Telecinematic Stylistics - (Advances in Stylistics) by Christian Hoffmann & Monika Kirner-Ludwig (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Over the last two decades, the study of discourse in film and television has become one of the most promising research avenues in stylistics and pragmatics due to the dazzling variety of source material and the huge pragmatic range within it. Meanwhile, with the advent of streaming and the box set, film and television themselves are becoming separated by an increasingly blurred line.

This volume closes a long-standing gap in stylistics research, bringing together a book-level pragmastylistic showcase. It presents current developments from the field from two complementary perspectives, looking stylistically at the discourse in film and the discourse of and around film. This latter phrase comes to mean the approaches which try to account for the pragmatic effects induced by cinematography. This might be the camera work or the lighting, or the mise en scène or montage. The volume takes a multimodal approach, looking at word, movement and gesture, in keeping with modern stylistics.

The volume shows how pragmatic themes and methods are adapted and applied to films, including speech acts, (im)politeness, implicature and context. In this way, it provides systematic insights into how meanings are displayed, enhanced, suppressed and negotiated in both film and televisual arts.

Review Quotes

Telecinematic Stylisticsdraws together a number of innovative studies to explore central themes and style choices in narratives from both film and screen. The chapters consider a range of telecinematic texts (from horror films to trailers and captions) through an equally comprehensive range of theoretical approaches (from corpus methods to cognitive pragmatics). These exemplary analyses successfully demonstrate the breadth of methodologies and topics within this exciting new field of research, and highlight how telecinematic discourse - in all its various contexts - can be examined rigorously and meaningfully through a stylistic perspective.
Chloe Harrison, Lecturer in English Language and Literature, Aston University, UK

Featuring rigorous stylistic analysis of a range of text-types - TV shows (including soap operas, documentaries, sitcoms and dramas), films, trailers and multimodal adaptations - this book demonstrates the increasing prevalence and importance of stylistic attention to telecinematic discourse.
Alison Gibbons, Reader in Contemporary Stylistics, Sheffield Hallam University, UK

About the Author

Christian Hoffmann is Senior Lecturer at the University of Augsburg, Germany.
Monika Kirner-Ludwig is Assistant Professor at the University of Innsbruck, Austria