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
Don’t Be So Critical
There are all sorts of critics. There are literary critics and film critics and art critics and theatre critics and so on. (I don’t think we would talk about a baseball critic or a football critic, though I’m not sure why not.) The job of a critic may be to evaluate books or movies or…
Ambient and Out-of-Nowhere Comments in Don DeLillo’s “White Noise”
In my previous post I discussed two rhetorical figures, congeries and pysma, in Don DeLillo’s White Noise. In this post I want to look at another rhetorical figure in White Noise—a figure that (so far as I know) has never been named. Sometimes a writer will invent and deploy a figure for a specific purpose;…
Congeries and Pysma in Don DeLillo’s “White Noise”
This post examines a couple of rhetorical figures which are used repeatedly in Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise. The first figure is congeries. (I did a whole post on congeries—“A Heap of Words”—back on 26 October 2020.) A congeries, according to Richard Lanham’s Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, is just a “word heap”. It’s one of…
Breaking News!
My new book, How to Reread a Novel (Louisiana State University Press), is now available. Here’s the publisher’s description: A novel is among the most intricate of human creations, the result of thousands of choices and decisions. In How to Reread a Novel, Matthew Clark explicates the intricacies of fiction writing through practical analysis of…
More on Paronomasia and its Relatives
Rhetorical terminology is a mess. Often there is more than one term to designate a particular figure, and often a single term is used to designate several different figures. In my previous post I discussed the figure paronomasia, the use of words similar in sound but different in meaning (as in Ralph Ellison’s “his dream,…
Paronomasia
Recently I read a good (and very long) biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, by H. W. Brands (New York: Doubleday, 2006). I’m a big fan of President Roosevelt and of Eleanor Roosevelt and over the years I’ve read a fair amount…
The Art of Reading Slowly 