I. Theoretical fundamentals of literary analysis

1.1. Notion of style. Genre

Being exposed to the literary analysis of emotive prose mainly we bear in mind the two key points of the notion of style: functional and author’s style.

The author’s individual style is his/her individual manner of presentation, the author’s choice of language means correlated with his/her creative concepts. According to Seymour Chatman, “style is a product of individual choices and patterns of choices among linguistic possibilities”.

The literary communication is not homogeneous, and proceeding from its functions (purpose) we speak of different functional styles. This Guide limits itself to consideration of the belles-lettres style (fiction). The main function of the belles-lettres style, distinguishing it from other styles, is to impress the reader aesthetically, to call forth a feeling of pleasure, caused not only by admiration of the selected language means and their peculiar arrangement but also by the fact that readers are led to form their own conclusions as to the purport of the author. Besides, the belles-lettres style has informative and persuasive functions, also found in other functional styles.

The striking feature of the functional style under consideration lies in the artistic method as a special type of artistic vision, the way the writer chooses and analyses the factual material, the writer’s approach to the reality forming an artistic system (realism, romanticism, modernism, postmodernism) or a literary trend (baroque, sentimentalism, naturalism). Beyond this, the belles-lettres style has the following linguistic features:

• genuine imagery achieved by expressive devices;

• the use of words in contextual and more than one dictionary meaning, or at least influenced by the lexical environment;

• peculiar individual selection of vocabulary and syntax reflecting the author’s personal evaluation of things or phenomena.

Scientific language does not draw attention to itself, does not try to be beautiful or emotionally evocative. Its job is to point not to itself but to physical world beyond it, which it attempts to describe and explain. Literary language, in contrast, depends on connotation, i.e. on the implication, association, suggestion, and evocation of meanings or shades of meaning. Literary language is expressive: it communicates tone, attitude, and feeling. While everyday language is often connotative and expressive, too, in general it is not deliberately or systematically so, for its chief purpose is practical. Literary language, however, organizes linguistic resources into a special arrangement, a complex unity, to create an aesthetic experience, a world of its own. Unlike scientific and everyday language, therefore, the form of literary language – the word choice and arrangement that create the aesthetic experience – is inseparable from its content.

The belles-lettres style falls into language of poetry, emotive prose and drama. As being confined to emotive prose, its genres constitute particular conventions of content (such as theme) and form (including structure and style) which are shared by the texts by specifying themselves through variability in plot structure, setting, characters and language peculiarities. In such approach, broadly considered, genre is defined not only in terms of its language, but by features which could be described as external to the text itself. These include areas such as text purpose, writer/reader relationships, and the medium of communication, which naturally have implications for what is called internal features of the text, covering syntax, lexical choice, organization, layout, etc. Genres form a system of groups of texts defined by sets of conventions, which guide both the writing and reading of texts. Genres are often distinguished by the form of communication (e.g. narrative, drama), mood or attitude (elegy, satire), content (crime, science-fiction), the relation to reality (mimetic vs. non-mimetic), and aesthetic effect, or a combination of these criteria.

Texts within a given genre are likely to share certain features, though it is also possible for texts to differ considerably in terms of their structure and language.

The genres of the emotive prose can be of:

• small form: short story – covering one event of a person’s life; novelette – highly dynamic narration about an unusual incident; sketch – a documentary genre describing the morals of the society or some human type;

• medium form: a story about a person’s life interrelated with the lives of other people;

• large form: novel – traditionally defined as an extended fictional work of prose dealing with characters, action, thought, presenting a picture of real life, especially of the emotional crises in the lives of the personages portrayed.

Novels can be categorized in different ways: historical novels (showing conflicts of the epoch); war novels; didactic novels (intended to teach people a moral lesson, showing the forming of the character); travel novels (about an imagined travel); adventure novels; love stories; psychological novels (revealing the human soul); family epic (the history of one or more families); social novels, political novels; philosophic novels (concentrating on the clash of ideas or concepts); picaresque (which refers to the novels that feature, in a series of episodes, the adventures of a “wandering rogue” kind of character); Gothic novels (featuring mysterious happenings in castles, and thrilling, violent events); faction (mixture of fact and fiction presenting true events in fictional form).

Also, novels are referred to as humorous or satirical according to their tone or intention; as allegorical (the characters and events represent the ideas that lie outside the text and often teach a moral lesson); and lastly as epistolary (that consist of letters exchanged between the characters).

The definition of genre is closely connected with the cultural, political, historical and social conditions, and any text can be seen as embodying certain moral values and ideological assumptions. It is suggested that all cultures share the concept of shaping text according to some genres, and that the ways the texts are adjusted in relation to genres may show similarities across languages.

Question: To what literary artistic system/trend/genre does this piece of writing belong?

Language in use for analysis

the sharp-edged suspense of a detective story

the best-known scientific popularizer of our time

The passage now commented upon is a specimen of…

The information is rendered in terms of…

The genre chosen by the writer dictates the adoption of the certain style.

Several characteristic features pertaining to belles-letters style texts are observed in…

It belongs to the sub-style work as …

The novel is a rich blend of historical fact and derived fiction / a modern parable that invites readers to probe below its deceptively simple surface for deeper truths