Stylistics is a branch of linguistics. It studies and analyzes linguistic features of texts — literary or otherwise.
Stylistics explains and interprets the choice of language — vocabularies and discourses — with the help of semantics, phonetics, morphology and syntax. Though used to analyze a wide variety of texts in fields as varied as journalism, advertising, cultural studies and political narratives, stylistics is more commonly used in evaluating linguistic features of literary texts. So it connects literary criticism with linguistics.
But literary stylistics, as believe some critics, has a scope too narrow to fully understand a literary work in totality since it is more concerned with the use of language and ignores the broader or wider perspective on literary texts. It cannot, sometimes, grip the aesthetical or philosophical aspects of a piece of literature. But stylistics does proffer some unique ways of understanding and interpreting literary texts by highlighting such aspects that are otherwise generally ignored in critical evaluation, for example, the use or repetition of peculiar sounds, choice of specific vocabulary, use of particular parts of speech, use of tropes, idioms, metaphors and other rhetoric techniques that basically concern the linguistic characteristics.
But it is to be borne in mind that stylistics and structuralism have different spheres, despite the fact that both draw their basic philosophy and principles from linguistics, as mentioned by Gopi Chand Narang in his Adabi Tanqeed Aur Usloobiyaat. Structuralism covers, says Narang, a wider range of issues that engulf almost the entire human activity including mythology, beliefs, rituals, rites, cultural norms, artefacts and almost everything that human beings employ to communicate or perceive some kind of meaning. All human phenomena are interrelated, say structuralist theorists, and can be understood through understanding this interrelation. Stylistics, on the other hand, limits itself to literary expression and its linguistic nature or form.
Urdu does not have a long history of literary criticism based on stylistics, as even in the West modern stylistics did not really take off before the early 20th century. In Urdu it was Prof Masood Hussain Khan who wrote the earliest articles on stylistics in 1960s. He introduced the discipline to Urdu, with introductory essays explaining the theory and the principles of stylistics.
Later on, Mughni Tabassum, Mirza Khalil Baig, Gopi Chand Narang, Shamsur Rahman Farooqi, Qazi Afzaal Hussain, Tariq Saeed, Naseer Ahmed Khan, Ali Rafad Fatihi and some others penned articles and books, practically analyzing the works of some maestros. But these critics are based in India and in Pakistan not much was written on stylistics until the 1990s when Qazi Qaisar-ul-Islam, Syed Mazhar Jameel, Saleem Akhter and Vazeer Agha began discussing the discipline in their articles in literary magazines.
Rubeena Shaheen, a lecturer from a backward area like Mianwali, wrote her MPhil thesis on the stylistic school of criticism in Urdu, under the supervision of Nasir Abbas Nayyar. It was published in 2012 from Lahore. Qasim Yaqoob compiled articles on stylistics in book form in 2017. And aside from that, not much has been written on stylistics in Pakistan.
Now another Pakistani woman scholar has written a dissertation on stylistics: Nabeela Azhar’s dissertation, titled Kalam-i-Ghalib Ka Lisani-o-Usloobiyaati Mutal’a has just been published by Lahore’s Majlis-i-Taraqqi-i-Adab. It studies the linguistic and stylistic features of Ghalib’s poetry.
The first and second chapters are introductory and discuss the linguistics and stylistics. The third chapter that in detail analyzes linguistic features of Ghalib’s Urdu poetry is divided into three parts: Ghalib and his deep interest in linguistic issues, Ghalib’s arguments on certain aspects of Urdu orthography and grammar, lexicological issues and Ghalib’s approach towards language and lexicography. It also takes into account the rhetorical, prosodic, orthographic and expositional aspects of Ghalib’s Urdu poetry.
The fourth chapter discusses stylistic features of Ghalib’s poetry with reference to verbal, semantic, phonetic and syntactical characteristics that are either distinctive of Ghalib’s poetry or are chosen by Ghalib for various reasons. It enlists, with citations, the couplets of Ghalib that show the use of specific idioms, metaphors, similes and figures of speech.
No doubt, the work is highly commendable and fills a gap, but has a trait that has become a hallmark of research works being carried out in Pakistan these days: the reproduction of long paragraphs — word for word — to support an argument or as a reference. It seems that the young Pakistani research scholars have never heard of the term paraphrasing, a tool in academic writings to produce authentic and plagiarism-free content. One wonders if their research supervisors ever bother to read the dissertations or perhaps they too have never heard of the term, which is so commonly used all over the world.
Though the book does have some sporadic instances where paraphrasing has been used, most of the contents are riddled with long quotations, reproduced verbatim. These quotations are properly referenced and are mostly taken from authentic works, but they exasperate the reader as they make the book sound like a term paper written as assignment by undergrad students.
Published in Dawn, June 30th, 2020
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