Style

1. Style To me, style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the human body—both go together, they cannot be separated. –Jean-Luc Godard “

2. "The essence of a sound style is that it cannot be reduced to rules--that it is a living and breathing thing with something of the devilish in it--that it fits its proprietor tightly yet ever so loosely, as his skin fits him. It is, in fact, quite as seriously an integral part of him as that skin is. . . . In brief, a style is always the outward and visible symbol of a man, and cannot be anything else.“ --H.L. Mencken

3. Richard Lanham’s Style: an Anti-Textbook • Lyly’s decorative, ornate, verbal play, great use of figures of speech results in an opaque style where “manner becomes matter.” • The scientific style championed by Dryden (among others) emphasizes clarity and simplicity over invention. As a result, scientificstyle aligns itself with morality over aesthetics. • "Proper words in proper places, make the true definition of style.“—Jonathan Swift

4. Lanham • “for prose style, the way to sincerity lies through verbal artifice, not around it.” • “Prose style is always a presentation of the self.”

5. The Elizabethan florid writing style is known as Euphuism, named as such after John Lyly’s title protagonist from “Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit” (1578) and “Euphues and His England” (1580). Lyly employed an ornate aesthetic style drawing upon proverbs and mythology. His work was marked by an attention to sound and rhythm, alliteration and assonance and a host of figurative language, along with antithetical pairings in alternating patterns in order to highlight opposition and contrast.

6. “Seeing thou wilt not buye counsel at the first hand good cheape, thou shaltbuyerepentaunce at the second hande, at such an unreasonable rate, that thou wilt curse thy hard pennyworth, and ban thy harde heart.”

7. “I have read (saith he) and well I believe it, that a friend is in prosperity a pleasure, a solace in adversity, in grief a comfort, in joy a merry companion, at all times an other I , in all places the express image of mine own person; insomuch that I cannot tell whether the immortal Gods have bestowed any gift opun mortal men, either more noble or more necessary than friendship.”

8. “Although hitherto, Euphues, I have shrined thee in my heart for a trusty friend, I will shun thee hereafter as a trothless foe, and although I cannot see in thee less wit than I was wont, yet do I find less honesty. I perceive at the last (although being deceived it be too late) that musk though it be sweet in the smell is sour in the smack, that the leaf of the cedar tree though it be fair to be seen, yet the syrup depriveth sight—that friendship though it be plighted by the shaking of the hand, yet is shaken by the fraud of the heart. But thou hast not much to boast of, for as thou has won a fickle lady, so thou has lost a faithful friend.”

9. The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women John Knox 1558 • And first, where I affirm the empire of a woman to be a thing repugnant to nature, I mean not only that God, by the order of his creation, has spoiled [deprived] woman of authority and dominion, but also that man has seen, proved, and pronounced just causes why it should be.

10. The Restorationand John Dryden’s prose style reacts against the Euphuistic style as heralding immoral or intemperate excess. The age marked by a woman monarch and highly stylized prose was castigated by male successors in court. Dryden made his reputation by celebrating powerful men in the nation such as Oliver Cromwell.

11. Dryden’s preface to ReligioLaici privileged a simple style wherein “the expressions of a poem designed purely for instruction ought to be plain and natural, yet majestic...The florid, elevated and figurative way is for the passions; for (these) are begotten in the soul by showing the objects out of their true proportion....A man is to be cheated into passion, but to be reasoned into truth.”

12. Founded in 1660, The Royal Society was a committee designed to improve and standardize the English language and included Dryden, John Evelyn and Thomas Sprat. • Sprat considered the Euphuistic style as “diseased.” The ideal style should “reject all amplifications, digressions and swellings of style” in order to “return back to a primitive purity and shortness.”

13. The Renaissance • 1558-1603 Elizabethan • 1603-1625 Jacobean • 1625-1649 Caroline • 1649-1669 Commonwealth • Leading authors of the period include Lily, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Spenser, Milton.

14. Neoclassical • 1660-1700 Restoration • 1700-1745 Augustan Age • 1745-1785 Age of Reason Leading authors include Milton, Dryden, Bunyan Pope, Johnson, Swift, Sheridan, Aphra Ben.

15. Romantic • 1785-1830 • William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, John Keats, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Sir Walter Scott, Jane Austen. In the U.S., it flourished later with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Emerson, Poe, Whitman, Dickinson.

16. Victorians • 1832-1900 • Bronte, Tennyson, Thackeray, Matthew Arnold, Dickens, George Eliot, Hardy. • You can also characterize this period as literary realism in the U.S. 1860-1890. Twain, William Dean Howells, Henry James, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris.

17. Modernism • Traditionally believed to begin in the early 20th century, many scholars now trace modernism back to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary in 1857. • Joyce, Yeats, Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Conrad, Kafka, Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Faulkner, T.S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Lawrence,Beckett.

18. Postmodernism • 1960- • Pynchon, Barthes, Barthelme, Delillo, Lyotard, Derrida, Barth, Jameson, Martin Amis, David Foster Wallace.

19. Invention, variety, imitation • Erasmus demonstrated 195 different ways you could express the sentence “your letter pleased me greatly.” To be sure, how your letter delighted my spirits. Your communication poured vials of joy on my head. At your words a delight of no ordinary kind came over me (litotes-- A figure of speech consisting of an understatement in which an affirmative is expressed by negating its opposite).

20. Exercises in Style Raymond Queneau • “Metaphorically” In the centre of the day, tossed among the shoal of travelling sardines in a coleopter with a big white carapace, a chicken with a long, featherless neck suddenly harangued one, a peace-abiding one, of their number, and its parlance, moist with protest, was unfolded upon the airs.

21. Then, attracted by a void, the fledgling precipitated itself thereunto. In a bleak urban desert, I saw it again that self-same day, drinking the cup of humiliation offered by a lowly button.

22. “Synchysis” • Ridiculous young man, as I was on an S bus one day chock-full be traction perhaps whose neck was elongated, round his hat and who had a cord, I noticed a. Arrogant and sniveling in a tone, who happened to be next to him, with the man to remonstrate he started. Because that he pushed him he claimed, time every that got off anyone. Vacant he sat down and made a dash towards a seat, having said this. Rome (Cour de) in the I met him later two hours to his overcoat a button to add a friend was advising him.

23. “Homeoptotes” On a certain date, a corporate crate on wgich the electorate congregate when they migrate at a great rate, late, had to accommodate an ornate tracheate celibate, who started to altercate with a proximate inmate, and ejaculate: “Mate, why do you lacerate, obliterate and excoriate my plates?”

24. “Onomatopoeia” On the platform, plaplapla, of a bus, chuff chuffchuff, which was an S (and singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest), it was about noon, ding dang dong, ding dang dong, a ridiculous ephebus, poof poof, who had one of those hate, pooh, suddenly turned (twirl twirl)on his neighbour angrily, grrhgrrh, and said hmhm: “You are purposely jostling me, Sir,” Ha ha. Whereupon phfftt, he threw himself on to a free seat and sat down, plonk.

25. “Passive” It was midday. The bus was being got into by passengers. They were being squashed together. A hat was being worn on the head of a young gentleman, which hat was encircled by a plait and not by a ribbon. A long neck was one of the characteristics of the young gentleman. The man standing next to him was being grumbled at by the latter because of the jostling which was being inflicted on him by him.

26. “Alexandrines” One midday on the bus—the S line was its ilk— I saw a little runt, a miserable milk— Sop, voicing discontent, although around his turban He had a plaited cord, this fancy-pants suburban. Now hear what he complained of, this worm-metamorphosis With disproportionate neck, suffering from halitosis.

27. “Parachesis” On the butt-end of a bulging bus which was transbustling an abundance of incubuses and Buchmanites from bumbledom towards their bungalows, a bumptious buckeen whose buttocks were remote from his bust and who was buttired in a boody ridiculous busby, buddenly had a bust up with a robust buckra who was bumping into him: “Buccaneer, buzz off, you’re butting my bunions!” Rebuffed, he did a bunk.

28. “Philosophic” Great cities alone can provide phenomenoligical spirituality with the essentialities of temporal and improbabilistic coincidences. The philosopher who occasionally ascends into the futile and utilitarian inexistentiality of an S bus can perceive therein with the lucidity of the pineal eye the transitory and faded appearance of a profane consciousness afflicted by the long neck of vanity and the hatly plait of ignorance.

29. “Apostrophe” O platinum-nibbedstylograph, let thy smooth and rapid course trace on this single-sided calendar paper those alphabetic glyphs which shall transmit to men of sparkling spectacles the narcissistic tale of a double encounter of omnibusilistic cause. Proud courser of my dreams, faithful camel of my literary exploits, lissome fountain of words counted, weighed and chosen . . .”

30. “Antiphrasis” Midnight. It’s raining. The buses go by nearly empty. On the bonnet of an A1 near the Bastille, an old man whose head is sunk in his shoulders and who isn’t wearing a hat thanks a lady sitting a long way away from him because she is stroking his hands. Then he goes to stand on the knees of a man who is still sitting down.

31. “Gastronomical” After slowly roasting in the browned butter of the sun I finally managed to get into a pistachio bus which was crawling with customers as an overripe cheese crawls with maggots. Having paid my fare, I noticed among all those noodles a poor fish with a neck as long as a stick of celery and a loaf surmounted by a ridiculous donkey’s dinner.

32. This unsavoury character started to beef because a chap was pounding the joints of his cheeses to pulp. But when he found that he had bitten off more than he could chew, he quailed like a lily-livered dunghill-cock and bolted off to stew in his own juice.

33. “Modern Style” In a bus one day it so happened that I was a witness of the following as you might say tragi-comedy which revealing as it does the way our French cousins go on these days I thought I ought to put you in the picture. When the bus is full all the passengers foregather on the back platform, and one of them was a fancy-pants of the first water

34. with a fantastic long neck and a hat with a plaited cord or what have you round it and a pansy sort of overcoat—the lot. All very pricey, no doubt, but definitely not my cup of tea. Well this chap, what he did, he started to go for the chap standing next to him, claimed he kept treading on his toes if you please.

35. Other entries • Surprises, anagrams, animism, dream, precision, the subjective side, blurb, official letter, comedy, cockney, awkward, casual sonnet, olfactory, negativities, feminine, haiku, zoological, mathematical, dog Latin, West Indian.

36. Synonyms! • The character development shows the struggle of the main character to overcome the experience. The struggledevelops throughout the film to show the audience how much the character has learned from the experience. The strugglehelps him learn that there is more to life than material goods. • Character—protagonist, hero-heroine, central figure • Struggle—battle, adversity, combat, contest, contend, obstacle • Develop—evolve, cultivate, actualize, grow, generate • Experience—episode, event, encounter, ordeal, incident.

37. Enallage & Metaplasmus • Effective grammatical mistake “We was robbed!” Joe Jacobs, 1932. “‘Is there not wars? Is there not employment?’” -Shakespeare’s Henry IV • Effective spelling mistake Gawd/Godot “After giving the cropse of his wife a decent funferall, the man, really a fornicationist at heart sinduced his daughter into an act of insect.”—Joyce Finnegans Wake

38. Asyndeton & Polysyndeton • “I came, I saw, I conquered.” Caesar • “A woman mov’d is like a fountain troubled, Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty.”-- S TS “A cathedral, a wave of storm, a dancer’s leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped.” --Proust. • “The horizon narrowed and widened, and dipped and rose, and at all times its edge was jagged with waves that seemed thrust up in points like rocks.” --Crane. • “When men drink, then they are rich and successful and win lawsuits and are happy and help their friends. Quickly, bring me a beaker of wine.” --Aristophanes

39. Alliteration & Assonance “The soul selects her own society.”—Dickinson S’s Sonnet 30: “When to the session of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought” “Thou still unravished bride of quietness, Thou foster child of silence and slow time.” --Keats "Those images that yetFresh images beget,That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea."-- Yeats