| dc.description.abstract | In this interdisciplinary dissertation, I problematize the issue of style at the sentence level from a variety of perspectives, past and present, literary and compositional. My two-fold driving question throughout is, Can an adult significantly improve his/her sentence-level style, regardless of inborn linguistic talent, and if so, what methods will most effectively bring about such improvement? Put another way, to what extent is style learnable, a techne or craft, and to what extent is it simply a matter of gift?
After its heyday fifty years ago, the study of style has all but disappeared from the academy in recent days. In this dissertation, I build upon the work of the few scholars currently seeking to resuscitate style studies, but I provide new directions by concentrating upon the problem of individual stylistic change, and by making explicit the complexities fundamental to stylistics in order to highlight the need for further theoretical inquiry.
In the Introduction, I demonstrate the real-life stakes of style, explain why style is particularly exigent in today’s university environment, and review the history of style’s unusual decline in the academy, arguing why it is critical that this decline be reversed. I explore my central questions—including questions of style’s definition, measurability, and learnability—in the following chapters through a series of case studies, first of a representative writer from the past, then of myself and five current-day writers.
In Chapter One, I symbolically spotlight problems of style addressed throughout the dissertation in my case study of Charlotte Brontë. I claim an appreciable change of style between Jane Eyre (1847) and Villette (1853), detailing rhetorical devices repeated throughout Villette that create in the later novel a more elevated yet, I argue, dissatisfactorily contrived style. My argument generates problems of authority: Who determines what constitutes stylistic improvement, and by what criteria? Focused on questions of metacognition, I pose possible conscious motivations for Brontë’s departure from Jane Eyre’s more natural, emotionally direct style, such as a determined effort to assert her work as belonging to the canonical tradition and disassociate it from “women’s writing.” On the other hand, I ask to what extent Brontë was even conscious of the change in her prose, or whether the change was perhaps the unconscious (or unwanted) result of her recent personal tragedy. I thus reflect upon what amalgamation of internal and external forces may have influenced the writer’s change of style, and also consider how Brontë’s education, including her unusually extensive reading and the imitation exercises she practiced under Constantin Héger’s tutelage, is manifest in particular elements of her prose.
This consideration of education bridges to Chapter Two, in which I assess my own reading history and stylistic self-education as I emphasize the problem of nature versus nurture in relation to writing style. Continuing thematic questions raised in the previous chapters through a concentration on problems of subjectivity, metacognition, talent versus techne, and stylistic evaluation, I examine my decades-long struggle to change my language patterns during composition. The failure of my attempts to significantly change/improve my prose style, and the lack of help received from the educational system in this endeavor, illustrates problems resulting from the collective academic tendency to sideline style at the sentence level.
In Chapter Three, I learn, through in-depth interviews, about the varied methodologies by which five current-day writers have combated this tendency and worked autonomously to improve their sentence-level style. In keeping with the previous chapters, the case studies of present-day writers approach style from both a literary and compositionist perspective, and the results of the interviews confirm the inseparability of reading (literature studies) and writing (composition studies). The motifs guiding my interview questions are reflective of the problems unraveled in the foregoing chapters. The responses of the writers therefore enable me to offer incipient answers to the questions raised throughout this work, while simultaneously complicating the issue of style further. Taken as a whole, the qualitative compositionist study of Chapter Three substantiates my overarching argument that the academy’s neglect of style comes at a high price. Style studies should be pursued, then, for the sake of our relevance in English studies and for the purpose of becoming better equipped to address the needs of struggling student writers.
Throughout this dissertation, my goal in raising questions and pointing out problems is to bring style into the foreground, indicating how little we know, even now, about style itself and about how an individual’s style improves. Having drawn attention to the stakes of style and to problematic assumptions made about stylistic changeability, I point to the disconnect between the university’s neglect of style studies and the growth of popular interest in style. As my research here reveals, the potential for student interest in style—potential as yet untapped—provides an opportunity to make literature and composition studies relevant to students in these days of shrinking English departments. | |
