Philip Roth

Roth writes with a rhythm that maintains the fluidity of his prose throughout this passage, and works an emphatic signifier upon his digression from the beat of his language.

'And how did this affect him-the glorification, the sanctification, of every hook shot he sank, every pass he leaped up and caught, every line drive he rifled for a double down the left-field line? Is this what made him that staid and stone-faced boy? Or was the mature-seeming sobriety the outward manifestation of an arduous inward struggle to keep in check the narcissism that an entire community was ladling with love?'

'every line drive he rifled for a double down the left-field line?'

'the glorification, the sanctification'

'of every hook shot he sank'

'made him that staid and stone-faced boy?'

Each of these lines evokes a rhythm; Roth employs the repetition of stress to construct patterns of sounds and images in his prose, each one feeds into the next and elicits a new rhyme or beat. While 'sanctification' and 'glorification' rhyme, the use of assonance and alliteration in 'hook shot he sank' maintains the beat of the passage, proceeding the rhyme.

As Roth digresses into a social statement, loosening his aggrandizement of the community's glorification of 'the swede,' to make an analytical observation, he changes the beat of his prose.

'Or was the mature-seeming sobriety the outward manifestation of an arduous inward struggle to keep in check the narcissism that an entire community was ladling with love?'

This sentence diminishes the poetic formalism of the previous lines and evokes a sense of analytical realism that contemplates the fears, insecurities, and anxieties of the era on which Roth writes.

His solid construction of rhythms emphasizes the absence of the poetic in a recollection that reads more soberly than nostalgic.

The Uncanny

Freud's writing exemplifies rhetorical establishment of not only a literary argument, but it's relevance to the writer. He validates his argument and in doing so legitimizes his authority to approach the subject.

Trivializing the scope of subjects related to the 'uncanny' as an aesthetic theory, Freud then distinguishes the 'qualities of feeling' that aesthetic evoke as particularly relevant to psychoanalysis and his field of expertise. Using a cartographic language, Freud evokes the sense of the psychoanalyst as an explorer of the substratum that exists beyond the ostensible discourse of aesthetic theories. He refers to the 'qualities of feeling' the sensory aspect of aesthetics as a 'province' of the subject, one which he in his position is particularly apt to consider; and 'the uncanny' is but a remote and seldom explored province of aesthetic 'strata.'

Freud's essay instills in the reader a sense of author's authority.

On the Double and it's relation to Conrad:

From what I infer of this passage, the double is an archetypal figure derived from the disregard of ourselves -qualities or conceptions of ourselves misplaced- which for good or bad, we have declined to embrace and instead project upon others. The uncanny effect is occurs in the recognition of these qualities, or our rediscovery of them in others.