Discourse Strategies and Representation in Henry James: A Psychostylistic Study of the Matrix of Daisy Miller

Abstract

The present oeuvre explores the nature of stylistic choices that markedly appear in the literary discourse of Henry James in order to exemplify the desired aims of the author embedded within these choices along with the impressions these stylistic choices create on the mind of the reader in a multidimensional framework of Psychostylistics. Psychostylistics in its Postmodern orientation celebrates diversity in terms of narrative perspective, stylistic preferences, fictional substance and the entities of the writer, the text, and the reader. Keeping with this thesis, Psychostylistics endows not only with theoretical standpoint but a method to examine and investigate ‘style’ in the backdrop of narrative psychology in literary discourse. The theoretical assumption operational here is that ‘any conceptualization of a fictional world presupposes both a world to refer to, and a mind through which that world is reflected’ (Leech & Short, 1984:187). The formal design of the study is based on Roger Fowler’s theory of ‘mind style’. Practical analysis has been done by applying the properties of Bocketing 1994’s model of Psychostylistics eclectically and homogeneously. The main focus has been on focalization techniques, art of characterization, transitivity patterns, manifold narrative perspectives and marked stylistic idiosyncrasies resulting essentially as part of writer’s particular mind style. Likewise, the mutual interplay of language and consciousness has also been appraised to reveal how narrative perspective is counterbalanced by stylistic choices that direct the consciousness of the reader towards an apposite interpretation of the narrated phenomenon.