ACC 220 Stylistics

Content

This 200-level course in the Rhetoric and Argumentation track takes as its starting point the third of the five canons of rhetoric, elocutio, to focus almost entirely on the persuasive and argumentative properties of style in the epideictic category of literature. This is thus centrally an Arts & Humanities course. In modern terms, such a course in rhetoric is often called ‘literary stylistics’ and involves the study of style in language. Stylistics attempts to establish principles capable of explaining the particular choices made by individuals and social groups in their use of language. A stylistics course offers students a systematic way of exploring (primarily literary) texts. It looks at the language of texts and tries to explain how that language creates meaning, style and effect. This course will focus on the three central notions of text, context and cognition within a stylistic framework. Some theoretical issues that will be dealt with will include lexical and syntactic foregrounding, sound & rhythm, point of view, speech and thought presentation, image schemata, cognitive metaphor, figure and ground, etc. A number of additional seminal texts on all these subjects will be read and discussed or presented by students on a week-to-week basis. Students will also have to present their own stylistic analyses to the class in small groups and individually. The course has two exams (one-mid term and one end-of-term) and a 3000-word essay project.
    The course consists of 30 two-hour sessions, distributed over 15 weeks. Every week you will have 4 hours of tuition. Unless indicated otherwise, class meetings will take place twice a week.  In addition to this, you must work 10 hours per week on this course preparing lessons, reading extensively and doing assignments. The last week of the course is reserved for the final exam.

Instructor

Dr. Suzanne Fagel

Period

Spring / 2012

Evaluation/Assessment

• Attendance, Preparation & Participation (APP): 20%
• Analytic presentations: 20%
• Stylistics essay: 30%
• Exams: 30% (1) Mid-term (stylistics 15%) + (2) End-of-term (cognitive stylistics 15%)

Course Material

• Short, Mick. Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose. London: Longman (1996).
• Wales, Katie. A Dictionary of Stylistics. (2nd ed). London: Longman (2001).
• The Course Reader (a selection of theoretical, academic articles).

Prerequisites

The following course is required in order to take this course:

• ACC 120 Introduction to Rhetoric and Argumentation

Additional Prerequisites

• This course is a pre-requisite for ACC321 Creative Writing: A Stylistics Approach and is strongly recommended for ACC320 Persuasion in Social Discourses;
• Most courses in the Linguistics and the Literature tracks will be useful ‘companion’ courses.

Required for

This course is required in order to take the following course:

• ACC 321 Creative Writing: A Stylistic Approach
• A&H 225 Sociolinguistics