Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0415059917 ISBN 13: 9780415059916

Casa editrice: Routledge, 1991

"Political Stylistics" draws together ideas about society and language from a range of theorists including Pratt, Bourdieu, Goody and Watt and Bakhtin, to establish a political stylistics: a way of studying the formal properties of texts based on the principle that all linguistic production operates within the intricate network of power relations that structure the social realm. On a practical level, this methodology is used to analyze the representation of popular French and jargon in three literary works where it extends beyond the speech of the characters and enters the narrative: Zola's "L'Assommoir" , Celine's "Journey to the End of Night", and Queneau's "Zazie dans le Metro". The book is articulated on three axes: the trajectory of the French working class from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century; the trajectory of popular language from social margin to literary centre; and the evolution of the novel from naturalism, through modernism, to post-modernism. The stylistic analyses, considered alongside an investigation of the way these novels were received in the press, serve to demonstrate various strategies of containment. This book should be of interest to advanced students and teachers of linguistics, particularly sociolinguistics and students of French and English literature.