The Aesthetic Use of Language and Literary Experience: An Introductory Pedagogical Stylistics

230 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1984.This dissertation outlines a pedagogical stylistics, an approach to teaching poetry based on the aesthetic use of language. Two assumptions are made: poetry is one of the arts and reading poetry is an aesthetic experience. This entails two points. First, one of the distinguishing features of poetry is the manipulation of linguistic structures for literary (aesthetic) effects. Language, for poets, is an artistic medium. Second, the effects created from the patterning of language result from received relationships between language and content. They are reader based. Literary (aesthetic) responsiveness depends upon the ability to intuit (read) the analogical relationships between the selection and arrangements of elements of language and what poets try to communicate.Chapter II explores the sense of sound in poetry. It argues that the "sounds" of words include a tactile element as well as an auditory element. The chapter explores the use of articulatory features of sound to come to terms with the sense of sound in poetry.Chapter III argues that to appreciate rhythm in poetry we must explore the relationship between the metered line and the line as connected speech. Words, phrases, and clauses maintain their integrity against the meter and carry their own rhythmic weight. The rhythm of a poem results, in large part, from how meter and phrasal rhythms interact.Chapter IV argues that syntax can be exploited for spatio-temporal features as well as conceptual ones. Syntax can be used to convey abstract "shapes" produced from the compositional nature of grammatical structures. Because syntactic units occur in time, the pace of these units can be exploited. Finally, because grammatical structures carry an associated meaning-usage, the semantic nature of syntax also can be exploited.Chapter V looks at the role that pedagogical stylistics can play in literary education by looking at the problem of the text and the reader.These studies are directed toward introductory college poetry courses. Pedagogically, they should lead students to a better reading experience of poetry and provide educators with pedagogic tools to investigate with students the relationship among literary expression, poetic content and themes, and the reading experience.Ope