This is a blog about language and literature. I’ve always been fascinated by words, by how words form sentences, and how sentences form poems and stories. The technical term for this fascination is philology—the love of language. Friedrich Nietzsche defined philology as the art of reading slowly—that’s where I got the title for this blog. In the section titled What is Philology? I discuss what I take to be the four major components of philology: historical linguistics, the editing of texts, the interpretation of language in context, and the interpretation of literature with special attention to language. I’m interested in all of these, and I will post blogs on all of them, but my own work lies primarily in the third and fourth areas.
I created this site as an invitation for anyone who has a passion for literature—readers and writers of all sorts. I would like to think of this blog as one part of a conversation among people who share an interest in the way language works and the way it turns into art. Please feel free to enter the conversation by dropping me a note with your reactions to my posts or with your own thoughts. I welcome your comments and suggestions.
I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Karen L. Hogan, who did all the hard work of designing and mounting this blog. Without her help it wouldn’t have happened.
My Most Recent Blog Posts
One Last Kick at the Can: Three More Rings
There’s lots more to say about ring composition; I may return to the topic if I come across a ring that deserves comment, but this post will be the last in this series of posts. I. A story may be constructed so that the first link in the temporal sequence matches the last link. Thus…
More on Rings: Closure, Frames, and Dreams
In this post I continue my discussion of whole-plot ring composition with discussions of closure, frames, and dream narratives. I. Closure: The repetition at the end of a novel (or a story or a poem) of material from the beginning can create a feeling of closure, as we can see in Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”: ’Twas…
On the Road with Lena and Étienne
In my previous post I looked at an instance of Ring Composition in E. R. Eddison’s fantasy novel, The Worm Ouroboros. Rings come in various sizes and shapes. In a simple ring the beginning of a passage is repeated at the end: ABA. Some rings are more complicated: ABCBA or even more. (See, for instance,…
Ring Composition and The Worm Ouroboros
In this post I want to talk about an interesting example of ring composition in E. R. Eddison’s fantasy novel The Worm Ouroboros. Ring composition is a figure of speech, though it isn’t listed in any of the handbooks of figures of speech that I’ve looked at, nor is it discussed in any of the…
It’s Time to Wake Up!
In my previous post I discussed a figure of speech which, so far as I know, had never up till then been described or named. In this figure the last word of a clause (or nearly the last word) is repeated and then expanded upon to provide some explanation or expansion or specification. I have…
Naming a Figure of Speech
Readers of this blog will know that I’m fascinated by rhetorical figures, the figures of speech. I’ve written comments and even entire posts on tricolon, anaphora, antithesis, congeries, chiasmus, anadiplosis, polyptoton, epimone, palilogia, and several more. In the old days, from the time of the ancient Greeks down to the nineteenth century, the figures of…
The Art of Reading Slowly 