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 … Continue reading Don’t Be So Critical

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; … Continue reading Ambient and Out-of-Nowhere Comments 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 … Continue reading Congeries and Pysma in Don DeLillo’s “White Noise”

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 … Continue reading Breaking News!

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, … Continue reading More on Paronomasia and its Relatives

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 … Continue reading Paronomasia

Host, hospitality, hospital, hospice, hostel, hotel, hostile, hostility, ostler, and guest. The words in the subtitle of this essay are all related in both form and meaning, though the relationships may not be immediately obvious. It may not be obvious that “hotel” and “guest” are related in form, or that “hospitality” and “hostility” are related … Continue reading A Host of Hosts

We often say that a particular language belongs to a family of languages. French, for instance, is a member of the Romance family of languages, along with Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and some others. All the languages in the Romance family are derived from Latin. Latin itself belongs to a larger family, the Italic family, which … Continue reading All in the Family

For some time I’ve been posting essays on the topic of literary mimesis—also known as representation or world building. The topic is large and, to my mind, quite fascinating, but I feel like a change, so after this essay I will switch to another topic. Mimesis, world building, often involves some description of the objects … Continue reading Enough Mimesis (For Now, Anyway)

In this post I continue my discussion of mimesis—representation, world-building—in Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark. As I have said previously, in my system the synthetic, the mimetic, and the thematic are simultaneous, but they may be artificially separated for analytical purposes. In this post I will include a few comments on the synthetic … Continue reading Dr. Archie Delivers a Baby