At the initial stage of the emergence of stylistics as a branch of literary critical study, it was mainly concerned with the study of literary text without reference to context and other related factors affecting a text. Textualist stylistics and its predecessor, rhetoric assume that style, especially literary style, involves a deliberate shift of language away from its pragmatic, functional role disclosing meaning and towards a zone of playful self-reference. Barthes contends that this notion of style as an arbitrary self-referring system is a condition of all types of discourse. Again, LeviStraus argues that the various types of social, familial, sexual, political and ritualistic conventions constitute each human society and / or ethnic group. A literary text, therefore, is a product of a dynamic interaction of society and all its prevailing cultural aspects including oral tradition. Further folk and oral culture is indeed, not only a repertoire of linguistic forms but also a whole world vision, once inextricably linked with what is supposed to high, learned, literate culture. In the present study we propose to trace the relation between written literary text and orality and this will be dealt with in relation to Contextualist stylistics as developed by Barthes
Associate Professor, Dept. of English Suri Vidyasagar College, Suri, Birbhum (West Bengal)
