‘If you’re going to do something that’s new and different in an area that hasn’t been looked at much before,you probably need to start with something not too complex’: An interview with Mick Short

[Dan McIntyre] One of the things I’d like to know about is how you got into stylistics because I suspect the way people do stylistic analysis has changed a bit over the years. You were an undergraduate at Lancaster University, weren’t you?

[Mick Short] Yes, it was 1965 when I entered the university.

And Lancaster was quite a new university at the time.

Yes. The first entry was 1964, and I started as an undergraduate in ’65. The university was still being built at the time. We all lived in Morecambe [a seaside resort] and caught the bus into Lancaster, and later the Bailrigg campus, to be taught. In my first year we had lectures in a deconsecrated church at the bottom of St Leonard Gate which the university had taken over temporarily, along with other buildings nearby. Later on, the church became a pub; now it’s just empty. The church had an upstairs as well as a downstairs, and this meant that you could choose where you sat; you could sit at the feet of the lecturers you revered – they lectured from the pulpit! – or you could go upstairs and look down on them. That was quite fun. We had to wear gowns to lectures and I remember one Philosophy lecture when the lecturer whirled round in the pulpit to write something on the blackboard, and knocked his papers off the lectern with his gown and onto the floor of the pulpit! We complained strongly about having to wear gowns in a new university and they became optional by my final year and soon disappeared altogether.

What made you choose Lancaster? Because it was so new, I imagine that it didn’t have much of a reputation at the time.

That wasn’t really much of an issue for me. I came from a poor working-class family and basically I had made it academically when, at the age of 11, I got a place in the grammar school in Lewes. ² I was the first person in the family to pass the 11+ exam. My sister, who was a bit younger than me, was always saying I got better treatment than her! It was a 15-mile bus journey from my village to Lewes every day (an hour’s journey), plus a 20-minute walk each way between the bus station and school. I started in the A form but was demoted to the B form at the end of the first year. I just couldn’t get on with the way the teachers taught maths, at 100 miles an hour. Essentially, they taught to the people who were already very good at maths. And I just got lost and couldn’t cope. I was a reasonably good student in the B form but not outstanding. I suspect, looking back, that I was trying not to stand out. And being demoted to the B form had rather dramatic consequences for me. It transpired that if you were in the A form, you continued with Latin right the way through to O-level GCE [General Certificate of Education]. But if you were in the B form, you only did Latin for the first two or three years and then it just stopped. And, at that time, to matriculate for an English degree almost every university required you to have a pass at O-level in Latin as well as good A-levels. My school sent people to Oxford and Cambridge every year. It was a grammar school pretending to be a public school, really (we played rugby, not football, for example, which was considered to be inferior, and I got into bad odour because I turned down playing rugby for the school in favour of village football and not having a long Saturday bus journey!). So it was already the case that I wasn’t going to be able to apply to the best universities. It would never have occurred to me to do it either. I didn’t think of myself as being clever. I was never expected to do brilliantly at A-level, and indeed I didn’t. I ‘achieved’ a B in English literature, a C in History and a D in French. So I was already thinking that I ought to apply to universities that weren’t so grand, if I was to go to university at all. My last UCCA ³ choice was St David’s College, Lampeter, in Wales, ⁴ a backstop in case I didn’t get in anywhere else. And when I went for the interview there, because I was already playing football for my village side in the East Sussex League Division One, they were desperate for me to come and play in their football team, so they gave me a ridiculously low offer (CC)! But although I enjoyed Lampeter when I went for interview, it was a long way and I thought, well, maybe they are not so strong if they are making me such a low offer. And because the new universities had just opened, there were more universities which didn’t ask for O-level Latin as a precondition for study in English, which was good for me because otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to get past that general matriculation requirement. So I applied to Lancaster amongst others. I went for interview to Leeds and I hated it! It was really cold, it felt miserable. and I felt lost. And then they were not that helpful in the interview either and, indeed, they rejected me, as did York, where again I went for interview. But Lancaster just made me an offer without interview and it was an offer I thought I could manage. So I put Lancaster first choice. One of the things that has always made me proud of Lancaster – particular as a lecturer in the earlier days – is that they specialised in taking people who were able but hadn’t done that well at school, and turning them into really good scholars.

And what did you study? Was it English literature?

Well, at that time Lancaster was new and the head of the English department was a man called Bill Murray, an odd man in many ways, a bit of a Walter Mitty figure. He had been teaching in Africa and thought that it was a really good idea to have modern English language as part of the English degree. At that time, most English degrees consisted mainly of English literature courses and some Old English and Middle English language and literature. They didn’t have any modern English language or linguistics at all. The only other place that did offer all three areas of English, and they obviously got there before Lancaster, was University College London, where Randolph Quirk was based. He taught, among others, David Crystal ⁵ and Geoff Leech ⁶ who both became famous linguists and stylisticians. I was very lucky at Lancaster. I ended up unknowingly in an English department that taught English literature, which everyone wanted to do, and also history of the English language, which not many people wanted to do, and linguistics, which very few students liked or understood. Most of my year really struggled with linguistics. But I found all three areas interesting. And I did well in my essays. For me that was one of the really odd things about university. When I was at school I got mainly average marks. I almost never got As. But when I came to Lancaster, suddenly I was getting really good marks for just about everything! And so suddenly I was kind of a star. University just seemed to want different things from school and they happened to be the things that somehow or other I could supply. Then, as time went on, into the second and the third year, because I could do this linguistics stuff and the English language stuff as well as literature, I became a kind of informal tutor for my peers. Everybody was still living in Morecambe and now having to bus into Bailrigg. It took an hour or more to get from Morecambe to Lancaster on the bus because the traffic was so bad. So it took us ages to get to campus. Some people, like me, would more or less sleep on the bus on the way in. But Bob Fisk ⁷ who was in my year – he became a foreign correspondent for The Times – he used to sit on the bus with a portable typewriter on his knees, typing his essays. He was being funded by The Express and so every weekend he would go down to London to help edit The Sunday Express. And then he came back up on Sunday evenings. He was somebody that all the other students thought was really weird. He just had a work ethic that the rest of us didn’t have, because was already ensconced in a newspaper culture.

How did it come about that you became a kind of tutor?

We moved out to Bailrigg ⁸ at the beginning of my second year, by which time they had built the Library, University House and Bowland and Lonsdale Colleges. ⁹ So they had all these completed study bedrooms that couldn’t yet be used for accommodation because everybody was still living in the Morecambe. So they gave us study bedrooms to use as ‘offices’. Four undergraduates to each study-bedroom space – with a desk and bookcase in each corner. And there was a water heater in the communal mixing bays, so you could make yourself tea and coffee. People soon got into the habit of working for a bit and then taking a coffee break and chatting to other students. And that meant you talked about what you were reading or being taught in class. I started explaining things individually to friends who couldn’t get their heads round what a morpheme was, say – that sort of thing. And then it kind of developed from there and I ended up running revision seminars to help people get through the exams.

And was this linguistics that you were teaching?

Yeah. They didn’t need to be taught literature. They were good at that. But they couldn’t for the life of them get their heads round linguistics. And I think as a consequence I became much more knowledgeable about the subject. As you know, teaching something means you learn it properly!

And was Geoff Leech at Lancaster at this time?

No, he came in between when I left in 1968 and when I came back to teach in 1972.

Ah ok. So what kind of linguistics were you learning as an undergraduate? Was it the Chomskyan approach?

No, not really. Most of my tutors had been taught in the Hallidayan (i.e. British, not American), systemic school of linguistics. ¹⁰ We heard a little bit about Chomsky at undergraduate level but really he was just being treated like most other non-Hallidayan linguists at that time, like Sapir and Whorf. We knew more about de Saussure than Chomsky. We learned basic phonology, morphology and English grammar. Obviously this was before discourse analysis and pragmatics had been developed. And there wasn’t much semantics available either. But I was very lucky. One of my tutors was Anne Cluysenaar, who was one of the first people to write a book on stylistics (Cluysenaar, 1976). In the first year she taught me linguistics – that was her first year in the university as well. And during that year she wrote a spec for a course for second and third year students which was called Literary Criticism and Linguistic Stylistics. I took Anne’s course and that was where I learned about foregrounding. I found the course really interesting and started using what I had learned about how you could take things from language and linguistics and apply them in thinking about literary texts, which for me seemed a natural thing to do. Most of the other students in my literature seminars were making more general interpretative remarks and their emotional responses, but I was saying this is what I think and here’s my linguistic evidence for it, which seemed to go down pretty well. And I was getting seriously good essay marks too. I got to the stage where I was assuming that I would always get good upper-second or first-class marks in English. I got a bit grumpy if I didn’t get a good mark. I remember, I did a course on Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. I had been getting marks in the 70s for that course and over the summer vacation we had to do an essay about a particular Webster play. I thought well, I’ve got plenty of time so I’ll read all the plays, research the context, find out what others had said about Webster, and so on. Basically I then knew so much stuff that I wrote this incredibly long essay which didn’t really answer the question asked. When it came back marked at 49% I was absolutely livid. I went to see the tutor, who was called Mary Bell, and I said ‘I just don’t get marks like this. What’s going on here?’

I’ve had students like you!

Yeah! Before university I’d always been somebody who was average but at Lancaster I had somehow morphed into a kind of star. And now I’d been shot down. Mary Bell – she was very good – sat me down and took me carefully through the essay and all of her comments one by one. We must have been in her office for an hour or more. And at the end I had to admit she was right. When I wrote the essay I couldn’t see the wood for the trees and it was definitely only worth 49%! So I said thank you very much and left. A very chastening experience!

So what else did you study at Lancaster?

In the first year you had to do three subjects of equal weight. I studied English and History, which I enjoyed at school, and Philosophy too, to find out what it was. In those days you had to do things rather differently in Part II from the current pattern. First of all, you needed to do nine courses over the two years, as opposed to the eight which students do now. And they were longer courses because teaching went on in the summer term in both the first and second years, whereas now the summer term is entirely related to coursework, revision and exams. Unlike now, you were forced to do a minor subject as well as a major in Part II, and indeed, at that time, the university took its broadening policy a step further. Students studying humanities and social science degrees had to take a science-based course as one of their year two choices. I did an English major with a Philosophy minor and a ‘free ninth unit’, as it was called (see McClintock, 1974: 101), in Biology.

That’s quite an enlightened view, isn’t it?

Yes, I think so. One of the things that Lancaster has always done well is to keep that three-subjects requirement in the first year in non-science subjects. Having three subjects gives students the chance to work out what those subjects are like when they get to university, as opposed to school. And quite a lot of students change their minds to some extent about what they want to do. So yes, I’ve always thought having a flexible curriculum is really good for students.

So when you finished at Lancaster, what did you do next?

I was assuming that I would be a teacher, basically because I couldn’t think of anything else. I knew there were MA courses because there was one in my department, which David Craig, the Marxist critic, ran. But there were no stylistics MAs anywhere, I didn’t have any money either and I didn’t even know there were such things as PhDs. When I asked Anne Cluysenaar if she’d write me a reference for my teacher-training college application, she said ‘Oh, I thought you were going to do a PhD’. So I asked ‘What’s a PhD?’ and she talked me through all of that, suggested some places I could apply to and encouraged me to apply for a postgraduate grant. She indicated pretty heavily that I should go to Birmingham to work with John Sinclair. ¹¹ She had worked with him at Edinburgh and he had written one of the first articles on poetry stylistics.

You mean ‘Taking a poem to pieces’ (Sinclair, 1966)?

Yes, he analyses ‘First Sight’ by Philip Larkin. I went for interview to Reading too but I didn’t really like Frank Palmer, ¹² who interviewed me. As a consequence I may well have chosen the wrong department! The amazing David Crystal was at Reading too, so I think that if I had gone there I would probably have got him as a supervisor. John Sinclair was a nice enough bloke, though, and very clever. But he was basically empire-building at the time, so I was mostly left to my own devices. And again I was a bit naïve. I didn’t really understand that there was a distinction between a one-year MA and a two-year MA by dissertation, which might then be developed into a PhD thesis if things went well. I’d always wanted to work on prose stylistics because there was practically nothing about it available, so I decided to have a go at Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck, 1937). It was a short and relatively simple and straightforward novel, and I thought if you’re going to do something that’s new and different in an area that hasn’t been looked at much before, you probably need to start with something not too complex. As time went on, it became clear that I wasn’t going to be able to finish what I wanted to do in a year. So I ended up writing a two-year MA dissertation, which John felt couldn’t really be developed into a PhD. And it was only then that I realised that I only had one year left to do a PhD! I worked away at that as hard as I could but chose a rather difficult theoretical topic this time, which basically was just too difficult. I was wondering how you could integrate the stylistic approach with a detailed analysis of story and plot. I couldn’t work it through and because French structuralism was a new thing at the time, and parts of it were plot-related, John sent me off to Paris to find out about it. I got a small grant from the AHRB, ¹³ who supported me to go to Paris for a week. At the time in the UK very few people knew what structuralism was.

Where did you go in Paris?

I went first to the Ecole Britannique because John had a contact there. I knew absolutely nothing about Paris! I was very naïve (I have been for quite a lot of my life!). And then, basically, the chap I met made some suggestions and I went around trying to find relevant books. I couldn’t get into their libraries as the French universities were quite sniffy about that sort of thing. So all I could do was tour the bookshops, buying books that looked interesting. John had also said that I should go to UNESCO because he knew Richard Hoggart, ¹⁴ the man who wrote The Uses of Literacy (Hoggart, 1957), who was high up in UNESCO at the time. Hoggart had previously been an academic in the English department at Birmingham. John had got on well with him and seemed to think that all I needed to do was turn up at UNESCO and ask to see him; and that he would probably put me up at his flat, as well as giving me advice. And, of course, it turned out that he was unavailable. He may not even have been in the country at the time! Anyway, I couldn’t get past the UNESCO front desk, so I had to give up on that. My trip to Paris did help me find out about Tzetvan Todorov, though. He was trying to use generative-grammar-style ways to characterise plot (e.g. Todorov, 1969). But basically I think what I needed was a rather sophisticated pragmatics of plot before linguistic pragmatics had been established; and I just couldn’t find my way through it. So I’d written all this stuff but then just ran out of PhD time. I needed a job now, and John encouraged me to apply to a Birmingham college called Newman College. John had just invented these Birmingham degrees in English Education (B.Eds) in which students who wanted to become teachers had to do modern English language as well as English literature and Education. So the colleges suddenly needed somebody to teach English language courses – and there weren’t many of us around!

So these were undergraduate courses that were taught at Newman but which Birmingham was validating?

Not just Newman, all the Birmingham colleges of education were offering them. Indeed, I had already been teaching linguistics courses part-time in Bordesley college while I was still a Masters student. Then in the summer following my first year of teaching I had to go into hospital to have an operation on my right wrist. While I was in hospital, out of the blue Geoff Leech tried to ring me at home. Hilary came to tell me with our baby, Hiroko, who was only a couple of months old, in her arms. She said she’d had a conversation with this Geoffrey Leech from Lancaster. He would like to talk to me about coming up to Lancaster for an interview for a one-year lectureship. So I had to go along with my arm up in a sling at the requisite time to the public phone box near the hospital entrance and wait for the phone to ring. Geoff said that Anne Cluysenaar, who was suddenly leaving Lancaster, had suggested me as somebody who might come and replace her for a year. Anne had left Lancaster in high dudgeon because of the Craig Affair. ¹⁵ She’d been a supporter of David Craig and, at the end, David did a deal with the Vice-Chancellor, in which he left the English department and taught courses in his own one-man department. Anne thought that he had let the side down by cooperating at a point when he had the Vice-Chancellor over a barrel. She felt that he could have forced the VC to back down completely. She was so angry that she just upped and left. She went to Huddersfield Polytechnic for a year and then after that she got a post with John Sinclair, after I had left Birmingham. Eventually she went to teach at Sheffield Polytechnic, which became Sheffield Hallam University. As I was not happy in the English department at Newman, I gave up a permanent post there for a one-year post at Lancaster. When I arrived in Lancaster, I was given Anne’s old office, which had a filing cabinet stuffed with papers she had left. I went through it carefully, in case there was anything she might have wanted to hang on to and discovered, in the bottom drawer, a draft of my review article on Geoff Leech’s A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry (Leech, 1969). I had written this somewhat critical article about it for the American journal Language and Style (my first published article) and had sent the first draft of the manuscript to Anne for interest. In turn, she had passed it on to Geoff with a note saying ‘A former student of mine has written this. I don’t think it is very good but I thought you might want a look.’ There was also a note back from Geoff saying ‘Oh, I thought it was pretty good’!

And so I guess that meant that you couldn’t finish the PhD at that point?

That’s right. Once I was back in Lancaster I was thrown into teaching and got further and further behind, writing new lectures and designing new courses etc. Some years later, I received my PhD from Lancaster for my publications. I wasn’t too bothered about having a PhD but Geoff and other colleagues badgered me until I filled in the application forms. I really enjoyed the viva. Henry Widdowson was my external examiner and Geoff, Henry and I spent a couple of hours arguing like cat and dog about various theoretical issues across the whole gamut of stylistics. Great fun!

But a PhD wasn’t so important back then, was it, for a university post?

No it wasn’t. There were lots of good people in my department who didn’t have a PhD. And that was true across the university, and indeed most universities. And some non-PhD-holders were extremely clever too. Norman Fairclough ¹⁶ and Geoffrey Sampson ¹⁷ were the most obvious ones. They only had MAs at that time but there they were, turning out all this interesting stuff and doing really well. Geoff [Sampson] wasn’t very popular amongst the student body, particularly, because he had very right-wing political views. He was trying to connect his version of linguistics to align with his politics, while at the same time, Norman was trying to connect his linguistics to his very left-wing views. We had some quite extraordinary, very crowded meetings of our staff-student Linguistics Circle. They would fight like hammer and tongs and, at times, the sweat would literally run down the walls of Bowland College senior common room. It was wonderful.

So when you got to Lancaster what were you teaching? Were you able to start teaching stylistics from that point?

I taught seminars on the first-year modern English course Language and Style, which Geoff [Leech] had organised into blocks, Varieties of English, English Phonetics, English Grammar and so on. The last five weeks of the course was on stylistics, so I taught stylistics then, in my first year of teaching. I also taught on a Part II course which was called Stylistics and Criticism. This was Geoff’s version of the course that Anne had originally invented when I was an undergraduate. It was a two-term, final year course, with two distinct halves. The first term was on individual critics and schools of literary criticism, looking at what they brought to literary study. I did the lectures on that half. Geoff said that if I knew of other critics that I thought would work, then fine, I could work up lectures on them. Among others, I lectured on David Lodge, ¹⁸ who I’d met in Birmingham and who had really impressed me. I taught seminars all through the course. But the lectures I gave initially were mainly on the critics and Geoff’s lectures were mainly on various areas of stylistics, in the second half of the course. I was learning lots of new stuff then too. You were asking earlier about Chomskyan grammar. Well in Birmingham I had hardly come across it on the postgraduate research seminar which John Sinclair ran. We did do a little bit on Chomsky but it was in the context of also spending time on Sydney Lamb, ¹⁹ Sapir, Whorf, Bloomfield and various other people like that. It was a sort of tour of North American linguistics. Chomsky seemed no more important than the others and it was only when I came back to Lancaster that I realised that he had more or less taken over the linguistics world! So that was another reason why I had to put the PhD on one side. I was having to learn all these other things in linguistics which I knew zilch about.

Yes, because I suppose contemporary linguistics was still very new really, wasn’t it, as a discipline?

Yes. And there were no computers (Geoff and I typed Style in Fiction on our portable typewriters) in those days, and no internet. So news travelled much more slowly. A really good example of that was when Lancaster got access to Paul Grice’s famous article. He had written a paper, now well known, called ‘Logic and conversation’ (Grice, 1975). It arrived in Lancaster via Jim Hurford. ²⁰ Jim had been off to the States over the summer – he had been a research fellow and Assistant Professor in California and his wife was American, so they often went to the US. Anyway, he’d brought this typed article back which was extremely faint. It had originally been a Roneo copy, ²¹ which had then been photocopied time and again. So, by the time it got to Lancaster, it was almost unreadable – a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. Everybody got a copy of it from Jim and it was really interesting. We didn’t talk about it in Linguistics Circle at that time, but it turned out at the end of the academic year that just about everybody had been adding Grice into their courses! The students complained because they were getting ‘Logic and conversation’ again and again and again! But that’s what it was like at the time. It was exciting because you felt you were at the front edge of things. And our students were very lucky in those days too, they really were. Most received grants to live on, fees were paid for them by the government and so they could just get on with enjoying university life and its intellectual buzz. They didn’t spend lots of their time worrying about things, as students often seem to do now.

So you could study for the sake of studying, really.

I think so, yes. Maybe it was different for other people but as an undergrad I just went along with things. I found everything interesting, even the exams! I certainly wasn’t stressed out by it all. But then no-one had told me how important it was to get a well-paid and interesting job, which students are now so aware of, even when they are still at school.

Can we talk a bit about PALA? How did PALA come about?

Well, it was very difficult in those days to find a place to go and talk about stylistics outside your own department. Most of the literary critics didn’t want to know about stylistics. Indeed, many were quite strongly antipathetic towards it. ²² Quite a lot of English university lecturers had studied at Oxbridge, which tended to dominate UK English departments. They’d never done stylistics or modern linguistics so they felt it was not relevant to them. So, it was difficult to be able to read a paper at a literary conference or find a UK journal to publish in, unless you were already well-known. My first sole publications were in American journals, Language and Style (Short, 1973a) and Style (Short, 1973b). I remember when I came to Lancaster for my first interview, I was interviewed by Geoff Leech and an English literature professor I’d never met. At the end of the interview, when they asked me if I had any questions, I asked if it would be possible to do short stylistic analysis sessions inside various literature courses. I thought it would be interesting to try out the stylistic approach in lots of different literary areas. And the literature professor just said, ‘Oh no, dear boy. Oh no’ and that was it! It was like that all the time. The linguists were better. Most weren’t interested in learning anything about stylistics themselves but they were happy enough for me to do it. I started going to the LAGB [Linguistics Association of Great Britain] meetings. And because people like Geoff Leech, Paul Werth ²³ and David Crystal also went to those meetings – they were doing bits of stylistics of various sorts among other things and so were not antipathetic to it – you would even occasionally hear a stylistics paper. I remember a very interesting talk that Paul Werth gave, comparing parallelism in literary texts and newspaper editorials. He discovered – hey ho – that, despite what people had assumed (i.e. that there was lots of parallelism in literature but not in other texts), that it was just as common in newspaper editorials and indeed in other sorts of texts too. But it was difficult for somebody at the bottom of the ladder to have much to say that would be of interest to the linguistic great and good. After a while the LAGB did establish a stylistics workshop within its conferences. This would be an afternoon event where those interested in stylistics could miss some of the main papers and sit together in a room to talk stylistics. For me, at least, that rather quickly became a desultory experience because many of the people who came in successive years were not the same. A few of us were regulars but most were not. And there was no programme as such; it was just a rather aimless sort of discussion each year. We ended up talking about Wimsatt and Beardsley’s Intentional Fallacy (1946) and Affective Fallacy (1949) again and again. And I thought, I just cannot take this, we’re not going anywhere. I talked with others who were coming more regularly – people like Ron Carter ²⁴ and Katie Wales ²⁵ – and we agreed that we needed a dedicated association, with its own conferences. I talked to Geoff Leech about it, wrote a draft letter that went out to the people we’d met at the workshop and anybody else that we knew about – Roger Fowler ²⁶ and Henry Widdowson, ²⁷ for instance. Ron, Katie and I felt we needed someone well known, not us, to be the association’s Chair. Geoff said he couldn’t do it because he was too busy. Henry Widdowson and John Sinclair said the same. But luckily Roger Fowler said yes. So Roger became our first Chair and Ron volunteered to run the first conference, which, from vague memory, had between 25 and 30 people at most. But gradually PALA picked up steam. And that was wonderful for us. All of a sudden we had somewhere to talk to other people who were doing the same sort of thing and, because it was such a small conference, everybody heard everybody else’s paper. In turn that meant that when you were outside the sessions, in the bar or whatever, it was very easy to talk to other participants about any and all of the conference papers. And this cohort of people with shared experiences led on to other things, like shared entertainments ²⁸ after the conference dinner and so on. You asked whether we intended the association to be a long-term thing. This question never occurred to me, certainly. We just needed somewhere to be able to talk to one another. And then it grew gradually. I had put an advert in the Times Literary Supplement for the Nottingham conference, saying we’d created this association. And it turned out – though I didn’t know it till the conference – that Peter Verdonk ²⁹ and Gerard Steen ³⁰ had read the ad and came to Nottingham from Amsterdam to give papers. When we first set up PALA, we only knew other people in the UK. It never occurred to me that there would be many people in the rest of Europe who were interested too! And the LAGB was our model – the Linguistics Association of Great Britain. So we thought, ok, we’ll be the Poetics and Linguistics Association of Great Britain. Soon we dropped ‘of Great Britain’, when we realised we were not alone! The word ‘stylistics’ was never in the title because at that point stylistics was almost unknown as a general phenomenon (though the adjective ‘stylistic’ was fairly common in discussion). Nobody thought of their courses as being part of an established academic area called stylistics. And we wanted to have a title that pulled people in from both the literary and the linguistics ends of the scale. So that was how we eventually settled on ‘Poetics and Linguistics Association’, which also echoed the title and sentiments of Roman Jakobson’s influential article (1960).

How soon after starting PALA did you start producing Parlance? Because that was the original journal, wasn’t it, that preceded Language and Literature?

Yes. I think there were four issues of Parlance the journal. The word Parlance had originally been the title of the PALA newsletter, which was entirely the brainchild of Katie Wales. She came up with the name and ran the whole enterprise single-handed. The newsletter encouraged a spirit of togetherness as well as providing useful information. Katie has always been a very inventive person, as her range of activities, from serious academic linguistic and literary critical works to dictionaries and joke books for children, shows. Then, after a while, we decided we needed somewhere to publish articles as well as somewhere to talk, as it was so difficult to get into the linguistics or literature journals. We started small, as usual, by inventing what was effectively a samizdat journal. And Katie generously gave up her name Parlance for that first journal, the individual issues of which were edited by different people. The physical production was handled in Lancaster by myself and others. And Katie’s newsletter became The PALA Newsletter until the name Parlance could be readopted, after Katie, Tony Bex and I persuaded Longman to publish what we decided to call Language and Literature, as the phrase was inclusive, like PALA, and transparent.

So Parlance the journal gave way to Language and Literature. When you look back over 30 years of Language and Literature what developments in stylistics do you think have been particularly significant?

At the beginning my career, the established and well-worked areas in central linguistics were phonetics, morphology and grammar. So those linguistic levels dominated stylistic analyses. There was relatively little in semantics and discourse analysis, and almost nothing in pragmatics which we could try to apply to texts. But then discourse analysis began to be developed and I wrote that article for Applied Linguistics on discourse analysis in drama (Short, 1981), which got more stylisticians interested in that style of analysis. Next, pragmatics became a big thing – and, later still, the corpus approach, which is now being used more and more. So effectively these developments in linguistics opened up new areas for us to use in text analysis. Now there’s the cognitive linguistics approach too, which is part of straight linguistics but has led to a developing cognitive stylistics, which combines the cognitive linguistics angle with foregrounding theory and other developments in psychology and psycholinguistics. Finally, text world analysis, of the sort that Paul Werth initially developed (e.g. Werth, 1999) is being worked on now. I’m less sure personally that applying some of that style work is as carefully accurate as it needs to be and I think there’s a similar issue about the cognitive and psychological side of thing too. Sometimes, when you read some of the cognitive contributions, for example, it’s almost as if it is being assumed that everything is known by now and all you have to do is apply it unproblematically across to texts. But I think we are actually over-egging what we know about brains and how they interact with texts. I think that’s what the psychologists would say too.

I sometimes worry that some of the cognitive stuff is just too broad brush, and that to really get to the bottom of some of these phenomena, you really need to test them much more carefully and in much more controlled conditions.

Yes, that’s my own view. I mean, if you take cognitive metaphor as an example, the general insight works well; metaphor is clearly not so much, as was traditionally assumed, a phenomenon of language, but a cognitive phenomenon which plays out, as it were, in language and other areas. But it is difficult to achieve the kind of analytical accuracy we are used to in grammar and phonetics when doing this sort of analysis. Essentially, it is hard to get from the cognitive generalisations to what is actually going on inside the minds of individual readers when they read particular texts. My own view is that, yes, there certainly needs to be a lot more careful empirical work; but we also need to be clear that empirical work can itself have problems. The more social-scientific empirical approach, for example, often has an issue in relation to memory. Respondents are usually interviewed or have to fill in questionnaires after they’ve read and responded to some text. But we can’t trust our memories to be accurate. If you ask the psychologists, they’ll tell you that in the work that’s been done on what occurred in even very foregrounded situations – for example, witnessing a robbery or a traffic accident – the amount of memory variation you get from one witness to another can be quite extreme. And I also think that there’s a tendency to assume that you can move from the general to the text-specific in a way that’s too straightforward. There’s a sense in which the whole of stylistics is underdeveloped in psychological terms; much recent work on foregrounding, for example, is not really that much of an improvement on what was being done in Russia and Czechoslovakia [in the early years of the 20^th century]. But you have to remember, of course, that testing foregrounding is itself difficult to do well. My own view is that the best work in that area is by Sanford and Emmott (2012). I really like Cathy Emmott’s work generally. The reason it’s so good is because she’s very careful analytically and also challenges and tests out her assumptions all the time. I think we need to understand that quite a lot of testing work does well on general phenomena – like foregrounding – but not necessarily so well in terms of people’s understandings of, and reactions to, particular texts. And I think that the kind of nitty-gritty, bit-by-bit analysis that you need – rather like the kind of analysis that can be done on sentence structure analysis in texts – is just not there. Similar remarks can be made about other relatively new approaches, corpus stylistics, or critical stylistics, for example. I think that what all this hesitation on my part comes down to is that I am worried, as I always have been for myself too, about following the new fashions in analysis too uncritically and at the expense of the careful analytical and empirical work that, for me, is what the stylistics approach is all about. I have always been keen on making my linguistic analyses, and their connections inferentially to interpretation and effect, as clear as I possibly can, so that others can improve on what I have done. For me, stylistics, like science, is a cooperative endeavour.

OK, last question: Which works of stylistics would you like to see referred to more often? Are there any books, articles or book chapters that you think have been unduly forgotten or that should have got more attention than they have?

As I said earlier, I really like Sanford and Emmott’s (2012) Mind, Brain and Narrative and would love to see more work in that vein. I would also like to see more careful explorations of exactly how the corpus approaches can be used in a detailed way to support text-analysis-supported interpretation, response and value. And I think there is a lot more work to be done yet in the use of pragmatics in stylistic analysis, especially in relation to the modern neo-Gricean approaches and in how we use detailed chains of inference to get from text to meaning. I think that John Searle’s somewhat overlooked article ‘Indirect speech acts’ (in Searle, 1979) would be a good starting place. In that article Searle uses his own speech act theory in combination with Grice’s conversational implicature approach to sketch out how we can get observably in analysis from one possible, more direct, speech act interpretation to another, indirect one (e.g. how an apparent question about the hearer’s ability, like ‘Can you pass the salt?’, is actually seen as a request from the speaker to the listener). I think that this approach could be a way in to specifying observable chains of inference in getting from text to meaning. I also think that a lot more work is needed in connecting stylistic analysis to narrative analysis approaches, and, in particular, how stylistics and story/plot analysis can be integrated, something I started worrying about as a postgraduate student. Finally, I am very aware that a number of PhD theses written by my own research students are just sitting in my own university library and have never seen the light of day in the form of book publication. They contain some insightful theories and text analyses which others could benefit from. The same must be true of PhDs in other universities. Perhaps PALA could explore the development, maybe in combination with Language and Literature, of an electronically accessible archive of the best stylistics PhDs worldwide, which could be made available to researchers in PALA or even more widely? Experienced supervisors could informally recommend the best few PhD theses in their own university libraries?