Description
MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS Registering the Difference Reading Literature Though Register 1999 Edition by Lance St. John Butler
The concept of register is a tool for readers of all kinds of texts, especially literary ones. This book explains how register can be used without resorting to the full panoply of linguistic jargon. Readers at all levels have often fought shy of trying to "do stylistics" with their literary and other texts because of the apparently impenetrable terminology in which the discipline of linguistics wraps them. Here is a book that will help you to read for style without expecting you to become conversant with transformational grammar or functional systemic linguistics. After a brief outline of the topic of register and a history of its development (including hijacking by linguisticians) this study considers literary register and Register and Power using examples from the work of writers such as Hardy, Beckett, and John Fowles. Mikhail Bakhtin and Roland Barthes have influenced the author's approach and the result is a rapprochement of language and literature. This book could be used as an introduction to any kind of serious reading and could serve as a textbook in courses concerned with English language stylistics and the "interface" between language and literary studies. Table of contents :- Part I Reading for a register: noticing a difference; the history (and the hi-jacking) of regisister; two big distinctions - formal/informal and written/spoken. Part II The ways the register works: registers of culture and power; literary register; register and genre; translating register. Part III Case studies: "pestling the unalterable whey of words" Samuel Beckett's attempt at unstyle; register and dialect - Thomas Hardy's voices; "singing to each other" - sounding like poetry.