61) Stylistic Analysis/ from the Author’s, Reader’s point of view. Levels and Methods of Analysis. Linguostylistic analysis of imaginative literature.

There are two main directions in the stylistic analysis - analysis from the author's point of view (encoding stylistics) and from the reader's point of view (decoding stylistics). Encoding stylistic analysis presupposes that the peculiarities of the author's style are singled out on the basis of comparison with other writers. Encoding stylistic analysis includes the critical study of the author's style, vocabulary means used by him. Much attention is paid to the author's ideas concerning the creative work in general and his work in particular. Ideas can be extracted from the writer's diaries, letters, articles, etc. Encoding stylistic analysis takes into consideration the facts of the writer's biography, the genesis of the work in question, the characteristic features of the epoch and literary trend. This kind of analysis is based on the thorough knowledge of the History of Literature. Analysis from the author's point of view treats the work of art as a result or consequence of creative activity.

Linguo-stylistic analysis of literature relies on both linguistic stylistics and literary criticism. Literary criticism consists not only of the language analysis but also of all the elements of the form and the content of the literary work. It is important to remember that linguistic stylistics is the base for literary criticism, because while decoding any text it is essential to rely on the facts of the language.

The analysis of the text goes through a number of definite stages. It begins with the analysis of main ideas and themes of the literary work which include the complex of philosophical, moral, social, political, psychological problems and author's emotions, attitudes and view on them. This stage is followed with the analysis of the composition and the system of images of the literary work connected with the plot, characters and setting. Then follows the analysis of lexical and grammatical expression of the images - stylistic devices and means. And finally we pay attention to phonetic or sound form of the text and its graphical representation.

But the reader usually follows the reversed way. He transforms the graphical presentation into words, then into the system of images, feelings, thoughts of the author, and at last the reader can grasp the main idea of the author. Much attention is paid to the text, less to the writer. A work of art is treated as a source of information and impressions. This is another kind of stylistic analysis, i.e. from the reader's point of view, or decoding stylistics.

Levels of Stylistic Analysis

The following is the levels that stylists/linguists investigate when they aim at analysing a piece of text, either written or spoken.

1. PHONETICS - an examination of sounds; the study of the characteristics and potential utility of human vocal noise

GRAPHETICS – the study of written or printed shapes (visual analogue of phonetics)

2. PHONOLOGY (PHONEMICS) - the study of the sound system of a given language; the formalised rules of pronunciation

GRAPHOLOGY (GRAPHEMICS) – the analogous study of a language’s writing system; the formalised rules of spelling

3. GRAMMAR – both the syntactic and morphological levels need to be discussed; the aim is to analyse the internal structure of sentences in a language and the way they function in sequences; in other words, clauses, phrases, words, nouns, verbs, etc. need to be distinguished and put through an analysis to find out what is the norm (foregrounding) and what is somehow deviant (against the norm)

4. VOCABULARY – on the lexical level – it is the study of the way in which individual words and idioms tend to pattern in different linguistic context; on the semantic level – in terms of stylistics, it is the study of the meaning of stretches longer than the single lexical item (in linguistics, it is the study of the meaning of a single lexical item)

5. DISCOURSAL/TEXTUAL LEVEL – in this area, for instance, the interest lies in information processing (theme – rheme), and to what extent a text is coherent and what cohesive devices were used to achieve the particular level of coherence of the text.

Methods of analysis:

-Analysis of common content of a work: main idea is singled out lexically, syntactactically, phonetically, morphologically, which approve, specify or refute, deny a hypothesis.

-Details and form of a content of a work: some pecularity is singled out (unusual word order, on this basis a researcher formulates an idea). Aim is to make evident the unity of content and whole details.