Stylistics

Catalog description

This course will employ the methods of linguistics to analyze literary texts and explore the linguistic choices that authors make in composing a work, and what effects those decisions have on the text and its reception. Topics that may be covered include: point of view, narration, dialogue and speech markers, implicature, speech acts, meter and prosody, figurative language, and qualitative and quantitative methods of stylistic analysis. To tie our linguistic analyses both to literary criticism and the production of literary texts, students will apply linguistic analysis to literary works of their own creation, as well as canonical works of literature.