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Mind Style Translated
Susan Derwin
The Poetics of M. F. K. Fisher
Janet Ruth Heller
Toni Cade Bambara’s Use of African
American Vernacular English in “The Lesson”
Werner Wolf
The Role of Music in Gabriel Josipovici’s Goldberg:
Variations
Laura Hidalgo Downing
Negation as a Stylistic Feature in
Joseph Heller’s Catch-22: A Corpus Study
Building on the notion of “mind style,” first used by Roger Fowler in 1977, this article considers how the translator of poetry, who is also, in the first instance, a reader, reconstructs from stylistic evidence in the text a cognitive state that can reasonably be attributed to the original poet. However, this cognitive state, embodied in the style of the original, is not in any sense absolute. A comparison of two English translations of a poem by Christian Morgenstern clearly illustrates that the posited cognitive state to be re-created is the product of the interaction of the reader’s own knowledge, ideas, and aims with the evidence of the mind style in the text.
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Susan Derwin, “The Poetics of M. F. K.
Fisher” / 266
M. F. K. Fisher has been regarded as a food writer, although she did
not think of herself in this way. Food was her main topic, but she did
not just write about food: she studied, prepared, served, and ate it. Food
was Fisher’s primary link to her world and self, and her writing bodied
forth the life-connections that coalesced around food. As a writer, Fisher
subscribed to a principle of indirection, the result of which is that in
her writing, self-disclosure occurs not explicitly but through her works’
formal properties. Fisher is not explicitly self-analytic. Rather, her
writing stages the complexity of her psychological responses. The diffusion
of the psychological throughout the rhetorical aspects of her works produces
a poetics with the density of literature and a style that reflects the
way in which Fisher experienced life at many levels of her being.
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Janet Ruth Heller, “Toni Cade Bambara’s
Use of African American Vernacular English in ‘The Lesson’” / 279
In Toni Cade Bambara’s short story, “The Lesson” (1972), the narrator,
Sylvia, speaks in African American Vernacular English (AAVE). This is an
appropriate dialect for Sylvia, a working-class black child about twelve
years old who lives in a New York ghetto. AAVE adds realism and humor to
the story. The dialect also reflects Bambara’s pride in her ethnic heritage.
AAVE fits the story’s main theme: wealth is unequally and unfairly distributed
in American society. In “The Lesson,” the have-not children speak AAVE.
This vernacular dialect emphasizes the children’s distance from mainstream
white bourgeois culture and economic power. However, Bambara also celebrates
AAVE as a vehicle for conveying black experience: Sylvia uses AAVE to express
her self-confidence, toughness, feminism, assertiveness, and creativity
as a young black woman. AAVE also embodies Sylvia’s and Bambara’s ability
to question their society and to resist pressure to conform to the dominant
culture.
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Werner Wolf, “The Role of Music in Gabriel
Josipovici’s Goldberg: Variations” / 294
As a contribution to the “intermedial turn” that has characterized
fiction after Modernism, a number of novels have attempted to “aspire towards
the condition of music.” Among them figures the latest work by the avant-garde
author Gabriel Josipovici, Goldberg: Variations (2002). In fact, among
the various ways in which this experimental novel refers to music, attempts
at imitating musical forms (notably theme and variation) and modes of composition
(such as polyphony) loom large. The essay analyzes the role music plays
in this text and examines to what extent and for what purpose Josipovici
tries to musicalize fiction and meets the expectation that his text is
a verbal counterpart of the Goldberg Variationen of Bach alluded to in
its title. Music, in particular classic music, is found, on the one hand,
metonymically to represent the overwhelming creative capacity of the past
and to contribute to a postmodern consciousness of exhausted possibilities;
yet on the other hand the references to music, in particular the imitation
of the form of theme and variation, also functions as a device for creating
aesthetic coherence as well as an indirect means of reflecting on the literary
medium, on art and meaning in general.
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Laura Hidalgo Downing, “Negation
as a Stylistic Feature in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22: A Corpus Study”
/ 318
The present article is a corpus based study of negation as a stylistic
feature in the novel Catch-22, by Joseph Heller. The frequency and distribution
of types of negation in this novel is compared to the frequency and distribution
of negation in two corpora, the sections of general fiction in LOB and
Brown, and a sample of conversation from Tottie. The frequency of negative
words is calculated and compared in the three corpora of fiction, followed
by the calculation and comparison of the frequency of negative clause types
in a sample from Catch-22, a sample from Brown, and Tottie’s sample of
conversation. Results show that the overall frequency of negative words
is higher in Catch-22 than in the other corpora of fiction. With regard
to the types of negative clause, an initial analysis is carried out applying
Tottie’s classification. Results show a much higher frequency of implicit
denials in the samples of fiction than in the sample of conversation. A
new subclassification of denials is proposed in order to account for relevant
discourse functions of negation in fictional discourse. The most significant
finding in the analysis of these categories is the presence of what I have
termed as reversal, which occurs in Catch-22 but not in the Brown sample.
The concluding argument is that negation is a salient feature in Catch-22
not only because of the high frequency of negative words in the novel,
but because of the role played by reversals in the novel.
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