The Style and Timbre of English Speech and Literature

Recent discoveries in neurophysiology have revealed the way we read books and perceive their content. For years scholars treated semantics as being almost exclusively the area of linguistics. But human experience and our vision of the world switch on certain areas in our brain that allow us to perceive the content not only semantically but also phonetically – the experience that we tend to call 'timbre' – or the collective aural impression of the defamiliarised elements of the text. Such aural canvases formed by the foregrounded peaks of the auditory perception form a new vision of the narrated reality that may revolutionize our views of how we understand the written content. This book reveals formerly hidden sides of many familiar texts, including those written hundreds of years ago. It serves as a supplement to the regular courses of stylistics and rhetoric in language schools, universities and courses of language development.

Marklen Konurbaev is Professor of English Philology at Department of English Linguistics at Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia. He is the author of over 80 publications including 4 books devoted to stylistics of Modern English speech and literature. His main research interests include the style and history of the King James Bible as well as cultural anthropology and translation studies.