Prof. Małgorzata Drewniok. What Can Stylistic Approach Add to Analysing Texts Across Media?

[00:00:19]thank you for your wonderful introduction this was very kind of you and i'm happy to be joining um you tonight thank you for joining us and i hope you find it interesting i'm slightly different probably a different type of your usual speaker here because i come from the linguistics background so today i want to tell you a little bit about how can stylistics approach as to analyzing text across different media and i'll give you examples of texts with two different media so today i want to cover several things so first some introductions to explain to you why i'm talking about stylistics and then what is it with stylistics that i'm talking about and how you approach this type of analysis then talk a little bit about the texts that i mentioned in my abstract so you already know which text i'm going to be talking about and do some short sample analysis and and then draw it together and maybe recommend some reading if you're interested in learning about stylistics or about analyzing language of popular culture so just to start with um as um houston already mentioned i'm i'm currently working as a head of international college at the university of lincoln in uk and this is a unit that supports international students so actually my job is about teaching students for whom english is not the first language teaching academic writing and skills so it's actually not related to theoretical linguistics or literature i have a phd in linguistics uh stylistic so i described myself as a stylistician from lancaster university but i am graduate of your institute my first degree i did in vlotsworth and that's how of how i met houston and other colleagues and all my dissertations so my phd visas my emma dissertation which i also did at lancaster and ba dissertation which i did at middlesex university and are all in stylistic so we're drawing on stylistics approach on fiction so for my beer dissertation i actually looked at fiction chronicles of narnia and then the other two dissertations were focused on tv shows so i've like houston i mentioned since very early in my in my academic career i've been interested in popular culture because i enjoy consuming popular culture especially television and but also i'm interested in creativity and language and that's that's why i'm looking at this and the other reason why i'm talking about it today is because i use stylistics and this approach both in my research so i try to be research active and do different things and also in teaching because i teach like i said academic writing and academic study skills and in what we call eap english for academic purposes and i use stylistic approach with this way of looking at texts in both so a disclaimer here i'm not here to say on the the authority on stylistics far from it but i just want to share thoughts on how you can use this approach to maybe enhance the way you look at text or maybe you're already doing it and just give you the names what it is or give you an additional tool to look at different texts please stylistics if you haven't heard of it if you have sorry for repetition but i can't assume that this is something you know i think i've only heard about it when i moved to england so this this was a new word to me so um stylistics can be called a sub discipline of linguistics that is concerned with the systematic analysis of style in language and this can vary according to different factors usually different types of texts and text could be a written text a novel and a poem but it could be a song lyric or a tv show or a film so a key word here is systematic analysis so you have some kind of framework that you follow looking at elements of language in those texts but also to do stylistics is to explore language and more specifically creativity and language use and this is this is why i resonate with stylistics because i'm interested in creative uses of language basically playing and manipulating language to achieve something so to explore language in a systematic way this is what stylistics is for me now there are many definitions and many terms used about stylistics one of the things that you might most often hear is literal linguistics so those are interchangeable either stylistics and in some schools or universities you would hear literal linguistics i don't particularly like this term personally because i believe the stylistics can be applied to any any text not just um literally text and if you say literal linguistics you think about literature especially high literature and i think you can use it for a lot of different things and so for me it's a little bit of um not not not very helpful that's why i prefer to say stylist because it's about language and style and not pointing what text now but this is really interesting and where it's coming from is if you study and i wonder where you position yourself with it all of you are just literally well literally scores from the literary side or maybe some of you have background in linguistics as well and if you ask linguists you know those for example might be doing literal historical linguistics or something that they consider more serious literal linguistics would be the softest side of linguistics and that's why it's called literal linguistics because it's toward literature if you ask literary scholars they would say oh you're more serious you're towards linguistics that's why you're literally linguistics and that's why it's like an in-between term but i don't think it's extremely helpful also here at term cognitive stylistic so this is a type of stylistics cognitive to do with how our mind works when the language is manipulated so either when you decide and what do you do with language or when you read as an audience as a reader as a receiver of of a language not all stylistics is cognitive because some is just focused on text but a type of this could be cognitive stylistics you can also hear about corpus stylistics so if if you had about corpus corpus is a large collection of texts or corpora is more more more collections in plural and corpus linguistics is in their last 15 20 years a big development in in the area of linguistics to allow us to um very quantitative work so you can actually bring together huge amounts of text and then analyze them quantitatively through corpus tools which could be software that helps you deal with it so it's not qualitative when you analyze one text you analyze loads of text and this is useful for newspapers for lots of different texts now in stylistics there is a trend of corporate stylistics and this is something that is quite big in in my place where i did my degree in lancaster so you would hear scorpio stylistics but again this is just one type within stylistics you might hear about pedagogical stylistics and this is something that is particularly important to me because um and it's also recent development but this is to do with using this approach looking at language and style to teach and you'll be interested in it if you are a literary scholar because traditionally pedagogical stylistics would be using a text in the target language whether it's english french or spanish and you would instead of teaching the way many of us learned a foreign language traditionally you know grammar translational method where you would grammar vocabulary and build sentences in class this would be analyzing a text of getting a text in target language and learning a language from this literary text and that's how it is that's why it's called pedagogical stylistics and you can extend it so i'm particularly interested in in it using it to teach academic reading or teach academic writing and for example write your phd physics and that's how i'm sort of exploring it um because you can extend it so you can for for reading you can approach analyzing text looking at the academic journal article and then using language and style approach thinking okay do i agree with this how this author is telling me their stance do they give evidence and how do i feel about what they're saying or when you're writing for your own writing you can look how do i express my writing how do i express my stance you could also hear about eco-stylistic this is a very new area so there is eco-linguistics which is much more developed by eco stylistics is beginning there this is something i've just recently been interested and i'm actually doing a project with your very own professor uh kozniak and and this is basically stylistic approach to text with the ecoslant there's these lots of things about humans and environment and language and how it's expressed this is by no means everything this is just something that you might hear the one you would probably hear is literal linguistics or stylistics and then others now you might think i analyze text and there are other things that i know how to call them so you might hear discourse analysis or cda which is critical discussion i'm not saying they are the same but they are related and so they they are also textual uh um analysis uh textual approaches the difference is that for discuss analysis is closer to social linguistics and the focus is on the social context and very often especially in cda it is about how language is manipulated to achieve something in the social context like a political manifesto or speech whereas in stylistics we focus on the text so you obviously you you consider the tech the context but you really focus on the text and not on the social aspects and so cda is multidisciplinary also approaches from outside linguistics whereas stylistics is within linguistics field just focusing on the text you might also hear about textual analysis and they are role related because all of them is looking at text but this would be more general approach to analyzing text and for me particularly i i associate textual analysis if what with literal analysis so all of these come from different ones different sort of approaches different perspectives but they are related so they're all looking at the text but for me the difference for statistics and textual analysis stylistics is more looking at language at the word level and and maybe you know systematic framework i look at lexis gramma and other things whereas textual analysis perhaps might be more more um free to to look at what elements whether it's metaphors or some literary devices at least this is my understanding just to give you the background so what do stylisticians do they try to discover not just what a text means but also how it comes to me what it does so it's not just this is the result but how did we get there what sort of devices tools and elements to manipulate language or to create language were used to achieve this this final result whether it's used beautiful poem or a beautiful novel or maybe a very very very successful advert so stylistics works within linguistics but draws on lots of different fields and subfields within linguistics so it would draw on phonology and phonetics for example graphology morphology syntax grammar lexical analysis and lexicology semantics pragmatics you know and any any area of linguistics we can draw on so it's very interesting sub-field that it's not separate from others but actually drawing from lots of different fields to look at language and style now how do you do it so the traditional manuals would tell you you need to ask yourself questions about the texts and and you would ask about foregrounding or deviation or parallelism so what is different what is the same style variation within text this is really interesting and i'm sure you you recognize it if you have a text but it's part of it is one style and then it switches time sound meaning and effect rhythm and meter is for poetry disconstruction speech realism for drama speech accent turn taking or conversation analysis uh conversation behavior also drama speech and foot presentation this is particularly uh big and developed within stylistics field you know think about stream of consciousness for virginia woolf you know thinking about house pigeon food is presented politeness and impoliteness services more pragmatics assumptions precipitation sorry presuppositions and inserting meaning so again pragmatics and lexical and grammatical choices now all those are often given you need to consider all those four more is more useful for literal text so if you look i'll give you references at the end but there's a song and there's a sorry there's a book um analyzing the um language of uh prose drama and poetry or poetry person drama and then it gives by my by mick short and it gives you literally checklist ask those questions for each type of text they are useful for more literary text but as i said what i'm trying to convey today is this approach is useful for any type of text you want and so i call it applied stylistic so here's a sort of simplified way of thinking okay what do i ask what do i look at if i have this text and it's interesting linguistically and i want to just see what what what's there so we could look at patterns repetition and irregularities and this is not just word level because you could find it at you know story level of course and uh and phrasal phrase level and uh chapter level and so on but stylistics goes down to the world level so patterns repetitions irregularities lexical choices grammatical choices and implied meaning services for pragmatics metaphor idiom colloquialism any other literary devices that you can think of intertextuality so referring to other texts or other styles if it's a referring to or invoking a style of another text we would call it interdiscussivity conversational behavior and other effects like sound spelling and font these are really useful when you analyze adverts for example and nothing in format and i think these are more useful to think about if to approach any other text right not just literally or high literature so to having introduced you to stylistics and sorry if you knew all this already but this is so this was a reminder this is the approach so it's language and style and drawing on different uh ways of looking at texts now i today i'm looking at two different texts and i'll tell you why so the first one is the ink trilogy by british author alice broadway and it's inked um spark and scar from 2017 to 2019. now this is difficult to categorize because it's published by a scholastic which is scholastic children books and but actually i think it's on the verge between children's and young adult and because these communities for children's literature i thought you might find it interesting and they are very beautiful stories very interesting body world building stories if you're interested in in a world building and some kind of dystopian realities and and also these are translated into polish if you if you prefer to read in polish or give it to to your child and i i know because i gave the polish version to my nephew and so the ink the main character is just turning 16 so that's why i think it's on the verge of becoming the story is quite children's but i think it's sort of between children's and young adult uh literature and and and this character she's just turned 16 so she's on the verge of thinking well what do i do in the future she just lost her father so there's this moment of um you know perspective changing and growing up but she lives in a world that is different to ours so in her world the natural thing to be is to be tattooed that's why it's called ink so every single person in the community she lives in is inked and there are um official signs which would be dots for you for your age but also you know your profession your qualifications from school if you are a criminal your crimes and and some other achievements official achievements but you would also after you turn 16 you can start adding symbols that are important to you so it could be symbols pictures words so it could be name of your children or your lover or and it could be different symbols that mean something to you so she she lives in this world and the community accepts this is the reality there is another group that is called the blanks who don't have tattoos who refuse to get tattooed and they've been exiled so this word has this mythos about why they are tattooed and why they and they need to do it this is to do with being able to read people so they have they have lots of those important marks they can be everywhere on the body but the important marks are on the form forearms so even in winter they have to uh dress so they show off the forum so everyone can read them so people without tattoos are suspicious because they have secrets you don't know anything about them because you can't read their skin and so in the first book leo ravitz the main character she um she's we were introduced to this world and she she explores what she wants to do she because she takes an apprenticeship to become an inca or tattooist then in the second book she actually spent some time with the blank so she's changing her perspective and learning the other side of the methods why they what they believe and why they believe they shouldn't be tattooing each other and then um in the third book in scar she returns to a community but she's changed and people are changing i'm not going to say more you can read it why this this whole happens but it's it's very interesting word so i i i would recommend it my second text is and you might be more familiar with fate the wink saga netflix which we had first season last year and second season i read should come autumn this year so we have a few months to wait and and this is interestingly based on the um animated series wings club i think it's called with fairies with wings like tinkerbell or nickelodeon children's channel so this is also interesting for another project for you is the adaptation of children's animated series into young adult live-action series on netflix and what does it mean you know for for all the uh audience this is centered around bloom who is um the girl in in front of a poster and she she grew up in our world but actually she discovers she has powers and she's a fairy so magical creatures are the fairies and she starts going to this college for fairies to learn about her magic and control it and i think it's really interesting because it's this young adult story about growing up learning about yourself learning about to control your powers and is also beautifully built uh world why i chose those two texts because practice practice from practical point of view well i'm here for children's literature community so it has to be texts that are relevant to you so there's a children's slash young adult trilogy of books and then you have young adult tv show i wanted to show you different media so you have a fake written fiction and a tv show dialogues in a tv show and also for me it's a bit dogmatic because i very strongly believe that we should be looking at popular culture and different texts and this is relevant to people we all consume those series and if if we talk to people out there who who consume the series and you can tell them something interesting about them this is relevant for other people so i think and interesting so i think we should be looking at those because why not and not not all people should study shakespeare or other high literature so i'm going to give you some examples um briefly because i know that we have limited time from both texts just to show you how i approach it and what what you can notice if you look at the language of the text so this is from ink the first book in the trilogy the very beginning so the very first sentence is i was older than all my friends when i got manifested this is straightforward and if if you you expect the children's or young girls so you think okay he's a teenager talking about tattoos maybe and maybe she just they turned 18 and they think should we get the two it's quite interesting the sentence so what happens here you're creating assumptions in your head right something about it too you talk about friends maybe it's a teenager maybe a young person so you have a schema this idea of what this character might be the next sentence is my mother loves to tell the story i wish she wouldn't so we now learn there is a mother so it's not an old friend there is a mother she loves to tell the story i wish you would and not already you see this there is a grammatical ellipses so you don't have a full sentence i wish she wouldn't tell the story to everyone i just said i wish you wouldn't and so it's shortened it's quite informal so you have this style it might also tell you that our character is a teenager because it's sort of his attitude or it's embarrassing i wish she didn't tell the story because and it's a bit embarrassing so far so good so this gives an informal style first person narrator and this assumption of this teenager narrator however the next sentence at two days old you meant to get your birthmark but i got sick instead and mom canceled the ceremony now at this point you think okay two days old birthmark you're not sure what it is but the first sentence was about tattoos so you're thinking is it tattoo and this is getting really strange because i didn't expect an infant of two days being tattooed so at this point our challenge our assumptions are being challenged notice there's a birthmark which is also uh marked because normally when we talk about the birth mark is something you're born with right so it's not it's not something that someone does to you it's something you're born with it's it's it's innate so again there's the deviation there but let's continue what it says and so have mom's friend said you need to get her marked but she told them she would wait until um i was better i would be named an inked when she ignored the whispers warnings and for i saw for 20 days i remained formless and void until one day my mother said let her be leora and i was leora the word was punched with many school needles into my flesh now there's loads of things going on here the first thing probably you notice is there's words that are action verbs here look at those inked unmarked but we're obviously thinking about marking and punched and those of this actually waves physical doing the mark inking which is very physical and you think you know a baby 20 days old baby and you're talking about inking which is very uh unusual and it's challenging this um this idea of of of what happens to babies and the other thing you see there there is a the other idea about what happens to babies and what happens to babies when they die unmarked and you have to have the ceremony now i don't know about you but if you come from maybe christian background you might be thinking about the baptism or some kind of naming ceremony so on the one hand you have in your head okay this is what happens with babies and you might think okay what happens with babies who don't have this ceremony and you might have a belief you know if if they are not baptized maybe they don't go to heaven and so you might think about this but here it's very physical it's about if the babies are not tattooed what happens with them and and in the stories they do not remember this it's not about going to heaven but they're not remembered so they're forgotten right the other thing that is very striking here is that she says um i'm remain i remained formless and void now this is very striking because if you think even if you're thinking about baptism in our terms you don't think about child being formless and void and so this is very very strange use of words so as if this mark would give you form and filled your way up right it give your identity this naming and so already you have marked use of verbs inked and marked punch we are very physical and also and adjectives like formless and void which really makes you think okay what is she saying here this is for grounding that this whole first book is about her identity well the whole trilogy is you know what does it mean to be marked is it what i am or maybe i can be something else not also that there's a use of mom here so not mother previously was mother my mother but this is mom so closer relationship but it's also spelled with capital letter not everyone and lot of people in english wouldn't spell it with capital letter so it's we're very close and i also respect her so i write with mom and and the other thing notice that that is really pointing to how small this baby is because you have mini school needles not just small mini school needles and tiny letters so you have minuscule and tiny pointing to how small she was when she had it and it'd grow they let us groan with her for 16 and she's now 16.

[00:27:36]the last thing i wanted to point here is the style so there's a story so mum's friend said this but mom told them this she ignored this and so for 20 years i remained and then i was leora and so on this is a very storytelling so if you think about fairy tales this is a starring thing style and we can ask whether this is what leora is saying or is actually she is reporting what her mom would say when she describes this so there's a lot to unpack in you know a small paragraph here just an example if it jumps at you and so just it continues which is literally the next sentence it's the first page and a half of the book and i'll let you read this this is probably will this will leave you probably more uncomfortable if you haven't looked up those books so what happens with uh with people who die they they are turned into a book so basically their skin is like another body and turned into a book it's not a book just bound in skin every part is a page with with specific tattoos from the life story and you open it and you see the story of your life so it is very very uncomfortable if you think about it but look what's happening here so first of all you have two more of those very physical marking words so edged do you remember we had imprinted we had punched we had inked and now we have edged and imprinted so it's also linked to uh ink so the story is in etched in your body moments imprinted again it's all about being very physical so although we think that you live on but it's all about physic physicality and the body and also notice that it's all about the community so it's we are not afraid of the of death we are surrounded by the death so we as a community i believe what everyone else does then it's everyone has skin books not just the physicality of i can breathe them in touch them and read their lives so it's not i'm thinking about them i can breathe them in from the from the skin and but notice the switch to pronoun i because it's first this is the community beliefs and then this is what i experienced myself and then the last sentence this is before the paragraph the chapter section of the chapter ends but it was only after my father died that i saw the book of someone i'd really known and this sets up what happens next so there's a lot of things going on in this so my last example from ink is uh further down in the book it's page 68 so it's sort of um less than halfway through and and this is a dream so there's quite a lot of dreams that she has because she she's transforming and she's quite anxious so she has those dreams so the top one is a dream and you can see that she's lying in a bed in hospital bed in her dream and she sees the needle in her arm and something is a dark liquid is being taken she thinks it's blood but then she sees that her tattoos are slowly unraveling each mark into being unwritten and and it's not my blood we're taking but my ink i look down at my skin i'm naked i'm lost this is very interesting there's a lot of verbs about looking so i'm observing it because it's a dream so i look i look down i watch and my tattoos are unraveling and and again is linking to the tattoos is very identity because without them i have his bare skin i'm naked and i'm lost so she doesn't like it and she rips the needle from her arm now remember what she said when she wasn't inked at 20 days of when she was an infant she said i was formless i was void and now i was i'm naked and i'm lost so it's linked no tattoos no identity i'm i'm i'm formless and i'm void i don't know what it means like it's not me and then she wakes up and the bottom one is when she wakes up and she talks about my skin tells the tale the government has chosen for me so on one hand is those official marks that i have to have because everyone in our community has but then i have a sudden yearning to fill every inch or so that nothing is lost so all the important things so this shows over i don't have a choice that we do it i have a choice what i put on my skin and this is also linked to the fabulous 16 so only after you turn 16 you can actually decide those special symbols that you have so when as you can see from those texts before i give you an example from the other text is there are very physical descriptions there's a lot of action verbs or participles talking about inking or etching or imprinting something so physically doing something to the skin evoking tattooing and there's this mixed schema because on one hand you have some expectations about teenager about babies about naming ceremonies or baptisms but on the other it's actually all about tattoos and about physicality so there's this fight of that spiritual because naming and baptism for us might mean something spiritual for them is very physical because you need to get the ink and that's why it's so striking because the world the alice broadway builds is so different for us and you know it makes you uncomfortable so the second text is the wing saga and this is the first scene that we see blue so we have a main character bloom and she meets this boy called sky this is when she arrives in the school that she's going to go called alfia and she meets sky in the courtyard you know she doesn't know where she's going there's lots of students going with luggage but she doesn't know what she's gone so sky is here two in the second year so he knows the school and he notices her and she has striking retail he likes that he goes to talk to her and you can see i'm not going to read all of this but you can see what's happening here so he comes in and he says a lot so he's babbling because he likes her if you see i'm impressed with her confidence in the face of complete ignorance there's no really meaning there right it's just saying for the sake of is it saying so he's in he wants to impress her with lots of words but actually there's not a lot there and and then um he he he sort of sounds like he wants to help and she because she starts the conversation if you think from conversational analysis point of view and if you're interested go look at that because conversation analysis is really useful for dialogues is whoever starts the conversation has the power because they initiate right they they choose a topic they initiate and wait for the other person to um to join the conversation and so she reassessed herself she said i don't need help thanks right so she sort of cuts it off and takes initiative and um power from from sky but he continues because he's a little bit condescending i i don't remember offering so presumptuous so he's a bit condescending but remember there are two teenagers they are very flirtatious so she's smiling it's not very mean here then they have a chat about her being a fairy and sort of she's serving sharing information about what she she is and and so he they they fall into you know i offer information he comments it's an odd thing she offers more information we don't have those schools and then he asks where are you from and she says from california so it turns out she's from other worlds so in in this saga um in this show there's this whole other world with several rhythms parallel to our world so most of the students in the school they all left another world and she comes from outside and then they continue talking so she's flirting again when she says uh floating also if if you want your mind blown three months ago i didn't know about this and and he said well if you are lost which i'm not saying you are and if you need help which i'm not saying i'm offering and again he's babbling so on one hand he wants to show off but on the other hand he's sort of this is completely redundant so if you think i don't know you've ever heard about crisis cooperative principle in pragmatics but this basically says if you ask the question or if you want to give information you just have to give in enough not too much not too little enough and he's he's breaking less in communication because we don't need all this this is redundant he just says well if you want help this is this is where you need to go but he's not saying that and and she's playing into this so again she's taking control again because she's saying oh a specialist hall obviously this is sarcastic but she has no idea what he's saying and again he notes because he doesn't um record that she's being sarcastic so she says and i definitely know what a specialist is again she has no idea and he said oh sorry but then she doesn't want him to be in control and you know treat her that she doesn't know so she interjects and he says i'll be happy to help or do something and she says men's playing it she says no sure kind of seem like your thing so she implying again there's a lot here happening that not what is said but what is implied this is typical pragmatics and the power relation between the two characters i think what is really interesting here we can see there's two young people and they are flirting a bit but it's also showing that this is probably quite um realistic of how young people might talk especially when she's using very current word men's plan so the audience would know what this means and this is the second example from this i have two from this text this is when she meets her new roommate aisha and just before that she was talking to her um to her parents on the phone and her parents doesn't don't know where they are where she is so they think she's in switzerland so she was like oh this is aisha it's strange you um you have human parents but you are fairy so she wants some explanation bloom explains but look at the right-hand side because this is the part that really interests me is when bloom says oh i can't get used to this ridiculous thing that i'm in a magical school and i just said oh my god are you the only person in the universe who's never read harry potter now this is quite funny and obviously if you get a harry potter reference and you read harry potter you know what she means this is quite over a reference because she could have said you've never heard of hogwarts so this is a little bit more uh in-depth reference and but also she is making an assumption that whoever read harry potter would love to be in a magical school which probably is not true but yeah and then there's a there's a whole discussion about harry potter so bloom says if you knew how many hours i have wasted taking sorting hard quizzes and all the others if you read harry potter you know exactly what we're talking about if you haven't you don't really know especially when she talks about sorting hat but most people reading those books will know notice how here there is a banter so they are very playful and she says a ravenclaw and sometimes slivering and naisha sort of contest off it explains the lies implying slivering students are liars and then bloom says let me guess gryffindor explains the judgment to counter verse and walks off implying with gryffindor and students are so good that they are very judgmental and but what what you look at what you see here especially in terms of grammar is you see this is a normal conversation with very elliptic in grammar so there's no full sentences it's when aisha says ravenclaw she doesn't say oh let me guess you're you're you were sorted into ravenclaw just ravenclaw and we know what it means so and ellipsis is working because we're not we don't need the full sentence to to get the whole meaning there's a lot of conversations like this between bloom and other students there's great scenes between her and the headmistress of her school and i think this gives you just a very very small flavor on what you can actually do when you look at dialogues um on the on the television so when she talks to skye there is some flirting he's a little bit bubbling because he likes her a little bit condescending she is uh sort of trying to reassert her especially when she says you're men's planning when she talks to aisha in this scene she is playful there's this banter between two teenagers so when when she's talking to sky the power relation is not even because sky knows maurice all there is a guy so she tries to reassert it so that they can be on the same level when she talks to aisha they are roommates they're all both first years they're on the same level they're more and playful there but what happens here and i think you know judging from what i see from from the text and from what i've seen in the show is the they successfully imitate how i think younger people would speak and i had a conversation have a banter being sarcastic being flirtatious and you can see it in those exchanges and you know in a grammar and words that they choose so just to bring it all together i think on this very small sample i tried to show you that stylistics can be applied to a variety of texts and to be either fiction but it could be you know television show which i've done a lot it could be a lyric from a song it could be an advert it could be a little note somewhere could be anything um that there's a lot to be to be analyzed out there being systematic helps so what we want to do if we use this approach is consider all the mark elements so if you're looking okay we look at word if let's say we look at dialogue like here we look at watch choice and grammatical things what is said about also who starts the conversation who says more who seems to have more power and how it's played out let's say so it helps if you think okay are all those elements there and i need to consider them all to have an idea what's happening stylistics approach can give you evidence to justify studying popular culture text because it gives you evidence on the world level and so this is something i i used in my phd because as houston i mentioned in the beginning my phd was in buffy vampire slayer and one of the comments throughout my phd was how can you um apply conversation analysis to a text like this conversation analysis traditionally would be applied to everyday real life speech not not fictional so the one of the arguments i found for vet and it helped me in my phd is that um the the is very similar to natural speech so one of the things is not similar is for example there's no overlap when you watch tv or films because peop actors just wait till one says something and then another says something but in real life we don't notice it so when we watch we actually see it as a normal dialogue because we don't notice overlap in real life if you do a stylistic analysis then you have evidence it's actually there's enough similarity to real life talk that is based you know in in composition analysis research that you can do that and this is a good argument and also it offers you and i i don't know uh those of you who are who have joined us here what your background is but if at least some of you studied are studying uh english philology what i did which is both literature linguistics you have both elements there this is actually a great opportunity to engage both of those expertise if you and you don't have to be experts in both but you know from both sides and it actually merges and gives you a nice lens to look at texts so if you'd like to read more about stylistics these are some really useful uh texts and i'm happy to share those slides if you'd like to and i would recommend especially short and legion short there are seminal text manuals step by step with checklist this is what you need to do the other ones explain more what stylistics are contemporary different approaches so all of them are really really useful an example what you can do um is what what i've published but this is just to show you what texts could be looked at and it could be located together with the literary text you've done you're looking at and so the bottom two are from my phd about the buffy so these are chapters and then the middle one 2015 is on a series of paranormal romance books it's a series and about narration so it's very narratology focused and then the top ones actually top two is something recently i've been doing is the language of my other cinematic universe so the top one is actually in the works and will probably come out next year and but just to show you that if you're interested in this there's no limit to what text you're you're looking at and people are interested in looking an analysis of such text if you would like to look at people who were really experts in language and popular fiction or language of popular culture i would suggest those readings so there's monika bel narek from university of sydney she wrote a lot about language of fictional television and she also created a television dialogue corpus that you can use and then there's others like susan mandela based in uk and others talking the montora russia sheila wrote about chiclets so um popular fiction for women and and there's others about television and so this looks me to the end thank you for listening and feel free to connect with me and now you know why my twitter handle is run by linguist and you feel free to email me or connect with me on linkedin thank you and now stop sharing thank you very much what's going on okay uh thank you so much for uh introducing us to all these uh nuances uh of uh stylistics and and the variety of approaches within it and also uh to the terminology and to these two readings of two different texts to different formats now we have time for questions so just to remind you you can ask them in our comments of course you can ask them in the chat or if you also directly if you raise your hand so we have time for that at the moment i can't see any questions in the chat okay if i may have a question or it's um to kind of start to to kick us off let's say um i was wondering especially in relation to um okay tv series um and i was thinking well not really about uh let's say ye or children's series but about big bang theory to be honest one of my favorites i'm wondering how much of stylistics do the creators of these dialogues actually know because it seems that just looking at the quality of the dialogues the you know how it engages you how funny it is uh that they seem to know quite a lot and i'm kind of do you know anything about this i mean it's not just something that's uh you know people are working in the field it is really difficult to a certain and obviously it is it's the same thing as when we analyze a poem and we think what the poet wanted to say it's difficult right because you can't really say unless you ask them so for tv series is the same some of them say openly that they write in a certain style so for example for buffet it was quite easy because they um they actually openly said but they write the way joe sweden speaks and he had a whole we call them a stable of writers who actually knew this is how he speaks and we're emulating his style what he likes and they all wrote the same way some writers like jane has espenson known from buffy and she now does lots of other series she actually has a degree in linguistics so this really helps but it's difficult to assert and i think they are aware of it and when they learn screenwriting if they had degrees in this they think about it how to play the dialogues and they emulate a style that they might like they might not consciously think if i do this people would love it or this is what will happen it might be subconscious but yeah it's it's it's not 100 possible to ascertain but definitely there is some kind of intention okay i'm checking the chat because i have another question alright yes there is question from karen's is please hello karenza good to see you hello thank you that was really interesting sorry i couldn't find a chat so i think i would just ask the questions so um i'm also a buffy fan i haven't researched it but i've enjoyed watching it and i'm just thinking about the episode called hush where the actual language is taken away from the characters for a while and they find different ways to communicate so very visual ways and it's got me thinking about the visual aspect of stylistics because for instance if you're reading a novel you might have some words that are in italics or if you're reading poetry they might play around with the typography and i wondered if you'd had any experience of this alternative visual modes of communication like removing the voice and visual modes if you've had the chance to look at that in terms of stylistics as well but that's a really great question thank you carinsa and it it depends how you understand stylistics because if you think all this is just a linguistic way of text in what i've done so far i've always looked predominantly at text but yes if you're analyzing a tv show and normally you know what i did today i didn't have a lot of time but normally you would analyze all the other elements as well because they are really important so you would employ some kind of additional framework from visual analysis and you would think what do i look at and again this would be similar approach if it's you know i used to teach language of advertising so if you have a static poster and it's it's slightly different it's like a image and analyzing images or if you have a tv show there's movement and there's music and there's everything so definitely if you were doing something like this with a scene you would definitely employ extra elements into your toolbox so not just you know grammar like this this but also music and wherever actors standing and i tried to tell you you know with bloom and sky what they were actually physically doing so yes so you definitely have to do it if you don't do it then you are accused of you just looking at language it's a tv show and there's all those elements so you employ extra things and with with buffy i haven't done a lot of this because i focus on language but i analyzed those two vampires spike and angel and i looked at the scenes with all those elements so it's an extra visual elements that you need to include but in any analysis like this i would say you just say how much you include because you cannot do everything right you're not a musicologist for example with a music or costume specialist so you just have to say okay i'm just looking at those elements that are pertinent to the scene okay thank you very much oh yes and we have another question madeline please hello everyone i don't know if you can see me but i hope yes thank you thank you so much for a very interesting lecture i had a question and that relates to a possible combination between a stylistic approach a stylistic approach and a neurotological approach because where i come from i'm a staff member of a comparative literature department these are things that we combine in in our textual analysis for instance when you talk about different linguistic registers that's very interesting but that could also be linked to questions concerning point of view and also to power relations in a text between those who get to vocalize to present their point of view and those who are only vocalized who are the objects of vocalization so when it comes to to a critical approach to looking at power relations in the text i imagine that such a link could also be very fruitful so could you please comment on that yeah yeah definitely this is a fantastic point thank you madeline it's definitely uh something that you can use and we should be using uh so it's just the case of um i guess when you when you approach a text this is how i was taught stylistics and how i do it you you just decide what things you put in your toolbox right whether you use narratology or not because narcology is more from literary side and would definitely help so you know whether power relations are from point of views in narration or whether it's within conversation behavior then you can look at it differently so i guess at one point you think what is actually most useful for me what's the best framework for me or i build my own framework it would be really useful i i used a bit of this um in this paper i wrote about a narration in um other words series by jasmine galen because this is a series about three three sisters and each book is narrated by a different sister so i looked at you know one is a vampire one is a which one is a cat and how it's narrated and i looked more on the language level you know verbs and things i've read but it's definitely very fruitful so i guess what i'm arguing here is this is one of the options and if if what you're doing is narratology this is something that you can just attach to your own toolbox and but we just have to decide what what how we are poaching and what's the best uh help for for what we want to do yeah thank you thank you very much thank you and also thinking about what matlan said coming from comparative that which are of course cultural issues right and then there would be so uh i mean statistics uh being also defined i guess or particular or even i don't know conversational behaviors right being defined by a particular culture that would also come into i guess yeah i guess it's a discussion yeah i think what what happens is all those elements come up when depending on your text services of course in my first quote when different factors right so if there's this social element really important definitely you need to consider it i just gave you very small examples from those two texts but this is what i found you know in my phd when i looked at spike for example and when he's you know human is his bubbling british poet and british accent so i looked at but he says british accent and angel has fake irish accent but also looked at cultural elements there in terms of lexus because um spike for example when he is wants to be a poet he uses lots of uh latinet words to be more flowery when he becomes a vampire he looks lots of war uses lots of germanic words and associated with lower social class and sort of like cockney english which is which is also very interesting so i think it all depends on the text but it's definitely there so what i'm saying look at your text and then think okay what i need to draw out of it and then what tools i need to employ to actually draw it out in a systematic way but i can argue does something and i think especially for um analysis of texts uh for young readers uh because what you focused on were let's say um especially the dialogue right it was between peers um then in the in the book i mean the ink trilogy there was more about this i think uh chatted out power differentials but especially i think looking at dialogues between children or young people and adults right it would be interesting also to see how power kind of plays out uh in uh okay for example through once again behaviors or maybe choice of words or yeah definitely and there was a scene from uh the wing circle that i wanted to include but i just didn't have space i think i went all the time anyway but there was one um where she talks to the headmistress who recruited her to the school and it's really interesting because she said oh i thought i would sell wings and i want to practice my magic and i had him headmaster says what you need to learn is control because she's she's a fire fairy so she can really do her damage but she the headmistress finishes the conversation you you came here because you didn't have a choice and it's very very powerful movies like end of conversation so yes there's a lot of going on there so that's why conversation analysis would be really useful for children's literature if you're looking at something like that because what i found that it doesn't matter how many words or how much you speak the person who doesn't speak much can be in the powerful position so you're just looking at what's going on that that but yeah it'll be rich food too okay do we have any more comments um you can't see in the chat karenza has a question please thank you very much so um i was wondering also about um the language of animals in novels i understand that your research field is fantasy in particular so i don't know if you have the chance to look at this but i was thinking of a book called wolf brother by michelle paver it's a series um and in this series um a lot of the book follows the adventures of a boy but some of the chapters or the elements are written from the perspective of a wolf and this wolf is given to use language like uh for fire he calls it the bright beast that bites hot for instance and some of the language is very repetitive so everything is bad bad bad when it's their animal character speaking and i'm quite interested in that and i wondered if you've looked at animals from a stylistic perspective at all an animal language or if you know of anybody else that has that's also a good question thanks karenza um i don't know on top of my head but i can find out if you'd like uh because i don't know on the top of my head someone else i didn't have much chance to look at it in the chapter i mentioned about those three sisters there's a little bit about it because the one that is she's aware cut so she's human but she turns into a tabby cat sometimes she turns into a puma and there's lots of cats there but they are more very antropomo and topo formized personified that they behave like humans or they they just you know they wouldn't speak physically but you have uh um their thoughts like as humans right so i think that that would be really interesting is it you know is it a real animal or is it someone turning into animal but while you were explaining it but i need to read this book because it sounds really good and i was thinking about the book i don't know if anyone heard of it because i did it in um in a module about animals in literature and it's it's called eva i think by peter mitchell yeah and then i was just thinking if we wanted to explore this that would be a brilliant idea when the main character is sort of becoming more and more and more chimpanzee and whether she's losing language or creating a new language but i haven't looked at it um myself so i think it's a really interesting something to do so karen said there's a project there look at look at those type of things thank you very much okay thank you any more questions comments if i just have a final a question or comment i was thinking right at the beginning when you started to uh to analyze uh uh those excerpts from inc and any how like the very first sentence in a way builds this kind of schema in in the reader's mind but i was also wondering about what kind of let's say expectations readers come come with right when they start reading such a book probably knowing that it's a dystopian story i mean maybe it has been recommended by someone else or they read a blurb or something like that so uh there is i think also a kind of interaction going on between what we get in the in the story uh the particular uh okay the particular elements the particular words uh and and what these words kind of trigger in our in our minds um of course about the expectations for the development of the narrative and so on but also i think uh what we come with matters um i don't know if you have any observations maybe on on on this as well on this kind of play between yeah i think i think it's true and uh-huh it's probably difficult now to come completely as a blank page right because you bought it because maybe you looked at the cover or someone told you the covers are most beautiful in the picture yes but they are very sparkly and tactile they don't have a blub at the end but it says the truth will get under your skin at the back so there's no bigger blab that's actually a very clever blurb yes yes but not telling you too much yes and i think um over there is inside it says imagine a world where your every action every deed is marked on your skin for all to see so obviously this is what you can do i think you would expect this but things like your dad dies and they make a book out of his skin probably is not what you expected and for me an adult reader was quite shocking and there's a whole profession of i think they call them flares who get the skin out and prepare the skin for the box so so it's really um yeah but i think you are right this is this um this interplay about between how much do you expect and whether this uh fulfills these expectations or not uh but probably there will be elements especially a story like this that would really shock you anyway if even if you know what to expect especially if you are a young reader so and then the meta is there there's there's this character called the saint who is with the saint but they just call him saint no saint peter whatever is the saint and there's this whole story when he goes to the other world and he's being fled alive and he comes back with his skin on his arm and it's just very gruesome so i think there is interplay but i don't think it negates what you find when you look at language and style because there's still those elements even if you knew what to expect i think this is a very powerful beginning yeah yeah yeah it is definitely and also even when you come at least when you think about let's say the convention of dystopia of course you you expect that things will get too bad so are bad right in this in this fantastic world so this in a way confirms your uh kind of expectations and you're looking for more i guess maybe even maybe i'm reading i don't think it kind of it happens very consciously but uh i guess you would be looking for some kind of science right of that reality yeah and maybe this is where you know lanalizingly would install comes in because you're looking for them so you need to have them you need to reinforce this message we know what to expect but you need to reinforce it keep maintaining it yeah yeah uh-huh okay thank you do we have any other comments questions okay i can't see any so i think we'll be closing uh once again big thanks uh gaucia uh for introducing us uh to this approach and to probably we do it all the time uh thinking about texts uh but we just don't at least well i'm speaking for myself right i don't know we do not really thank you such terms but uh definitely um i will from now on at least try to at the back of my mind to uh to try to think along these uh categories so many thanks once again for that i think it will work like this for some of us at least um and uh as we said at the beginning uh the stock has been recorded so we will make it available uh soon but of course we'll let you know uh when it's out there and and um you are interested of course you can return to it if you are interested in eye contacting gosha i'm sure you can look her up or if you can't find information we'll gladly share it with you and this is our last talk for before the summer we'll for sure return we are returning definitely in october but we'll be sending out of course uh the information the details for uh the feather talks so once again thank you very much some of the guests of the participants today they have been joining us quite regularly so big thank you to i'm very grateful we appreciate uh your following this series and for those who are here for the first time of course we invite you to join us again thank you very much thank you