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Full page photoA Road to Aesthetic StylisticsALLS 7(4):95-112, 2016
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A descriptive investigation as such may precede or come along with the aesthetic interpretation. In this light, the
linguistic form is directed to sustain the aesthetic form; in the analytical process the two forms will be reciprocally
interlinked, as clearly structured in Fig. 2
Figure 2. The Two interlinked circles of Aesthetic stylistics
The
aesthetic interpretation
is a phase in which the linguistic findings will be interpreted aesthetically. If the language
of a literary text, for instance, forms a sort of aesthetic distortion to the norms of the standard language in terms of the
Prague Linguistic Circle, then this language serves an aesthetic interest on the side of the writer/speaker. As with the
descriptive analysis, the aesthetic interpretation will be bound to a specific theory of beauty. The history of ideas has
proven the advanced paradigms of philosophy of beauty from Plato to Santayana. So, in order not to be a set of cursory
or exerted notes on the descriptive description, the aesthetic interpretation should be framed within a definite aesthetic
coherent system of ideas.
In certain stylistic studies and academic papers, the two phases might operate in a divergence: there is a haphazard
connection between the linguistic finding and the critical interpretation. In order to avoid such pitfalls, the two stages of
analysis should be interlinked by a definite hypothesis; therefore, the whole interpretative process would flow through a
scientific and objective channel. Whether the aesthetic judgment is subjective (intuitive) or objective (scientific)
is debatable. What matters, here, is that our linguistic analysis should be structural since it is grounded in the linguistic
science of language.
The term
Aesthetic stylistics
might be circulated in the literature of modern stylistics to assert the aesthetic function of
language as in the literary and linguistic corpus of the Moscow and Prague circles in the first mid- twentieth century. In
his ( 1981) book,
Linguistic Theory and Structural Stylistics
, Taylor thinks that "great importance was given to the
choice and artistic arrangement of words" and " such a practice is seen as
aesthetic stylistics
, [ The italics are mine], as
it is ornamental in its approach." Sure, this was the main concern of structural schools whether in Europe or in the
United States of America. Figures of style were envisaged into a new vision; they were looked at as new powers in the
creation of aesthetic style, and not
ornamental
as Taylor has put it. Moreover. The form and content, in the classical
theory of rhetoric, are two separate processes, whereas in the modern structural theory, the term
structure
refers to the
hierarchically systematic arrangement of constituents in the span.
Aesthetic stylistics
, being a term, might have been circulated in the literature of stylistics; our approach is entirely
different in nature, technique, and application. Our approach, as the elucidation here above has shown, has nothing to
do, for instance, with Taylor's cursory term: the term in Taylor (1981) refers to the
poetics
of the
Formalist school
,
more specifically to Jacobson's linguistic paradigm in the interpretation of text- linguistics. Our orientation is a dyadic
process: a linguistic analytical process that leads to an aesthetic critical interpretation; the whole process is based on
the selected data for analysis. But a question may come to one's mind here: Is
Aesthetic stylistics
a merely theoretical
grid? Any theory may prove its validity by and through application: our orientation is applicable in the sense that it
can be applied, not only to literary artifacts as in
Literary stylistics
, but also to other discourses, including the divine
manuscripts.
The dyadic process followed by our approach might bring to the reader's awareness Austin's
Stylistic criticism
. In his
study,
Constraints on syntactic rules and the style of Shelley's Adonais
, Austin has followed a triadic process in
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