Radical stylistics: yet another epithet?

Abstract

An investigation into the history of stylistics will reveal that definitions have had short lives, mostly because stylistics has tended to be narrowly defined. Very few studies have attempted to integrate all the multiple approaches into one large and flexible model (cf. Carter, 1989). As a result, stylistics has been sitting uncomfortably between linguistics and literature and questions about its validity remain in every theoretician’s agenda. These questions are not new. Twenty one years ago Fish (1973) asked what stylistics was and why people were saying such terrible things about it. Here he maintained that stylisticians could collect relevant data but were still unable to justify the interpretation of these data. The scientific method proposed failed when it came to interpretation, which remained arbitrary.