Yoshifumi, Saitō
(1997)
Style and creativity: towards a theory of creative stylistics.
PhD thesis, University of Nottingham.
Abstract
The purpose of this thesis is to present a new theory of creative stylistics as an antithesis to traditional description-oriented stylistics. For this purpose it undertakes:
(1) a selective historical survey of stylistics with special attention to its academic formation in the context of the theoretical dissociation between linguistics and literary criticism (Chapter 1),
(2) a theoretical survey of stylistics with special attention to the way it has been defined and subcategorized (Chapter 2),
(3) a rearrangement of various stylistic theories according to the criterion of purpose, and a cognitively oriented demonstration of redefined linguistic, literary, and pedagogical stylistics (Chapter 3),
(4) a theorization of creative stylistics as a prescriptively oriented discipline complementing the descriptivism of traditional stylistics, in terms of the cognitive processes of textual creation (Chapter 4), and
(5) a demonstration of creative stylistics through an examination of my own literary writing, together with a discussion of further pedagogical and cross-cultural issues arising from this (Chapter 5).
Through these chapters I make it clear.
(a) that the theoretical proliferation, the variety of nomenclature, and the arbitrary subcategorization of stylistics has made this discipline seem more complicated than it really is;
(b) that stylistics has so far only followed the course laid down by descriptive linguistics and literary criticism, and has not yet fully explored or exploited the dynamic interaction between language and literature, since it has hardly paid attention to the issue of the creativity of style and language;
(c) that, in order to establish stylistics as a truly interdisciplinary field of study between linguistic and literary studies, we need to take up the classical idea of rhetoric with its prescriptive function as well as the new idea of 'creative language awareness' in order to open up the domain of stylistic study for the purpose of textual creation;
(d) that, as the descriptive analyses of traditional stylistics should be retrievable, so the processes of creative stylistics should be replicable for any creatively-motivated writer, irrespective of the kind of text he or she is trying to create;
(e) that, by being replicable, the theory of creative stylistics would be extraordinarily useful in pedagogical contexts in helping language learners both to improve their skills in writing and to sensitize themselves to language and literature; and
(f) that creative stylistics is designed to explore and exploit the possibilities of breaking down the native/non-native opposition in English studies and of bridging native/non-native cultural gaps in aesthetic creation.
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