Literary notes: A linguistic and stylistic study of Ghalib's poetry.

Byline: Rauf Parekh

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...

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