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Book Review: The year's work in stylistics: 2001

Geoff Hall Language and Literature 2002 11: 357 DOI: 10.1177/096394700201100404 The online version of this article can be found at: http://lal.sagepub.com/content/11/4/357

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R E V I E W A RT I C L E
The years work in stylistics: 2001
Geoff Hall, University of Wales, Swansea, UK

The year 2001 is likely to be remembered in particular for its studies of narrative, though various publications invoking the category voice may eclipse even that large category. Attempts at interdisciplinary intertextuality were both stimulating and tantalizing in many instances. Shades of Genette and Bakhtin haunt, variously, the work of contributors to van Peer and Chatman, and of Ireland, Coupland and Cohen. Another notable feature of this years work are substantial revisions to important works in the field, including Katie Waless Dictionary of Stylistics, to which we may turn appropriately here as usual when workers in language and literature look for guidance: (3) Voice is popularly used in LITERARY CRITICISM and STYLISTICS, especially in the discussion of modes of NARRATION and REPRESENTATION OF SPEECH, to describe one who speaks in a narrative, whether the IMPLIED AUTHOR, or CHARACTER, or both (as in FREE INDIRECT SPEECH). (p. 406) A pithy sentence and part of an entry characteristically expanded (from three to five sub-headings) and updated: the entry now includes Andrew Gibson (1996), for example, and, via a reference to Ann Banfields (1982) unspeakable sentences, the concession that: In the novels of George Eliot as of James Joyce there are sentences certainly not easily assignable to either a character or narrator (p. 407). Ten years on Waless Dictionary now also features new entries under headings such as COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS and CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS. We shall not be surprised then to observe important activities which could be grouped under those headings in the following pages of this review, but I return initially to some of the important narrative studies appearing during the year. Van Peer and Chatmans ambitious collection derives mainly from a 1995 Netherlands conference, Narrative Perspective: Cognition and Emotion. The aim is to present a state of the art dialogue between a cross-disciplinary representation of more theoretical reflections or proposals (Part I), with literary history (Part II), and with more traditional criticism, and most importantly with more empirical cognitive psychological investigations into readings of narrative, with regard to point of view, aspect and perspective. In brief: Cognitive psychologists kn[o]w about readers, but not much about texts, while literary scholars kn[o]w about texts, but rather little about readers (p. 10). Well, at least psychologists know about 20-year-old college student readers in campus situations, the cynic might interject. Literary studies characteristically teach complexity and respect for minute particulars, where psychology in the past sought hard statistical facts and universals. Respective methodologies have been marked by these aims. Psychologists, then, often suspect the literary workers of

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complexifying unnecessarily, where the latter remain suspicious of hopelessly reductive oversimplifications, a search for certainties, which it is the mission of Literature to falsify. Of course, all agree, we need to see both trees and wood, though this can never be simultaneous (my understanding of Gestalt). A sub-text, of the editors of the collection at least, as well as of Mick Shorts Epilogue, is a polemic against what are seen as the excesses of a post-Nietzschean relativist literary Theory (perspectives are all we can ever have: though even here, see Nnning, 2001) which can be curbed by the healthy discipline of the laboratory. Fortunately, these ideas are not intrinsic to the work presented and need not distract from an otherwise useful collection with an eminently sensible foundation for interdisciplinary conversation even if we do not quite see the conversation take place here. The influential research of Kintsch and his school, for example, (Weaver et al., 1995) freely acknowledges the need to build models of reading in which readers are seen as social subjects in context, not disembodied bundles of neurons: comprehension was constituted in discourse; concepts are considered as products and instruments of social practice (Greeno, 1995: 91). I sometimes missed this situated (Lave and Wenger, 1991) aspect of cognition in this collection of nevertheless impressive names and range of interests. The chapter of Graesser et al. does make the right concessions: Cognitive psychologists once believed that text comprehension involves little more than a single speaker/writer, a comprehender, and a structured sequence of sentences. This simple analysis is inadequate A single speech act is shaped by the knowledge states of multiple agents. (p. 256) (p. 256; compare Nikolas Coupland, discussed below, and discourse analysis) While it would be unrealistic to expect any simple consensus and to emerge from these varied perspectives and writers tensions between empirical rigour and ecological validity, for example, are attenuated but will not disappear it is not an exaggeration to agree with the editors that here, as elsewhere, there is an emerging sense of understanding of the importance of real narratives, universals as well as specific features of linguistic (literature, news articles) or filmic narratives in whatever media, and how they work for those who co-construct them, and that such understanding must be central to understanding what it means to be human in societies today. That the book as a whole raises more questions than it answers is to its credit in an area its own efforts illuminate as highly complex (in particular the reading of literary narrative). Affect (or is it pleasure?) is addressed most directly in this volume by Miall and Kuiken (though see also Graesser et al. on involvement) and in some ways confirms Friedrichs observations on literariness and affect (reported below). This is to bring together text and effects as the editors and fellow contributors Dixon and Bertolussi (2001a) also advocate. As Miall and Kuiken put it, we want to understand how a reader arrives at a felt perspective, often a personal one, which inheres in a literary texts expressively rich aesthetic components (p. 292). Presuppositions here again are eminently debatable, but again, too, the aim is an interesting one

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and chapters like these show that empirical questions are not necessarily trivial. Shorts Epilogue recognizes that literary specialists look for news, new interpretations, new texts, new readers, while stylisticians or narratologists, never mind psychologists, are more likely to look for norms and the unexceptional. This is an acute observation. At the same time, literary critics since Jonathan Culler (1975) have at least asserted that we need to understand how texts work, rather than simply produce ever more ingenious interpretations of them, and here Short rightly sees the ground for a possible meeting of minds and interests: the elucidation of meaning and effect (p. 354). Thus, for example Jonathan Boulter in Interpreting Narrative in the Novels of Samuel Beckett writes an engaging study of Beckett to demonstrate that [his] novels not only thematize the reading process but in various ways are about the reader and the process of interpretation, or hermeneutics (p. 4); the instability of the text begins to reflect the instability of the reading experience (p. 5). I was largely convinced, but it has to be admitted that such a study is classically literary in the sense that we are asked to witness and applaud the performance of the virtuosic critic engaged with the formidably challenging postmodernist text, armed only with his Gadamer. True for who? we can ask of such interpretative work. There does seem to be a need for some more empirical component to fully carry the day. The view of understanding seems overly solipsistic, celebratory rather than critical, perhaps finally too complicit with Becketts own linguistics and hermeneutics. Curiously, the index to van Peer and Chatmans New Perspectives gives only one entry for voice presumably the name is too vague and modish! NLH, however, runs a whole special issue of some interest under this topic label (ed. R. Cohen), and it includes some of the same contributors and many overlapping references and concerns in its discussions. (4) In the writings of Bakhtin (e.g. 1981) voice takes on the broader connotations of STYLE and DISCOURSE (Wales, 2001: 407) For Richard Aczel, then, in NLH voice is composite and quotational(p. 598), but voice too can be shot through with diffrance (p. 599). Thus, while he applauds real advances in the turn towards the reader in constructivist, cognitive and natural narratology (p. 598), he still argues that the new narratology needs more hermeneutics in its models. Similarly: The text is language, but it is not a tape recording. Attributions of voice are interpretive moves (Monika Fludernik, same issue, p. 633). This reminds me of my call in last years Work Review for a more careful linguistics of writing in discourse stylistics; as does Gibsons contribution to the NLH symposium, invoking the Derridean neologism of spectropoetics (p. 643), hearing voices when, emphatically, nobody speaks in a literary text: the dream of hearing the other in the text is precisely intrinsic to the self-communion that is reading (Gibson, 641). Another contributor to the NLH collection is Steven Connor, whose fascinating study of ventriloquism (2000) is recalled by Debbie Camerons (2001) Designer

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Voices, if the tone here is more critical linguistic. The central paradox Cameron highlights is the idea of voice as the most fundamental marker of an individuals identity which is also the object of attention of great self-awareness, even conscious training and education, as Labovs rhotic speakers taught us all those years ago. Labov in fact is a contributor to one of the most consistently intelligent collections I read and surely a key publication of the year for sociolinguists, Penelope Eckert and John Rickfords Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. Couplands chapter may be picked out as strong in its own right, but of particular interest to readers of this journal for his insistence that sociolinguists need to learn from Roger Fowler and literary studies more widely, that variation is not a simple once and for all setting (such as the presence or absence of rhotic /r/). The argument is for more qualitative and contextualized studies of speakers. Studies of style, Coupland urges, need to be less generalized, and more aware of interpersonal and local stylistic variations within the same speaker, as well as between speakers, and the charge is that this aspect has been neglected by a mainstream quantitative sociolinguistic tradition. Elsewhere Coupland (2001b, 2001c) pursues these ideas with reference to his key theme of stylization in, respectively, radio talk and breakfast TV news. Stylization is the knowing deployment of culturally familiar styles and identities that are marked as deviating from those predictably associated with the current speaking context (2001b: 345); in this case Welshmen performing Welshness in solidarity with each other, as well as with a genuine allegiance to a self-conscious Welsh identity: what might be termed an authenticity beyond the everyday. A bonus in the article is to extend the analysis of the data into the social theory of identity in late modernity. Similarly, Coupland (2001c), like Cameron (2001), beyond the particular analysis of news presentation in The Big Breakfast, opens into wider and significant questions of trust, belief, knowledge and truth as mediated by the media to increasingly sophisticated audiences in these same late modern societies who no longer unquestioningly follow men in grey suits. Ironically, the critique often made of literary criticism or of critical discourse analysis, that conclusions derived from purely textual analysis need to be validated by empirical work with actual readers/viewers/listeners, could be reiterated here, but this is certainly advanced work which gives later researchers something to build on. From the evidence of his careful and modest article on Parody and Style in Poetics Today, Seymour Chatman might find work like that of Coupland or Bakhtin-inspired postmodernists not sufficiently rigorous. Chatmans plea is to delimit more carefully the reach of parody and to distinguish it, after Genette, from cognate forms such as satire, pastiche and travesty. When parody comes to be more or less synonymous with unbounded intertextuality (as in Meinhof and Smith, 2000 perhaps, though the reference is mine, not Chatmans), it loses its value as an analytic category. Parody, for Chatman, must include a tribute or homage, as well as exaggeration of key features derived from close (loving) study of the texts/ author to be parodied (the object of parody can, for Chatman, be ideationally stylistic as well as or instead of simply linguistic). As such, a

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parody can be a very revealing text for the stylistician to study. It is not often a loud belly laugh shatters an academic library (more often a mobile phone), but I have to confess that Chatmans central exhibit, Beerbohms late Henry James (p. 37), certainly made the point about the pleasure that can be taken in the kind of parody that is not cheap and easy to produce. In fact I laughed twice this year. Who says academics are dry? Another study of parody to be recommended, in this case for its careful literary historical recontextualization, is Faye Hammill (2001). I had forgotten, or perhaps never appreciated, Cold Comfort Farms wonderful imitations of deep dark (etc.) Lawrencean sensuality in the woodshed. A wonderful cold shower of commonsense! On a theoretical level, the article raises important issues regarding canonicity and literary value. Returning to more central and established ideas of perspectives on narrative, the reliable New Critical Idiom series from Routledge added a Narrative title (Cobley, 2001b), a wide-ranging, theoretical as well as historical survey, which may well be suggestive for more detailed work of language and literature narratologists. As mentioned in my comments on van Peer and Chatman, and exemplified in the Cohen collection, here again the more literary writer emphasizes the contextualized complexities of particular narratives, and is suspicious of attempts to tame the form into rules and regularities; although, as editor of The Routledge Companion to Semiotics and Linguistics (2001a), and Reader in Communications, Paul Cobley is clearly also well aware of more principled linguistic and structuralist-inspired approaches. Cobleys book certainly attempts to move beyond the range of the narrowly literary, with chapters on less researched areas such as early proto-narratives, factual as well as fictional narratives, cinema, postmodernism and cyberspace. The approach is generally constructionist (p. 3; compare Nnning, in van Peer and Chatman), i.e. meaning or understanding is seen as produced through interactions between readers and texts, though Cobleys orientation sounds more semiotic: representational systems rather than their users and objects, allow meaning to occur (p. 3). Narrative is frequently personified in the book. A more obviously stylistic study in literary history is the proposal of Joe Bray in an article in Style to find important precursors of Austens Free Indirect Discourse in (primarily) Richardsons Sir Charles Grandison. Leafing through another important second edition of a classic reference guide, I notice, among other changes, that Michael Toolan adds a whole new section on Paul Simpsons (1993) model (3.7) to his chapter on focalization. The level and extent of revision throughout are impressive and detailed and undoubtedly make for a more contemporary and precise textbook, if also, given the advances in understanding, or at least in the growth of writing published, sometimes more demanding too. There are fuller notes, exemplifications and exercises and updated references, all surely eminently justifiable in this field. Note that narrative grammarians (1988: 48) are now replaced by discourse linguists (2001: 42). Note, too, the publishers announcement of a second edition for 2002 of the other classic introduction to narrative, for many of us, Shlomith Rimmon-

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Kenans Narrative Fiction (1983). Jacob Meys second edition of Pragmatics adds chapters on literary pragmatics (Ch. 9, including 9.4. Voice and Point of View), and cross-cultural pragmatics (Ch. 10). Another title to consider within the narrative rubric is Ken Irelands The Sequential Dynamics of Narrative. This book has clearly had a long gestation (a reading of Genette back in the 1970s is mentioned) and, a rare virtue in days of RAE-driven research, benefits from careful consideration of a wide range of references, primary and secondary, from the European literary canon as well as from Japan and Africa, and in narratology and reader research. The material is lucidly presented throughout. What governs sequence in narratives? If, for example one event follows this rather than that event in the act of narration, what difference should it make? (Introduction, p. 15). Art as opposed to one damned thing after another? See Chapter 1! A very thought-provoking read altogether, on notions of time and temporality in the novel. Punctuation, chapters, and sections on one hand, the search for patterns, coherence and the phenomenology of reading on the other, continuities and discontinuities, this is a rich field to mine. Ireland too argues a need for hermeneutics and cognitive psychology to be brought to bear along with narratology, criticism and the linguistics of writing: Sequential dynamics relate, then, both to the manner in which sequences are arranged, in terms of overt authorial division of a text, and to the manner in which the reader, proceeding through that text, registers temporal and continuity relationships, and creates sequential ties. (Ireland, 2001: 37) There is a rich empirical mapping of historical instances of narrative onto theoretical taxonomies, with Part 3 opening vistas from literary history onto homologies of preference of cultures and times for varieties of sequential dynamic, even if, at the end of a very stimulating study, van Peer and Chatmans Introduction may return to consciousness: literary scholars tell us a lot about texts, but not enough about readers and reading. Meir Sternbergs Factives and Perspectives in Poetics Today is a long, demanding article, and possibly will appear to some to make overly precise claims in favour of linguistic approaches to the study of inference in literary narrative. The argument again is that literary critics, for all their insights and fine detailed work, have been too reluctant to systematize and extrapolate principles from their activities, but also that pragmatics could learn from this most sophisticated area of human inference-making as opposed to the reductive simplicities of truth conditional semantics or ordinary language philosophy. The argument and examples need to be traced by individual readers on their own account to make up their own minds but the article certainly repays careful reading (and several necessary re-readings!). Peter Stockwells Poetics of Science Fiction (2000) deals with time as one topic or setting in narrative (including discussions of deixis), often a utopian or dystopian future or alternative possible worlds. The format is of an undergraduate textbook, with thought-provoking exercises and focused references, and topic-

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based (neologism, genre, realism, coherence all as linguistic achievements). Stockwells often stimulating articulations of theory, description and analysis together with empirical research on readers and literary cognition are generally applied (in the spirit of Shorts Epilogue to van Peer and Chatman quoted earlier) to the mainstream ordinary and popular science fiction rather than some of the more experimental or unusual work the literary critic may want to privilege. Obviously we need to understand both, and can probably only understand the non-canonical in the light of the canonical, and it is therefore imperative for the different departments to know and respect each others work: for Linda Anderson (2001) (say) of Autobiography to talk or be ventriloquized in conversation with! Stockwell; or the aforementioned Boulter with Short. Cognitively speaking, Discourse Processes continues to be a journal worth watching, to complement some of the work in a collection like van Peer and Chatman. Peter Dixon and Marisa Bertolussis article which opened the first issue of the year caused somewhat of a flurry, though on closer examination, as often with such academic flurries, the difference seems to boil down to a polemic emphasis rather than anything more fundamental. Somewhat in contradiction with their article in van Peer and Chatman, though more convincingly to my mind, Dixon and Bertolussi (2001b) offer A Challenge to a Common Assumption, when it is claimed that those who study text processing tend to take text, as communication, where canonical communication is face to face and oral, and thus such researchers underestimate the importance of the mode of writing, as well as tending to exaggerate the importance of a reader straining to recover supposed intentions of a writer. It is further claimed that such an approach becomes particularly problematic where literature is concerned, since authors (not speakers) intention is arguably even less relevant than usual, and ambiguities and uncertainties of the essence of how literature works: even though the texts fail to communicate reliably, they are still successful as literature (p. 13). Focus on the activities of readers as readers rather than overhearers or some other second-order reality is therefore urged. The article is thus very much in line with the linguistics of writing mentioned earlier (nobody speaks), including passim references to the circumstances of literary production and transmission, and so of texts, which editing theorists have pointed to in recent years (p. 14). One possible reservation might be a tendency to refer still rather unproblematically to text comprehension (whose comprehension? similarly, Raymond Gibbs seems to hold ideas of interpretations as right interpretations only). When Gibbs (2001a) responds as one of the named culprits (in Gibbs, 1999), his stress that readers do look for authors is not in contradiction with Dixon and Bertolussis ideas: what is important is the text itself and the readers mental processing, knowledge and expectation (Dixon and Bertolussi, p. 15). Gibbs is surely right that part of expectations, and Dixon and Bertolussi are not clear enough about this, is to search for an author. Empirical studies demonstrate that ordinary readers consciously use their assumptions about authorship to interpret texts and infer what authors likely wish to communicate through their

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texts (Gibbs, 2001a: 75). [W]e are not disputing that writers have intentions and that these are reflected in the text; clearly they do. We also are not arguing that readers are uninterested in the intentions of the (implied) author [sic]. Our point is simply that what controls the readers inferences in this regard is generally the text, not the authors intention. This may all sound like a rehash of Wimsatt and Beardsley (1954) but these are more sophisticated versions of that debate. A second valid criticism, but one equally easily incorporated (Gerrig and Horton, 2001), is that it is unhelpful to think of Categorical Versus Continuous Views of Communication, that is, that ordinary conversation and literary writing are varieties along a continuum rather than completely different animals because of technological differences in mode of communication. In this way, for example, readers will look for intention more or less according to whether they are dealing with a business e-mail or a poem by Keats, but with differing expectations of success, and in combination with other agendas, including pleasure, we hope, in the case of Keats (Miall and Kuiken in van Peer and Chatman, 2001; Chatman, 2001). One of the more convincing and challenging empirical studies of readers reading literature in this year (by Victoria Kurtz and Michael Schober in Poetics) concludes that themes do not reside in texts in any obvious way but are constructed by readers, and also that thematic inferences are not computed automatically, as part of comprehension, but rather later as acts of interpretation (p. 139). Understanding the interaction of the parameters of the reading experience is clearly going to need much ongoing research in the future. Another study to tackle the relation of more cognitive studies to narrative in 2001 was David Herman in Narrative Inquiry. Even if not everybody would want to follow Hermans enthusiastic eclipse of earlier narrative studies by the brave new cognitive world available from the MIT Encyclopaedia of the Cognitive Sciences, he is right to point to the usefulness of this source in guiding less informed critical and cross-disciplinary thinking. I know of at least one lecturer and his students who have found the freely available online resource to be invaluable (Herman refers only to the hard copy which is perhaps more comprehensive; I have not myself seen this). Cognitive studies of metaphor (like parody, an overused term?) seem thinner on the ground this year, though Leezenbergs Contexts of Metaphor is a thoughtful contribution, attempting to develop insights from Gibbs, Wittgenstein and others with interesting accounts of earlier writers to reconceptualize metaphor at a semanticspragmatics (the relevance of context) interface which draws, in conclusion, on Vygotsky. Gibbs himself also published his Proverbial Themes We Live By (Poetics, 2001b), which, though it could be criticized for some rather grandiose or imprecise claims and lack of empirical evidence for them (something like its intertextual predecessor) makes an interesting attempt to describe and classify uses of proverbs in everyday conversation. However, I suspect the situation is less clear than is suggested here. Cognitivists should also notice the often innovatory investigations of Ren Dirven et al. into Language and Ideology (2 volumes).

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A useful empirical supplement to Gibbs (2001b) is Anita Naciscione who insists from study of corpora, including literary text, that the use of phraseological units in discourse needs to be seen as typically instantial and creative, as in extended metaphors or punning, which speakers and writers use to give coherence to their discourse. Nacisciones Phraseological Units are of wider ambit than proverbs, though including them, but extending to idiom, fixed expressions and the like. The study gives much food for thought to those working on language as culture (literature, advertising) and creativity in language use as well as secondlanguage acquisition (discourse competence). Other contributions to the creativity in language use research effort would include Brigitte Nerlich and David Clarke, whose study in the Journal of Pragmatics demonstrates the importance of not being clear in everyday discourse, through pragmatic exploitation of ambiguities and obscurities latent in language in the interests of the creation of intimacy and social bonds (p. 14). (Compare Dixon and Bertolussi (2001b) on literature, earlier.) Antonio Lillo in English Studies provides a useful lexicographic compendium of linguistic xenophobia in rhyming slang, with a brief commentary, although it would have been more comfortable to see clearer signs of the writer being disturbed rather than mildly amused by this kind of racism: verbal playfulness [sic] and creativity in word-formation (p. 336). A more far-ranging study of lexis and creativity is Barbara MacMahons psycholinguistic look at creative literature representing slips of the tongue in Joyce and OBrien, also in English Studies. The Third Policeman is shown despite claims of some psychoanalytic critics to represent more accurately naturally occurring data, where Finnegans Wake is more concerned to relate sound and multiple meaning activation in what is in fact a more traditionally poetic tradition. If true disruption of meaning and the like are to be valued by postmodernists, it seems, OBrien is the better bet. Eric Stanley, across two extensively researched articles in Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, investigates deliberate lexical puns and other creative devices through literary history and across languages, where the effort is lexicographical rather than critical. Kupferberg, Green and Gilat, a further illustration for Naciscione, in an article in Narrative Inquiry, trace the use of metaphor as a cohesive device in troubled callers help to problem lines in Israel, as (to return to an earlier theme) the callers narrativize their lives for volunteer interlocutors. Computational stylistic studies this year included Cynthia Whissell and Lee Sigelman in Computers and the Humanities. Their study of power language (simple, highly imaged, emotionally evocative, with references to American cultural values) in presidential inaugural speeches through history suggests style is the times rather than the man. Wendy Baker ambitiously traces Biberian dimensions of stylistic variability across creative writing in English in three continents in pursuit vain as it turns out of possible universals of gender and language use across cultures (World Englishes). The results are negative and the discussion somewhat speculative, but at a minimum such a study provides backing for those who argue that contextless men and women need to be replaced by more carefully grounded discussions (compare Coupland [2001a] and

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Susan Ehrlich, 2001). Herbert Igboanusis article in Multilingua is a welldocumented study of Igbo English in Nigerian English literature as a significant stylistic literary device. Turning more precisely to gender as a stylistic concern: (5) In FEMINIST CRITICISM voice has been a central preoccupation (Wales, 2001: 407) Toolans revised textbook (2001: 8.7.2334) has revised and updated the Gender section of his critical linguistic introduction to narrative, though Wales (2001) stays with feminism, and arguably Toolan could have done the same. Linda Andersons account of Autobiography may also be mentioned here as very much a feminist take on a genre generally agreed to be much concerned with conscious identity construction in language. It is therefore slightly disappointing that the plethora of relevant linguistic work available is not visible in this study, whatever its more obviously traditionally literary merits. Something of a missed opportunity in my view. Take, by contrast, Susan Ehrlich, where a researcher much respected for her earlier narratological work (Ehrlich, 1990; compare Lanser, 1981, 1986) turns her devastatingly thorough and conscientious attention to the ethical issues involved in Representing Rape in Canadian hearings in the first instance. This is a careful, in many ways exemplary, critical discourse analysis of an issue which is shown to be much illuminated by close attention to the language in which incidents and people are narrated and discussed. Linguisticideological constructs like men, women and the whole field of sexuality and rape are scrutinized through a careful case study whose ramifications evidently stretch far beyond the immediate case study. Ehrlich successfully brings together (or shows the inseparability of): (1) the study of language use: how individuals draw upon linguistic resources to produce themselves as gendered and (2) the study of linguistic representations: how culturally-dominant notions of gender are encoded (and potentially contested) in linguistic representations (p. 4). The opening chapter is in its own right a valuable state-of-the-art exposition of feminist discourse analysis. A related study is Irina Anderson and Geoffrey Beatties in Semiotica which, relevant to earlier points made in this article, critiques the lack of ecological validity of psychological investigations into attitudes to and perceptions of rape among the general public because the invented narrative vignettes used in such research are shown to be unrepresentative of stereotypes of acquaintance rape as opposed to real rape, and the way such stories are typically constructed in the press. The psychologists research is important and potentially valuable, but needs much more subtle understanding and knowledge of everyday narratives of the issue. Elsewhere Jennifer Coates, in an article in Narrative Inquiry, pursues the previously noted phenomenon of sequential conversational story tellings, here between male friends, where data selected show supportive cohesive second stories where the second narrator orients very carefully to the story told by the

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first narrator, not competitively, as has been observed of more adolescent subjects, but to demonstrate that they are listening and paying attention, doing friendship, as Coates terms it (p. 81). Clare Walshs Gender and Discourse is another notable feminist critical linguistic contribution, in this case examining representations of women and uses of language in the public sphere politics, the Church, environmental groups, Irish and Welsh politics and the media. Walsh appears less reluctant than Ehrlich would be to accept a view of womens language, and in general I felt the strength of this critical discourse analysis is less the theoretical sophistication, but rather the books rich range of extensive data. Ingrid Pillers Identity Constructions in Multilingual Advertising is an important contribution to the study of English uses in Europe (possibly to be supplemented by lexicographical work like Manfred Grlachs Dictionary of European Anglicisms), as well as of advertising in magazines. It returns us also to ideas of Bakhtinian voice, first prompted, she writes, by contemplating the Made in Germany [sic] label at the bottom of a German-language advertisement in a German-language glossy magazine (where Made in Germany connotes quality and sophistication which is best conveyed in the English language for the target reader-consumers). A careful corpus-based as well as qualitative study reveals English doing symbolic work in these advertisements (German is used for more functional work) to activate stereotypes of aspiration and ambition for younger professional elites who see their sophisticated successful (and fun) future in cosmopolitan travel, electronic and satellite technologies and what we might term high style living in general. Paul Simpsons offering on advertising in the Journal of Pragmatics is a more mainstream pragmatic-linguistic investigation of advertising as appealing to reason or more mood oriented, even poetic values (often through narrative frames which generate humour or tension). Both these studies add to our understanding and knowledge of modern advertising techniques, and reinforce the old stylistic insight of the proximity of art and advertising. If we should still be in any doubt, Dolf Zillman and Sylvia Knobloch in Poetics illustrate viewers responding to daily news as drama spectators. Studies of drama itself are as usual thin this year, with the significant exception of Jonathan Culpepers eagerly awaited study of characterization in drama. Part 1 deals with social and cognitive psychological perspectives on Mind, with Part 2, Text, showing the relevance of pragmatics and politeness studies to the analysis of (especially, but not exclusively) dramatic texts. While the literary critic will look for a little more attention to the specificity of dramatic text (linguistics of writing) and bemoan a certain lack of historical perspective, I was reminded of Shorts position (as in the Epilogue quoted earlier), that stylistics exists to explain rather than add new interpretations, to deal with the ordinary, popular and everyday more than the exceptional and original. Orientations to this position will be likely to determine responses to Language and Characterisation. Literary language uses are both different and the same, for most of us, and another way to read Culpepers study is as a contribution to a better understanding of those complexities.

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Studies of poetry and poeticity are stronger, again as usual. At the more technical end Nigel Fabb in Lingua looks at non-prominent syllables in English iambic pentameter, and the problems raised for generative metrics, emerging with a Jakobsonian formulation at the end of a difficult but enlightening discussion. Vered Shemtov in Poetics Today hears yet more Bakhtinian voices, now in the social sedimentation of poets metric choices (or hesitations). Paul Friedrich, in an article in Language and Society itself impassioned and characteristically unorthodox and original, argues for universal linguistic signifiers of lyric epiphany, moments of transcendence part of the human experience that can and should be studied as part of cultural linguistics and sociolinguistics (p. 217). One sees it all at once; synchronic, monocular vision of an absolute aesthetic truth (p. 218) give a flavour of this writing. Among Friedrichs concerns, here as in previous publications (thicker sound texture, p. 219) is sound symbolism, and this is another perennial that seems to be attracting renewed commitment from many researchers at present. Olga Fischer and Max Nnny prefer the term iconicity for their ongoing project, on The Motivated Sign. I am struck by the range of eminent contributors from the USA and Europe, but including only one Briton. Why the lack of British interest? Admittedly, one of the most stimulating chapters (Of Markov Chains and Upholstery Buttons, pp. 289302) is by Jacques Lecercle, now based at Cardiff University, who continues to worry productively at the conundrums of natural language and constructed sentences in linguistics and literatures status somewhere between. Another contributor is Piotr Sadowski, on gl- initial consonant clusters in English (though, strangely, with no reference to Bolinger). Sadowski appears again in 2001 with another observant paper on gr- words. If suspicions of some readers are being confirmed or aroused, a useful effort to distinguish what exactly can be claimed for sound symbolism in specific environments is David Mialls paper for Poetics, which demonstrates the sensitivity of his readers of fiction to contrasts rather than sounds in isolation: This, in a word, is why such effects can be described as iconic rather than symbolic, suggesting a relative rather than a fixed meaning (p. 69). Pedagogically, Ron Carter and John McRae produced a valuably revised student History of literature in English. Adrian Beard explores updated ideas for sixth form teachers and students under headings of the texts context, the readers context and the readings (sic) context. In addition, Urszula Clark in War Words looks at ideologies of English language literacy and standards across different educational sites in the UK, USA and abroad; and John McRaes edited volume on Reading Beyond the Text should be looked at too for a wide international range of approaches to second-language teaching and literature pedagogy. Particularly useful also is David Hanauers intervention in debates on literature use in second-language classrooms (Applied Linguistics). Methodologically, the study is exemplary, and I will certainly direct my own students to it in future. As Hanauer argues, despite strong assertions for and against, not to mention much indifference, there is very little actual empirical

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data relating to the reading and comprehension of literature within the language classroom (p. 295). Is it helpful for second-language acquisition or not? In what ways? (Hanauer looks at focus on form arguments with regard to poetry reading.) And again, what can second-language readers of a poem actually be observed to do? This protocol-based study of advanced students responding to a poetry reading task is therefore important as a precedent as well as in its own right, and will offer some grounded comfort to many of us too in its conclusions but you must read it for yourself if this is an area that concerns you professionally. An omission from Wales (2001), some will feel, is any sustained attention to new media uses of language, despite the interest this has raised in recent years, including 2001. David Crystals Language and the Internet is rightly cautious and provisional in its claims, but also right to claim that this is too important an area of contemporary language use for linguists to ignore. He provides, as we would expect, a very readable overview. Chapter 2 compares the language of the Internet with established characteristics of speech and writing (compare, among other features, discussion in Sandra Cornbleet and Ron Carters The Language of Speech and Writing.) Chapter 3 deals with identities on the Internet. Separate chapters deal with e-mail, chatgroups, virtual worlds (MUDs), the Web and Prospects for future developments with further references. Crystal is sure something new and important is happening to language in these environments. Tim Shortis provides one of the best Routledge Intertext monographs to date, at a more pedagogical level, with The Language of ICT. A distinctive strength is the extremely useful web-site netting-it.com which can be used by researchers at any level. Sections such as news on line in Michael Toolans revised final chapter of his Narrative will also be of interest in this area. Ethical concerns have arisen in my discussions of critical discourse analysis and feminism, among others. A new entry in Wales (2001) is ethical stylistics, which is proposed as a significant route for future developments in the field. I close then with Peter Mhlhusler and Adrian Peace, whose Discourses of Ecotourism in Language and Communication seems to me a valuable intervention in pressing issues for our time and an indication of what a socially and politically responsible stylistics can look like (including its accessible style) which can, we hope, be profitably read by administrators and a wider public. Whale watching, ecotours and guided walks around Fraser Island, Queensland, come under scrutiny here, all criticized for their evasiveness, exploitativeness and ineffectuality, behind the masks of concern. Tour guides and brochures portray a view of nature as a Darwinian struggle, which would seem to justify implicitly the disappearance of less fit species in the modern world. Whales are framed as performing, even in a circus. Any measure of understanding is set aside in favour of entertainment value (p. 373); anthropocentric world views are promoted, while native people are effaced linguistically as in life: Ostensibly, the emphasis of ecotourism is on teaching, interpreting, and changing attitudes. As our analysis shows, however, those objectives are seldom met, and there is little evidence that a serious attempt to address them has been made (p. 378).

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Language is used to reproduce a complacent or fatalistic or inconsistent view of environmental issues in this context (applicable of course much more widely than Fraser Island). This is critical or applied linguistics or ethical stylistics dealing with the most serious issues in urgent and committed tones, and it may indeed point a way forward for others of us too.

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Address
Geoff Hall, Centre for Applied Language Studies, University of Wales Swansea, Singleton Park, Swansea SA2 8PP, UK. [email: g.m.hall@swansea.ac.uk]

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