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Module 6: Style

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ENGL 1001_SW3 - Literature and Composition I

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(Winter 2019 Stanley) Module 6: Style

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Module 6: Style

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Table of contents O vv eerr vv Toop pii cc 1:: D e fi ni i tt i i o n o Toop pii cc 2 :: D ii c t Toop pii cc 3 :: II m maag Toop pii cc 4 :: S ii m m Toop pii cc 5 :: M e ttaaph To p ii cc 6:: S e ntteenccee LLeen g tth h a n d S ttrr To p ii cc 7:: Re a dii n g P rrii de a nd P rre To p ii cc 8:: Us ii n g P rrii m maarryy a n d S e c o n d a rryy To p ii cc 9:: Re s e a rr To p ii cc 10 :: Re v ii ssii n g a n To p ii cc 11 :: P a s ssaag e A n a ll

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Module 6: Style

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Overview The commentaries and questions in Module 5 focused on point of view. This module examines the main elements of style: diction and imagery, similes and metaphors, and sentence length and structure. You’ll have opportunities to test your understanding of style through some study questions. The writing task of the last module gave you an opportunity to practice the crucial skill of avoiding plagiarism by identifying for your readers the sources of ideas. As additional preparation for your research essay—Assignment 4—this module’s readings from The Bare Essentials"include information on primary and secondary sources and research skills. Finally, this module will prepare you for one of the three parts in your final exam with instructions on how to write a passage analysis. The attention to detail required in a passage analysis should also provide you with useful practice in taking note of the elements of an author’s style—one more indispensable skill at the service of writing thoughtful, in-depth essays on fiction.

Readings Note All short story readings are from The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, edited by R. V. Cassill and Richard Bausch. All readings on writing are from The Bare Essentials.

Short Stories William Faulkner: “Barn Burning” D. H. Lawrence: “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter”

Writing Chapter 27: “Using Research Resources Responsibly: Crediting your sources: MLA and APA documentation.” Chapter 27: “Using Research Resources Responsibly: Using Online Sources.” Chapter 25: “Paragraphs: Keeping your reader with you.”

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Chapter 26: “Revising Your Paper.”

Outcomes The goals listed in the Course Guide apply to Module 6. After you complete your work for Module 6, you should also be able to do the following: Identify the significance of style as a component of fiction. Define the main elements of style: diction and imagery, similes and metaphors, and sentence length and structure. Differentiate between primary and secondary sources. Apply the strategies for careful revision and self-editing. Write a detailed passage analysis.

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Topic 1: Definition of Style Style refers to the ways that writers exploit the expressive potential of language. The specific literary features that may contribute to a particular writer’s style are practically unlimited—especially if we were to consider the work of every kind of writer in every period of literary history! Style illustrates the evidently limitless flexibility of the English language. In this module, we’ll consider only the most fundamental categories that define literary style. Andrew Gray points out that astute readers often pick up on aspects of a writer’s style that she/he may not have been conscious.

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Topic 2: Diction Diction simply means an author’s choice of words. Authors may favour using words that are formal or colloquial or even slang—the three main levels of diction. From among the stories we’ve studied, “The Yellow Wallpaper” has the strongest claim to the formal category, even as it attempts to reflect the often loosely connected thoughts of the story’s narrator. Its apparent formality may be partly the result of when it was written. First published in 1892, the language of “The Yellow Wallpaper” may strike us as old-fashioned or maybe even a little pompous. In spite of the narrator’s claim to being “ordinary,” the story’s opening sentence suggests the speech of an educated, upper-class lady: “It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.” The words “seldom,” “mere,” “secure,” and “ancestral” suggest the narrator’s sophistication and anchor the language of the story securely to the formal level. Even at the end of the story, when in a state of mental delirium the narrator contemplates jumping out the window, she expresses herself in a formal, dignified manner: “I know well enough that a step like that is improper and might be misconstrued.” The contrast between the narrator’s formal language, its focus on propriety and on what others might think of her, and the suicide she contemplates produces a darkly comic effect. The diction of James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” is generally informal or colloquial. Scattered here and there are also slang expressions that reflect the story’s social setting. Words such as horse (slang for heroin ) and dope (slang for a narcotic drug ) point to Harlem’s drug subculture. The narrator compares his brother to “Harlem hipsters,” which is slang for those in the New York City district with the latest styles and attitudes. Near the end of the story, slang expressions such as a gas to describe something that’s enjoyable and chicks to describe young women evoke the unconventional atmosphere of the nightclub. The diction of some stories may be confined to simplicity and restraint, whereas the diction others may reach for the unusual or even the far-fetched. Hemingway’s diction is famously simple. A brief survey of the adjectives in “Hills Like White Elephants,” for example, confirms Hemingway’s reliance on plain vocabulary: long , white , hot, warm, brown, and dry. These comments primarily distinguish between levels of diction. To summarize how levels of diction function, however, we need to relate diction to point of view. A story’s diction reflects its point of view. The objective point of view, for example, places strict limits on diction. Since “Hills Like White Elephants” records only what can be seen and heard, its diction, reflecting only what can be seen and heard, is simple. Words that describe emotions, for example, have been carefully excluded.

Question 1 6 of 23

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How would you describe the diction Margaret Atwood uses in “Death by Landscape”? Compare your answer to the one provided below. Show Answer

Reading For a brief summary of style, turn to the definition in the “Glossary of Critical Terms” at the back of your short story anthology.

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Topic 3: Imagery Imagery refers to the collection of images in any literary work. In spite of its obvious reference to the visual, images are words that can refer to any of our sense impressions—things we can see, but also what we can hear, smell, taste, and touch. The most obvious function of imagery is to fill in the details of a story’s world, in other words, its physical setting. In “Rules of the Game,” the smells, tastes, sounds, sights, and the sensations of touch that Waverly describes help to bring San Francisco’s Chinatown to life for the reader. For example, she describes cooking smells—the “fragrant red beans” as they cook and the heavy “odor of fried sesame balls.” She describes the taste of different foods, the “pasty sweetness” of the beans and the “sweet curried chicken.” Sounds are also part of Waverly’s world: the “cracking” of the roasted watermelon seeds and the “gurgling pigeons.” Waverly’s Chinatown is filled with exotic sights: “insect shells,” “saffron-colored seeds,” “boxes of dried cuttlefish,” “crates of live frogs and crabs,” and so on. Finally, Waverly also uses words that convey what things feel like: “slimy” for the fish tank and “slippery” for the fish. The sand dabs with their flattened eyes make her “shiver.” Amy Tan’s use of imagery is lavish; “Rules of the Game” engages all our senses.

Question 2 In what way does the imagery in Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” differ from the imagery in “Rules of the Game”? Compare your answer to the one provided below. Show Answer

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Topic 4: Similes So far we’ve been talking about literal images that refer to the actual features of a story’s setting. The literal images of the “gurgling pigeons,” the “slides well-shined down the middle,” and the “wood-slat benches” are all literal or actual features of the playground as described by Waverly in “Rules of the Game.” But images also appear in figurative uses of language, most commonly in similes and metaphors. The “white elephants” in “Hills Like White Elephants,” for example, aren’t literal images like the hills themselves. The white elephants don’t exist in the world of the story as do the hills. The hills only appear to the girl to look like white elephants. In comparing the hills to white elephants, the girl makes use of a simile, a figure of speech that compares two objects with the words “like” or “as.” She says, “‘They [the hills] look like white elephants.’” Not surprisingly, Hemingway’s story isn’t a rich source of figurative images; his abbreviated style doesn’t allow them much elbow room. Margaret Atwood often uses similes in “Death by Landscape” to embellish the description of a character’s physical appearance. The description of Cappie’s head that juts forward and jigs “like a chicken’s” adds a comic dimension to her portrait. Lucy’s “large blue eyes like a doll’s” emphasize the artificiality of her unblemished features. With his eye patch, Lucy’s father is “like a pirate,” a romantic image that underlines Lois’s belief in her friend’s fascinating background as compared to her own disappointingly ordinary one. Of course, Atwood also uses similes in other contexts. One noteworthy example is the simile that describes the sensation in Lois’s arms after a day of paddling the canoe: “The muscles of her sore arms were making small pings, like rubber bands breaking.” Atwood’s choice of a figurative image adds sound—the pings—to the familiar ache of overtired arms, which we don’t normally “hear.” That the pings are associated with breaking rubber bands—whose sharp pain and snapping sound we’re all familiar with—creates a far more vivid impression than the words “sore arms” alone could supply.

Question 3 Similes aren’t an important feature of the style of Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral.” Why? Compare your answer to the one provided below. Show Answer

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Topic 5: Metaphors Like similes, metaphors are figures of speech used to compare two different things. Unlike similes, however, metaphors don’t use the words “like” or “as.” Consider Melville’s description of his remarkable employee Turkey: “In the morning, one might say, his face was of a fine florid hue, but after twelve o’clock, meridian—his dinner hour—it blazed like a grate full of Christmas coals; and continued blazing—but, as it were, with a gradual wane—till 6 o’clock P.M. or thereabouts, after which I saw no more of the proprietor of the face, which, gaining its meridian with the sun, seemed to set with it, to rise, culminate, and decline the following day, with the like regularity and undiminished glory.”

Question 4 What is the metaphor Richard Ford uses in the last sentence of “Great Falls”? Compare your answer to the one provided below. Show Answer

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Topic 6: Sentence Length and Structure Like diction, sentences can be simple and conversational or complex and formal. Some sentences may contain many modifying phrases and subordinate clauses, while others may be stripped down to the bare minimum of a subject and a verb. A style that settles somewhere in between very long and elaborately constructed sentences and very short and simply constructed ones seems to be the standard for most writers. Nevertheless, some writers specialize in one or the other sentence type. Hemingway’s sentences aren’t necessarily shorter than most, but they do tend to avoid complex structures. Instead of specifying the relations between sentence parts with a variety of connecting words, Hemingway tends to rely on the conjunction and. Sentences such as the following from “Hills Like White Elephants” show how and connects both phrases and clauses: “They sat down at the table and the girl looked across at the hills on the dry side of the valley and the man looked at her and at the table.”

Polysyndeton The rhetorical term for this frequent use of and is polysyndeton. Unlike Hemingway’s sentences, Melville’s sentences are often long and elaborate. See for example the sentence quoted in Topic 5. The sentence has a rhetorical exuberance about it, as if Melville is pushing it to its limits.

Reading Read William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning” and D. H. Lawrence’s “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter” before reading the Module 6 commentaries, which focus on style. (If Faulkner is new to you, you may need to read “Barn Burning” twice before going on to the commentaries. It may be the most challenging story you read for this course.) Consider identifying features of style as you find them in the stories you are reading. For a more detailed consideration of style in these stories, ask yourself the following question: How does style contribute to our impressions of a story’s settings, characters, and conflicts?

Commentary: William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning” Diction Faulkner’s style is peppered with uncommon and sometimes outlandish word choices. Abner, the story’s barn-burning

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antagonist, vindictively cleans Major de Spain’s rug—on which he earlier wiped his dung-covered boot—with harsh lye and a sharp stone. The damage that causes to the rug is described in formidable terms: “Where they [the tracks of Abner’s boot] had been were now long, water-cloudy scoriations resembling the sporadic course of a Lilliputian mowing machine.” The effect of such words as scoriations—an obsolete term revived by Faulkner to mean the grooves worn into the carpet by scrubbing—and Lilliputian —an adjective derived from the imaginary country of Lilliput, inhabited by little people, in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels—is to turn the damaged carpet into a portentous sign of Abner’s destructive pride. You already may have noticed the unusual adjective water-cloudy in the quoted passage: Faulkner, like Margaret Atwood in “Death by Landscape,” coins striking and poetic compound adjectives. Other notable examples are friction-glazed , pebble-

colored, and vine-massed . Our final observation on diction, although certainly not the last one we could make, is Faulkner’s use of dialect in the speech of his characters. The reaction by one of Sarty’s sisters to their new two-room house, for example, reveals the family’s low socioeconomic status and lack of education: “‘Likely hit [the house] ain’t fitten for hawgs.’”

Imagery The imagery in “Barn Burning” relate to clothing, food, plants and animals, household items, and farming implements—to name only some of the major categories. On the whole, the images reflect the sense impressions of the story’s ten-year-old protagonist and point-of-view character, whose full name is Colonel Sartoris Snopes, shortened to Sarty. In the story’s opening paragraph, he smells “cheese,” sees the canned food as “solid, squat, dynamic shapes,” their labels decorated with “scarlet devils and the silver curve of fish.” These images fill in the details of the store’s interior, but they also tell us that Sarty is hungry. Faulkner often repeats images, re-combining them throughout the story. Of all the images associated with Abner, Sarty’s father, “black” and “stiff” are perhaps the two most frequently repeated. Abner’s hat and coat are black, and the word stiff is applied, in various passages, to Abner’s back, limp, and foot. When these words are repeated in the same sentence, the effect is incantatory. Among the many examples to choose from is the following fragment of a longer sentence: “once more he [Sarty] followed the stiff back, the stiff and ruthless limp.”

Similies Faulkner’s similes tend to be unusual and elaborate, sometimes developed at such great length that we might lose sight of the point behind the comparison. In an early scene of “Barn Burning,” Sarty waits in the hushed room for Harris the landlord to

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decide whether or not Sarty himself should be questioned about his father’s actions. Sarty realizes that he can’t testify against his father, that he will have to lie if the Justice of the Peace questions him. That moment of wordless anticipation and anxiety as experienced by the boy before he is finally released from testifying is described by means of an extended simile: “But he could hear, and during those subsequent long seconds while there was absolutely no sound in the crowded little room save that of quiet and intent breathing it was as if he had swung outward at the end of a grape vine, over a ravine, and at the top of the swing had been caught in a prolonged instant of mesmerized gravity, weightless in time.” This simile suggests that Sarty’s dread at the possibility of testifying is like the stark physical sensation of being unnaturally caught in mid-air instead of returning to earth by gravity’s familiar pull. In addition to the literal images repeated throughout the story to describe Abner, the figurative image of tin, introduced by means of similes, also appears repeatedly to characterize him. He appears to his son as “a shape black, flat, and bloodless as though cut from tin in the iron folds of the frockcoat which had not been made for him, the voice harsh like tin and without heat like tin.” As the static character against which Sarty defines himself, Abner is as cold and implacable as metal. Approaching Major de Spain’s mansion, Sarty notices that his father’s figure “had more than ever that impervious quality of something cut ruthlessly from tin, depthless, as though, sideways to the sun, it would cast no shadow.” Sarty sees his father, not as flesh and blood, but as a tin cut-out, without feeling or remorse.

Question 5 W...