EL5221 Discussion: Session 2

Linguistics, Literature, Stylistics and Pedagogy

Discussion date: 22^nd August 2006

Today's discussion session will concentrate on preliminary issues, mainly in relation to lecture notes 1, and the further readings recommended for lecture 1.

1. As this is our second session and everyone doing the module is (or should be) here, you should take the opportunity to introduce yourselves:
   • Very basic personal details — name, full-time/part-time student, profession (previous or present), etc.
   • What do you hope to achieve by doing this module?
      
2. What is literature? How do you define it? Are there boundaries to what is and is not literature? You may be interested in looking at the following, which is a corpus-driven study of what literature is, according to a group of students surveyed:
   • 'What is literature, really? A corpus-driven study of students' statements' by Sonia Zyngier and Tania M. G. Shepherd Style 37.1 (Spring 2003): 14–26.
      
3. What is your highest attainment for the study of literature? Are you familiar with all the terms defined on my page, A Brief List of Some Key Terms in Literature?
• In this connection, you may be interested to take a look at a website created by some of my previous students as part of their project work. They were doing the related course Stylistics and the Teaching of Literature. What are your views of their website?
   
4. Discuss some of the issues found in lecture notes no. 1:
   Basic requirements
   • Are you up to them?
   • What difficulties do you think you will face?
   • Grapho-metric and orthographic features
   • What are they?
   • Do you think they are significant?
   • Semiotics and style
   • Are orthographic and grapho-metric features to be looked at as non-linguistic features that ought to be considered as semiotic units?
      
5. Is the linguistic analysis of literature of relevance in the teaching of literature or language? This is of course the topic of your project as well. What are your views of the following articles? Are they relevant to what you are interested in doing for the project?
• Steve Buckledee 'Language and literature in tertiary education: The case for stylistics' English Teaching Forum 40.2 (2002): 8–13.
• Urszula Clark and Sonia Zyngier 'Towards a pedagogical stylistics' Language and Literature 12.4 (2003): 339–51.
• Ian MacKenzie 'Institutionalized utterances, literature, and language teaching' Language and Literature 9.1 (2000): 61–78.
• John Tinker 'Vagrant sympathies: From stylistic analysis to a pedagogy of style' Style 37.1 (Spring 2003): 86–100.

Last revised: 21 June 2006