On the history of functional stylistics

The speaker began by talking about Ch. Bally, the founder of functional stylistics, and then he discussed how his students, J. Marouzeau and M. Cressot elaborated on Bally's legacy. Following a temporary setback, stylistics underwent a new period of upswing, as the speaker demonstrated by two examples. First, he discussed the yield of a conference on stylistics held late in 1991 at Sorbonne (cf. Qu'est-ce que le style? Ed. by Georges Molinié and Pierre Cahné, Paris, 1994). Second, he noted the fact that M. Cressot's 'Le style et ses techniques' (1947) appeared in a 13th edition in 1991. Then he gave a detailed analysis of whatever Laurence James changed in that edition and what he added to Cressot's original discussion. The talk concluded by stating that functional stylistics is capable of renascence and can absorb many results of more recent approaches without the danger of eclecticism.