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

In my previous post I looked at the structure of a sentence written by the Elizabethan theologian Richard Hooker and quoted by Herbert Read in his book, English Prose Style. In this post I will look at the context of the sentence, both internal and external. I begin by repeating the passage for ease of … Continue reading More on Faith, Hope, and Charity

Lately I’ve been posting on world building, the mimetic aspect of narrative, and I will continue that series later, but today I thought I would take a break and talk about style. Recently I came across an interesting passage in Herbert Read’s English Prose Style, first published in 1966. I wouldn’t place it at the … Continue reading Faith, Hope, and Charity

Lately I’ve been writing posts about narrative world building, the mimetic aspect of narrative, with particular attention to descriptions of moveable objects, including clothing. I’ve been concentrating on novels by three writers: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark, and Doris Lessing’s The Good Neighbour. There’s lots more to say … Continue reading More on Mimesis in Willa Cather’s “The Song of the Lark”

In my previous post I looked at some passages from Doris Lessing’s novel The Good Neighbour to show something about her techniques of world building, mimesis. There are many passages in the novel that show how interested she is in enumerating and describing things; these enumerations and descriptions contribute to the meaning of the novel, … Continue reading Lessing, Austen, Cather

In this post I will continue my discussion of mimesis—world building—in Doris Lessing’s novel The Good Neighbour. There is an overabundance of great mimetic material in this novel; I will hit some of the high points. In my previous post I discussed the beginning of The Good Neighbour—first, the initial summary of antecedent action (in … Continue reading More on Lessing