux n'etaient que des travaux d'approche"
(p. 8). This "trench-work" as Bruneau calls it,
195
II est des sciences de "ramassage," si je puis dire,
telles que la botanique et la zoologie; elles observent
et classent des faits sans etablir de lois. Sous sa
forme premifere et modeste, la stylistique ne pouvait
gufere Stre qu'une science descriptive. (p. 8)
Like most non-scientists who are fond of making analogies
with science, Bruneau seems to have misunderstood the nature
of botany and zoology and perhaps of science in general.
There exists no science of which the sole purpose is to
classify; rather, classification is a relevant aspect, but
by no means the only one, of every kind of study which is
called a science. The periodic table in chemistry is as
much a system of classification as anything the zoologist
makes, and the nature of plant life can be explained in
terms of "laws" just as much as chemical reactions can. Un
deniably, "II ne sera possible de construire des syntheses
solides qu'en s'appuyant sur un grand nombre de faits bien
^tablis, soigneusement dates et pr^cisement localises" (p.
8). But it does not follow from this that it possible to
construct a solid synthesis of any particular great number
of well-established facts. The facts selected may or may
not have any bearing on one another.
That a "science" is only in the programmatic stage, of
course, scarcely constitutes conclusive evidence of its in
adequate conception, but it is indicative. The science of
196
biochemistry was established only after, not before, consid
erable success had been achieved in the study of biochemical
phenomena. Alchemy may have led to the science of chemis
try, but it never led to the transmutation of "baser" ele
ments into gold; that was a misconception that had to be
abandoned. Sciences are not raised upon platforms but upon
foundations. One important criticism that can be made of
the stylistically-minded linguists on both sides of the
Atlantic is that they have never clearly demonstrated that
style exists and is something that can be studied. They
have not studied it; they have only talked about studying
it. And such behavior is even more indicative when it is
noted that the result of still another "clarification" of
the concepts of style and stylistics is the vague conclusion
of Bruneau's that
Le style serait alors 1'ensemble des faits particuliers
que caracterisent l'individu, £crivant ou parlant, par
rapport au materiel que la langue (la soci^t^) lui four-
nit. (p. 14) .
"Par rapport" here tells us nothing. Whether there is such
a relationship and what it is are the crucial questions and
the ones which Bruneau ignores.
What arouses even more apprehension about the still
programmatic nature of linguistic stylistics, however, is
197
the extravagance of its claims and expectations. In the
first place, the stylistically-minded linguists claim that
they are the only students of style who are truly "scien
tific," and they are very critical on this basis of all
other approaches. "La nouvelle linguistique ou 'criticisme
stylistique,'" says Bruneau, referring to the work of Spit-
zer, the Alonsos, and others of the intuitive school of ap
proach to style, "n'est pas une science" (p. 13). This is
perhaps indisputable. What is puzzling though is the im
mediately succeeding observation, "Que la stylistique soit
indispensable au critique litteraire, le linguiste en est
convaincu," which furthermore is followed immediately by the
footnote that "Le linguiste constate seulement— avec re
gret— que la stylistique scientifique n'est encore qu'une
pauvre chose balbutiante et qui cherche sa voie" (p. 13).
Bruneau declares himself convinced that the stylistics which
he conceives is scientific, although he admits that he has
no grounds whatsoever for the conviction. His conception of
the scientific, like that of his American counterparts,
seems to rest on a faith in the indisputability of tabula
tion. Bruneau feels that stylistics could provide psychol
ogy with "documents d'une precision vraiment scientifique"
(p. 10), and to illustrate this claim he describes a method
198
of demonstrating the contrasting imaginations of two authors
by
. . . d'aligner, sur deux colonnes ou sur deux pages,
des series d'images choisies parmi les plus caracteris-
tiques de deux auteurs. Ces images auraient de prefer
ence un caractkre commun, soit qu'elles portent sur les
mdmes objets ou qu'elles expriment des sentiments ana
logues. Le contraste des deux 'potentiels' imaginatifs
serait sensible. (p. 10)
Spitzer is quite right, of course, in pointing out that the
decision as to which images are the most characteristic of
the authors is an entirely subjective procedure,^ regard
less of what is demonstrated by their juxtaposition.
In the second place, these exclusive claims to "scien
tificness" tend to merge into even more unfounded and ex
travagant claims about the probable achievements of this new
scientific approach to style. Most notably, stylistics will,
. . . grSce & une analyse extr£mement precise et minuti-
euse, fondee, k l'occasion, sur des statistiques, ^tablir,
mieux que 1'introspection ou les autres moyens utilises
par les psychologues, les diverses attitudes de 1'esprit
humain dans 1'infinie vari^t^ de leurs nuances. (p. 7)
And not only this,
Tant au point de vue psychologique qu'au point de vue
linguistique, cette enqu£te approfondie peut aboutir a
des resultats objectifs? elle permet de "savoir" et, dans
une certaine mesure, de "prevoir." (p. 7)
Bruneau's expectations here, however, are rather modest in
14 ✓
"Les theories de la stylistique," p. 167.
199
comparison to those of some American linguists- Hill says
that
the function of stylistics is to reduce the area of lin
guistic arbitrariness by explaining as much as possible
of linguistic variation. It is not, of course, believed
that all variation is controlled— it will never be pos
sible to predict all that a man might say before he says
it. Nonetheless the area of scientific stylistics is
exactly the area in which explanation, and therefore pre
dictions, of linguistic choices can be made.^
This is a remarkable claim, but built into it are a number
of assumptions, not the least of which is that what can be
explained can therefore be predicted. Nevertheless, if
stylistics could enable us to predict, if only partially,
what a man might say before he says it, it would constitute
the most extraordinary and significant achievement of all
linguistic science. The issuance of such a claim, there
fore, even in the form of a promissory note, merits con
siderable attention. The particular kind of linguistics
which has been developed in the last thirty years has often
and rightly been called "descriptive linguistics," that is,
the analysis and description of given data--groups of utter
ances, languages, dialects. But the tendency has been grow
ing to think of linguistics as a predictive science. This
is mirrored in such concepts as "generative grammar," but
^ Introduction to Linguistic Structures (New York,
1958), p. 408.
200
also in such notions as that of C . F. Voegelin's that
. . . the very interesting possibility exists that lin
guistic selection may throw a sharp but narrowly focused
light on the large but diffuse problem of free will.16
If this possibility does in fact exist and if stylistics is
in fact that area of linguistics in which it does exist,
then the concept of style propounded by the linguists merits
the utmost attention and promises to be of the greatest
metaphysical importance because it will 1 1 shed light on" one
of the most ancient problems of human existence.
Unfortunately, not only is this possibility purely
hypothetical, it is also obviously derived from a purely
linguistic mistake, a mistake, that is, in the "choice" and
application of certain terms. If style, as the linguists
define it, is choice, and if, as such, it is studiable, then
one is only being reasonable in supposing that style or
"linguistic selection" might throw some light on the nature
of choice and therefore on the existence of free will. Un
fortunately, style as choice is not a workable concept.
Neither is it entirely new— nor are the claims made for it.
Thirty years ago I. A. Richards, writing under the heading,
not of linguistics or stylistics, but of rhetoric, proposed
16
"Casual and Noncasual Utterances within a Unified
Structure," in Sebeok, p. 58.
201
that
A discussion of the reasons for the choice of words—
which too often seems a trivial exchange of whimsies--
can become an introduction to the theory of all choices.^
Almost everyone at the Indiana conference, as we claimed
earlier, had been talking about the same thing— literary
critics like Richards and anthropologists like Voegelin in
cluded. What had created the difficulties and disagree
ments, of course, was that at bottom there was nothing there
to work on. Any attempt to apply the concept of style to
literature must inevitably end in frustration.
A quotation from almost any linguist will serve to show
that the definition of style predominant among linguists is
that of style as choice. Hill says
It is possible to define the sum total of style [not
"style" itself] as all the choices of equivalent items
which the language offers the user in each linguistic
situation. Stylistics under this . . . view, is the col
lection and tabulation of these alternatives, sentence
by sentence throughout the corpus under study.-*-8
To be sure, Hill also offers another definition, but "Dif
ferent as the two definitions might appear to be," he
claims, "they can be reconciled and are no more than obverse
and reverse of the same coin" (p. 407). This other
*^The Philosophy of Rhetoric, p. 86.
■^Introduction to Linguistic Structures, pp. 406-407.
202
definition, it should be noted, however, is not even a defi
nition of the sum total of style but of stylistics.
The definition of stylistics . . . which has gained con
siderable currency among linguists . . . is that stylis
tics concerns all those relations among linguistic enti
ties which are statable, or may be statable, in terms of
wider spans than those which fall within the limits of
the sentence. (p. 406)
The question which this definition prompts is a simple one:
Haven't the linguists been doing this all along? To be
sure, the linguist occasionally likes to think that he ana
lyzes one utterance (i.e., loosely defined, one sentence) at
a time, regardless of the utterances which come before or
after it.19 But this is, at least in English, not an en
tirely feasible activity. For in English the linguist deals
with a large group of words which are analyzable only in
terms of preceding utterances,- these are the various substi
tution classes— pronouns, auxiliaries, adjective substi
tutes, adverb substitutes. Noun-determiners, function
nouns, and function verbs quite often function and are ana
lyzable only as words which relate one sentence to another.
Coordinators, sentence modifiers, and sentence-1inkers, as
their names indicate, function similarly.20 Ideally the
19
Cf. Harris, Methods in Structural Linguistics
(Chicago, 1951), pp. 11-12.
20
Cf. W. Nelson Francis, The Structure of American
203
linguist may think he works only with single utterances, but
in point of fact, he cannot do linguistics without consider
ing relations between and sometimes among utterances. In
this sense "stylistics" seems to be a needless addition to
an already abundant terminology. In any case this other
definition presents us with no concept of style whatsoever.
It is therefore difficult to see in what way it is the other
side of the coin to style as choice.
Thus the relationship between the two definitions and
thus the clarity of the one have been obscured. "Stylisti
cally considered," says Hill in attempting to combine the
two definitions, "what was an unpredictable choice within
the sentence becomes something explainable in terms of the
wider span" (p. 407). Certainly the use of "thus" as the
first word of the first sentence in this paragraph would be
inexplicable were it not known that a sentence— and a spe
cific kind of sentence at that— had preceded it. Its ap
pearance as the first word of an essay or book would not be
a seemingly "unpredictable choice," however,* it would be in
comprehensible. "Thus" can be understood here only as a
English (New York, 1958), esp. pp. 413-417; and Charles C.
Fries, The Structure of English (New York, 1952), esp. pp.
240-255.
204
word which relates one sentence or more to others. As an
example of predictable choice Hill offers the fact that
Linguistically, spherophore and ball-carrier are differ
ent items, but under conditions in which the stylistic
situation is fully known, the occurrence of one or the
other can be predicted. (p. 407)
But this seems simply to say that if one knows the entire
discourse in which a word appears except the word itself,
one can predict which of two possibilities will occur. And
that seems indeed to be an unpredictable use of the term
"prediction." About the choice of "spherophore" or "ball
carrier" Hill explains.
We would ordinarily say they "mean the same thing" or
"have the same reference," which are loose ways of saying
that the difference is without linguistic function— the
two forms do not keep separate phrases and sentences
apart. They are synonyms, in short. (p. 408)
"Spherophore" is in fact a word coined by Hill from Latin
roots to be synonymous with "ball-carrier." What Hill is
actually offering here, despite the linguistic jargon and
the misleading use of "prediction," is simply another state
ment of the by now familiar, indeed, hackneyed concept of
style as choice, as choice among at least two ways of saying
the same thing. "Prediction" here is being used, idiosyn-
cratically, to mean knowing why the author chose the words
or constructions he did choose from what alternatives were
available to him, and seems to have nothing at all to do
205
with knowing what a man might say before he says it. The
idea of restricting stylistics to spans wider than the sin
gle sentence is relevant only if one is under the mistaken
assumption that grammar ends with a period or rather a "sen
tence-final intonation pattern."
What Hill offers as a concept of style is what a host
of linguistically-minded students of the new science of
style offer: the ancient concept of style as the manner at
tached to the matter. And the concept of choice is just
another attempt, like the mind or Weltanschauung or id of
the author or the attitude of the implied speaker, to halt
the infinite regress of causal explanation by talking about
the behavior of the author. Here is James Sledd in A Short
Introduction to English Grammar, which utilizes the tech
niques of contemporary descriptive linguistics, talking
about style:
Style, that is, will be for us the manner of saying what
is said. . . . The manner of the utterance is as essen
tial to its effect as the carefully chosen details which
are its matter. . . . If style is the manner of saying
what is said, then it follows that style is possible
only because there are more ways of saying a thing than
one. . . . It should be plain, by this point, that style
in language is itself synonymous with linguistic choice.
. . . We must recognize that if we want to talk about a
man's style, we must know both how he said things and
how he might have said them but chose not to. . .
Here is Ullmann presenting and supporting the concept of
206
style of Saussure’s disciple Bally and Bally's disciples
such as Bruneau:
The pivot of the whole theory of expressiveness is the
concept of choice. There can be no question of style un
less the speaker or writer has the possibility of choos
ing between alternative forms of expression. synonymy,
in the widest sense of the term, lies at the root of the
whole problem of style. . . . At the risk of oversimpli
fication, one might say that everything which, in lan
guage, transcends pure communication belongs to the prov
ince of style.22
Here is H. A. Gleason, author of the standard text, An In
troduction to Descriptive Linguistics (New York, 1955), as
serting that
. . . there are usually several ways in which a sentence,
a clause, a phrase, or even a single word can convey the
required meaning and still be grammatical. The author
is, therefore, presented at every point with options.
He must choose, and the choice is one of the elements of
style. . . . Style is . . . the patterning of these
choices over long stretches.^
Charles Hockett in A Modern Course in Linguistics (New York,
1958), says that
. . . two utterances in the same language which convey
approximately the same information, but which are differ
ent in their linguistic structure, can be said to differ
in style. (p. 556)
21 (Chicago, 1959), pp. 261, 263-265.
22Style in the French Novel, p. 6. See also his Seman
tics: An Introduction to the Science of Meaning (Oxford,
1962), p. 151.
23,1 What Is English?" CCC, 13:1-10, October 1962.
207
Joshua Whatmough in Language: A Modern Synthesis (New York,
1956) declares, "That is what style is— the selection of
particular linguistic units and the variation in their ar
rangements" (p. 88). And as a final example of how all-
pervading this concept of style is, Charles E. Osgood in
"Some Effects of Motivation on Style of Encoding" says,
The study of style concerns the variable features of the
code. However, the variability need not be completely
"free" (i.e., chance, unpredictable); rather, the student
of style is interested in the statistical properties of
choice where there is some degree of freedom in selection.
. . . Stylistics is generally more concerned with struc
tural choices than with lexical choices, that is, in how
a person talks about something rather than what he talks
about. (Sebeok, p. 293)
Such unanimity might make the cautious soul apprehen
sive. Might there not be "something" to a concept which so
many seem agreed upon and which has, indeed, been agreed
upon for centuries? The answer to this question is three
fold. One, agreement is more likely to be found in theories
or programs than in practices. Two, style would not be the
first prevalent and enduring concept which has been found to
be fallacious. Three, it is fallacious.
When we have said that style is choice, we have not as
yet said anything specific. Whose choice is it? Most lin
guists would seem to agree that it is the author or speak
er's choice. But even this is not so clear cut as it might
208
seem. A work of literature, indeed, any writing, does not
seem obviously to be a pattern of choices. How do we know
what the author or speaker decided among? We know in a
sense what he did choose, that is, what he did say, but this
hardly constitutes "choice" in any standard sense of the
term, unless, as Sledd says, we know also how the author or
speaker might have said what he said but chose not to. In
short, we have to know what his alternatives were, and those
are not in the text. In some instances, of course, we have
alternative texts, earlier versions of the author's which
contain words inserted and others crossed out. This does
not guarantee, however, that we have in these cases only a
difference of how the author said what he said. Perhaps the
author's ideas changed during the course of composition.
There is no reason to suppose that he began with the liter
ary work which he ended up with and that composition is only
deciding how to say what one wants to say. And in any case,
the number of variant manuscript versions of literary works
which are available is relatively slight. Therefore, if the
study of style were confined to them, it would constitute a
very small and hardly very significant area of study needing
numerous new investigators.
Of course the linguists are not talking about this.
209
What they want to ask is: How, given the language in which
the author was writing, could he have said the same thing
differently? This might be expressed in Hill's terms as:
What are the synonyms available in the language for every
thing which the author said? Actually, this is not choice
in any conventional sense of the term since we can never,
except in the case of variant manuscripts, really know of
any choices which were available to that particular author.
No one person has available to him all the elements of the
"language" of which he constitutes one user. This may not
be obvious in the case of sentence patterns and inflections,
but it is certainly so in the case of vocabulary. Any given
language consists of an enormous variety of utterances (la
parole) of which the linguists' and lexicographers' abstrac
tions (la langue) are of a small number of recurrent fea
tures. We know simply what the author said; we do not know
what he knew that he might have said.
Even though we cannot know what choices were actually
available to a particular author writing at a particular
time, however, let us grant for purposes of discussion that
the entire language was available to him for choice of those
linguistic elements which would best convey his meaning.
Even though these were not the actual alternatives available
210
to the author, let us assume that there is something— we do
not yet know what— to be gained from examining the hypothet
ical alternatives to what the author wrote offered by the
language in which he wrote. How are we going to do this?
What alternatives, even hypothetical ones, present them
selves? These alternatives, in order to be considered le
gitimately possible alternatives, have, according to Hockett,
to convey the same information, though they will, of course,
differ in linguistic structure. They have to be, that is,
synonyms, words or expressions which are distinct but "mean
the same thing." Ullmann's statement that "Synonymy, in the
widest sense of the term, lies at the root of the whole
problem of style" is therefore no exaggeration.
Unfortunately, the concept of synonymy does not clarify
the problem at all. It merely pushes it one step backwards.
And this happens regardless, and linguists disagree, of
whether there are such things as synonyms or not. If syno
nyms or synonymous expressions do exist— that is, if one can
say exactly the same thing differently— then the concept of
choice ceases to be relevant. If two or more words or syn
tactical constructions do mean exactly the same thing, then
it makes no difference whatsoever which one the author chose
to use. The choice was aimless, unpredictable, meaningless.
211
Choice here exists only in the sense that there are two pos
sibilities, but there exist no grounds for making a decision
between them. It is interesting to note that Ullmann in a
chapter on synonymy in his Semantics points out that com
plete synonymy does seem to exist "where one would least ex
pect it: in technical nomenclatures."
The fact that scientific terms are precisely delimited
and emotionally neutral enables us to find out quite def
initely whether two of them are completely interchange
able, and absolute synonymy is by no means infrequent.
(p. 141)
Later he uses as examples a number of technical terms in
German which differ only in that one of each pair has been
formed from native roots and the other from Graeco-Latin
roots. "And as these synonyms are used in the same con
texts," says Ullmann, "and sometimes even in the title of
the same book, one can hardly speak even of stylistic dif
ferences between them" (p. 142). The inference should be
clear, though Ullmann does not draw it. If two words are
synonyms, that is, truly alternative choices, then the choice
of the one or the other makes no difference, is, in fact,
meaningless. Therefore, "the collection and tabulation of
these alternatives, sentence by sentence throughout the cor
pus under study" would be as pointless, as meaningless, in
short, as the choice among the synonyms was for the author.
212
On the other hand, if it is agreed that there are no
actual synonyms, then a difference between two words or
phrases constitutes a difference— not in style--but in mean
ing. If there are no words which have the exact same mean
ing, then the difference between any two words, regardless
of how similar or dissimilar they are in meaning, is by
definition a difference in meaning. That is why they are
not synonyms. "The best method for the delimitation of
synonyms,1 1 says Ullmann in his Semantics, "is the substitu
tion test."
This, it will be remembered, is one of the fundamental
procedures of modern linguistics, and in the case of
synonyms it reveals at once whether, and how far, they
are interchangeable. If the difference is predominantly
objective, one will often find a certain overlap in mean
ing? the terms involved may be interchanged in some con
texts but not in others. . . .If, on the other hand,
the difference between synonyms is mainly emotive or
stylistic, there may be no overlap at all: however close
in objective meaning, they belong to totally different
registers or levels of style and cannot normally be inter
changed. (p. 143)
If the best method for the delimitation of synonyms is the
substitution test, and if certain kinds of words, no matter
how similar in meaning, are not interchangeable, then pre
sumably they are not synonyms. They do not pass the synon
ymy test. Therefore, they do not offer themselves as alter
native choices to the writer, even hypothetically. The
writer could have used the one if he had meant the one; he
213
used the other because he meant the other. The writer chose
to say what he meant. The concept of choice in such a con
text evaporates and with it the concept of style. What is
the difference between two different words with similar
meanings? They do not have the same meaning. Although
Ullmann does not realize it, he has just refuted his own
conception of style, and in doing so has refuted that of all
the linguists who define style as choice.
The linguists have, in fact, fallen into the same pit
as all the others who have tried to talk about style. They
have seen that there is nothing in the literary work itself
which can be pointed out and designated as style. On the
one hand there is the specific meaning or interpretation of
the particular instance of language (la parole), and on the
other hand there are the features of the work which render
it an intelligible instance of a particular language— its
grammar and vocabulary insofar as it belongs to la langue.
Where then is style? It is not in the work. Perhaps it is
something in the work insofar as the work exists in relation
to something else? To be sure, the linguists did not set up
the author as the entity to which the work is related by
virtue of its having style or a style. But in effect they
did the same thing. Style as choice is not precisely an
214
attribute of the author, but then neither is it an attribute
of the work. What the author wrote reveals, by comparison
with the language in which he wrote, what he might have
written had he chosen to do so. This notion of choice makes
it a purely hypothetical behavior just as the author's
Weltanschauung, id, psyche, or the implied speaker's atti
tude are purely hypothetical entities, entities established
in order to enable one to talk about the style of a work
since style itself cannot be shown to exist. In every case
of the use of the word "style" which we have examined, the
user has found it necessary to go outside the work to estab
lish the existence of style, and in every case he has had to
go to something for which there exists no evidence but the
particular work whose style he wishes to discuss. There
exists no evidence for the choices of an author except inso
far as he chose to write the work which he did in fact
write, just as the only thing we know, of what must have
been in the mind of an author at the time he wrote a partic
ular work, was the work which he did in fact write at that
time.
There will be no new science of style. The reason the
pronouncements of the linguists on both sides of the Atlan
tic have remained in the programmatic stage is that they
215
cannot progress beyond that stage. Were the linguists actu
ally to attempt to apply the concept of style which they ad
vocate they would see at once that it embodies a simple
logical error that renders it inoperable.
It seems only fitting that an analysis of the concept
of style should conclude with an analogy drawn from an area
of human endeavor which has been much invoked in modern
stylistics— science. Throughout these pages we have heard
time and again numerous contemporary students of style de
fend the scientificness of their own conceptions and methods
and accuse those with different conceptions and methods of
being unscientific. Of course, as we have seen, the charges
and countercharges have ultimately proven irrelevant.
Nevertheless, it is appropriate to point out one way in
which the concept of style during the course of its entire
history has resembled a famous and crucial scientific con
cept— the concept of ether.
Like the concept of style, the concept of ether proved
to be at best a stop-gap hypothesis in lieu of adequate ex
planations and at worst an inadequate but comfortable ex
planation which blinded scientists to the need for a re-
evaluation of their conclusions. Although sometimes vehe
mently insisted on— for metaphysical reasons— ether had no
216
properties of its own and thus "presented certain problems,
not the least of which was that its actual existence had
never been proven."^
To eighteenth and nineteenth century physicists it was
obvious that if light consisted of waves, there must be
some medium to support them. . . . Hence when experiments
showed that light can travel in a vacuum, scientists
evolved a hypothetical substance called "ether" which
they decided must pervade all space and matter. Later on
Faraday propounded another kind of ether as the carrier
of electric and magnetic forces. When Maxwell finally
identified light as an electromagnetic disturbance the
case for the ether seemed assured. (pp. 40-41)
But because every theoretician gave ether the properties
that were required by his particular theory, "by 1880 the
properties that had to be assigned to ether were so contra
dictory that physicists began to doubt its existence alto-
2 S
gether." Furthermore, as Whitehead points out in Science
and the Modern World,
Whereas quite a simple sort of elastic ether sufficed for
light when taken by itself, the electromagnetic ether has
to be endowed with just those properties necessary for
the production of the electromagnetic occurrences. In
fact, it becomes a mere name for the material which is
postulated to underlie these occurrences. If you do not
happen to hold the metaphysical theory which makes you
^Lincoln Barnett, The Universe and Doctor Einstein
(New York, rev. ed. , 1957), p. 41.
^^Morris Kline, Mathematics in Western Culture (New
York, 1953), p. 435.
217
postulate such an ether, you can discard it. For it has
no independent vitality.
The parallel with style here should be patent: an entity
with no attributes of its own, whose existence has never
been proven, which is assigned the properties of whatever
system it happens to be applied to, and therefore has numer
ous contradictory properties, and which, finally, can be
discarded as a mere duplicate name "if you do not happen to
hold the metaphysical theory which makes you postulate" such
an entity, is open to serious doubt.
It was at this point, 1881 to be exact, that two Ameri
can physicists, A. A. Michelson and E. W. Morley, performed
their classic experiment to discover once and for all
whether there really was any such thing as ether. The spe
cific details and purpose of the experiment need not concern
us here, suffice it to say that if ether does exist, "a
light ray projected in the direction of the earth’s movement
27
should be slightly retarded by the ether flow." There
fore, Michelson and Morley "constructed an instrument of
such great delicacy that it could detect a variation of even
2^In Alfred North Whitehead: An Anthology, ed. F. S. C.
Northrop and Mason W. Gross (New York, 1953), p. 453.
2^Barnett, p. 42.
218
a fraction of a mile per second in the enormous velocity of
light" (p. 43) .
The whole experiment was planned and executed with such
painstaking precision that the result could not be
doubted. And the result was simply this: there was no
difference whatsoever in the velocity of the light beams
regardless of their direction. (p. 44)
In short, so far as man could determine with the most pre
cise tools and methods imaginable, ether did not exist.
Then, after a quarter of a century of debate among scien
tists, a twenty-six-year-old patent officer published his
classic paper on relativity in which he began by rejecting
the ether theory.
Needless to say, this radical analysis of the concept
of style does not constitute a theory of relativity, but it
may not be presumptuous to compare it to a Michelson-Morley
experiment. Its results are purely negative, but a negative
experiment which is precisely conducted, so that its results
are conclusive, can be a positive contribution, if for no
other reason than that it disposes of concepts which ob
struct the development of more adequate conceptions. To be
able to discard the concept of an entity which is not neces
sary and whose existence can be neither empirically estab
lished nor logically deduced— this is to be truly scien
tific .
A P P E N D I X
APPENDIX
FOUR CRITICAL TERMS
A work of literature has been defined in this disserta
tion as a statement o£ an event which functions as an ana
logue in an implied analogy with an aspect of human experi
ence. Given this definition, four distinctions emerge as
basic tools of criticism. In any developed critical discus
sion of a literary work the event, that is, what the work is
about in the primary sense, ought to be stated. The con
ception of the event will be derived from inferences made
from the text, which will in turn provide the basis for the
major inference, the theme, and for conceptions of human ex
perience implicit in the work, its implications. Defini
tions of these four terms are provided below. Sample state
ments illustrating what phases of the critical procedure the
term covers are based on Katherine Anne Porter's novelle,
"Old Mortality," from the collection Pale Horse, Pale Rider
(New York, 1939), pp. 3-89. A great deal more can be said
about any work than these terms cover. They are the minimum
220
221
basic distinctions for pursuing a critical discussion, not
the pursuit itself.
EVENT: That single inclusive imaginary space-time oc
currence which the work is about (i.e. its subject) and the
statement ojf which is the work. This may be co-extensive
with the mode of narration, as in Moll Flanders and "0 West
ern Wind," but not necessarily so. For example, in Lord Jim
the event, i.e. Marlow's recounting of his knowledge of Jim,
is not introduced until Chapter Five. The event may include
more than the work; e.g. in "0 Western Wind" a speaker whose
cry it is is inferred from the fact that the statement is a
cry. The event may comprise less than the work, as in Lord
Jim. The event is not the words or sentences on the page
but the total occurrence which the reader infers from the
statement which is the work. The event of "Old Mortality"
is the relationship of a Southern girl to her family as she
grows up to the age of eighteen.
INFERENCE: An interpretation of an aspect of the event
based upon the information given in the work. "X does Y be
cause of 53" is an inference from the work if X, Y, and are
each a part of the statement which is the work. The infer
ence may be from any part of the work and on any scale.
222
When Maria asks about the reference to the dead Amy as a
"singing angel" in Uncle Gabriel's poem ("Did she really
sing?") , we can infer that Maria has not understood the
meaning of the poem as her elders understand it (p. 17).
This is an inference from just a few lines of the work. On
a larger scale we can infer that Miranda's primary motiva
tion in marrying suddenly, whether or not she recognized it
at the time, was to achieve freedom from her family.
THEME: The most inclusive yet concise inference that
can be made about the event as a delimiting of the pattern
of the event by omission of its particulars and relation of
it to an aspect of human experience. It is that statement
about the work which covers both it and the aspect of human
experience to which the particular work is analogous. The
theme of "Old Mortality" is the way in which children embody
the traits of the older generation even in rebelling against
it. "Old Mortality" is a statement of how this happens in a
particular instance. That statement of is what is unique
about the work, but themes are recurrent,* they are what en
able us to recognize the work as analogous even though it is
unique. Individual themes appear again and again as the
themes of particular works. Indeed, the title of "Old Mor
tality" suggests this recurrence of its theme elsewhere,
223
since it is also the title of a novel by Scott.
IMPLICATION: A generalization about an aspect of human
experience which the event or part of it can be taken to
corroborate. There is only one correct delimitation of the
theme, but there are any number of implications. The theme
is about the work; an implication, however, is about life.
Like an inference, an implication may be from any part of
the work and on any scale. An implication of Maria's mis
understanding inferred above is that children are literal-
ists and find it difficult to grasp the metaphoric thinking
of adults. An implication of the motivation inferred for
Miranda's hasty marriage is that women often marry early and
suddenly as a rebellion against their families. Another im
plication is that Southern society encourages a romantic
fatalism.
BI B LIO GRA PHY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp. New York, 1953.
Ackerman, James S. "A Theory of Style," Journal of Aes
thetics and Art Criticism, 20:227-237, Spring 1962.
Allen, Don Cameron. "Style and Certitude," ELH, 15:167-175,
September 1948.
Allen, Harold B., ed. Readings in Applied English Linguis
tics . New York, 1958.
Alonso, Amado. Materia y forma en poesia. Madrid, 1955.
. Poesia y estilo de Pablo Neruda. Buenos
Aires, 1940; 2nd ed., 1951.
. "The Stylistic Interpretation of Literary
Texts," Modern Language Notes, 57:489-496, November
1942.
Alonso, Amado, and Raimondo Lida, eds. Introduccion a la
estilistica romance. Buenos Aires, 1932; 2nd ed.,
1942.
Alonso, Damaso. La lengua po^tica de Gongora. Madrid,
1935.
_. Poesia espanola: Ensayo de metodos y limi-
tes estilisticas. Madrid, 1950; 3rd ed., 1957.
_. La poesia de San Juan de la Cruz. Madrid,
1942; 3rd ed., 1958.
Arnheim, Rudolf, Fred Attneave, David Kraehenbuehl, and
Edgar Coons. "Information Theory and the Arts: A Sym
posium," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 17:
501-524, June 1959.
225
226
Arnold, Aerol. "Why Structure in Fiction: A Note to Social
Scientists," American Quarterly, 10:325-337, Fall 1958.
Aronstein, Philip. "On Style and Styles in Language,"
American Speech, 9:343-351, December 1934.
Auerbach, Erich. Introduction aux Etudes de philologie
romane. Frankfurt am Main, 1949.
_________________. Literatursprache und Publikum in der
lateinischen SpStantike und im Mittelalter. Bern, 1958.
_________________. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in
Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask. Prince
ton, 1953.
Baldwin, Charles S. Ancient Rhetoric and Poetic: Inter-
preted from Representative Works. Gloucester, Mass.,
1959.
____________________ . Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic. New
York, 1928.
____________________ . Renaissance Literary Theory and Prac
tice . New York, 1939.
Bally, Charles. Precis stylistique. Geneva, 1905.
_. Traite de stylistique frangaise. 2 vols.
Heidelberg, 2nd ed., 1919.
Barnett, Lincoln. The Universe and Doctor Einstein. New
York, rev. ed., 1957.
Bate, Walter Jackson. The Stylistic Development of Keats.
New York, 1945.
Bateson, F. W. English Poetry and the English Language.
Oxford, 1934.
Baum, Pauli F. The Other Harmony of Prose. Durham, N.C.,
195?.
Beardsley, Monroe C. Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy
of Criticism. New York, 1958.
227
Beare, William. Latin Verse and European Song: A Study in
Accent and Rhythm. London, 1957.
Black, Max. Models and Metaphors. Ithaca, 1962.
Bloch, Bernard. "Linguistic Structure and Linguistic Analy
sis." In Archibald A. Hill, ed., Fourth Annual Round
Table on Linguistics and Language Teaching. Washing
ton, D.C., 1953.
Bloomfield, Leonard. Language. New York, 1933.
_____________________ . "Secondary and Tertiary Responses to
Language," Language, 20:45-55, April-June 1944.
Boas, George. "The Problem of Meaning in the Arts." In
George P. Adams, et al., eds., Meaning and Interpreta
tion . Berkeley, 1950. (University of California Pub
lications in Philosophy, vol. 25.)
Bockmann, Paul, ed. Stil- und Formprobleme in der Literatur.
Heidelberg, 1959. (VortrSge des VII Kongresses der
Internationalen Vereinigung fur moderne Sprachen.)
Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago, 1961.
Bradley, A. C. "Poetry for Poetry's Sake," Oxford Lectures
on Poetry. New York, 1909.
Bray, J. W. A History of Critical Terms. Boston, 1898.
Brewster, W. T., ed. Representative Essays on the Theory of
Style. New York, 1905.
Brooke-Rose, Christine. A Grammar of Metaphor. London,
1958.
Brooks, Cleanth. The Hidden God. New Haven, 1963.
_________________. The Well-Wrought Urn. New York, 1947.
Brooks, Cleanth, and Robert Penn Warren. Fundamentals of
Good Writing. New York, 1950.
228
Brooks, Cleanth, and Robert Penn Warren. A Modern Rhetoric.
New York, 2nd ed., 1958.
____________________________________________. Understanding
Poetry. New York, 2nd ed., 1950.
Bruneau, Charles. "La stylistique," Romance Philology, 5:1-
14, August 1951.
Buffon, Comte de. Discours sur le style. Paris, 1875.
Carroll, John B. "The Critical Need in the Study of Lan
guage," CCC, 13:23-26, October 1962.
_________________. The Study of Language: A Survey of Lin
guistics and Related Disciplines. Cambridge, Mass.,
1953.
Ceccato, Silvio. "Operational Linguistics and Translation,"
Methodos, 12:11-80, 1960.
Chatman, Seymour. "Linguistics, Poetics, and Interpreta
tion: the Phonemic Dimension," Quarterly Journal of
Speech, 43:248-256, October 1957.
__________________. "Robert Frost's Mowing: An Enquiry into
Prosodic Structure," Kenyon Review, 18:421-438, Summer
1956.
Cherry, Colin. On Human Communication. New York, 1957.
Chomsky, Noam. Syntactic Structures. 's-Gravenhage, 1957.
Christensen, Francis. "A Generative Rhetoric of the Sen
tence," CCC, 14:155-161, October 1963.
______________________ . "Notes Toward a New Rhetoric:
I. Sentence Openers; II. A Lesson from Hemingway," Col
lege English, 25:7-18, October 1963.
Clark, Donald Lemen. Rhetoric in Greco-Roman Education.
New York, 1957.
_____________________. Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renais
sance: A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renais
sance Literary Criticism. New York, 1922.
229
Clarke, M. L. Rhetoric at Rome: A Historical Survey. Lon
don, 1953.
Classe, Andre. The Rhythm of English Prose. Oxford, 1939.
Cooper, Lane, ed. Theories of style. New York, 1907.
Craddock, C. E. Style Theories as Found in Stylistic Stud
ies of Romance Scholars; 1900-1950. Washington, D.C.,
1952.
Crane, R. S., ed. Critics and Criticism: Ancient and
Modern. Chicago, 1952.
____________ . The Languages of Criticism and the Structure
of Poetry. Toronto, 1953.
Cressot, M. Le style et ses techniques. Paris, 1947.
Croce, Benedetto. Aesthetic: As Science of Expression and
General Linguistic, trans. Douglas Ainslie. London,
2nd ed., 1922.
Croll, Morris W. "The Baroque Style in Prose." In Kemp
Malone and M. B. Ruud, eds., Studies in English Philol
ogy: A Miscellany in Honor of F. Klaeber. Minneapolis,
1929.
_____________ . Introduction, Euphues, ed. Harry Clemons.
London, 1916.
Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin
Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask. New York, 1953.
Daiches, David. "The Literary Use of Language," A Study of
Literature. Ithaca, 1948.
D 1Alton, John F. Roman Literary Theory and Criticism. New
York, 1931.
Davie, Donald. Articulate Energy: An Inquiry into the Syn
tax of English Poetry. London, 1955.
______________ . Purity of Diction in English Verse. New
York, 1953.
230
Devoto, Giacomo. "Introduction a la stylistique," Melanges
Marouzeau. Paris, 1948.
_________________. Linguistics and Literary Criticism, trans.
M. F. Edgerton, Jr. New York, 1963.
Dionysus or Longinus. "On Literary Excellence." In Allan
H. Gilbert, ed., Literary Criticism; Plato to Dryden.
New York, 1940.
Dobree, Bonamy. Modern Prose Style. Oxford, 1934.
Dresden, S. "Stylistique et science de la litterature,"
Neophilologus, 36:193-205, October 1952.
Duckworth, George E. Structural Proportions in Vergil's
Aeneid. Ann Arbor, 1962.
Eliot, T. S. Introduction, Ezra Pound Selected Poems. Lon
don, 1928.
Else, Gerald F. Aristotle's Poetics: The Argument. Cam
bridge, Mass., 1957.
Elton, William, ed. Aesthetics and Language. New York,
1954.
Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity. London, 1930;
rev. ed., 1947.
_________________. The Structure of Complex Words. New York,
1951.
Entwistle, William J. Aspects of Language. London, 1953.
Erlich, Victor. Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine.
1s-Gravenhage, 1955.
Fergusson, Francis. The Idea of a Theater. Princeton,
1949.
Firth, J. R. Papers in Linguistics. London, 1957.
_. "A Synopsis of Linguistic Theory: 1930-1955."
In Studies in Linguistic Analysis. Oxford, 1957.
231
Fisher, Solomon. "Meaning and Structure in Poetry," Journal
of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 13:453-461, June 1956.
Flores, Angel, and M. J. Benardete, eds. Cervantes Across
the Centuries. New York, 1947.
Foster, Richard. The New Romantics: A Reappraisal of the
New Criticism. Bloomington, 1962.
Francis, W. Nelson. The Structure of American English. New
York, 1958.
Frank, Paul L. "Historical or Stylistic Periods?" Journal
of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 13:451-457, June 1955.
Fries, Charles C. "The Bloomfield 'School.'" In Christine
Mohrmann, et al., eds., Trends in European and American
Linguistics: 1930-1960. Utrecht and Antwerp, 1961.
_________ ________. The Structure of English. New York,
1952.
__________________. "Meaning and Linguistic Analysis," Lan
guage , 30:57-68, January-March 1954.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton, 1957.
________________, ed. Sound and Poetry. New York, 1957.
________________. The Well-Tempered Critic. Bloomington,
1963.
Fucks, Wilhelm. "On Mathematical Analysis of Style," Bio-
metrika, 39:122-129, May 1952.
. "Mathematische Analyse von Sprachelementen,
Sprachstil und Sprachen," Arbeitsgemeinschaft ftir For-
schung des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen. KBIn and
Opladen, 1955.
Gardiner, Sir Alan. Theory of Speech and Language. Oxford,
1951.
Gibson, Walker. "Authors, Speakers, Readers, Mock Readers,"
College English, 11:265-269, February 1950.
232
Glasgow, W. D. "The Concept of Choosing," Analysis, 20:63-
67, January 1960.
Gleason, H. A., Jr. An Introduction to Descriptive Lin
guistics . New York, 1955; rev. ed., 1961.
. "What Is English?" CCC, 13:1-10, Octo
ber 1962.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. "Einfache Nachahmung der Natur,
Manier, stil." In Goethes Werke, ed. Werner Weber and
Hans Joachim Schrimpf, vol. 12. Hamburg, 1953.
Goodman, Paul. The Structure of Literature. Chicago, 1954.
Gourmont, Remy de. Le problfeme du style. Paris, 1902.
Greenlaw, Edwin. "A Better Teacher than Aquinas," Studies
in Philology, 14:200-214, April 1917.
Guberina, P. "Proc^d^s stylistiques et stylographiques:
analyse scientifique et litteraire," Proceedings of the
Sixth Triennial Congress of the International Federa
tion for Modern Languages and Literatures. Oxford,
1954.
Guiraud, P. La stylistigue. Paris, 1954.
___________ . "Stylistiques," Neophilologus, 38:1-11, January
1954.
Hall, Robert A., Jr. "American Linguistics: 1925-1950," I,
II, Archivum Linguisticum, 3:101-125, 1951; 4:1-16,
1952.
_____________________ . Idealism in Romance Linguistics.
Ithaca, 1963.
Hamm, Victor M. "Meter and Meaning," PMLA, 69:695-710,
September 1954.
Harris, Zellig S. "Co-occurrence and Transformations in
Linguistic Structure," Language, 33:283-340, July-
September 1957.
233
Harris, Zellig S. "Discourse Analysis," Language, 28:1-30,
January-March 1952; 28:474-494, October-December 1952.
__________________. "Distributional Structure," Word, 10:146-
162, August 1954.
__________________. Methods in Structural Linguistics.
Chicago, 1951.
Hattori, R. S. "The Analysis of Meaning," For Roman Jakob-
son: Essays on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday.
's-Gravenhage, 1956.
Hatzfeld, Helmut. Bibliografia critica de la nueva estilis-
tica aplicada a las literaturas romdnicas. Madrid,
1955.
__________________. A Critical Bibliography of the New Styl
istics: Applied to the Romance Literatures, 1900-1952.
Chapel Hill, N.C., 1953.
__________________. Don Quijote als Wortkunstwerk: Die ein-
zelnen Stilmittel und ihr Sinn. Leipzig, 1927.
__________________. Literature Through Art: A New Approach to
French Literature. New York, 1952.
__________________. "Methods of Stylistic Investigation,"
Literature and Science. Oxford, 1954. (Proceedings of
the Sixth Triennial Congress of the International Fed
eration for Modern Languages and Literatures.)
__________________. "Recent Italian Stylistic Theory and
Stylistic Criticism." In A. G. Hatcher and K. L.
Selig, eds., Studia philologica et litteraria in hon-
orem L. Spitzer. Bern, 1958.
__________________. "Stylistic Criticism as Art-Minded Phil
ology," Yale French Studies, 2:62-70, Spring-Summer
1949.
Heath, P. L. "Intentions II,” Aristotelian Society Supple
mentary Volume, 29:147-164, 1955.
234
Heilman, Robert B. "Poetic and Prosaic: Program Notes on
Opposite Numbers," Pacific Spectator, 5:454-463,
Autumn 1951.
Hendrickson, G. L. "The Origin and Meaning of the Ancient
Characters of Style," American Journal of Philology,
26:249-290, July-September 1905.
Henning, Edward B. "Patronage and Style in the Arts,"
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 18:464-471,
June 1960.
Herdan, G. Language as Choice and Chance. Groningen, 1956.
__________ . Type-Token Mathematics. 1s-Gravenhage, 1960.
Hill, Archibald A. "An Analysis of 'The Windhover': An Ex
periment in Structural Method," PMLA, 70:968-97 8,
December 1955.
___________________ . "Correctness and Style in English Compo
sition," College English, 12:280-285, February 1951.
___________________ . Introduction to Linguistic Structures.
New York, 1958.
___________________ . "Linguistics since Bloomfield," Quar
terly Journal of Speech, 41:253-260, October 1955.
. "'Pippa's Song': Two Attempts at Struc
tural Criticism," University of Texas Studies in Eng
lish, vol. 35, 1956.
___________________ . "Prescriptivism and Linguistics in Eng
lish Teaching," College English, 15:395-399, April
1954.
___________________ . "A Program for the Definition of Litera
ture," University of Texas Studies in English, vol. 37,
1958.
___________________ . "A Sample Literary Analysis," Fourth
Annual Round Table on Linguistics and Language Teach
ing. Washington, D.C., 1953.
235
Hill, Archibald A. "Towards a Literary Analysis," English
Studies in Honor of James Southall Wilson. Charlottes
ville , Va., 1951.
Hockett, Charles F. A Course in Modern Linguistics. New
York, 1958.
Hofstadter, Albert. "The Scientific and Literary Uses of
Language," Symbols and Society. New York, 1955.
Hulme, T. E. Notes on Language and Style, ed. Herbert Read.
Seattle, 1929. (University of Washington Chapbooks,
vol. 25.)
Hungerland, Isabel. Poetic Discourse. Berkeley, 1958.
(University of California Publications in Philosophy,
vol. 33.)
Hytier, Jean. "La methode de M. L. Spitzer," Romanic Re
view, 41:42-59, February 1950.
Jack, Ian. Augustan Satire: Intention and Idiom in English
Poetry: 1661-1750. Oxford, 1952.
Jacobs, Melville. The Content and Style of Oral Literature.
Chicago, 1959. (Viking Foundation Publications in
Anthropology, vol. 26.)
Jakobson, Roman. "The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles." In
Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Lan
guage. 's-Gravenhage, 1956.
Joos, Martin. "Homeostasis in English Usage," CCC, 13:18-
22, October 1962.
_____________ . The Five Clocks. Bloomington, 1962. (Sup
plement, International Journal of American Linguistics,
vol. 28, no. 2.)
_____________ . "Linguistic Prospects in the United States."
In Christine Mohrmann, et al., eds., Trends in European
and American Linguistics: 1930-1960. Utrecht and Ant
werp, 1961.
Kayser, Wolfgang. Das sprachliche Kunstwerk. Bern, 7th ed.
1961.
236
Kenyon, John S. "Cultural Levels and Functional Varieties
of English," College English, 10:31-36, October 1948.
Ker, W. p. Form and Style in Poetry, ed. R. W. Chambers.
London, 1928.
Kline, Morris. Mathematics in Western Culture. New York,
1953.
Krieger, Murray. The New Apologists for Poetry. Minne
apolis, 1956.
Kroeber, A. L. Style and Civilizations. Ithaca, 1957.
Lambert, Mildred. "Studies in Stylistics," American Speech,
3:173-181, February 1928; 3:326-333, April 1928; 4:28-
39, October 1929; 4:137-144, December 1929; 4:228-243,
February 1929; 4:395-402, June 1929; 4:477-489, August
1929.
Langer, Susanne K. Feeling and Form. New York, 1953.
___________________ . Philosophy in a New Key. Cambridge,
1942.
___________________ . Problems of Art. New York, 1957.
Lausberg, Heinrich. Handbuch der 1iterarischen Rhetorik:
eine Grundlegung der Literaturwissenschaft. Munich,
1960.
Levy, Raphael. "A New Credo of Stylistics," Symposium, 3:
321-334, November 1949.
Lord, Albert B. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, Mass.,
1960.
Lucas, F. L. Style. London, 1955.
Lussky, A. E. Tieck*s Romantic Irony. Chapel Hill, N.C.,
1932.
Lutwack, Leonard. "Mixed and Uniform Prose Styles in the
Novel," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 18:
350-357, March 1960.
237
MacDonald, Margaret. "Language and Fiction I," Aristotelian
Society Supplementary Volume, 28:165-184, 1954.
Malmstrom, Jean. "The Workshop on Generative Grammar," CCC,
13:26-30, October 1962.
Mapes, E. K. "Implications of Some Recent Studies on Style,"
Revue de litterature comparee, 18:514-533, 1938.
Marouzeau, J. "Comment aborder 1*etude du style," Le fran-
cais moderne, 11:1-6, January 1943.
_. Precis de stylistique frangaise. Paris, 3rd
ed., 1950.
_. "Quelques aspects de la question du style,"
Conferences de 11Institut de Linquistique de 1'Univer
sity de Paris, vol. 7, 1939.
Martin, Harold C., ed. Style in Prose Fiction. New York,
1959.
Martinet, Andre. A Functional View of Language. Oxford,
1962.
McDavid, Raven I., Jr. (Rev. of The Five Clocks), College
English, 25:233-234, December 1963.
McKeon, Richard, ed. Introduction to Aristotle. New York,
1947.
_______________"Rhetoric in the Middle Ages," Speculum,
17:1-32, January 1942.
Messing, G. M. "Structuralism and the Literary Tradition,"
Language, 27:1-12, January-March 1951.
Miles, Josephine. The Continuity of Poetic Language.
Berkeley, 1951.
_________________ . Eras and Modes in English Poetry. Berke
ley, 1957.
____________ . The Vocabulary of Poetry. Berkeley,
1946.
238
Miller, George A. Language and Communication. New York,
1951.
Miriam Joseph, C.S.S., Sister. Shakespeare * s Use of the
Arts of Language. New York, 1947.
Monk, Samuel H. The Sublime. Ann Arbor, 2nd ed., 1960.
Morgan, Douglas N. "Psychology and Art: A Summary and Cri
tique," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 9:81-
96, December 1950.
Morris, E. P. "A Science of Style," Transactions and Pro
ceedings of the American Philological Association,
vol. 46, 1915.
Muller, Gtinther. "Morphological Poetics." In Susanne K.
Langer, ed., Reflections on Art. Baltimore, 1958.
Munro, Thomas. "Style in the Arts: A Method of Stylistic
Analysis," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,
5:128-153, December 1946.
Murry, John Middleton. The Problem of Style. Oxford, 1922.
Myers, Henry Alonso. "Style and the Man," South Atlantic
Quarterly, 40:259-268, July 1941.
Nowell-Smith, P. H. "Choosing, Deciding and Doing," Analy
sis , 18:63-69, January 1958.
O'Connor, D. J. "Possibility and Choice," Aristotelian
Society Supplementary Volume, 34:1-24, 1960.
O'Connor, William V. An Age of Criticism: 1900-1950.
Chicago, 1952.
Olson, Elder. "An Outline of Poetic Theory," In R. s.
Crane, ed., Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern.
Chicago, 1952.
_____________ . The Poetry of Dylan Thomas. Chicago, 1954.
_____________ . Tragedy and the Theory of Drama. Detroit,
1961.
239
Olson, Elder. "William Empson, Contemporary Criticism, and
Poetic Diction." In R. S. Crane, ed., Critics and
Criticism: Ancient and Modern. Chicago, 1952.
Otto, A. Die Sprichwdrter und sprichwortlichen Redensarten
der RQmer. Leipzig, 1890.
Parkin, Rebecca P. "Alexander Pope's Use of the Implied
Dramatic Speaker," College English, 11:137-141, Decem
ber 1949.
Passmore, J. A. "Intentions I," Aristotelian Society Sup
plementary Volume, 29:131-146, 1955.
Perrin, Porter G. "Style," Writer's Guide and Index to
English. Chicago, 3rd ed., 1959.
Plath, Warren. "Mathematical Linguistics." In Christine
Mohrmann, et al., eds., Trends in European and American
Linguistics: 1930-1960. Utrecht and Antwerp, 1961.
Potter, Simeon. Modern Linguistics. London, 1957.
Raleigh, Sir Walter. Style. London, 1897.
Rannie, D. W. The Elements of Style: An Introduction to
Literary Criticism. London, 1915.
Ray, Punya Sloka. "The Formation of Prose," Word, 18:313-
32 5, December 1962.
__________________. "The Logic of Linguistics," Methodos, 13:
239-254, 1961.
Read, Herbert. English Prose Style. Boston, 1928; rev.
ed., 1955.
Reid, T. B. W. "Linguistics, Structuralism, and Philology,"
Archivum Linguisticum, 8:28-37, 1956.
Retamar, R. F. Idea de la estilistica. Havana, 1958.
Richards, I. A. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. New York,
1936.
________________. Practical Criticism. London, 1929.
240
Richards, I. A. Principles of Literary Criticism. London,
1924; 2nd ed., 1926.
Rickert, Edith. New Methods for the Study of Literature.
Chicago, 1927.
Rieser, Max. "The Semantic Theory of Art in America,"
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 15:12-26,
September 1956.
Riffaterre, Michael. "Criteria for Style Analysis," Word,
15:154-174, April 1959.
_____________________ . "Vers la definition linguistique du
style," Word, 17:318-344, December 1961.
Roberts, Murat H. "The Science of Idiom: A Method of In
quiry into the Cognitive Design of Language," PMLA, 59:
291-306, March 1944.
Roberts, William Rhys. Greek Rhetoric and Literary Theory.
New York, 1928.
Rothwell, Kenneth S. "Structure in Literature," College
English, 24:602-607, May 1963.
Rouse, W. H. D. "Style." In N. C. Smith, ed., Essays and
Studies by Members of the English Association. Oxford,
1942 .
Rus, Louis C. "Structural Ambiguity: A Note on Meaning and
the Linguistic Analysis of Literature," Language Learn
ing , 6:62-67, 1955.
Ryle, Gilbert. The Concept of Mind. Oxford, 1949.
Saidla, L. E. A. Essays for the Study of Structure and
Style. New York, 1939.
Saisselin, Remy G. "Buffon, Style, and Gentlemen," Journal
of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 16:357-361, March 1958.
Sanford, F. H. "Speech and Personality: A Comparative Case
Study," Character and Personality, 10:169-198, December
1942.
241
Sapir, Edward. Language. New York, 1921.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. Cours de linguistigue generale.
Paris, 1916; 4th ed., 1949.
Sayce, Richard A. "The Definition of the Term 'Style,'"
Proceedings of the Illrd Congress of the International
Comparative Literature Association. 's-Gravenhage,
1962.
__________________. "Literature and Language," Essays in
Criticism, 7:119-133, April 1957.
__________________. Style in French Prose. Oxford, 2nd ed.,
1957.
__________________. "Style in Language," Archivum Linguisti-
cum, 14:77-83, 1962.
Schapiro, Meyer. "Style." In A. L. Kroeber, et al., eds.,
Anthropology Today. Chicago, 1953.
Schlauch, Margaret. The Gift of Language. New York, 1955.
Schorer, Mark. "Fiction and the 'Analogical Matrix.'" In
John W. Aldridge, ed., Critigues and Essays in Modern
Fiction. New York, 1952.
Scriven, Michael. "Language in Fiction II," Aristotelian
Society Supplementary Volume, 28:185-196, 1954.
Sebeok, Thomas A., ed. Style in Language. New York, 1960.
Seidler, Herbert. Allgemeine Stilistik. Gbttingen, 1953.
Shipley, Joseph T., ed. Dictionary of World Literature.
New York, 1953.
Skinner, B. F. Verbal Behavior. New York, 1957.
Sledd, James. "Coordination (Faulty) and subordination (Up
side-Down)," CCC, 7:181-187, December 1956.
_____________ . A Short Introduction to English Grammar.
Chicago, 1959.
242
Smith, G. Gregory. Elizabethan Critical Essays. 2 vols.
Oxford, 1937.
Solmsen, Friedrich, ed. The Rhetoric and the Poetics of
Aristotle. New York, 1954.
Spitzer, Leo. "Answer to Mr. Bloomfield (Language 20, 45),"
Language 20:245-251, October-December 1944.
_____________ . Aufsatze zur romanische Syntax und Stilistik.
Halle, 1918.
_____________ . (Rev. of Allgemeine Stilistik) , Comparative
Literature, 8:146-149, Spring 1956.
_____________ . (Rev. of Style in the French Novel) , Compara
tive Literature, 10:368-371, Fall 1958.
_____________ . Essays on English and American Literature,
ed. Anna Hatcher. Princeton, 1962.
_____________ . "Les etudes de style et les different pays,"
Langue et litterature. Paris, 1960. (Actes du VIIIe
Congres de la Federation Internationale des Langues et
Litteratures Moderne, vol. 31.)
_____________ . Linguistics and Literary History: Essays in
Stylistics. Princeton, 1948.
_____________ . A Method of Interpreting Literature. North
ampton, Mass., 1949.
_____________ . Romanische Literaturstudien. Ttlbingen, 1959.
_____________ . Romanische Stil- und Literaturstudien. 2
vols. Marburg, 1931.
_____________ . Stilstudien. 2 vols. Munich, 1928.
_____________ . "Les theories de la stylistique," Le francais
moderne, 20:165-168, July 1952.
_____________ . Die Wortbildunq als stilistisches Mittel ex-
emplifiziert an Rabelais. Halle, 1910. (Beihefte zur
Zeitschrift f(ir romanische Philologie, No. 19.)
243
Spoerri, Theophil. "Die stilkritische Methode," Die Form-
werdung des Menschen. Berlin, 1938.
Stearns, Marshall. The Story of Jazz. Oxford, 1956.
Straumann, Heinrich. "Between Literary Criticism and Seman
tics," English Studies, 36:254-262, October 1955.
Sturtevant, Edgar H. An Introduction to Linguistic Science.
New Haven, 1947.
Stutterheim, C. F. P. "Modern Stylistics," Lingua, 1:410-
426, September 1948; 3:52-68, February 1952.
Tate, Allen, ed. The Language of Poetry. Princeton, 1942.
Tillyard, E. M. W. , and C. S. Lewis. The Personal Heresy:
A Controversy. London, 1934.
Thompson, John. The Founding of English Meter. New York,
1961.
Tuve, Rosemond. Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery.
Chicago, 1947.
Ullmann, Stephen. The Image in the Modern French Novel.
Cambridge, 1960.
__________________. The Principles of Semantics. Glasgow
and Oxford, 2nd ed., 1957.
__________________. "Psychologie et stylistique," Journal de
psychologie, 46:133-156, April-June 1953.
__________________. Semantics: An Introduction to the Science
of Meaning. Oxford, 1962.
__________________. Style in the French Novel. Cambridge,
1957.
Utley, Francis Lee. "Structural Linguistics and the Liter
ary Critic," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,
18:319-328, March 1960.
Van Ghent, Dorothy. The English Novel: Form and Function.
New York, 1953.
244
Verschoor, J. "Parole, langue et les deux stylistiques:
Questions de terminologie," Neophiloloqus, 39:184-191,
July 1955.
Voegelin, C. F., and J. Yegerlehner. "Toward a Definition
of Formal Style, with Examples from Shawnee." In W. E.
Richmond, ed., Studies in Folklore. Bloomington, 1957.
Vossler, Karl. Gesammelte Aufs&tze zur Sprachphilosophie.
Munich, 1923.
_______________. Introduccion a la estilistica romance.
Buenos Aires, 1932; 2nd ed., 1942.
_______________. Positivismus und Idealismus in der Sprach-
wissenschaft. Heidelberg, 1904.
Waldock, A. J. A. Paradise Lost and Its Critics. Cambridge,
1947.
Walsh, Dorothy. "The Poetic Use of Language," Journal of
Philosophy, 35:73-81, January 1938.
Waterman, John T. Perspectives in Linguistics. Chicago,
1963.
Watson, George. The Literary Critics. Baltimore, 1962.
Weaver, Richard M. The Ethics of Rhetoric. Chicago, 1953.
Wellek, Rene. Concepts of Criticism, ed. Stephen G.
Nichols, Jr. New Haven, 1962.
______________. A History of Modern Criticism, 1750-1950:
Vol. I, The Later Eighteenth Century. New Haven, 1955.
______________. A History of Modern Criticism, 17 50-1950:
Vol. II, The Romantic Age. New Haven, 1955.
_____________ . "Leo Spitzer (1887-1960)," Comparative Liter
ature, 12:310-334, Fall 1960.
Wellek, Rene, and Austin Warren. Theory of Literature. New
York, 1949; 2nd ed., 1956.
245
Werkmeister, W. H. An Introduction to Critical Thinking.
Lincoln, Nebraska, rev. ed., 1957.
Werner, Heinz, ed. On Expressive Language. Worcester,
Mass., 1955.
Whatmough, Joshua. Language: A Modern Synthesis. New York,
1956.
___________________. Poetic, Scientific, and Other Forms of
Discourse. Berkeley, 1956.
Wheelwright, Philip. The Burning Fountain. Bloomington,
1954.
_____________________. Metaphor and Reality. Bloomington,
1962.
Whitehall, Harold. "English Verse and What It Sounds Like:
From Linguistics to Criticism," Kenyon Review, 18:411-
421, Summer 1956.
___________________. "From Linguistics to Criticism: A Book
Review" (rev. of An Outline of English Structure),
Kenyon Review, 13:710-714, Fall 1951.
Whitehall, Harold, and Archibald A. Hill. "A Report on the
Language-Literature Seminar." In Harold B. Allen, ed.,
Readings in Applied English Linguistics. New York,
1958.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Alfred North Whitehead: An Anthol
ogy, ed., F. S. C. Northrop and Mason W. Gross. New
York, 1953.
Williams, C. B. "A Note on the Statistical Analysis of Sen-
tence-Length as a Criterion of Literary Style," Bio
met rika, 31:356-361, March 1940.
Williamson, George. The Senecan Amble: A Study of Prose
Form from Bacon to Collier. Chicago, 1951.
Wilson, Edmund. Axel's Castle. New York, 1936.
246
Wimsatt, W. K., Jr. Philosophic Words: A Study of Style and
Meaning in the Rambler and Dictionary of Samuel John
son . New Haven, 1948.
_. The Prose Style of Samuel Johnson. New
Haven, 1941.
_. The Verbal Icon. Lexington, Ky., 1954.
Wimsatt, W. K., Jr., and Cleanth Brooks. Literary Criti
cism: A Short History. New York, 1957.
Winkler, Emil. Grundlequng der Stilistik. Leipzig, 1929.
Yule, G. U. The Statistical Study of Literary Vocabulary.
Cambridge, 1944.

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

The Phenomenon Of Literature: Prolegomena To A Literary History

PDF

Cleanth Brooks And The Formalist Approach To Metaphysical And Moral Values In Literature

PDF

William Faulkner: From Past To Self-Discovery; A Study Of His Life And Work Through 'Sartoris' (1929)

PDF

A Consideration Of The Criticism Of Swift'S 'Gulliver'S Travels,' 1890 To1960

PDF

A Structural Analysis Of Shakespeare'S Early Comedies

PDF

Versions Of Pastoral In Henry Fielding'S Prose Fiction

PDF

The Word Within The Word: A Literary Examination Of Lancelot Andrewes' Presentation Of The Life Of Christ

PDF

Keats'S 'Presider': The Influence Of Shakespeare On Keats

PDF

The Syntax Of C.S. Lewis'S Style: A Statistical Look At Some Syntactic Features

PDF

The Artful Artificer, Bertolt Brecht: A Study Of Six 'Bearbeitungen.'

PDF

British And American Verse Drama, 1900-1965: A Survey Of Style, Subject Matter, And Technique

PDF

The Adjectives Of Donne And Wordsworth: The Key To A Poetic Quality

PDF

The Dramatic Function Of Comic Elements In Three Shakespearean Love Tragedies

PDF

The Portrayal Of The Jew In American Drama Since 1920

PDF

The Theme Of Communication In The "Essais" Of Montaigne

PDF

An Analysis Of Selected British Novelists Between 1945 And 1966, And Their Critics

PDF

George Orwell'S Utopian Vision

PDF

The Reception Of American Literature In Germany, 1861-1871

PDF

The Religious Language Of Thomas Traherne'S 'Centuries'

PDF

An Investigation Of Some Critical Factors In Language Synthesis And The Implications Of These Factors For Linguists As Language Engineers

Asset Metadata

Creator Gray, Barbara Bennison (author)

Core Title An Inquiry Into The Problem Of Style: A Negative Experiment

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Literature, General,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Christensen, Francis (committee chair), Arnold, Aerol (committee member), Hadley, Paul E. (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c18-358901

Unique identifier UC11359012

Identifier 6503104.pdf (filename),usctheses-c18-358901 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 6503104.pdf

Dmrecord 358901

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Gray, Barbara Bennison

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA