On the History of Stylistics

Seminar paper from the year 2017 in the subject Art - Visual arts general, stylistics, grade: 100, , language: English, abstract: The history of stylistics can be traced back to the era where the concentration was made on the oral expressions. Style, as we know today, has its origins back to the the ancient rhetoric which was called "lexis" by the Greeks and "elocutio" by the Romans. The ancient rhetoric was divided into five laws. The first law was made by generating and discovering textual material. This led to some arguments based on one of the Aristotelian proofs, logos, ethos, and pathos. The second law was made by the use of that material for ideal impact in any circumstances. This led to the constitution of the third law which stylized the textual material. Last but not least the forth and fifth laws were made by committing the material to memory and delivering it , if it was in the form of speech. The third law of rhetoric, which stylized the textual material, was based on two forms: the first form investigated the clarity, accuracy, and appropriateness of the language. The second form, on the other hand, investigated the figures of style in the language. So, these forms were either schemes, that distorted from the syntactic level of language, or tropes, which distorted from the semantic level. Style was also divided into three types, high, middle, and low. The high style was dedicated to literature and poetry. The low style was dedicated to more common performances of discourse communication. The middle style was a mixture of both styles and was dedicated to average situations.