‘There was all this terminology proliferating and the students needed to know precise terms,not vague or impressionistic ones’: An interview with Katie Wales

[Dan McIntyre] Can we start by talking about what you studied at University?

[Katie Wales] I studied English language and literature from Old English to the twentieth century, plus options in Germanic philology, Old Icelandic, and Modern English Structure and Usage. This was at the University of London, which in those days was a federal institution and I was at Royal Holloway College. But it was a university-wide syllabus, so we had weekly lectures which we attended in Bloomsbury. I wanted to go to the University of London because the course had a broad historical perspective, and you could study both language and literature.

And did stylistics feature in your undergraduate education?

In those days as an undergraduate, there wasn’t a stylistics course as such, but because London was a federal institution we had a guest lecture at Royal Holloway from Michael Halliday, ¹ who was then in the Linguistics Department at University College London (UCL). He analysed Yeats’s poem Leda and the Swan, and to me it was just mind-blowing, because he was using precise linguistic terms and he was illuminating the way features helped me to interpret the poem. This was the first time I had come across stylistics, and I was hooked from then on. Because of the federal structure, I was also able to attend lectures by Randolph Quirk ² (UCL) on Shakespeare’s and Dickens’s language, so even as a student I did start to think that there was something ‘out there’ called stylistics.

So Halliday was referring to it as stylistics, was he?

Yes. In the mid 60s he had already devised what later became Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), a development of his ‘scale and category’ grammar. He also did a lot of stylistic work at that time (e.g. Halliday 1964a, 1964b). But then he left UCL. ³

And apart from going to that one lecture, did you do any stylistic work as an undergraduate?

No. Even the study of modern English grammar was only just getting going in London, because of Randolph Quirk’s Survey of English Usage at UCL. Before then it was the history of the English language and Germanic philology. So I was lucky to be in London at that time.

So what happened after you graduated?

I thought UCL was the place to study at. I went there to start an MPhil by research in stylistics and Old English saints’ lives. Why Old English? Only because straight after graduating I was offered a teaching studentship in medieval literature at my former college, Royal Holloway. So I thought I would apply stylistics to Old English poetry. But I also attended as many MA courses in linguistics and phonetics at UCL as I could, and also seminars at the Survey of English Usage: which eventually led to the great grammars Quirk and his colleagues produced (Quirk et al. 1973, 1985). Geoffrey Leech ⁴ was around a lot at that time, because he was a co-author. He was giving seminars on advertising language, and his Linguistic Guide to English Poetry came out in 1969 (Leech, 1969). This was the work that helped to promote the concept of foregrounding from Eastern Europe.

That’s really interesting. I did not know that you had done stylistics on Old English.

Yes, but I did not ever publish much on that. A year later I was offered a full-time tenured lectureship at Royal Holloway, at the age of 22. In the late 1960s, early 70s, it was much easier to get a university post: the university sector was expanding because of what was called the Robbins Report ⁵ (Committee on Higher Education, 1963).

Mick Short was saying something similar (this volume), that he had not done a PhD because it just was not so important then.

We were very lucky: it was not so important then, yes.

So did your first university teaching post involve teaching stylistics?

Not really. Only gradually, because I was mainly teaching medieval literature; and then I wanted to teach modern English grammar and usage as well. Eventually I developed an MA in English language and stylistics following the merger of our college with Bedford College, and once the university was de-federalised. And then, when course unit degrees came along, it was easier to develop your own options in stylistics.

Did you ever encounter any resistance to the teaching of stylistics from colleagues or from students?

Never from students. There was some resistance from literary colleagues in my college. I was never approached to lecture on Shakespeare’s style or Dickens’s, for example, in the relevant literary courses. But Barbara Hardy, ⁶ who was my head of department at one stage, encouraged me to develop a stylistic interest in James Joyce for the Modern Literature MA – which led to my book on James Joyce eventually (Wales, 1992). Gradually, though, in London and later at the University of Leeds, I was able to contribute stylistics to what came to be quite popular BA and MA courses on critical theory, especially to first year students. Then I did develop more stylistic options. But at first it was quite hard, yes. I was seen to be on the ‘language’ side of the department, not the ‘literature’ side, even though I was very interested, of course, in literature too.

And when students started doing stylistics with you, what was their reaction to it?

They loved it. It was a different way of looking at texts. But they needed ‘tools’, a terminology.

So is this where your Dictionary of Stylistics (Wales, 1989) comes in?

Exactly. I was developing the new MA at Royal Holloway, and the dictionary was as much for my benefit as for the students’, because there was all this terminology proliferating and the students needed to know precise terms, not vague or impressionistic ones. And stylistics had taken on so many ideas from other disciplines like discourse analysis, text linguistics, literary theory and traditional rhetoric. Also, the same terms were used in different ways by different scholars; or the same concept could have different names. So the dictionary was really meant to clarify things for me and to help the students as well. But I also wanted to show stylistics in action, as it were. So that is why I had all those quotations for each entry. I wanted to show students how stylistics worked.

Was it a long process to write that book?

Yes, it took about four years from start to finish, getting the material together, etc. But Longman the publishers were so nice. I went to Longman because they were publishing all of Quirk’s books from 1962 onwards; and they had published Geoffrey Leech (e.g. Leech, 1969) and Walter Nash (e.g. Nash, 1985) and Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) Cohesion in English. That is why later we thought that Longman would be a really good publisher to approach for the journal Language and Literature. Also, Mick Short was a Longman adviser to various series at the time.

Can we talk a little bit about the journal? How did you come to set that up? I know that Parlance was the precursor to Language and Literature. How did that come about?

It is rather confusing because there were two Parlances. The first one was the newsletter which I sent out by post when I was PALA secretary, right at the beginning, for members to keep in touch. And then it became the name of a kind of samizdat journal. But PALA also published individual papers separately at the time, at Lancaster University. I was not involved in the Parlance journal, only the Newsletter.

And then Language and Literature followed on from Parlance.

Yes, we thought we needed it. Parlance was a good idea, but it needed more people involved, and more contributions from a wider readership. There was the journal Style available, which is still going. I like the journal very much and I still review for it. There was also Language and Style, which I published in at the time; but they are both American journals. There was nothing in the UK, that was the point. I am very proud, by the way, of my input into the design of the ‘logo’ on the cover!

I was thinking about the name of the journal. Language and Literature makes perfect sense to most stylisticians, but there is also that early work by people like Crystal and Davy (1969) on non-literary stylistics. How familiar with that were you at the time?

Very familiar. Their work came out of the Survey of English Usage at UCL. Derek Davy ⁷ was there as a research assistant at the time, and so was David Crystal. ⁸

And was it seen as stylistics at the time?

I am not sure, to be honest. There was a lot of useful work around at the time on register, certainly, in non-literary discourse. But I think stylistics as we know it, in its more literary sense, really came to prominence in the UK with the work of Roger Fowler, ⁹ PALA’s first president (and an ex-English student at UCL).

I was interested in why particularly you had decided on Language and Literature as a title.

Because we wanted potential contributors and readers to think of approaching literary texts through the perspective of linguistic features, etc.

So it was primarily seen as a literary stylistics enterprise?

Yes. But we did want to keep the options open, which has happened. There have been many articles published over the years on the one hand on literary theory; and on the other, even more articles on non-literary discourse types, increasingly on e-communications, etc. So it was a case of trying to have a title that had as broad an appeal as possible, knowing that Language and Style had already been used!

I also wanted to ask you about some of your memories of those early PALA conferences.

They were so stimulating. We had found our academic friends: we were not alone! And we had got something important to say. We also wanted to help each other develop, and so we gave each other lots of helpful ideas, rather than negative feedback. We were able to do this quite easily because the conferences were not very big at first, and we could attend everyone’s presentations. The Association was not very ‘international’ at first, but it soon grew and we had some great discussions in the sessions and in the bar afterwards. We had literary colleagues attending, like Antony Easthope and Derek Attridge. I think the ethos of trying to encourage young scholars and postgraduates is still here, even though the conferences are much bigger. And I think the growth of special interest groups (SIGs) has been an excellent development.

I think I have always felt more closely tied to PALA than to my university.

That is indeed very interesting. I think I did myself when I was at Royal Holloway College. Leeds was a bigger institution, so that I did not feel quite so much on my own; but PALA did certainly invite me to feel at home amongst a whole community of like-minded scholars.

So you moved from Royal Holloway to Leeds. Was that to move to a larger department?

Definitely. I wanted more support in English language teaching. After I left Royal Holloway, English language studies gradually declined in prominence, until they ceased altogether there, sadly. The relationship between ‘language’ and ‘literature’ studies does vary between different institutions. At the University of Lancaster, for example, as Mick Short will verify, English language and linguistics eventually split completely from English literature. ¹⁰

And when you were at Leeds, I think that is when you wrote your Northern English book (Wales, 2006)?

Yes. Because when I got to Leeds I wanted to revive dialect research arising from its famous Survey of English Dialects. ¹¹ In such a hallowed place I thought I just had to write a book about Northern English, the dialect of my childhood.

And did your interest in stylistics impact on how you went about that?

Of course. I have always taken a cultural as well as social interest in literary dialect through the different historical periods and genres, until the present day.

And I suppose also in a way that was going back to your earliest work? The work you did on the stylistics of Old English and on medieval English?

Yes. I think at heart I still have very much of a historical perspective on subjects.

And do you see yourself as a linguist primarily or literary critic?

I always see myself as wearing two hats: I am equally passionate about language and literature. My particular obsessions are James Joyce and Charles Dickens on the one hand, and pronouns on the other, the latter ever since researching them at the Survey of English Usage.

I think it is interesting how your work has ranged so broadly across English language, particularly when many stylisticians are much more ‘niche’ if you like.

Perhaps I am the last of a certain generation!

I hope not! Something else I’d like to ask you about is your creative work; namely the many joke books you have published. At a time when public engagement is so high on the agenda in universities, it is interesting to note that you were doing this long before it was a requirement for academics. Did you see it in those terms and how did that work relate to your academic work in stylistics?

‘Public engagement’ sounds very grand for what I was doing: although I did go into book-shops and local primary schools to tell jokes and to get the children to write their own. The dozen joke-books that were published over a period of time all started with my life-long obsession with elephants. In the mid-1980s there was a craze for ‘elephant jokes’, which blurred the distinction between the logical and the absurd, and children loved them: ‘How does an elephant get down from a tree? It sits on a leaf and waits till autumn’. I collected lots of these, and distinguished nine different structural types. At the end of The Elephant Joke Book (Wales, 1985) I asked readers to send me their favourites I might have missed: enough to fill a sequel, The Return of the Elephant Joke Book (Wales, 1988). Many of the children who contributed became ‘pen-pals’, and one I know grew up to be a linguistics student. They were so popular I was asked to produce more joke books, which I did on different themes; for example, Easter, creepy-crawlies, outer space. Christmas was an obvious subject, because of its association with Christmas cracker jokes anyway. I admit that crackers provided an obvious source of material; but actually I did make up most of the jokes myself for the non-elephant books. As a stylistician I have always appreciated word-play and patterns in language.

And what about changes in stylistics over the years? When you look back over the 30 years of Language and Literature, what for you are the most significant developments in the field, do you think?

Definitely corpus-based research; and also cognitive theories of different kinds, especially text world theory.

And so to take the opposite perspective: looking forwards, what do you think needs to be done next or what do we need to be doing more of?

Obviously there has been a widening in recent years of the kinds of texts studied, especially social media and multi-modal. But I am concerned – I think partly because of my own interests, really – that we are in an age of constriction: for financial reasons, but also because of cultural sensitivities. I know some university departments have closed down their medieval studies, Shakespeare and seventeenth-century literature provision, for example. And because of this, I think that one of the unfortunate consequences could be a narrowing of historical stylistic studies. Students, and perhaps even scholars, are less likely in the future to study pre-20th century literature, and so, from my point of view, they are less likely to appreciate certain distinctive genres and also potential differences in reader responses in earlier periods. The articles that are published in Language and Literature are really interesting and intellectually stimulating, but I just worry that in the future we are going to have less and less stylistics of historical texts. At the same time, I do think there is a future for more stylistics work that engages with ‘real world’ issues: an ‘applied stylistics’. It would be nice to see more articles published in the journal on forensic stylistics or on ‘green’ issues; and, in view of what has been happening in the past two years alone, on Covid-related discourses and the ethics and rhetoric of politics.

Those are very insightful points. I wanted to finish by asking you about what you were reading at the time when you started studying stylistics. I guess that there were not many textbooks around then. Should we be going back to any of those texts in particular? Also, which book now would you recommend to a student beginning stylistics?

What I was reading at the time was the work of Roger Fowler and Geoffrey Leech. Also at the time there were a lot of publications coming from the US: for example, Donald Freeman, ¹² Archibald Hill. ¹³ And then, once Leech and Short came out and Bakhtin, both in 1981, it was very exciting for me. And there was the work of Michael Halliday. Everyone should read his collected works some time in their life. Someone that Geoffrey Leech was influenced by in the 1960s was UCL’s Winifred Nowottny, ¹⁴ who wrote a book The Language Poets Use (Nowottny, 1962). She was not a stylistician, but she was really sensitive to language, as a lot of literary critics are, like Derek Attridge; ¹⁵ and Nowottny’s book is still worth reading. Which book now would I recommend to a student beginning stylistics? Definitely Lesley Jeffries’s Critical Stylistics (Jeffries, 2010), as I think it is inspiring and practical at the same time.

And looking to the future of PALA, how do you see it developing?

Someone at the PALA-Aix conference ¹⁶ asked at the end of Mick Short’s presentation on the history of PALA whether there was a future for it. Mick replied that of course there was. I do think myself, because of the current situation in UK universities ¹⁷ and perhaps in Europe also, with the uncertain future of arts and humanities studies, actually we might need PALA more than ever. We may end up with departments with just one stylistics teacher, or none at all: as in the early days. It is not just English language posts in danger, but English literature too. I think it is very worrying, the ‘Gradgrindian’ approach to higher education, where only STEM ¹⁸ subjects matter, not arts or humanities. The co-operative ethos we had at the outset of PALA, that is important to keep going. PALA needs to be an organisation that is there to help people, even if it is only emotional or psychological help. You then think that there are other scholars and researchers ‘out there’ who maybe you can contact. And PALA so far has proved to be an organisation which, as you know yourself, has found PhD supervisors, referees, book co-authors, life-long colleagues, etc. Long may this continue.