Stylistic Analysis In The Last Word

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The article aims to explore and investigate that how particular choices made by the writer contribute to create particular meanings. The story selected for the purpose of stylistic analysis is ‘The Last Word’ by Dr. Abdur Rashid Tabassum, who is the first winner of the PatrasBukhari Award for English Literature instituted by Pakistan Academy of Letters. Munawar S. Khalid (2009, November 02) remembers him as one of the outstanding Pakistani literary authority who has written more than three dozen books in English, Persian and Urdu. The story under consideration for the purpose of present analysis is from his book of short stories ‘A Window to the East’ , for which he received award along with cash prize from the President of Pakistan in 1983. …show more content…

These varied approaches, as Wales observes, are “due to the main influences of linguistics and literary criticism”. While Widdowson (1975) is of the view that stylistics is a link between the disciplines; literary criticism and linguistics, David Crystal (1980) sees stylistics as a part of linguistics which “studies certain aspects of language variation”. In this sense stylistic analysis tends to explore and explain the particular choices made by the writer/author in the selection of words and sentence structure. In other words the style employed by the author serves to present a particular emotion and meaning. Leech and Short (1981) also explains style as the way of the writer to convey message to the reader.
2.2 Stylistic Analysis
Traditionally stylistic analysis was seen as a way of exploring the meaning of literary text but now it has gone beyond this structuralistic approach and moved towards a more pragmatic orientation to “link choices in text to social and cultural context” (Thornborrow&Wareing, 1998). According to this view an author makes certain choices in relation to the particular context.
This does not imply that the trend of exploring the meaning in stylistic analysis has changed altogether. Along with the discovery of meaning, stylisticians have started taking interest in the ways in which features of text: particular choice of words …show more content…

In this way the writer achieves two goals through the use of this technique. Firstly, all the action is conveyed to the reader in a very economical way. Secondly, a strong bond between the protagonist and the other characters in the story is rendered, where all the other gardeners are concerned about the protagonist and the protagonist is well aware of this without them addressing him directly, and he is consoling

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