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 … Continue reading Naming a Figure of Speech
Author: Matthew Clark
Matthew Clark is a classical philologist and literary critic. He received his BA and MA degrees from the University of Toronto and his PhD degree from Harvard University. He has published five books: Out of Line: Homeric Composition Beyond the Hexameter (Rowman and Littlefield, 1997); A Matter of Style: Writing and Technique (Oxford University Press, 2002); Narrative Structures and the Language of the Self (Ohio State University Press, 2010); Exploring Greek Myth (Blackwell, 2012); Debating Rhetorical Narratology: The Synthetic, Mimetic and Thematic Aspects of Narrative, with James Phelan (Ohio State University Press, 2020). His current project has the working title How to Reread a Novel: Essays in Narrative Analysis.
The Old Wives’ Tale
I recently reread The Old Wives’ Tale, by Arnold Bennett (first published in 1908) and I thought the first part of the first chapter was worth some analysis and comment. Bennett was born in 1867 and died in 1931. He wrote 34 novels and 96 short stories; I’ve read three of his novels: The Old … Continue reading The Old Wives’ Tale
Novels: The Formless Form?
I just happened to read a book of literary criticism that I’ve owned for many years but never got around to reading: The World and the Book: A Study of Modern Fiction, by Gabriel Josipovici (Macmillan 1971). Josipovici is a prolific writer, a novelist and a critic and a playwright. This is the only book … Continue reading Novels: The Formless Form?
From Paragraphs to Plots
My new book, “From Paragraphs to Plots”, has just been officially published by Louisiana State University Press. This volume complements “How to Reread a Novel”, which was published not quite a year ago. There will be a facebook digital booklaunch next Wednesday, Oct 2, at 12:00 Eastern time. All are welcome to join. I’ll talk … Continue reading From Paragraphs to Plots
Datelines and Chronotopes
Every story has to occur at some time and in some place. An essential part of building a narrative world is establishing the time and place of the story. The Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin used the term “chronotope” for the combination of time and space in a literary work—“chrono” meaning “time” (as in “chronology”) … Continue reading Datelines and Chronotopes
The Year of the Cicadas
This year there will be a rare double appearance of two broods of cicadas, one seventeen-year brood and one thirteen-year brood. I remember very clearly the appearance of a seventeen-year brood back in 1953, when I was just a small child. (We called them locusts back then, though we knew they were properly called cicadas.) … Continue reading The Year of the Cicadas
Please Accept My Apology
In this post I will look at three English words—“apology”, “martyr”, and “angel”—borrowed from ancient Greek with meanings somewhat different from their meanings in Greek. The lesson is that the original meaning of a word isn’t always a good guide to its current meaning. I begin with the word “apology”. I. In the year 399 … Continue reading Please Accept My Apology
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 … Continue reading Don’t Be So Critical
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; … Continue reading Ambient and Out-of-Nowhere Comments in Don DeLillo’s “White Noise”
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 … Continue reading Congeries and Pysma in Don DeLillo’s “White Noise”
The Art of Reading Slowly 