Sir Walter Scott

In the twelfth grade I did a local theater production of A.R. Gurney's 'The Dining Room,' a vignette style dramatic comedy about the decline of the 20th Century W.A.S.P. society in America. There's a climactic sequence I remember, some white guy has slapped another white guy because Jesus Christ and Buddha Too, a rumor's abound that white guy one might be gay. [Hence appropriately the 'slapping'] As one white guy is carried off to the hospital, at the sequences' conclusion, his wife follows shortly with her white sons and calls to one of them, "Meet us at the doctors, bring a book, a long book, bring Ivanhoe."
I didn't get it. Now I get it.
It's easy to put Sir Walter Scott in a box, his interpretation of the lower class is not quite PC by contemporary standards, but I think his narrative approach is more irrelevant that irreverent. Meaning that I think Scott's commentary on the working classes, which may seem a tad demeaning is unintentionally so; In fact I think that Scott's narrative may be trying to romanticize the 'Drover class,' rather than convey the negative a portrayal that, today, reflects more poorly on Scott than the Drover.
His descriptions appeal to nature and the 'natural' qualities of the class system: certainly a romantic motiffe. But unfortunately, today his analogical language and alluisons to the drovers place amongst the 'herds' seems more like an elitist appeal to animalism than the beauty of nature.
"For the Highlander, a child amongst flocks, is a prince amongst herds, and his natural habits induce himt o disdain the shepherds slothful life, so that he feels himself nowhere more at home than when following a gallant drove of his country cattle in the character of their guardian."

Ok so not much need for explanation. His writing is very thoughtful, but lacks the critical thought to which modernism (particularly realism) appeals. 'A child amongst flocks' is a nearly biblical imagef Scott manages to convey without explicity allusion. 'Country cattle in the character' is a smooth use of alliteration, and the passage as a whole is rhetorically sound. Sir Walter Scott is a very good writer and clearly a thoughtful one.
However, his to his great unfortunance, modern readers will have a difficult time overlooking the dated ideals that resonate throughout almost every paragraph of his prose.

Mere Anarchy

Woody Allen evokes the voice of a neurotic film noir character. His eclectic syntax juxtaposes a dialogue of words like 'ratiocination' 'crepuscular' and 'astringent' with a more simple 'telling' not showing descriptive language. He contrast literary allusions and pop-culture references. Ultimately Allen evokes a high-middle style.

more on this later............

CON-JUNG-RAD

Joseph Conrad's The Secret Sharer uses a suspensive and elaborately metaphysical style to envelope the reader's conscience in the narrator's struggle. The circumstances and conflict that constitute and provoke the narrative structure, the story's suspensive arch, -a young captain encounters and reconciles with his literal double - coincides with the narrator's internal struggle to achieve confidence and understanding of his self. Symbolic language characterizes Conrad's abstract narration, but his suspensive style pulls the reader into soul of the character. As we read The Secret Sharer, readers become Secret Sharers, for they like the double, have partaken in a discourse of the narrator's inner-most insecurities.

'I saw the straight line of the flat shore joined to the stable sea, edge to edge, with a perfect and unmarked closeness, in one leveled floor half brown, half blue under the enormous dome of the sky. Corresponding in their insignificance to the islets of the sea, two small clumps of trees, one on each side of the only fault in the impeccable joint, marked the mouth of the river Meinam we had just left on the first preparatory stage of our homeward journey.'

Everything that needs to be said about the ensuing events Conrad here says. The character is on a homeward journey, and at this point in his story he feels divided. Duplicity pervades the introductory paragraph. The flat shore corresponds to the stable sea, but both are still and stagnant under the dome of the sky. His symbolic language utilizes the cosmic to express the workings of the subconscious. Conrad's own Christian cosmology also resonates in his depiction of the narrator's soul. A trinity is formed between the land, the sea, and the overarching sky: father, son, and holy spirit, perhaps corresponding to the ego, super-ego, and id.

Conrad is very likable because his stories often explain the internal in terms of the external. He writes in a mythological style that consciously abstracts the inner struggles and realizations of his characters.

The European Dilema and The future belongs to Islam

In 'The European Dilemma,' Stephen Holmes uses the coinciding work of two separate authors as a catalyst for opening his own discussion about the future of Islam in Europe. Holmes' writing is mostly a critical juxtaposition of the two text in which he allows the reader to infer what possible significance the contrast and correlations may have. He pulls the works together by posing rhetorical questions that link the theories of each author. For example on page two when Holmes' has explicated a point made by Ian Burma, he transitions to a common theme addressed by the second author of his subject, Ayaan Hirsi, with the question 'Why have many Islamic immigrants failed to integrate successfully in countries such as Holland?'

In this way Holmes balances his review between the two authors and involves the inference of the reader in his comparison.

As a political piece, and not merely a review of two political works, Holmes' comparison implies a message: that there is a polarization between Islamic Europeans and the rest of secular Christian Europe. Rather than arguing his point, Holmes' implies it as a working assumption of his entire article; readers accept its reality as they read the headline, before they even begin considering the two text Holmes uses to reinforce his constructed theory.

Mark Steyn's 'The future belongs to Islam' is a far more explicitly political piece. Steyn's prose is dynamic and written to enforce his point, and his point is this:

'Age + Welfare = Disaster for you;

Youth + Will = Disaster for whoever gets in your way.'

This excerpt, an abstract breakdown of the factors at play between the new wave Islamic Europeans and the White Europe of old, exemplifies the immediacy of Steyn's thesis and his stylistic argument. Much of Steyn's writing is hypotactic, he argues that the sum of contemporary conditions in Europe is the Islamic tension he portrays. He constructs an argument in which the situation in Europe is a developing equation, and each of the issues at hand -age, history, racial tensions- are each factors increasing the inevitable.

Paste

Henry James writes suspensive narrative sentences in a cumulative-periodic style. Though each individual sentence does not end with the punch of a periodic narration, the suspensive style of each sentence cumulates into a transition for the proceeding sentence: using sharp transitional punctuation, James forms narrative intervals between the long stretches of suspensive narration, allowing his reader to take a breath from the heavy narration. In these passages James' own voice, that of an eloquent observer, becomes most apparent.

"Our young woman found that she had done with the children, that morning, with a promptitude that was a new joy to them, and when she reappeared before Mrs. Guy this lady had already encircled a plumb white throat with the only ornament, surely, in all the late Mrs. Prime's -the effaced Miss Bradshaw's - collection, in the least qualified to raise a question."

Despite the heavy use of narration, James' own authorial voice rarely reveals itself. His telling, though intricate, is very plain: it is without much interpretation from the narrator himself.

Instead, James' voice is expressed through the reactions of characters to developing dynamics within each sequence. In his description of Charlotte's rushing the children's lessons he writes that she dismisses them with a ' promptitude that was a new joy to them.' Here Joyce observes and interprets for the reader a sequence he deemed worthy of note, but unworthy of further development. The use of an explicitly authorial 'telling' voice is to construct a transition, moving the action of the plot forward without further delay; so despite James' slow, suspensive style, his choice here shows a decisive discipline. His narration is a deliberate portrayal, constituted by a formulated composition of plot elements. Therefore despite the running together of ideas, as each sentence subject seems indefinably suffused to the next, James' style is periodic, and his plot emanates a series of well systemized stylistic choices.

I appreciate Montaigne, and so should you.

If anyone asks what I did tonight, I'll tell them, 'I read Montaigne.'
'Hmmm,' they might say, 'that's really great.'
'Yes I'd say so, it was very great' I would say.
If a bold inquierer so dares to queery, "On what?"
'Hmmm?'
"Montaigne on what, what was he writing on?"
"Oh, uh; he was writing on some verses of Virgil" I'd snap.
Because honesty is the best policy, and if anyone asks I would tell them the truth: Tonight I read Montaigne on Virgil.
What I got out of this.........................................................
Somewhere elluded me.

I really do like Montaigne. I've read him before, he's really not SO difficult to keep up with, translations varying, but his style opposes the assumptions that any modern reader brings to a text. We often associate precision with concision, but montaigne's sentences each contain an exhausting anatomical correctitude. An occasional fragment would be cathartic for the Montaigne reader, instead his heavy punctuation weighs down his prose and encumbers the eyelids of his readers.
Not that it's bad -his writing- it's brilliant, but it opposes the standards of contemporary lit, in way incomparable even to the dry, dense sentences of some modernist like James and Joyce.

"Pleasure is a quality of very little ambition: it thinks itself rich enough of itself without any addition of repute; and is best pleased where most retired. A young man should be whipped who pretends to a taste in wine and sauces; there was nothing which, at that age, I less valued or knew; now I begin to learn; I am very much ashamed on`t; but what should I do? I am more ashamed and vexed at the occasions that put me upon`t. `Tis for us to dote and trifle away the time, and for young men to stand upon their reputation and nice punctilios; they are going toward the world and the world`s opinion; we are retiring from it: "Sibi arma, sibi equos, sibi hastas, sibi clavam, sibi pilam, sibi natationes, et cursus habeant: nobis senibus ex lusionibus multis, talos relinquant et tesseras;" the laws themselves send us home. I can do no less in favor of this wretched condition into which my age has thrown me, than furnish it with toys to play withal, as they do children; and, in truth, we become such. Both wisdom and folly will have enough to do to support and relieve me by alternate services in this calamity of age:
"Misce stultitiam consiliis brevem."


-In the preceding passage Montaigne establishes a truism. Then he draws it out. Then he relates it to himself. Then he draws it out.

His style is not flawed, relative to the era it may have been revolutionary (I really don't know). The thesis of his paragraph 'Pleasure is a quality of very little ambition' may have, in Montaigne's age, seemed like a cutting edge observation rather than a grandfather's parable; but today the reader expects more relation to the immediate.
Montaigne has by no means lost relevance, his place in the canon, his work as a leg of the pedestol on which the great writers of all time stand, is by no means ephemeral. However, the approach that readers take montaigne has changed. We're not reading for content but analysis, not of his substance but his style.

Marx-Engels

"A spectre is haunting Europe -- the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies."

Marx utilizes a suspensive series of juxtapositions that simultaneously evoke a sense of the immediate and the universal. His subject transcends rank, conviction, prejudice and -most essentially- generation barriers. His cause seems timeless, but suddenly contemporary. Yet the 'subject,' his 'cause' may well evade most readers, for the stylistic power of Marx's writing, it's sensory effect on the ear, contains it's interminable substance.

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes."

Very eloquent language, the loose alliteration of 'patrician and plebian,' the rhythmic, assonance of the opposing terms 'guild-master and journeyman,' all promote the illustrious tone of Marx's message; regardless of what that message actually says.

I think the lasting quality of Marx's work as the premier statement of Communist ideas may derive from his tone. Surely there were other great and similar political theorists scribing their quarrels in illustrious statements throughout the 19th century, but Marx explicitly establishes his notions as an expression of the ages; as a truism, relatively adaptable to any era. And his language, his grandiose style of statement, exudes the romance of an oration in antiquity. Leftist of the twentieth century may have idealized the revolutionary content of Marx as rhetoricians of the thirteenth century held Cicero on a pedestal.

Well I have read the wrong text for this weeks post. Assuming that the first link I saw was our assignment, I read 'A Good Man is Hard to Find.'

Working on Marx and Ben's piece now.

Hopefully I'll have something written by tonight.