Sandrine Sorlin

Le rapport éthique au discours

Les traditions philosophiques et rhetoriques de l’epoque antique ont alternativement aborde l’usage technique du langage comme un moyen d’acces au progres moral ou comme un instrument dangereux de manipulation. A l’epoque classique, certains philosophes des Lumieres ont preconise une therapie du langage visant a nous rendre conscients de notre usage des mots. Plus recemment, le renouveau de la rhetorique, qu’on observe depuis plusieurs decennies, semble inseparable d’une reflexion ethique. Fruit d’un colloque international et interdisciplinaire (Montpellier, avril 2011), cet ouvrage collectif s’attache a mettre en relation le questionnement ethique et les usages publics du langage dans une perspective historique et prolonge ces analyses par des investigations contemporaines. Il rassemble les reflexions theoriques et les analyses pratiques d’eminents specialistes autour de trois periodes majeures (rhetorique antique, âge classique, epoque contemporaine), en croisant les regards methodologiques francais et anglo-saxon. nCe livre contient des contributions en francais et en anglais.

Three major handbooks in three years: Stylistics as a mature discipline

This review article brings to the fore what the publication of three handbooks in major publishing houses in the past three years (The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics, The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics and The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics) can reveal about the state of stylistics in 2016. After depicting the specific character of each volume, the article highlights the way old theoretical models in stylistics are re-exploited in innovative ways and gives prominence to new theories and perspectives that have developed rigorous methodologies and proper purposes. It also makes apparent how the volumes both explicitly and implicitly perceive the field of stylistics as regards its scope and frontiers, the extent of its corpora and its relation with other close disciplines. If it inherently welcomes interdisciplinary collaborations, it yet seems to do so without adulterating its primary concern for language. The three handbooks show that stylistics has entered its prime as a discipline. Yet although it has become a self-assured field, it remains uncompromisingly open to criticism and debate as reflected in some chapters. The last sub-section is devoted to the future prospects of stylistics in terms of the promising research paths the discipline is currently taking.

The ‘indisciplinarity’ of stylistics

Abstract This paper aims at showing why the stylistician can be construed as a prolific “impostor” in a most positive sense: pledged to no specific linguistic prophet, she can opt for different theoretical linguistic tools (in the sphere of pragmatics, critical discourse analysis, cognitive grammar, etc.) depending on her object of study and what her research question is. The liberty claimed by the stylistician explains why stylistics is the “undisciplined” child of linguistics, shirking any clear definition of its boundaries. It will be argued that stylistics can only exist as a cross-disciplinary field given its conception of language as fundamentally contextualized. If it was a discipline determined by clear-cut pre-established boundaries, stylistics would be far more “disciplined” but would run the risk of serving only itself. The broad goal of this paper is thus to evince that the “indisciplinarity” of stylistics constitutes its very defining essence. With this aim in mind, it will demonstrate what stylistics owes to other disciplines, what it shares with similar language-based disciplines and what it can offer to other fields or practices of knowledge.