Speaker: Marcello Giovanelli @mmgiovanelli
Affiliation: Aston University, Birmingham (UK)
Title: Stylistic Perspectives on Covid Poetry
Abstract (long version below): Stylisticians have long been interested in perspectives, both the ways that authorial and/or narratorial stances in relation to the text can be analysed and, increasingly so, how reader data can be examined alongside the text to provide an overall sense of what Stockwell (2009) calls ‘texture’. Whereas early work in stylistics was simply formalist in nature, there is now a recognised and fairly established dual intensive commitment to text and reader response analysis that brings stylistic scholarship closer to empirical literary studies whilst still, and crucially, maintaining an essential focus on the language of the text by drawing on modern linguistics.
In this paper, I present work from my ‘Writing and Reading the Pandemic’ project that draws on a corpus of over eighty poetry collections that were published in UK/Ireland/USA/Canada between March 2020 and December 2023. Specifically, I exemplify stylistics’ dual intensive commitment by reporting on one aspect of a pilot study (outlined in Giovanelli 2022b) which examined how readers respond to a poem from Michele Witthaus’ collection From a Sheltered Place. The stylistic analysis highlights several foregrounded features that present interpretative potential for readers; the reader data highlight how readers draw on these language features to both make sense of their own experience and, crucially, show empathy towards the pandemic experiences of others. In other words, they demonstrate the ability to take on alternative perspectives or re-construe (Langacker 2008; Giovanelli 2022a) the scenes described in the poem.
Overall, I will argue that this dual intensive commitment offers a promising way of capturing what matters in literary studies but that stylistics could – and should - continue to learn more from established empirical methodologies.