The Stylistics of 'You'

This book takes ''you'' the reader on board an interdisciplinary journey across genre time and medium with the second-person pronoun. It offers a model of the various pragmatic functions and effects of ''you'' according to different variables and linguistic parameters cutting across a wide range of genres (ads political slogans tweets news presentation literary genres etc.) and bringing together print and digital texts under the same theoretical banner. Drawing on recent research into intersubjectivity in neuropsychology and socio-cognition it delves into the relational and ethical processing at work in the reading of a second-person pronoun narrative. When ''you'' takes on its more traditional deictic function of address the author-reader channel can be opened in different ways which is explored in examples taken from Fielding Bront Orwell Kincaid Grimsley Royle Adichie Bartlett Auster and even Spacey''s ''creepy'' 2018 YouTube video ultimately foregrounding continuities and contrasts in the positioning of the audience.