Novel Beginnings WRIT1700

What Do You Think?For this lecture, instead of listening to me talk about what I think about how rhetorical devices and strategies work to make effect and meaning, specifically in terms of how sentences are written in the “Novel Beginnings” readings, you will tell us what you think.

On the following slides you will find some recaps of terms discussed in last week’s lecture as well as a few new terms, particularly those related to sound qualities.

You will also find that for the first slides, specific devices have been linked to specific passages from your readings. However, the exact sentences in which you can find the devices at work have not been pinpointed, nor have any explanations been suggested regarding the possible effects those devices have on your reading experience

In this week’s Q&A forum, you will tell us what you think. Specific instructions will be available under this week’s Activities section on your tutorial sites.

Suggestions MatterJust as the way devices are used suggest ideas to you, you will suggest your ideas to us.

Which is to say: don’t worry about getting a “correct” interpretation of these novel beginnings. Do not go searching for information on these passages or the novel they come from. Using secondary sources instead of trying to sit and think about the passages will not fulfill the activity

Unless you know the novel the passage comes from, you should not be able to sum-up what it is about based on one or two paragraphs.

Read with care and consideration, reflect on how the way the sentences are written lead you to certain ideas or feelings, and then share your suggestions with us

Asyndeton & Jane Eyre 

• Asyndeton: a rhetorical device: coordinated phrases and clauses without the use of conjunctions, such as ‘and’, ‘for’ or ‘but’: I came, I saw, I conquered

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so somber, and  a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question.  I was glad of it: I never liked long walks, especially on chilly afternoons: dreadful to me was the coming home in the raw twilight, with nipped fingers and toes, and a heart saddened by the chidings of Bessie, the nurse, and humbled by the consciousness of my physical inferiority to Eliza, John, and Georgiana Reed.

Re-Cap from Last Lecture: The Periodic Sentence

In a periodic sentence, the main meaning of the sentence is withheld until the end—most often by delaying the independent clause which contains the primary subject and verb of the sentence.

A periodic sentence can have multiple effects. Our understanding of the sentence is “suspended by syntax”—we await the main subject. We usually know we are waiting because the sentence begins with a preposition or other subordinate information which signals that the main subject is coming (at some point).

In linguistics these sentences can be called left-branching sentences:

>>>---------------------------------------------------- Main Subject.

Recall Martin Luther King’s amazing periodic sentence from “A Letter from Birmingham Jail” (from last week’s reading & lecture)

Moby Dick  1851Chapter ILoomings

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago--never mind how long precisely--having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

Jacob's Room & Parataxis

Parataxis: a rhetorical device. Clauses and phrases are organized with or without conjunctions but always without subordination. The clauses and phrases are “coordinated”. Parataxis can create juxtaposition between independent clauses or an additive construction whereby each clause adds to the previous ones. However, the relationship between the clauses is not always evident. If you were using parataxis in an essay, the relationship needs to be evident, but below, in Woolf’s example, the relationships are not evident. Why?

"So of course,” wrote Betty Flanders, pressing her heels rather deeper in the sand, "there was nothing for it but to leave.”

Slowly welling from the point of her gold nib, pale blue ink dissolved the full stop; for there her pen stuck; her eyes fixed, and tears slowly filled them. The entire bay quivered; the lighthouse wobbled; and she had the illusion that the mast of Mr. Connor's little yacht was bending like a wax candle in the sun. She winked quickly. Accidents were awful things. She winked again. The mast was straight; the waves were regular; the lighthouse was upright; but the blot had spread.

"...nothing for it but to leave,” she read.

"Well, if Jacob doesn't want to play” (the shadow of Archer, her eldest son, fell across the notepaper and looked blue on the sand, and she felt chilly--it was the third of September already), "if Jacob doesn't want to play”--what a horrid blot! It must be getting late.

Cumulative Sentence & The Maltese Falcon 1929

A cumulative (or loose) sentence begins with an independent clause which gives us the main subject; this is then followed by subordinate phrases and/or clauses which provide information about the subject. Cumulative sentences work by adding information to something we have already understood. These sentences can also be called “loose” sentences or, in linguistic terms, right-branching sentences.

Main Subject ------------------------------------------------------->>

Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth.  His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller v.  His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal.  The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down--from high flat temples--in a point on his forehead.  He looked rather pleasantly like a blond Satan.  He said to Effie Perine: "Yes, sweetheart?”

           She was a lanky sunburned girl whose tan dress of thin woolen stuff clung to her with an effect of dampness.  Her eyes were brown and playful in a shiny boyish face.  She finished shutting the door behind her, leaned against it, and said: "there's a girl wants to see you.  Her name's Wonderly.”

          "A customer?”

         OR on the next slide.........

The Water Cure 

 These pages are my undertaking. I am guilty not because of my actions, to which I freely admit, but for my accession, admission, confession that I executed these actions with not only deliberation and premeditation but with zeal and paroxysm and purpose, above all else purpose, that I clearly articulate without apology or qualification, and so I find myself merely a sign, a clear sign, and like any sign I am indifferent to the nature of the thing that I designate or, for lack of a better word, signify, while scratching at the dried blood beneath my nails, my voice rough and hoarse from disuse, for no matter how articulate my confession, it takes a few words to utter it, the truth always requiring fewer words, and generally smaller words, than lies and half-truths, and they are never called half-lies, and this is instructive, the way so many things are instructive, and it all comes back to that indifference to the marked thing, the way nouns and names behave badly and play loose with meaning, the way language resists the tightening of screws and the sketching of schema and the way the angle of incidence complements the angle of reflection: the whole mess of language yearning for a decent visual metaphor to connect it with the world toward which it is so indifferent. The true answer to your question is shorter than the lie. Did you? I did.

Rhetorical Devices & The Catcher in the Rye

Hypotaxis: a rhetorical device. Clauses and phrases are organized in dependent and subordinate relationships. The relationship between clauses and phrases is made evident. To Kill a Mocking Bird

Polysyndeton: a rhetorical device: phrase and clauses are linked by the (usually excessive) use of conjunctions. Catcher in the Rye

Asyndeton: a rhetorical device: coordinated phrases and clauses without the use of conjunctions, such as ‘and’: I came, I saw, I conquered

Periodic and Cumulative Sentences

Sentence Types: declarative, imperative & perhaps, arguably interrogative

Periphrasis: Circumlocution. Evasive, wordy, or indirect language

The Catcher in the Rye 

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them. They're quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father. They're nice and all--I'm not saying that--but they're also touchy as hell. Besides, I'm not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything. I'll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy. I mean that's all I told D.B. about, and he's my brother and all. He's in Hollywood. That isn't too far from this crumby place, and he comes over and visits me practically every week end. He's going to drive me home when I go home next month maybe. He just got a Jaguar. One of those little English jobs that can do around two hundred miles an hour. It cost him damn near four thousand bucks. He's got a lot of dough, now. He didn't use to. He used to be just a regular writer, when he was home. He wrote this terrific book of short stories, The Secret Goldfish, in case you never heard of him. The best one in it was "The Secret Goldfish." It was about this little kid that wouldn't let anybody look at his goldfish because he'd bought it with his own money. It killed me. Now he's out in Hollywood, D.B., being a prostitute. If there's one thing I hate, it's the movies. Don't even mention them to me.

Repetition, VariouslyLast term we thought about different kinds of repetition, including

Anaphora: the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses/phrases/lines

Epistrophe: ending a series of clauses/phrases/lines with the same word or words

Isocolon: the repetition of similar phrasal or clause structures, but not of the same words—this is a type of parallelism and usually refers to two such phrases or clauses

& there are other types we haven’t named but which you can find at work in prose and poetry—any kind of repetition can be significant in terms of the effects it creates and how these effects shape your understanding of the text.

Think about how repetition is used in the following passage—you may not understand all that you are reading, but if you read with thought and purpose, you will have some ideas about how the way language is used impacts your reactions to the text.

Written on the Body

Why is the measure of love loss? 

It hasn't rained for three months. The trees are prospecting underground, sending reserves of roots into the dry ground, roots like razors to open any artery water-fat. 

The grapes have withered on the vine. What should be plump and firm, resisting the touch to give itself in the mouth, is spongy and blistered. Not this year the pleasure of rolling blue grapes between finger and thumb juicing my palm with musk. Even the wasps avoid the thin brown dribble. Even the wasps this year. It was not always so. 

I am thinking of a certain September: Wood pigeon Red Admiral Yellow Harvest Orange Night. You said, "I love you." Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? "I love you" is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when you say it and when I say it we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them. I did worship them but now I am alone on a rock hewn out of my own body. 

CALIBAN You taught me language and my profit on't is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you for learning me your language. 

Love demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid. It is no conservationist love. It is a big game hunter and you are the game. A curse on this game. How can you stick at a game when the rules keep changing? I shall call myself Alice and play crocket with the flamingoes. In Wonderland everyone cheats and love is Wonderland isn't it? Love makes the world go round. Love is blind. All you need is love. Nobody ever died of a broken heart. You'll get over it. It'll be different when we're married. Think of the children. Time's a great healer. Still waiting for Mr. Right? Miss Right? and maybe all the little Rights? 

The Aural Text: Euphony & Cacophony

Euphony & Cacophony: These are not devices in themselves, but rather ways of describing the sounds other devices create.

Euphony: Euphonious rhythms are softer, steadier, and are often considered more pleasing to the ear. The consonants l, m, n, r, v, and w produce softer sounds, as opposed to consonants, like t, k, c, b, p. Vowel sounds are generally more euphonious than the sounds created by consonants. The longer vowel sounds—moon, love, leave, bone, are smoother than short vowel sounds, such as in sit, cat, not, him. You should be familiar with the device of assonance, which is the repetition of vowel sounds in groups of words and which can be a primary technique of creating euphonic sound patterns.

Cacophony: Discordant sounds often created by juxtaposing harsh letters or syllables. It can be created inadvertently, but sometimes cacophonous sounds are used deliberately for effect. To create sounds appropriate to the content, the writer may sometimes prefer a cacophonous effect instead of the more common euphony. Consonants such as /t/ /c/ /k/ can create cacophony; the plosives /b and /p/ are particularly cacophonic, especially if the sounds are repeated.

The Aural Text: Internal RhymeAlliteration: the repetition of the same initial sounds, usually consonant sounds, in a sequence of words.

Assonance: the repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds in neighbouring words.

Consonance: The repetition of similar or the same consonant sounds in a sequence of words with different vowel sounds: coming home, but is most often used to describe repetition in which the words are identical except for the stressed vowel: middle/muddle; wonder/wander

Interlaced Rhyme: when a word, usually in the middle of a line, rhymes with the end of the same line.

Possible texts for considering how aural/sound qualities impact meaning & interpretation: Lolita, In Another Place, Not Here,& Light in August