Affective stylistics

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Philippine Normal University
College of Languages, Linguistics and Literature
Department of Languages, Bilingual Education and Literature

Subject: Litt 502 (Introduction to Stylistics)

Topic: Affective Stylistics
Discussant: Manuel, Jesullyna C.
MAed- Literature

September 26, 2009

AFFECTIVE STYLISTICS: EXPLORING THE TEXT, THE READER
AND THE READER’S RESPONSE

I. INTRODUCTION

Philosophers from Plato to the nineteenth century recognize the central

importance of the reader in their theories of art or poetry. Plato's banishment of poets

from his Republic was due as much to the unhealthy influence that poetry had upon the

reader as to its suspect ontological status as an "imitation of an imitation." Horace, on

the other hand, saw the legitimate purpose of poetry as "to please and to instruct" the

reader. In both of these cases, however (and for most of the two thousand years since)

the reader is viewed as an essentially passive recipient of the work of art.

With Percy Byshe Shelley's declaration that poets are the "unacknowledged

legislators of the world" the Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century shifted

Affective Stylistics (Exploring the Text, the Reader and the Reader’s Response)

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the focus of literary criticism from the reader to the author. But it was not until the

advent of New Criticism, with its focus solely on the formal elements of the text (to the

exclusion of authorial intention and cultural or historical significance) that a

consideration of the reader's role in literary interpretation was condemned as the

"affective fallacy."

Once a consideration of the reader's role had been identified as a critical heresy,

those who chose to focus on this aspect of the literary endeavor, whether from a

structuralist, psychoanalytic, or phenomenological perspective, were grouped together

under the umbrella term of reader-response theory.

II. AFFECTIVE STYLISTICS AND ITS MEANING

Affective Stylistics is a term used by Stanley Eugene Fish to describe the

necessary reliance of the critic upon his or her affective responses to stylistics elements

in the text. According to Fish, the literary text is not formally self-sufficient; it is created

in part by the interpretive strategy that the reader deploys. One must therefore analyze

"the developing responses of the reader in relation to the words as they succeed one

another in time." The work and its result are one and the same thing; what a text is what

a text does. (www.library.utoronto.com).

Affective stylistics is derived from analyzing further the notion that a literary text is

an event that occurs in time- that comes into being as it is read rather than an object

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that exists in space. The text is examined closely, often line by line or even word for

word in order to understand how (stylistics) it affects (affective) the reader in the

process of reading. Although there is thus a great deal of focus on the text, which is why

some theorists consider this approach highly transactional in nature, many practitioners

of affective stylistics do not consider the text an objective, autonomous entity- it does

not have fixed meaning independent of readers- because the text consists of the results

occur within the reader. For example, when Stanley Fish describes how a text is

structured, the structure he describes is the structure of the reader’s response as it

occurs from moment to moment, not the structure of the text as we may assemble it-

like puzzle pieces all spread out at once before us- after the reader’s impressionistic

responses but a cognitive analysis of the mental processes produced by a specific

elements in the text. Indeed, it is the “slow motion,” phrase by phrase analysis of how a

text structures the reader’s response for which affective stylistics is perhaps best

known.

In his book, Is There a Text in this Class, (1980), Fish emphasizes that the

reader controls his or her experiences when reading and there is a less control of the

text in the interpretive act. Fish’s position holds that the readers actually create a piece

of literature as they read the text. Fish concludes that every reading results in a new

interpretation that comes about because of the strategies the reader’s use. Fish also

gives emphasis to the role of his so called “interpretive community” whereby meaning is

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attributed to a text through readers who, as members of such a group, share certain

“interpretive assumptions”. In recent years various reader-response theorists have

turned to the concept of Fish’s interpretive communities to more fully account for the

diversity of readers' interpretations of literary texts. Fish has moved away from his early

belief that all "informed readers" will arrive at similar interpretations of a single text, and

now recognizes the fact that various interpretive communities will shape their members'

reading experiences in different ways. Ironically, while Fish uses the concept to account

for diversity of interpretation, Holland sees membership in a particular interpretive

community as a means of accounting for similarity of interpretation between individuals

with different identity themes.

The affective stylistics of Stanley Fish is based, in part, on the fact

that readers don't defer their interpretation of a story, a poem, or even a single sentence

until the end, but constantly create meaning based upon limited knowledge. As new

information is gathered, prior interpretations must be modified or rejected. While other

critics might ignore this process, Fish sees the modification of prior interpretations as an

inherent part of the text's meaning.

That Judas perished by hanging himself, there is no certainty in the scripture:
though in one place it seems to appear it, and by a doubtful word hath given
occasion to translate it; yet in another place, in a more punctual description, it
maketh it improbable, and seems to overthrow it. (“Literature” 71)


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According to Fish, the question “What does this sentence mean?” or “What does this

sentence say?” yields little because the sentence provides us with no facts with which

we could answer the question. Even if we notice that the sentence does say something-

it says the scripture gives no indication of whether or not Judas hanged himself- his point

is that the sentence tells us only that it is unable to tell us anything. In contrast, he notes,

the question “What does this sentence do to the reader?” or “How does the reader of this

sentence make meaning?” yield something quite useful.

What this passage about Judas does, Fish notes, is move the reader from

certainty to uncertainty. The first clause “That Judas perished by hanging himself, (which

is quite shorthand because most of us know that Judas hanged himself) is an assertion

we accept as a statement of fact. We, thus, begin with feeling of certainty that leads us

without being quite conscious of it anticipate a number of possible way in which the

sentence might end all of which would confirm our uncertainty. Fish offers these three

examples of the kinds of endings the first clause leads us to expect.

1.) That Judas perished by hanging himself is (an example for us all)

2.) That Judas perished by hanging himself shows (how conscious he was of the

enormity of his sin)

3.) That Judas perished by hanging himself should (give us a pause).

(“Literature” 71).


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These expectations narrow the possible meaning of the next three

words in the passage “there is no.” At this point, the reader expects to see “there is no

doubt” but is given instead of “there is no certainty”. Now the fact the Judas hanging

himself, upon which our understanding of the sentence has rested, becomes uncertain.

Now the reader is involved in another kind of activity. As Fish puts it, “rather than

following an argument on a well lighted path (a light, after all has gone out), [The

readers] is now looking for one. In such situation, the reader will tend to read the

passage, in hopes of finding clarification. But as we continue to read the passage, our

uncertainty only increases as we move back and forth between words that promised

clarity- “place”, “affirm”, “place”, “punctual”, “overthrow”, and words that seem to

withdraw that promise: “thought”, “doubtful”, “yet”, “improbable”, “seems.” Uncertainty is

further increased by the excessive use of the pronoun it because, as the sentence

progresses, the reader has more and more difficulty figuring out what it refers to.

Such analyses are performed by the reader’s response critics in order to map the

pattern by which a text structures the reader’s response while reading. This response

then, used to show that the meaning of the text does not consists the final conclusion we

draw about what the text says; rather, the meaning of the text consists of our experience

of what text does to us as we read. For a text is an event that occurs in time; it acts on us

as we read each word and phrase. As we just saw in Fish’s passage first reinforces our

belief about Judas, the reader probably already holds and then takes that reinforcement

away, leading the reader on in hopes of finding an answer that is never provided. If this

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kind of experience is created in the passage is repeated throughout the text from which

the passage is taken, then a reader response critic might say that the text teaches us,

through a pattern of raised expectations disappointed, how to read that text, and perhaps

how to read the world: We must expect that our expectation of acquiring sure knowledge

raised and disappointed. We desire sure knowledge. We pursue it, and we expect to get

it. But this text teaches us that we cannot be certain of anything. In other words, this text

is not only about Judas or the Scripture, but it is about the experience of reading. (Tyson,

1975)

III. SOCIAL READER-RESPONSE THEORY

While the reader’s subjective response to the literary text plays the crucial

role in subjective response theory, for social reader response theory, usually associated

with the later works of Stanley Fish, there is no purely individual subjective response.

According to Fish, what we take to be our individual subjective responses to literature is

really a product of the interpretive community to which we belong. By interpretive

community, Fish means those who share the interpretive strategies we bring to texts

when we read, whether or not we realize we’re using interpretive strategies and whether

or not we are aware that other people share them. These interpretive strategies always

results from various sorts of institutionalized assumptions (assumptions established, for

example in high school, churches, and colleges by prevailing cultural attitudes and

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philosophies) about what makes a text a piece of literature- instead of a letter or a legal

document or a church sermon- and what meaning we are supposed to find in it. (Lois

Tyson, 2006)

An interpretive community can be as sophisticated and aware of its critical

enterprise as the community produced by the followers of a specific Marxist critical

theorist. Or an interpretive community can be unsophisticated and unaware of its

interpretive strategies as the community produced by a high school teacher who instruct

his students that it is natural to read literature in search of a static symbols that tells us

the “hidden meaning” of the story. Of course interpretive communities are not static; they

evolve over time. And readers can belong consciously or unconsciously, to more than

one community at the same time, or they can change from one community to another at

different times in their lives. (Tyson, 2006)

In any case, all readers come to the text already predisposed to interpret in a

certain way based on whatever interpretive strategies are operating for them at the time

that they read. Thus, while Bleich (1975) believes his students produces communal

authority through negotiation that occurs after they read the texts, Fish claims that the

multiplicity of interpretive communities to which the students already belong, determines

how the students read the text in the first place. Fish establishes that readers do not

interpret poem. They create them. He demonstrated this point rather dramatically when

he taught two college courses back to back. At the end of the first class he wrote an


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assignment on the board consisted of the following linguists’ names his students were

studying.

Jacobs- Rosenbaum

Levin

Thorne

Hayes

Ohman (?) (Is There a Text? 323)

When his second class entered the room, he told them that the writing on the

board was a seventeenth century religious poem like the ones that they have been

studying. In the discussion that ensued, his students concluded that the poem celebrated

God’s love and mercy in giving his only begotten son for our redemption. Their

interpretation accounted beautifully for every word in the poem, including among other

evidence the following points: The poem is in the shape of the cross or an altar; “Jacobs”

suggests Jacob’s ladder, a reference to the Christian ascent into heaven; “Rosenbaum”

literally means rose tree and refers to the Virgin Mary, the rose without thorns, whose

son Jesus is the means by which human being can climb to heaven; “Thorne” thus refers

to Jesus crown of thorns, a symbol of the sacrifice he made to redeem us; and the letters

that occur most frequently in the poem are S,O,N ( Is There A Text? 322-29)

Fish’s point was proven that every literary judgment we make, including the

judgment that a particular piece of writing is a poem, results from the interpretive

strategies we bring with us as we read the text


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IV. READER’S RESPONSE THEORY TERMS AND PRINCIPLES

Unlike such rigorous theoretical approaches to literature as

deconstruction, psychoanalysis, or Marxism, reader-response criticism is less a single,

unified method of literary analysis than a collect ion of varied approaches with one

special interest in common--namely, the role of the reader in interpreting--or

experiencing--a work of literature

There are really two kinds of reader-response criticism: one is a

phenomenological approach to reading which characterizes much of Fish's earlier work,

and the other is an epistemological theory characteristic of Fish's later work. The

phenomenological method has much to commend itself to us as it focuses on what

happens in the reader's mind as he or she reads. Fish applies this method in his early

work "Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost." His thesis in this work is that

Milton used a number of literary techniques intentionally to lead the reader into a false

sense of security whereupon he would effect a turn from the reader's expectations in

order to surprise the reader with his own prideful self-sufficiency. The supposed intent of

Milton was to force the reader to see his own sinfulness in a new light and be forced

back to God's grace. Fish's thesis is a rather ingenious approach to Paradise Lost and to

Milton's (mis)leading of the reader (www.xenos.org/essay/litthry.com)


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Common Assumptions of Reader-Response Theories:

Reading may be
The text is a program Readers' responses to
Readers actively analyzed in its
designed to produce texts may be predicted
Readers follow learned construct the text's "temporal" or
events in readers' because of recurrent
interpretive rules or meaning by processes diachronic
minds, not all of them patterns in those texts
conventions (see Tyson which are not dimension just as
"correct." Texts try to which are presumed to
on Culler [1975], 230- necessarily linear but Structuralism
mislead us and we manipulate processes
2) which can be analyzed texts in
make predictable run by readers' rules or
predicted. their synchronic
mistakes. conventions.
dimensions.

Types of Reader-Response Methods, Objectives and Terms:

R-R Type /
"Reader" Definition "Text" Definition Processes Studied
Practitioner

efferent vs. aesthetic reading
(LR)
No prior-constraints on A set of instructions
who qualifies as a "reader," coded in words on the stimulus function produces
Transactional
defined as a "poem" page, from which meaning and blueprint function
Reader-Response-- corrects meaning (LR)
constructor (Rosenblatt); readers make
Louise. Rosenblatt
OR a more precisely "poems," acting at
(1978), Wolfgang Iser anticipation, retrospection,
defined "implied reader" times as a "blueprint" fulfillment or disappointment,
(1974), and Wayne
whose beliefs and to correct assumptionsrevision of understanding (WI)
Booth's Rhetoric of
conventions may be inferred (LR) or to project
Fiction, (1961)
from the text's strategies meanings upon the
(Iser and Booth) text (WI)

Affective Stylistics-- Slow-motion analysis of
No fixed meaning
Stanley Fish (the Literature is designed for sentences' release and
independent of
"Early Fish" of the "informed reader" who concealment of meaning in the
readers, but rather the
Surprised by Sin: The has achieved a definable readers' processing of syntactic
product of how the
Reader in Paradise "literary competency" for complexity and usage's power
work affects its
Lost, 1967) The "Later the genre and era from to generate denotative and
readers, phrase by
Fish" lost his belief that which the work arises connotative varieties of
phrase, clause by
texts produced any meaning.
clause, sentence by
stable meanings for

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readers unless those
readers belonged to
"discourse sentence.
communities" that told
them what texts meant.

Readers are psychological Symbolization (the symbolic
The text in the mind, world our minds create in
subjects who may discover
Subjective Reader- which we observe by response to the text)
their unconscious motives
Response--David means of reading
by observing their habits of
Bleich (1975) protocols recording Resymbolization (what our
meaning-distortion. There
what we thought the unconscious inscribes upon
is no such thing as a
(A subset of printed text meant and what we read)
Psychological Reader- "misreading" of the primary how we responded to
Response) text in Subjective R-R
that text/meaning.
criticism, only symptoms.

The text of the
readers'
interpretations of
Readers are psychological perceived threats in literature
literature are the
subjects whose unconscious
critic's true "text" and
drives may be studied by defense strategies
they are read for
examining their
Psychological Reader- thematic repetitions of
interpretations of texts for fantasy strategies
Response--Norman addition to or
the errors of omission and
Holland (1975) subtraction of the transformation strategies
commission they reveal.
literary work which
Holland recognizes
reveal the readers' anxiety reduction
"misreading" but still treats
"life themes," their
it as a reader's "symptom."
personalities'
grounding narratives
about existence.

Readers form "communities
of interpretation" based on actions of self-aware
Social Reader-
shared beliefs about the Whatever the interpretive communities
Response--Stanley
interpretive
Fish (the Later Fish of world, texts, and reading
community says the actions of unconscious
Is there a text in this behaviors. Those beliefs interpretive communities
establish legitimate and "text" is.
class?,1980.
illegitimate categories of
behavior for readers, and

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define unacceptable or
acceptable interpretations.

(http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng215/reader_response_terms.htm)

V. CONCLUSION

• The explanation of the meaning is not in the capacity of the syntax to

explain but rather it is in the capacity of the reader to discern the meaning

of a particular text.

• Meanings are actualized in the process of reading.

• It gives emphasis on the ability of man to give the world meaning rather

than to extract meaning that is already there.

• The experience of the reader while reading is an important aspect that

critics should focus on.

• That meaning is not the property of a timeless formalism, but something

acquired in the context of activity.

• Consciously or unconsciously we are all a part of interpretive community

and we uses our background when we interpret the text

• Interpretations will always be controlled by the relatively limited repertoire

of interpretive strategies available at any given point.


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VI. REFERENCES

Bleich, David. Readings and Feeling: An Introduction to Subjective Criticism . Urbana,
IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1975

Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities .
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980.

Guerin, Wilfred L. et al. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature Fourth Edition.
Oxford University Press. 1999.

Selden, Raman A Reader’s Contemporary Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory Third
Edition1993

Searle, Leroy. Critical Theory Since 1965, New York, 1986

Tyson, Lois, Critical Theory Today. New York 2006

Weber, J. The Stylistics Reader. New York. 1996

http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng215/reader_response_terms.htm

www. Sparksnote.com

www.library.utoronto.com

www.googlebooks.com


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www.wikipedia.com

www.scribd.com


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