ABSTRACT
This chapter is devoted to the challenge dual narrative dynamics present to stylistics and discusses how to meet the challenge. It shows that in a narrative with dual dynamics, the same linguistic choices may play contrastive or even opposite functions and/or take on different degrees of importance in the parallel narrative movements. Seen in this light, what determines meaning production is not co-text but a particular narrative movement as a trajectory of signification, which may be contradicted by another trajectory in the same text. Existing stylistic analyses, no matter what approach is adopted, invariably only pay attention to the meaning words generate in the text and are only concerned with one kind of thematic significance. To account for the different kinds of meaning the same words simultaneously generate in the parallel narrative movements, we need to double (or even triple) analytic procedures and carry out stylistic analyses along different thematic trajectories in the same text.
