Reading Style, Reading Fiction
Style
Home
"Negotiating Community in Augustus Baldwin Longstreet's Georgia Scenes."
Jed Deppman
"History
With Style: the Impassible Writing of Flaubert".
Michael Kearns
"Melville's
Chaotic Style and the Use of Generative Models: An Essay in Method."
R. A. Buck
"Reading
Forster's Style: Face Actions and Social Scripts in Maurice".
Jack Stewart
"Linguistic
Incantation and Parody in Women in Love."
Gerald Doherty
"Lady Chatterley's
Lover: Two Theories of Metaphor and Mental Disturbances."
Martha Dana Rust
"Stop
the World I Want to Get Off! Identity and Circularity in Gertrude Stein's
The World is Round."
Elena Semino and Kate Swindlehurst
"Metaphor
and Mind Style in Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."
Following the lead of Kenneth Lynn and his theory of the cordon sanitaire, most critics have interpreted the relationship between the gentleman narrator and the lower class whites in Longstreet's Georgia Scenes as an antagonistic one. Rather than simply asserting and justifying class privilege, however, Longstreet undertakes a complex negotiation of class roles. Lyman Hall, the primary narrator of Georgia Scenes, initially demonstrates a socionarrative style?that is, a social style reflected in narrative stylistics?that keeps the lower class at a social and moral distance, but at the expense of his being able to enforce his assumed social authority. During the course of the work, however, his socionarrative style evolves so that by the end of the text he is able to negotiate with the lower class a mutual perception of class roles. Although this resolution to class tensions produces the experience of an "organic" community, class hierarchies remain intact, with the fundamental difference that lower class respects Hall rather than resenting him.
back to top
Jed
Deppman. "History With Style: the Impassible Writing of Flaubert".
This essay integrates Flaubert's famous "historicism" and "realism"
with his stylistic revolutions, especially his free indirect style, irony,
and what I have described in detail as the style of impassibility. By combining
recent historicist readings of Salammbô with Marcel Proust's more
stylistic reading of Flaubert's works, I show how the complexity and rigor
of Flaubert's style makes writing, for him, a harmonious presentation of
ignorance: Flaubert disdains empiricist imperatives but nevertheless holds
himself to complex and difficult stylistic standards (for example harmony,
ignorance, internal fidelity, and impassibility) that constitute for him
the modern novel. My discussion of Madame Bovary and l'Éducation
sentimentale extends these findings to show how Flaubert, through studied
stylistic innovation, radicalizes the thingly character of objects to produce
a "historical" novel that reflects a new philosophy, neither Husserlian
nor Heideggerian, of the worldhood of the novel.
back to
top
Michael
Kearns. "Melville's Chaotic Style and the Use of Generative Models: An
Essay in Method."
Melville's semantically or syntactically flawed sentences, for example
"Ourselves are Fate" from White-Jacket, have not been adequately discussed
by traditional or contemporary literary scholars. These sentences tend
to clump together in textual positions of rhetorical emphasis and to arise
from the human experience of phenomena which cannot be wholly circumscribed
by verbal analysis, such as "the ineffable." Further, they give rise to
critical paraphrases which cannot be unambiguously tied to the sentence
elements yet which share general descriptive terms. Like the textual phenomena
themselves, this combination of textual and response phenomena can be metaphorically
described as a deterministic-chaotic system: although no exact correspondence
can be established between the textual details and the responses, patterns
emerge having more to do with a reader's "felt sense" than with any clear
set of propositions or images. Melville may have intended such an effect.
back to
top
R.
A. Buck. "Reading Forster's Style: Face Actions and Social Scripts in Maurice".
Stylistics research conducted over the last ten years and even that
produced today generally a) focuses on single linguistic-model applications
to a particular text and b) isolates findings rather than examines how
utterances in literary dialogue are connected to each other and influence
our understanding of preceding and succeeding utterances. Everything we
know about discourse from various models (namely conversational analysis,
Brown and Levinson's politeness theory, and frame/script theory) all interacts
to generate inferential meaning in text. An understanding of these communicative
presumptions allows us to unveil a process of meaning construction that
unfolds as we encounter a piece of literary dialogue, in this case a passage
from E. M. Forster's Maurice. Though readers and writers share general
knowledge of communicative principles, natural language models provide
a means by which we may explain differently constructed individual readings
within specified parameters.
back to
top
Jack
Stewart. "Linguistic Incantation and Parody in Women in Love."
In Women in Love, Lawrence shapes dialogue and action through polyphonic
language that attempts to overcome the inertia of the written word and
generate meaning from interaction of voices. According to Merleau-Ponty,
"the significance carried into the reader's mind exceeds langauge and thought
as already constituted and is magically thrown into relief during the linguistic
incantation." Dialogic language evokes more meaning than is conveyed in
the text, through repetition of key words, chanted phrases, mimicry (skaz),
caricatural echoes of a character's speech or concepts in the speech of
another, and the "double-voiced discourse" of parody (Bakhtin).
The dialogue in "Carpeting," with its incantatory repetition of do, use, and will, is tangential to the linguistic incantation of Lawrence's themes. Speech acts become moves in an ironic game, in which the text highlights their gestural function. Art-speech dialogizes the medium, exposing mechanical habits, so that common words are refined, defined, and redefined. The most explicit use of linguistic incantation is a dialogue in "Rabbit," that transposes key words into various languages. The turning of "mystery" into a lexical merry-go-round is a mockery of non-verbal otherness, while German, French, and Italian songs, catchphrases, pet names, and allusions scattered throughout the text increase its polyphony. Loerke's utterance is a bricolage from the rubbish-heaps of Europe; he and Gudrun spin "polyglot fancies" out of disintegrated languages and cultures. Underlying the variety of "social heteroglossia," Loerke finds only sameness and disillusionment; he is an ironic caricature of Birkin, for whom being no longer flows through the hardened arteries of language. This doubling forces a critical distinction between Loerke's cynicism and Birkin's questing. While recognizing the epistemological fallout in all language use, Lawrence struggles to express new ideas: he affirms thinking and writing as creative acts that can break through the walls of the unconscious.
In Birkin's letter to the Pompadour, parody opens an ironic distance
between authorial viewpoint and self-stylization in language. Mocking incantation
involves no recantation; Birkin's prophetic ideas stand forth in spite
of excessive rhetoric, his fervor contrasting with Halliday's sterility.
By framing the linguistic incantation within the speaker's mannerisms,
Lawrence relies on the reader to decode and salvage the convictions. Clear
discursive signals point to the position of authority rather than that
of transgression: the hegemonic discourse of the novel is thus tested and
reconfirmed. The "double-voiced discourse" of self-parody celebrates difference:
acknowledgment of esotericism goes along with the fullest indulgence and
reification of Lawrence's style. Exaggerating the cadenced flow of his
own rhetoric, Lawrence points beyond the distracting allurements of language
to the underlying power of ideas and his urgency to communicate them, despite
prejudice, interference, or incomprehension.
back to
top
Gerald
Doherty. "Lady Chatterley's Lover: Two Theories of Metaphor and Mental
Disturbances."
Textual "neurosis" and textual "psychosis" have their rhetorical source
in two different performances of metaphor. The distinction between the
two forms of mental disturbance is highlighted in sexual narratives, like
Lady Chatterley's Lover, which juxtapose sexual trauma and erotic wish-fulfillment
in a dramatically oppositional way. In that novel, neurosis is triggered
by libidinal repression, and takes the form of the disfiguring metaphor.
Psychosis, by contrast, is triggered by the orgasm, and takes the form
of the hallucinatory metaphor: it trades in fantasies of mastery, wholeness,
and omnipotence.
back to
top
Martha
Dana Rust. "Stop the World I Want to Get Off! Identity and Circularity
in Gertrude Stein's The World is Round."
A linguistic analysis of Gertrude Stein's 1939 children's story The
World is Round reveals that Stein's play with syntax, with semantics, and
with various strategies of narrative discourse work together to demonstrate
the inevitable instability of identity. The World is Round chronicles the
struggle of nine-year-old Rose to establish a stable sense of self in a
fluctuating, round world; the story's stylistics mirror her personal drama.
Stein's multiple lists of nouns, coupled with the linear discourse of narrative
itself, form a wedge against the story's overwhelmingly circular syntax
and create the fleeting impression that stability is possible in a round
world. Eventually, though, circularity has the "last" word in the story.
The lists of nouns that seemed to interrupt the story's spinning syntax
give way to a play of repetition and rhyme that only enhances its circularity,
and even the stable identities represented by the linear narrative mode
are eventually proven subject to flux. Stein thus gives her playful tale
a subversive message: in a round world, we may never know exactly "who"
we are.
back to
top
Elena
Semino and Kate Swindlehurst. "metaphor and Mind Style in Ken Kesey's One
Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."
A number of different studies of narrative fiction have highlighted
the role played by lexical, syntactic and transitivity patterns in the
creation of what Fowler has called mind style: "any distinctive linguistic
presentation of an individual mental self" (Fowler, Linguistics and the
Novel 103). Although it has received scant attention in studies of mind
style, metaphor can also contribute to the projection of characteristic
and possibly deviant ways of perceiving and conceptualising the world.
The theory of metaphor developed by Lakoff, Johnson and Turner (Lakoff
and Johnson, Lakoff and Turner) has important implications for a theory
of mind style, since it can be used to account for the cognitive implications
of consistent metaphorical patterns in texts. On the other hand, the notion
of mind style is highly relevant to the cognitive approach to metaphor,
since it highlights the way in which Lakoff and Johnson's claims concerning
the connections between conventional metaphors and culture can be applied
to the connections between non-conventional uses of metaphor and individual
world views. A detailed analysis of the language of Ken Kesey's One Flew
Over the Cuckoo's Nest shows how metaphorical patterns are used to create
the idiosyncratic mind style of the novel's first person narrator and to
chart his development throughout the novel.
back to
top