Cognitive Stylistics in the Classroom

Abstract

1. Introduction Cognitive stylistics has recently emerged as a topic of much interest in university education in both literature and linguistics departments. (1) Its popularity is primarily built on the success that literary stylistics has enjoyed over the past thirty years, especially in Europe, and on the relatively recent emergence of cognitive linguistics as a highly persuasive approach to the study of grammar and metaphor. There has, however, been little interest in studying teaching methodology in the cognitive stylistics classroom. This article will therefore seek to start to address this omission. In the recent past there have been some excellent pedagogical articles written on the teaching of literary stylistics in the university classroom (see, for example, Short; Simpson; Verdonk). These articles have all sought to record the pedagogical state of literary stylistics at a particular moment in time. This article will seek to add to the periodical recording of such moments. In particular, it will attempt to present an overview, albeit limited, of some teaching practices in this current transitional period in stylistics, from primarily textual stylistic analysis to principally cognitive stylistic ones. The very fact that stylistics finds itself at the confluence of text, context, and cognition arguably makes this an even more interesting moment to check on teaching practices and student requirements. Essentially therefore, this article will seek to consider what students may need to know from the domain of mainstream literary stylistics in order to be able to fully and fruitfully access a cognitive approach to stylistic study. Hence, the central question that will be posed here is whether or not a prior grounding in mainstream literary stylistics is desirable for undergraduate students who might wish to take a course in cognitive stylistics. It might well be the case that students can take courses in cognitive stylistics without any prior knowledge of the workings of language and style in literature, without this having a marked effect on their capacity to learn in a cognitive environment. This is what this article will hope to go some way towards discovering. In short therefore, this response-based study will consider how cognitive stylistics is currently being taught in just one tertiary educational environment, namely, in the English department at the Free University, Amsterdam. In doing so, it will aim to highlight some of the pedagogical shortcomings and suggest some possible solutions in order to assist undergraduate learning in the cognitive stylistic classroom. 2. Methodology: Some Preliminaries As has been suggested, one of the major concerns in my own stylistics teaching at the dawn of the cognitive age of critical literary practice is to discover whether or not it is advisable to allow undergraduate students to take advanced courses in cognitive stylistics before they have taken a regular literary stylistics course. In short, I am interested in finding out whether students require a more textual approach to stylistics before they move on into a more cognitive stylistic domain. This then is the main question that the testing in this article will set out to determine, as none of the twelve students in my cognitive stylistics course had previously been involved in any kind of regular literary stylistics program. Prior to setting up the test, I was inclined to make the tentative prognosis that students would indeed benefit from such a preparatory textual approach to stylistics. As such, I predicted that the majority of the students might very well struggle to link those very cognitive concepts that they were in the process of learning back to linguistic form and function for the practicalities of stylistic analysis. There are obvious pedagogical reasons for wishing to know whether or not it is beneficial to find out if undergraduate students might benefit from an essentially linguistic/textual approach to stylistics, before they are confronted with a far more abstract, and arguably far more abstruse, cognitive one. …

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