Belles-lettres Style

This style has three subdivisions or sub-styles:

1) style of poetry

2) style of emotive prose

3) style of drama

The function of belles-lettres style is twofold:

a) to inform and communicate facts and ideas to the reader

b) to affect the reader emotionally

As regard to the poetry the order should be reverse.

All the three sub-styles have quite a number of common features. But in spite of that each has individual characteristics as well.

The element of emotion is definitely higher in poetry where the author reveals his feelings directly. Unlike poetry the number of colloquial elements will be larger in drama where the oral type of language is widely employed since the form of plays is basically that of dialogs.

While observing this last feature one should also bear in mind that the functional styles not infrequently interact with one another and with colloquial speech on the other hand.

Emotive prose may amply use the elements from other functional styles, those of official documentation, scientific prose, publicistic speeches and newspapers. As far as colloquial speech is concerned, it remains an integral component of the belles-lettres style. It’s naturally used in plays, dialogues of stories, novels. Elements of colloquial speech, when used in fiction, help portray a character through his speech, but such elements are hardly possible in the author’s narrative proper.

 

Literature

1. Galperin I.R. Stylistics. – Moscow, 1991.

2. Skrebnev Yu.M. Fundamentals of English Stylistics. – Moscow, 1994.

3. Enkvist, N.E. Linguistic Stylistics. – The Hague, 1973.

4. Esser, J. English Linguistic Stylistics. – Tübingen, 1993.

5. Wales, K. A Dictionary of Stylistics. – London, 1990.

6. Арнольд И.В. Стилистика современного английского языка (Стилистика декодирования). – М., 1990.

7. Балли Ш. Французская стилистика. – М., 1961.

8. Стилистический энциклопедический словарь русского языка / Под ред. М.Н. Кожиной. – М., 2003.