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Rating: 
Summary: How many faces has stylistics criticism?
Review: This exciting volume organized by Jean Jacques Weber provides an overview of this subarea of linguistics. As he says "the book focuses on the main problems that have fascinated scholars working at the interface between language and literature: What is literature? How does literary discourse differ from other discourse types? How do we read and interpret literary texts? What is style? What is the relationship between language, literature and society?"Fine essays written by a few of the most important scholars of the stylistics area are edited as chapters of the book. One can choose while reading them all or just a special one. Each section introduces a particular approach, thus covering the major tendencies in stylistics in the last 35 years: formalist, functionalist, affective, pedagogical, pragmatic, critical, feminist and cognitive. The aim is to provide a full sense of what stylistics is all about. The reader will find out who are the main stylists up to the presente and what do they think about the discipline. Readers are encouraged to take up their own position in the fundamental debates. To grant this task, the early chapters introducting approaches current in the 1960s and 1970s are each followed by a more recent paper which takes issue with some of the assuptions behind these theories. The second part of the book presents the main currents in contemporary stylistics: pedagogical stylistics and the differents types of contextualized stylistics practised nowadays. There are suggestions for further reading, and notes and references are provided for each essay. I would recomend this book for all that work with linguistic criticism, not just literary stylistics studies. It is also a good "guide" for students, who are seeking for information and discussion about the interface between language and literature.
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