Concepts of Decoding Stylistics

This book is based on the main principles and concepts of Decoding Stylistics. The term decoding stylistics (suggested by M.Riffaterre) stands for a trend in stylistics, a theory evolved by professor Irina Vladimirovna Arnold and developed by her numerous disciples (including the authors of the present book). As developed in this country Decoding Stylistics unites and applies the concepts and achievements of linguistics, literary criticism, text theory, poetics, hermeneutics to text analysis and text interpretation and as the term suggests it focuses on the receiving end, on decoding and the addressee's response. The aim is to help the reader towards better comprehension and enjoying literature, to develop his gift of responsiveness. Reading must be effective in forming the student's personality, it must provide material for improving his linguistic skills, his knowledge of American and English culture. This approach to text interpretation stems from the works of Russian linguists at the beginning of the XXth century L.V.Scherba (with his "explication du texte"), V.V.Vinogradov, M.M.Bakhtin, B.A.Larin. The core of reader-oriented decoding stylistics is presented by special types of contextual organization known as foregrounding. Some concepts and the mechanism of foregrounding were first foreseen and pointed at by the Russian formalists Y.Tynyanov, B.Tomashevsky, R.Jakobson, V.Schklovsky, etc.. The latter introduced the notion which he called "ostranenye", i.e. achieving a fresh awareness of life as reflected in the text, by the introduction of a novel form. The concept was later defined as "actualisace" or deautomatization by Mukarsovsky of the Prague School. Following the Czech scholars whom he translated P.Garvin wrote abour foregrounding as opposed to automatization. Modern American scholars employ the terms "dehabitualization", "defamiliarization" in an attempt to render Schklovsky's "ostranenye". Under the general heading of foregrounding