H.G. Widdowson - Stylistics and the Teaching of Literature

Applied Linguistics and Language Study

GENERAL EDITOR: C. N. CANDLIN

APPLIED LINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGE STUDY

General Editor

Professor Christopher N. Candlin, Macquarie University

For a complete list of titles see pages 9 and 10

Stylistics and the Teaching of Literature

H. G. WIDDOWSON

First published 1975 by Addison Wesley Longman Limited

Twelfth impression 1997

Published 2013 by Routledge

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Copyright 1975, Taylor & Francis.

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ISBN 13: 978-0-582-55076-6 (pbk)

Acknowledgements

I should like to thank Alex Rodger for giving me the benefit of a literary perception much sharper than mine. My thanks are also due to Marillene and Patrick Allen, Mirjana Bonai, and Mick Short for their comments on an earlier draft of this book.

H. G. W.

We are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce copyright material:

Jonathan Cape Ltd. and Holt, Rinehart and Winston Inc. for the poems Dust of Snow, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening and After Apple-Picking from The Poetry of Robert Frost edited by Edward Connery Lathem, 1969. Copyright 1923, 1930, 1939, 1969 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston Inc. Copyright 1951 1958 by Robert Frost. Copyright 1967 by Lesley Frost Ballantine. Reprinted by permission of Holt, Rinehart and Winston Inc. and the Estate of Robert Frost; Authors Agents and Doubleday & Company Inc. for an extract from Mackintosh by W. Somerset Maugham in The Complete Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of W. Somerset Maugham and William Heinemann Ltd.; Faber and Faber Ltd. and Doubleday & Company Inc. for the poem Child on Top of a Greenhouse by Theodore Roethke from The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. Copyright 1946 by Editorial Publications Inc. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday & Company Inc.; Faber and Faber Ltd. and Harper & Row, Publishers Inc. for the poem Wind from The Hawk In The Rain by Ted Hughes. Copyright 1956 by Ted Hughes. Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row, Publishers Inc.; Faber and Faber Ltd. and New Directions Publishing Corporation for the poem In a Station of the Metro in Collected Shorter Poems by Ezra Pound. Copyright 1926 by Ezra Pound, Personae. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation; Faber and Faber Ltd. and Oxford University Press Inc. for the poem Prayer Before Birth from The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice, edited by E. R. Dodds. Copyright The Estate of Louis MacNeice 1966. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press Inc.; Faber and Faber Ltd. and Random House Inc. for two poems Two Songs for Hedli Anderson and Musee des Beaux Arts both by W. H. Auden from Collected Shorter Poems 19271957. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.; Granada Publishing Ltd. and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc. for two poems anyone lived in a pretty how town and me up at does by e e cummings from Complete Poems 19131962. Copyright 1940 anyone lived in a pretty how town, Copyright 1968 by Marion Morehouse Cummings. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc. Copyright 1963 me up at does by Marion Morehouse Cummings. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc.; Authors Agents and Macmillan Publishing Company Inc. for a poem Leda and the Swan and an extract from An Irish Airman Foresees His Death both by W. B. Yeats from The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. Copyright 1928 Leda and the Swan by Macmillan Publishing Company Inc. Renewed 1956 by Georgie Yeats. Copyright 1919 An Irish Airman Foresees His Death by Macmillan Publishing Company Inc. Renewed 1947 by Bertha Georgie Yeats. Reprinted by permission of M. B. Yeats, Miss Anne Yeats, Macmillan of London & Basingstoke and Macmillan Co. of Canada; Authors Agents and The Viking Press Inc. for two extracts from The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence and for an extract from Fanny & Annie in The Collected Short Stories of D. H. Lawrence. Reprinted by permission of Laurence Pollinger Ltd. and the Estate of the late Mrs Frieda Lawrence.

Preface

Let me try to select some of the reasons why I regard Henry Widdowsons book as making a considerable contribution to extending our view of the principles underlying language teaching and curriculum design, and not only as an expansion of the Applied Linguistics and Language Study series to the field of analysing and appreciating literary texts. His concentration on understanding discourse and his view of stylistics as a dynamic way of mediating between linguistics and literary criticism always possesses a wider perspective than mollifying the literary critics suspicion of linguistic analysis.

Dr Widdowson begins by distinguishing the notion discipline from the pedagogic subject in order to demonstrate that stylistics is Januslike in the way it can be treated, for example, at school or university, as a way from linguistics to literary study or the reverse. To understand this bidirectionality he explains distinctions between the linguists text and the critics messages by introducing the concept of discourse as a means through which to understand the communicative value of passages of language. Now it is this emphasis on communicative value which is of greatest importance to the development of teaching materials for language learning, whether oriented towards the study of literary texts or not. For too long materials have remained at the surface patterns of linguistic text, and have not drawn learners towards an understanding of the layers of meaning which can be peeled off from utterances; learners have seen sentences only as illustrations of grammatical patterns and have not asked pragmatic and sociolinguistic questions of what communicative value they have in given settings.

In discussing this relationship between the grammaticalness of text and the interpretability of discourse, the author does more than to suggest ways in which linguistic elements function to communicative effect. His emphasis on training the student in