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Prepared by: Ms.

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Feminist
Stylistics

Feminist
Criticism
Feminist
Movement
FEMINISM

FEMINIST

STYLISTICS

FEMINISTS
VIEW

They hold a belief

that
women are treated
oppressively and
differently from men
and that they are
subject to personal
and
institutional
FEMINIST
discrimination.

STYLISTICS

FEMINISTS
VIEW

They believe that

there is a
general difference in
the way that men and
women are treated in
society as a whole
and the way they
view
themselves and
FEMINIST
others view
STYLISTICS
them as gendered

Theoretical Bases of Feminist

Criticism

1. Understanding of literature (written

by men)
through the experience of reading
as a woman,
and queries the supposed
objectivity or
neutrality and universality of the
written discourse.

FEMINIST

STYLISTICS

2. Queries the evaluative

procedures which have
established a canon of literary
works where
minor writers
are
3. Discusses
the frequently
predominantly
women.
misogynistic
image
of women in the literary works.

FEMINIST

STYLISTICS

Feminism and Feminist Criticism,

therefore, have given rise to a host
of critical views about language,
the medium of literary reality, and
the real world codification of social
values. Some of these views have
crystallized into a fresh text
linguistic theory as well as an
approach to the study of stylistics
referred to as FEMINIST
STYLISTICS.

FEMINIST

STYLISTICS

FEMINIST
argues STYLISTICS
that there is a male
hegemony in both
the treatment of women in society
and their
characterization in literary works.
seeks to formulate an authentic
counter-image
of women through their writings.
explores the ways in which literature

FEMINIST
STYLISTICS
In the process,
literary art is seen
essentially as
a medium for the foregrounding of
female
experience
and the destruction
of
Feminist Stylisticians
place less
male
emphasis on the
stereotypes
about
women.
artistic on the artistic function of
language than
on other aspects of language. The
beauty of

FEMINIST
STYLISTICS

Thus, the heart of Stylistics is the

change in focus of analysis from the
strict analysis of text in itself to an
analysis of the factors that
determine the meaning of the text in
Feminist
writings
and feminist
its social
context.
stylistics recognize that since
literature both reflects culture and
shapes it, literary studies can either
perpetuate the oppression of women

FEMINIST
STYLISTICS

Feminist Stylisticians highlight in a

systematic
manner the self conscious attempts
by female
writers to modify traditional modes
of language
Sarah
Mills
then
describes
stylistics
use by identifying the dialectical
a
form
of
politically
motivated
features as well
stylistics
whose aim
is to of
develop an
as the alternative
forms
awareness
of
the
way
gender
is
expression in a text.
handled in texts.

FEMINIST
STYLISTICS
Feminist stylistics achieves its
goals through close linguistic
scrutiny and the explication of
linguistic theory to set out the
rationale for feminist textual
analysis.
The GOAL
therefore of this
approach to stylistic study is the
EVOLUTION OF LINGUISTIC and
SOCIAL CHANGE.

CHANGING TRENDS IN
FEMINIST STYLISTICS
Early feminist stylisticians
emphasis was
placed on the similarities between
texts
produced by both men and women.
They now insist that there is a
In modern times, however, emphasis
womens writing, which is
has shifted.
fundamentally different in style
from mens writing.

Virginia Woolf asserted that there

was a sentence which women
writers had developed which she
termed the female sentence or
the sentence of the feminine
gender.
For Woolf, certain women writers
crafted a new type of sentence
which is looser and more accretive
than the male sentence.

Modern feminist stylisticians thus

insist that men and women differ
even in their ways of thinking and
perceiving reality. The linguistic
differences in the way men and
women perceive social reality is now
technically referred to as
genderlect.
Woolf refers
to this as the female
sentence and Mills describes it as
the
gendered sentence.

THEMATICAL
LY

Male
Sentence
Has the element
of control
and choice
Clear and
rational

Female
Sentence
Aims for
admiration and
approval
Lacks authority
& rationality
Emotive

Assertive and
CHARACTERISTICS
Apologetic
authoritative

OF
MALE AND FEMALE SENTENCE

LEXICALLY
Feminist stylisticians repudiate
such genderlectal
suffixes as -man/-woman and ess in
expressions like
draughtsman/woman, air
-draughter(s)
(not
hostess and the cataphoric
use of
draughtsmen/women)
he to include
maleattendant(s)
and female. They instead
-flight
(not
advocate:
flight steward/ess)

CHARACTERISTICS
OF
-hotel attendant(s)
(not
MALE AND FEMALE SENTENCE
waiter/waitress)

LEXICALLY
Women are said to prefer such

devices of
hedging as really, however,
because, and so
more often than men.

Personalized pronouns as I, she,

he and
they are associated with
womens CHARACTERISTICS
writings
OF
while
male
texts
prefer
MALE AND FEMALE SENTENCE
determiners like a,

GRAMATICALLY (SYNTACTIC
LEVEL)

Womens sentences are generally

shorter
and so structurally less complex
than longer
sentences, and that because of a
perceived lack
of variety in sentence length
fewer of the
female writers possess a
CHARACTERISTICS OF
noteworthy style than
MALE
AND
FEMALE
SENTENCE
do their male counterparts.

 Another major distinction between

the female and
the male sentence at the syntactic
level is that
whereas mens writing prefers
subordination

(suppression; hypotaxis;
inequality) which is
exemplified by subordinate clauses
and complex
sentences, that of women employs
CHARACTERISTICS OF
co-ordination
(parataxis;
equality).
MALE AND
FEMALE SENTENCE

 Coupland (2077 p.58) posits in

support of this view
that: Feminist writers pursue nonlinear, antihierarchical and discentred writing.

But Mills concludes that the female

sentence is far
more grammatically complex than the
male sentence
which is linked only by hypotaxis,
that is, byCHARACTERISTICS
that fact
OF
that the clauses are placed side by
AND FEMALE SENTENCE
side;MALE
but it is

 Paradoxically, while the male

sentence with
its subordination and
hierarchizing is seen as
transparent, the female
sentence is described
as opaque on account of its
complexity.

CHARACTERISTICS OF
MALE AND FEMALE SENTENCE

SUMMARY
FEMINIST LINGUISTICS is a
systematic, empirical analysis of a
texts language, which brings to light
patterns or representation of issues of
sexism, political correctness, reader
positioning, agency, discourse,
Thus, feminist stylistics will
character and sentence analysis.
continue to interrogate the
linguistic basis for the struggle of
the emancipation of womanhood as
reflected in literary and non-literary

COGNITIV
E
STYLISTIC

Cognitive stylistics combines the

kind of explicit rigorous and
detailed linguistic analysis of
literary texts that is typical of
the stylistics tradition with a
systematic and theoretically
informed consideration of the
cognitive structures and
processes that underlie the

(Elena Semino and Jonathan

Culpeper, Cognitive Stylistics)
"What is new about cognitive
stylistics is the way in which
linguistic analysis is
systematically based on theories
that relate linguistic choices to
cognitive structures and
processes. This provides more
systematic and explicit accounts
of the relationship between texts

Semino and Culpeper strongly

argue that just as linguistics
matters to stylistics, so too
does psychology matters to
cognitive stylistics.

As Don Freeman writes in his

afterword to Cognitive Stylistics,
`what the essays in the volume
share is a far firmer empirical
basis and multidisciplinary
theoretical approach than was
possible given the state of our
knowledge in the early 1970s
about human cognition

In Gerard Steens essay in

Cognitive
Stylistics, Metaphor in Bob
Dylans
Hurricane: Genre, Language
and Style,
Steen analyzes a song about a
boxer with

As Steen asks:
Should a cognitive approach to
language and style aim for a
relatively superficial
psycholinguistic account for the
initial stage of accessing and
integrating the words of the
utterances, or for a relatively
deep and more generally
cognitive account of some

Steen notes that while some

critics have imagined cognitive
stylistics to be a branch of
cognitive linguistics, he
nevertheless desires to locate
cognitive stylistics within the
cognitive psychology of reading
(2003: 194).

For Steen, Cognitive- stylistic

analysis of language and style
needs to assume some sort of
framework for the cognitive
processing of texts, and that is
what may be found in the
psychology of reading. Steens
emphasis on psychology, in other
words, is an attempt to defend

Steens version of cognitive

stylistics also relies on empirical
methodology. After explaining
the relevance of research in
psychology to stylistics, Steen
then tests a prediction he makes
about how readers/listeners will
identify metaphors in the Dylan
song.

And according to Steen,

Cognitive Stylistics is an
admirable work but it
requires serious training in
social science research
design.
He adds, producing a
movement back and forth

Only in that way can

linguists and cognitive
psychologists begin to
cooperate on the study of
language and style in
reading and other forms of
language use ( Steen, 2003:

According to Simpson, cognitive

stylistics is one of the established
branches of contemporary
stylistics, but, as he admits, What
distinguishes cognitive from other
sorts of stylistic models is that the
main emphasis is on mental
representation rather than on
textual representation
(2004: 92).

For Simpson, defining language

as a form of
cognition allows us to study the
human
mind when it appears that what
we are
studying are texts.
What this means for cognitive
stylistics is
that we must give equal
attention to

As Simpson writes:
Stylisticians [in the 1990s]
began...exploring more
systematically the cognitive
structures that readers employ
when reading texts. In doing so,
they borrowed heavily from
developments in Cognitive
Linguistics and Artificial
Intelligence, and this new
emphasis in research method saw
the emergence of cognitive

While cognitive stylistics is

intended to supplement, rather
than supplant, existing methods
of analysis, it does aim to shift
the focus away from models of
text and composition towards
models that make explicit the
links between the human mind
and the process of reading
(Simpson 2004: 39).

According to Simpson, cognitive

stylistics is one of the established
branches of contemporary
stylistics, but, as he admits, What
distinguishes cognitive from other
sorts of stylistic models is that the
main emphasis is on mental
representation rather than on
textual representation
(2004: 92).

THANK YOU
FOR
LISTENING!

To GOD be the