Quick questions on Aesthetic features and stylistic devices in literary texts (QCE English Unit 3)

The two terms in the dot point are not interchangeable.

A short audit, with what each contributes.

The point of naming devices is to use the right name. Specificity is mark-bearing.

The single biggest IA2 trap is technique-spotting: a paragraph that lists devices without an argument. The fix is a three-step procedure for any device.

The strongest IA2 paragraphs do not isolate a single device. They show a cluster of moves at different scales working together.

Listing devices without argument. The single most common Band 5 mistake. Every device named must do work for a claim.

Properties of the text as a whole or of large sections of it. Form, structure, voice, focalisation, tone, atmosphere, pacing, narrative time, intertextuality. Aesthetic features operate at the scale of the chapter, the section, the novel.

Local language moves that operate sentence by sentence. Metaphor, simile, polysyndeton, anaphora, free indirect discourse, irony, juxtaposition, allusion, alliteration, assonance, syntactic inversion. Stylistic devices are the building blocks the writer arranges to produce the aesthetic features.

Novel, novella, short story, verse novel, lyric poem, narrative poem, play, screenplay, memoir, essay. Form is the kind of text. Form determines what the text can do (a verse novel can do compression and narrative simultaneously; a play cannot do interiority without convention).

The architecture of the parts. Linear or fragmented chronology, frame narrative, parallel plots, embedded narratives, ring composition. Structure is meaning at the level of organisation.

Who speaks and through whose consciousness the reader sees. First person interior, first person retrospective, third person limited, third person omniscient, free indirect discourse, choric (multiple voices).

The text's stance toward its material. Elegiac, ironic, comic, solemn, intimate, austere, exuberant. Tone is what colours the reader's reception.

The felt environment the text creates. Atmosphere is built through diction, sensory detail, pacing and weather.

The rate at which the text moves. A slow chapter that lingers on a single afternoon and a fast chapter that compresses a year are doing different aesthetic work.

When the text is set and how it moves through time. Flashback, flash-forward, real time, summary. Time handling is an aesthetic feature.