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

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

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

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

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