Volume 38, Issue 2

Translating poetry raises various issues to do with the relationship between form and meaning, with linguistic and cultural relativity, and with the opposition between adapting the (foreign) world of the poem to the target audience and requiring the audience to enter that world. In this article I use the translation of poetry by German-Jewish poet Rose Ausländer to consider some of these issues as they affect, and are affected by, an apparent linguistic mismatch between English and German in the expression of time and uncertainty.

This article defines and discusses a type of irony that has eluded existing classifications, namely, “context-determined irony.” Although existing types of irony – whether called “verbal” or “situational” or modified by some other terms – are in varying degrees related to context, none of them is really context-determined. Compared with verbal or situational irony, “context-determined irony” generates more textual tension and semantic density due to the co-existence of the conventionally positive meaning and the contextually determined ironic meaning. It is revealed that such irony implicitly permeates Kate Chopin's “The Story of an Hour” (A lady of Bayou St. John, Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1894), a textual analysis that is backed up by intertextual and extratextual considerations.

As Donald Freeman once aptly remarked, urging demonstration rather than propaganda, “The only way to do stylistics is to do stylistics” (Freeman, Styles and stylisticians, 1973). But not everyone is willing to do stylistics, by any means. The case for stylistics still seems to be resisted or ignored – or it simply fails to be heard. In English Literature departments, various passing influences have served to sideline whatever considerable claims can be made for a properly informed stylistic analysis. More or less simultaneously, emerging academic realignments have threatened to leave stylistics marginalized in exactly those theoretical and descriptive areas on which it vitally depends, namely Linguistics and English Language. In fact, in almost all its connections, stylistics tends to be affected by marginalization or isolation – or by a puzzling failure to make its irresistible case. This paper, drawing on (or drawing attention to) several friendly and enlightened assessments, again makes the case for stylistics and demonstrates its relevance in the focused analysis of a poem, namely the sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's ‘Homer’ by John Keats. The analysis focuses on syntactic and grammetric features of the poem, sometimes coinciding with earlier literary discussions.

This article traces the long-running conflict between the interests of ‘Language’ and ‘Literature’ within English studies in Britain, using as springboard a letter from C. S. Lewis (then professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature), to Angus McIntosh (then professor of English Language and General Linguistics). Written in 1961 when ‘Lang. & Lit.’ hostilities were at their height, the letter points two ways: back to old battles in Schools of English between philologists and literary scholars, historians and critics, and forward to continuing disputes about the contribution of linguistics to literary criticism. The main focus is on the period 1957–1977, before the impact of structuralism and poststructuralism diverted the attention of literary scholars, but during the development of stylistics as a method of analysing literary texts. McIntosh emerges as a pioneering figure in the struggle to achieve an effective integration of literary and linguistic studies.