Stylistics as a tool for critical language awareness
Abstract
This study discusses the role of stylistic analysis in the development of ‘critical language awareness’ (CLA) which according to Fairclough (2010) is crucial for assessing ideologies transmitted in discourse. The Critical Stylistic approach is used to compare narrative strategies in fiction and non-fiction: in Ishiguro’s novel The Buried Giant (2015) and in Wolff’s book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (2018) by using analytical tools such as transitivity, participants, actions and processes, vocabulary, syntax, modality, generics, personal pronouns, speech acts. Considering ambiguous approaches to the issue of truth in mass media when hundreds of fact-checking sites are telling people how to separate ‘truth’ from ‘fiction’, this study argues that the linguistic approach to narratives can foster critical thinking by helping readers understand the interpretative nature of the meaning of the text. In the light of contemporary literary strategies, literature is affirmed as mode of ‘truth’ (Clark, 2006, p.63) in the sense of an increased self-knowledge and insight on the part of the reader who carries out interpretation not as search for truth, but as opening up to the text in relation to multiple meanings. The stylistic approach towards narrative strategies is pointed out as prevention of prescriptive and dogmatic readings and as encouragement for critical literacy. As Geoff Hall states, the linguistic approach to the literary text is relevant beyond the sphere of stylistics, as it becomes an attitude and self-reflection of the individual about gaining knowledge and understanding (2014, p. 239).
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