西风颂的文体学分析 英文

A Stylistic Analysis of Ode to the West Wind

Class 3, Name:XXX, Student Number: XXXXXXXXXX

Abstract:Ode to the West Wind is the most famous lyric poetry of Shelley, a well-known English romantic poet. In this poem, Shelley applied many figures of speech, combined scenery-depicting and emotion-expressing. The lively rhythm, effusive emotion and profound meaning unified the form and the content. This paper tries to analyze in the following three aspects----Firstly, at phonetic level, to illustrate that this poem render atmosphere and express ideological purpose by acoustics, mainly in rhyme and pause. Secondly, at lexical level, this poem applied simile, metaphor and personification to make unreal images more specific and vivid, make flat words full of strong infection. Last, at syntactic level, from the structural analysis of the inversion, repetition and rhetorical question in this poem, we know clearer about the relationship between forms and contents.

Key Words: Phonetic level; lexical level; syntactic level; forms; contents

1 Introduction

“Using proper words in proper places, and this is the real definition of style.”From the definition of style that Swift gave. We can make a comprehension that the language expression way of a literary work is the most remarkable style. As the old Chinese saying goes, “the style is the man”. By reading the words and phrases of a work, it is no wonder that we can guess the creating time and author of the work. For instance, the writing style of Elizabethan Age is full of passion and romantic color, and integrated and unified in structure. The style of Hemingway is clear, concise and simple in sentence structure.

But we cannot treat different things as the same; we don’t exclude the

possibility that authors in different times may have similar writing style. Actually, since the stylistics came into being, there is no unified definition of style. Many experts and scholars tried to give a definition of style from their own research fields. Simply speaking, there are two research objects of style—one is the ideological contents of literary works; the other is linguistic feature of style. That is to say, it mainly refers to forms and contents.

Contents are the thoughts and view of author. Forms include grammar, vocabulary, rhetoric devices and so on, i.e. linguistic phenomenon. Experts argued about the relationship between forms and contents all the time. Generally speaking, early stylists emphasized the research of language forms rather than contents, such as, both “way of writing”and “mode of expression”show the separation of forms and contents. But later, people are more and more likely emphasize the impartibility between them. Then, what’s the relationship between literary works and stylistics? Like a literary work can analyze in different angles, the analytical methods of stylistics are different. The variety of problem analysis comes from the influence of the linguistics and literary criticism. Until now, literature text is the most common materials of problem analysis. Stylistic analysis depends mainly on text itself.

Most stylistic analysis is not only for the purpose of simply analyzing the characteristics of text itself, but to show the function on explaining texts, or combine literature effects with language causes. From all above, we can draw a conclusion that stylistics mainly refers to the analysis of text and the application of language, that is, stylistic analysis means the combination of thoughts and language features of the authors. This paper tries to analyze Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind in phonetic, lexical and syntactic Level.

2 The Phonetic Level

Compared with other literary forms, poetry pays more attention to the musicality. Different from other authors that use languages to express information, poets not only express meaning with words, but also convey sound. The musicality of