ves to the study and interpretation of literary texts, it was the growing importance of European historical linguistics during the mid-nineteenth century that produced the most easily recognized component of early modern stylistics: a deeply rooted concern with formal linguistic description of literary language. The methodological benefits that stylistics gained by uniting literary interpretation and linguistic analysis were matched by institutional gains as well [2]. Historical and general linguistics were well-established academic disciplines at the turn of the twentieth century, and stylistics could expect to benefit from that status. The use of linguistic procedures thus offered stylistics both an affinity with an established discipline and the possibility of founding the description and interpretation of style upon the bedrock of science. . p> While its air of scientific analysis made linguistics attractive, linguistic science was not itself a monolithic entity. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, linguistic study oscillated between a desire to define language through efficient analytical methods (often requiring a-contextual descriptions) and another, competing desire to define language as a social and cultural phenomenon. The work of the neogrammarians, key figures in the formation of linguistics as a modern scientific discipline, displays the tension well. Although the neogrammarians began their work with the intention of reintroducing behavior into linguistic description, the attractiveness of scientific method dictated the slow elimination of the user as a complex part of the description. The result for some linguists, notably the philologians, was a sacrificing of the real heart of linguistics to a sterile formalism; for many, however, the shift was the logical result of a move into the modern scientific age. It was in terms of these separate views of the proper role of linguistic description that the predominant approaches to modern stylistics developed, and because of the strong Continental influence of Romance Philology on historical linguistics, modern stylistics usually is seen as having begun there. p> The roots of modern stylistics can be uncovered in the work of Charles Bally (1865-1947) and Leo Spitzer (1887-1960). Bally's Précis de stylistique (1905) stresses the description and analysis of a language's generally available stylistic properties. Literary texts, in Bally's formulation, are particular examples of language use, and the analysis of their style is not a central part of the general stylistics he emphasizes. Nevertheless, Bally's work, and its later realization in the work of Jules Marouzeau ( Précis de stylistique française, 1946) and Marcel Cressot ( Le Style et ses techniques, 1947), strongly influenced the formation of literary stylistics. Such analytical work offered literary critics a relatively precise methodology for describing the components and features of a text. In place of an open-ended and evaluative interpretive process, linguistics both underwrote the need for a more precise analytical attitude toward language study and provided specific categories for characterizing sound, rhythm, and eventually syntax, as well as points of comparison and contrast between registers, forms, and functions within genres and literary periods. p> In contrast to the stylistique of Bally and his proponents, Leo Spitzer insisted upon following the more philologically based tradition of textual (and often literary-textual) analysis. Such work, while using the analytical techniques of modern linguistics, strives to unite the analytical description with a critical interpretation that relates the style to a larger conceptual or situational frame. Style is seen as an expression of a particular psychological, social, or historical sensibility or moment rather than as a general property of a particular language. In undertaking these wider interpretations, critics such as Spitzer did not, however, assume that they were defining their stylistics as separate from, or even as a subset of, linguistic analysis. In both his etymological studies and his more specifically literary-critical interpretations [3], Spitzer insisted that he was promulgating a general program of linguistic study, offering his stylistics in opposition to what he saw as the more reductionist analyses of general, scientific linguistics. Spitzer himself emphasized the split until the end of his career, regularly referring to his work as Stilforschung (literary, cultural interpretation of style - philology in his eyes) to set it apart from that of Stilistik, or Bally's stylistique (eg, "Les Études de style et les différents pays "23-39). At the same time, he assumed - as did fellow critics of style such as Ernst Robert Curtius, Karl Vossler, and Helmut Hatzfeld - that he was not reducing the scientific aspect o...
