Introduction to stylisticis the subject and main objectives of stylitics

INTRODUCTION TO STYLISTICIS THE SUBJECT AND MAIN OBJECTIVES OF STYLITICS

ROOTS AND PREDECESSORS

• Ancient time: Rhetoric - the art of creating speeches and Poetics (process of artistic creation)
• Aristotle “Poetics” 320 B.C. – epic drama and lyrics,
• Socrates - Dialectics ( the art of creating a dialogue)
• Poetics developed into Literary Criticism; Rhetoric and Dialectics – into Stylistics
• In ancient Rome:

CAESAR and analogists	CICERO and anomalists
Stressed regularity and system rules Focused on facts and data Their aim was to create simple clear and straightforward speeches Seneca and Tacituts	Aimed at creation of flowery language Used unnatural syntactic patterns, artificial sentence structures Created anomalies on all language levels Their true message was secondary to the form of presentation

MIDDLE AGES AND THE NEW AGE

• Anomalistic rhetoric of Cicero (aesthetically attractive) became a model way of public speaking
• Influence of ancient India – brevity of speech
• Distinction between FORM and CONTENT
• The language of science, culture, administration (Latin) was different from the language of common people
• Romanticism: style referred to written form of language Nicolas Boileau L’Art poetique (1674) language and parole
• 1. stylus altus (works of art)
• 2. stylus mediocris (the style of high society)
• 3. stylus humilis (the style of low society and comedies)
• 19 century W.von Humboldt “ Uber die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues..” functional styles Prague Linguistic Circle (1926)