Cooperation Beyond The Text:a Pragmastylistic Approach To Author-reader Relationship Of Fiction

Pragmastylistics refers to the study of literary text in terms of communication, using pragmatic models or from pragmatic perspectives. Compared with traditional stylistic studies, pragmastylistics has many advantages:1) it goes beyond the word and sentence levels, and studies the literary text/discourse,2) it takes context into consideration,3) it examines and explores plays and fiction effectively, while traditional stylistic studies focus on poetry,4) it advocates the study of communication in literature, and5) it often employs multiple models to do a research.Still, the previous studies of pragmastylistics have their imperfections. First, they mostly concern the communication inside the text, viz. communication between the characters in literary works, without accounting for the communication between the author and the reader. Second, the drama is widely and comprehensively studied, whereas the fiction is usually neglected.Therefore, the present study aims at exploring the communication beyond the text, i.e., that between the author and the reader of fictional prose. A constructive view on author’s intention and reader’s response is held in this study, that is, the author’s intention and reader’s response are constructed from the text through close readings. In addition, the present study adopts stylistic analysis and intuitional judgment as its methodology, thus gaining the advantages of both subjective judgment and objective analysis.Taking Grice’s theory of conversational implicature and the Cooperative Principle as the main framework, and also drawing from the theory of rhetorical narratology, the present study analyzes the means and effects of author-reader communication. The author could use various stylistic and narrative techniques to communicate with the reader, and the reader actively responds. The means of author-reader communication cannot be separated from its effects, including cognitive, emotive, aesthetic, and ethical ones.The study proposes a modified maxim of Quality for literary communication that is different from the one for everyday communication. In addition, some special features of the implicature theory are discovered when applied to literary communication. For example, for everyday communication, the maxim of Quality is superior to the other three maxims, but in terms of literary communication it does not enjoy such superiority and the maxim of Manner becomes foregrounded.The present study is interdisciplinary from two perspectives, combining stylistics and pragmatics as well as integrating pragmastylistics and rhetorical narratology, which will rejuvenate the study of stylistics and widen its scope. The combination of rhetorical narratology and pragmastylistics adopted in this study could be said another breakthrough after that between narratology and stylistics. In addition, the study breaks the borderline between linguistics and literary studies, which could be drawn from for future research.