The Universality of Literary Style: An Insight into the Graphic Novel

Abstract

Literary phenomena with a distinct style, i.e., containing significant stylistic elements, could be seen as universal. In this case, universality is understood as a tendency of stylistic elements to occur in a variety of texts, mainly but not exclusively in literary genres. Considering that literary studies borrowed the term style from other areas of the arts in the early 20^th century (cf. Juvan 187), it is not surprising that stylistic elements should have the ability to function in various environments – and thus in different text types. If these elements are observed in a transdisciplinary way, they are universal in a synchronous sense; on the other hand, they can also be studied vertically on the timeline, since they pass through all time periods from the Greek and Roman Periods to the present, thus achieving diachronic universality. This article first summarizes selected definitions of literary style, which can be divided into two major groups of approaches: monistic and dualistic. Although modern stylistics demonstrates the need for a complete renovation of classical treatments of style, the traditional categories prove to be adequate for understanding universality in the sense this thesis uses for the development of its central premise. The analytical part of the article deals with the phenomenon and function of the (usually classical) style markers in the graphic novel, where the linguistic semantic code is largely replaced by a visual/graphic one (despite the name graphic novel, the semantic code in this genre is not exclusively graphic). The analysis is based on the definition of style by Leech and Short, because their structured approach turns out to be the most appropriate. The findings are mainly illustrated with the examples from the award-winning graphic novel Maus by Art Spiegelman, and two other graphic novels. It turns out that the same stylistic elements that in the literary sense are traditionally justified in verbal discourse do function effectively even when transferred to a visual or visual-verbal code. Moreover, these style elements can even constitute the essential building blocks of literary structure in a graphic novel.