Linguistics and literature: stylistics as a tool for the literary critic

Since the emergence in the 1960s of English Language as a university subject in its own right, the relationship between the study of literature and the study of language has often been one of bitter rivalry. Literary critics have railed against the ‘cold’, ‘scientific’ approach used by scholars of language in their analyses of literary texts, whilst linguists have accused their literary colleagues of being too vague and subjective in the analyses they produced. Nowhere is this disagreement more clearly seen than in the clash between Bateson and Fowler (see Fowler 1971), which, although useful in terms of raising the issues involved, had the unfortunate effect of dragging the debate down to the level of personal insult. Fowler’s famous question to Bateson asking him whether he would allow his sister to marry a linguist represents, perhaps, the nadir of this particular argument. The relationship between literature and language, then, has, for the most part, been an unhappy one, and this is unfortunate since undoubtedly scholars in both disciplines have much to learn from one another. My aim in this article is to show how it is possible to bridge the divide between language and literature by using the analytical techniques available within the sub-discipline of language study known as stylistics. I analyse a poem by the American poet, E. E. Cummings, discussing how linguistic form relates to literary effect. I aim to show how taking a linguistic approach to the analysis of a literary text does not have to mean disregarding interpretation. Rather I would suggest that stylistic analysis can often illuminate just why a particular literary text is regarded so highly. Stylistics acknowledges the skills of the writer by assuming that every decision made in the production of a text is deliberate, despite whether these decisions were made consciously or unconsciously. Consequently, stylistics aims to explain the link between linguistic form and literary effect, and to account for what it is that we are responding to when we praise the quality of a particular piece of writing.