The Venezuelan poet and philosopher Ludovico Silva argues that much of the confusion around Marx's work results from a failure to understand his mode of expression. Through meticulous readings of key passages in Marx's oeuvre, Silva isolates the central elements of his style: the search for an architectonic unity at the level of the text, his capacity to express himself dialectically at the level of the sentence, and, above all, his great gift for metaphor.

Works of literature represent stories, characters, and events: these are the contents of a work. Often, the contents of literary works are fictional; however, it is just as characteristic of works of literature that these contents are narrated in a distinct style of writing, in an author’s distinct literary “voice.” In this paper, I consider whether works of literature might represent something over and above their fictional contents in virtue of their style alone and what consequences this might (...) have for our thinking about aesthetic education. Both of these concerns—with what works of art represent and what kind of knowledge they make available to us—have been central to recent analytic philosophy of art. While I.. (shrink)

The ArgumentStylistic analysis of an admittedly speculative scientific article can suggest what is involved in the social act of speculation. Walter Gilbert's influential paper “Why Genes in Pieces?” serves as an example of the conflicting demands of the need to display politeness and the need to display the urgency and excitement of the issues. Socially significant stylistic features emerge in comparison with another paper Gilbert co-authored, where the speculations occur in the discussion section of an experimental report, and in comparison (...) with another, more typical “News and Views” article by another author. The stylistic features include the use of impersonal subjects, the hedging of verbs, the unusual uses of the present tense, and the reliance on repetition, rather than conjunctions or pronouns, for textual cohesion. Later references to the article assimilate it to various lines of research without suggesting its speculative style. (shrink)

The study of film adaptations, particularly those coming from literature, has been growing at a rapid rate during the last years due to the amount of adaptations coming from both mainstream and independent film industries. The focus of these studies though is generally addressed to best sellers where the literary style is clearly adaptable to the screen; however, there are cases where the adaptive process has resulted in an entirely different outcome. Naked Lunch, written by William Burroughs and adapted (...) to screen by David Cronenberg, represents a bold change if compared with other novels turned into films. The purpose of this article is to descriptively analyse the literary style in order to understand how it has been represented and adapted into Cronenberg’s film. The analysis will be performed helped with computer-based tools to support statements, using the novel itself as corpus and adding theoretical ideas from Leech and Short’s perspectives. The results suggest that the author’s corrosive, sexually-fuelled claustrophobic style has been translated following three patterns in terms of adaptation theory, although Burroughs, in the hands of Cronenberg, becomes an almost new classification of adaptation, not only adding literary features to the film, but also distinguishable core moments of the writer’s life to the final product. The analysis conducted encourages the study of other uncommon adaptations from literary authors in order to understand the adaptive process followed by filmmakers. (shrink)

Savage Exchange: Han Imperialism, Chinese Literary Style, and the Economic Imagination. By Tamara T. Chin. Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series, vol. 94. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, Harvard University Press, 2014. Pp. xvi + 363. $49.95, £36.95, €45.00.

Problems of functional style differentiation of modern literary language are considered and analyzed in the article. Taking into account the communicative and pragmatic function, various substyles and sublanguages formed as a result of practical language usage in society are singled out on the example of the scientific style.

Two recent texts join the field of research on the Oulipo writing group. The End of Oulipo?: An Attempt to Exhaust a Movement is a slim volume, mostly comprising two essays and a preface. Authors Lauren Elkin and Scott Esposito contribute one essay each, in which they address some of the issues that have arisen with the present-day Oulipo. Cécile De Bary’s Une nouvelle pratique littéraire en France: Histoire du groupe Oulipo de 1960 à nos jours is almost as brief, (...) and assesses the Oulipo in terms of its evolution from experimental workshop to literary group.The Oulipo, or “Ouvoir de littérature potentielle” is now over fifty years old. It was founded in November 1960 by novelist... (shrink)

The notion of double consciousness, as a characterization of black subjectivity, is basic to Ménil’s critique of the alienated “mythologies” of Antillean life and its self-exoticizing literature. Double consciousness renders cultural identity deeply problematic. But it has other, more positive, manifestations, closer to a Bakhtinian idea of dialogism. Thus he praises Césaire’s use of irony as a dual voice. Ménil’s valorization of complexity and ambiguity in literature, against the simple naturalism favoured by the Communist Party but which he insists is (...) not a truly Marxist position, is thus linked to his view of the necessary “doubleness” of Antillean consciousness. Conversely, the simplicity of folklore can offer a basis for cultural identity, but not for good literature. Although Ménil emphasizes the importance of Antilleans reclaiming their history, this is less about discovering one’s roots than providing a dynamic grasp of one’s ever-changing place in a social reality governed by the Marxist dialectic. “Double consciousness” precludes the comforts of fixed identities, but it is a dialectical, not a tragic condition. (shrink)

The notion of double consciousness, as a characterization of black subjectivity, is basic to Ménil’s critique of the alienated “mythologies” of Antillean life and its self-exoticizing literature. Double consciousness renders cultural identity deeply problematic. But it has other, more positive, manifestations, closer to a Bakhtinian idea of dialogism. Thus he praises Césaire’s use of irony as a dual voice. Ménil’s valorization of complexity and ambiguity in literature, against the simple naturalism favoured by the Communist Party but which he insists is (...) not a truly Marxist position, is thus linked to his view of the necessary “doubleness” of Antillean consciousness. Conversely, the simplicity of folklore can offer a basis for cultural identity, but not for good literature. Although Ménil emphasizes the importance of Antilleans reclaiming their history, this is less about discovering one’s roots than providing a dynamic grasp of one’s ever-changing place in a social reality governed by the Marxist dialectic. “Double consciousness” precludes the comforts of fixed identities, but it is a dialectical, not a tragic condition. (shrink)

Arthur Danto numbers among the few contemporary philosophers whose writing is really a pleasure to read. Although rarely recognized, the source of that pleasure is Danto’s humor. His philosophical writing is consistently comic. Of course, the humor is obviously not of the knee-slapping variety. Yet it is pervasively playful.Danto will introduce a thought experiment and then explore it in several directions. Unlike many other contemporary philosophers, he is not stingy in laying out his examples. Whereas it is customary for most (...) other philosophers to sharpen their thought experiments like arrows in order to hit their target while carrying no wasted verbiage, Danto elaborates his, often.. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction New Beginnings, or Continuity? Contrasting Readings of the Republic Plato and his Audience, Plato and Socrates.

What are the relations, if any, between philosophy and literary style? Lang asserts "that the 'literariness' of philosophical writing is not accidental or ornamental but unavoidable--imbedded in that discourse and so also in its substantive questions and proposed solutions". Lang attempts to clarify and support his thesis in discussions of philosophy as literature and philosophy of literature.

Style: A Queer Cosmology considers artists and critics whose work defines style as that which eludes paraphrase or social scientific categorization; rather, they show style to be the attributes that make us all more like ourselves and less like each other.

ExcerptUses and Abuses of Criticism The memorialization of past events and persons as part of a shared cultural heritage was a fundamental obsession of nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalist historians. Historical memory always involves a certain imaginary component; however, as Friedrich Nietzsche pointed out, fictional constructs are all the more prevalent in depictions of the past that gravitate to the monumental or heroic. Writing in the midst of German unification in the early 1870s, Nietzsche critiqued oversimplified narratives that foreground exceptional national-historical (...) events. This “monumentalist” mode of history narrates a “chain … [of] great moments in the struggle…. (shrink)

In this paper I review four texts in which Aristotle comments on Empedocles ' writing style. I show that Aristotle thought that Empedocles was a fine poet. That is fine, if a poet is what you want.

In this expansive and provocative new work, Michael Dango theorizes how aesthetic style manages crisis--and why taking crisis seriously means taking aesthetics seriously. Detoxing, filtering, binging, and ghosting: these are four actions that have come to define how people deal with the stress of living in a world that seems in permanent crisis. As Dango argues, they can also be used to describe contemporary art and literature. Employing what he calls "promiscuous archives," Dango traverses media and re-shuffles literary and (...) art historical genealogies to make his case. The book discusses social media filters alongside the minimalism of Donald Judd and La Monte Young and the television shows West Wing and True Detective. It reflects on the modernist cuisine of Ferran Adrià and the fashion design of Issey Miyake. And, it dissects writing by Jenifer Egan, David Foster Wallace, David Mitchell, and Zadie Smith. Unpacking how the styles of these works detox, filter, binge, or ghost their worlds, Crisis Style is at once a taxonomy of contemporary cultural production and a theorization of action in a world always in need of repair. Ultimately, Dango presents a compelling argument for why we need aesthetic theory to understand what we're doing in our world today. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Literary Method of Urban Design: Design Fictions Using FictionAlan Marshall (bio)For students of design the world over, there’s usually nowhere near enough time in the school year to build a prototype of each and every single innovative idea that pops into one’s head—let alone to test them all in the social world or the marketplace. To speedily explore as many innovations as possible, students are sometimes encouraged (...) to follow an alternative pathway, to create “design fiction.” Intended to exist only on paper or the screen, a “design fiction” is not really destined for the real world.1 As a learning technique, it allows for a significant degree of technical experimentation as well as the imagining of new social arrangements. Many design experts see this “free-for-all” method as rather annoying and untrustworthy—more art than science. Yet for the most creative students, it serves to liberate them from the various constraints of their discipline. My own peculiar process of “design fiction” is what I call the “Literary Method of Urban Design.” I will come to this method in a moment.Last year, I was invited by the Bauhaus Museum in Weimar, Germany, to contribute artworks for a special exhibition entitled “Ways to Utopia: Life Between Desire and Crisis” (running from April 1, 2023—January 29, 2024).2 [End Page 560] This exhibition is a celebration of the one-hundredth anniversary of the Bauhaus’s first architectural product: a modern suburban family home in the city of Weimar called the Haus Am Horn. Built in 1923 the Haus Am Horn ushered in the Bauhaus style, a streamlined functional elegance presented in clean, bright, hopeful hues.3 Beyond just style, though, the house was proffered up in utopian terms. Its Bauhaus creators suggested that such a home could be mass-produced on an industrial scale cheaply and efficiently to provide elegant living to every single family in Europe, be they rich or poor. In its first iteration, the Staatliches Bauhaus was a high-spirited, playful, future-oriented, and socially aware fine arts and architecture school that ran from 1919 to 1933 in Weimar, then Dessau, then Berlin. However, its liberalism and experimentation away from traditional teaching and practice invited scorn from conservatives and from the Nazi Party. The former took the Bauhaus school’s funding away; the latter shuttered it for good. Despite the closure of the building, the Bauhaus style transformed design across the world as former teachers and ex-students applied Bauhaus principles and approaches in new settings. The old Bauhaus school has since been resurrected, with the opening of Bauhaus Universität Weimar, and the Bauhaus Museum, with locations in Weimar and Dessau.A few years back, Skyhorse Publishers published a book of my own “design fictions” depicting real-world cities set far in the future, each presented in utopian terms.4 Because of this, the Bauhaus approached me to help them celebrate their centennial anniversary by displaying my utopian urban designs in their museum. However, to convey the centenary theme of the exhibition, they requested exactly 100 different artworks of 100 different urban utopias portraying 100 different real-world cities set 100 years in the future. At the time, I had only produced eighty such works over the preceding decade. However, since the exhibition was to include masterworks by Bauhaus design greats like George Muche and Alma Buscher, I did not want to fall short. To make the “century” in quick time, I pushed ahead by deploying my own peculiar “Literary Method of Urban Design.”5 This method comprises three steps:1. Select a city.2. Select a literary work.3. Design the future of the selected city, based upon the themes of the selected literary work.[End Page 561] Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.Future London. By the author, inspired by More’s Utopia (1516).When I used this method for the first time with Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) as the literary base, a curator at the Museum of London was tickled enough to include it in an exhibition about the future of London.6Since then, the utopian spark has flowed through many of... (shrink)

The modern concept of ‘style’ – from which ‘stylistics’ is derived, a discipline that witnessed the quarrel between Linguistics and Literary studies in the 20th century – has inherited from Ancient Rhetoric its substance and was largely used as a direct translation from the Latin concept ‘_elocutio_’ and also as a translation for Greek concepts, such as ἑρμηνεία, λέξις and φράσις. There are still some other concepts that seem intimately connected to ‘style’, for instance ‘_ornatum_’ and ‘_decorum_’. Considering that (...) classical references of ‘style’ present themselves essential to write the history of this modern concept, this paper seeks to present a catalog of ancient concepts that have found in ‘style’ their traditional translation, as well as attempting to build a short history of each of these translation paths. (shrink)

There has been no major critical edition of Velleius with commentary since that of Kritz in 1840. Kritz, who took into account Sauppe's long essay on Velleius of three years earlier, was preceded by Ruhnken, whose commentary appeared in 1779. During the century which followed Kritz's work several valuable editions without commentary were produced, the last of which, by Stegmann de Pritzwald , almost coincided with the essay and bibliography devoted to Velleius in Schanz-Hosius . These two contributions of the (...) thirties remain standard to the present day. (shrink)

Coherence is a term of art in both epistemology and literary criticism, and in both contexts judgments of coherence carry evaluative significance. However, whereas the epistemic use of the term picks out a property of belief sets, the literary use can pick out properties of various elements of a literary work, including its plot, characters, and style. For this reason, some have claimed that literary critics are not concerned with the same concept of coherence as epistemologists. (...) In this article I argue against this claim. Although various nonepistemic notions of coherence figure in literary criticism, the epistemic concept has a mirror image in the literary–critical concept of thematic coherence. Moreover, evidence from literary criticism suggests that thematic coherence can be valuable from a literary-evaluative standpoint because it can be valuable from an epistemic standpoint, in particular by enhancing the credibility of a work's themes or author. My analysis of the notion of thematic coherence thus provides novel support for literary cognitivism, the view that a work's literary-aesthetic merits can depend on its epistemic merits. (shrink)

Literary Forms of Argument in Early China examines the functions of rhetorical markers and devices as well as the patterns and larger modes structuring various styles of early Chinese argumentation. The nine contributors to the volume each present tight analyses of specific compositional or literary aspects of persuasion, hoping to demonstrate how an unabashed focus on the formal elements of philosophical writing might come to the aid of, or even more drastically alter and transform, philosophical interpretation. The volume (...) includes essays by the following nine scholars, who are at once a mixture of philologists, textual and literary specialists, and intellectual historians: Rudolph Wagner, Andrew Plaks, David... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:178 BOOK REVIEWS The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, II: Studies in Theological Style: Clerical Styles. By HANS URS VON BALTH.AS.AR. Translated by Andrew Louth, Francis McDonagh, and Brian McNeil, C.R.V. Edited by John Riches. San Francisco: Ignatius Press; New York: Crossroad, 1984. Pp. 362. This is the second volume of the translation of Hans Urs von Balthasar's H errlichkeit edited by Joseph Fessio and John Riches, (...) corresponding to the first part of the second volume of the original. The translation has been a joint project, and, if as a wsult it is more uneven than that of the first volume, with rare exceptions it is an accurate rendition into good English of the author's difficult German. The problems which the book presents to the reviewer do not stem from the translation, but from the subtlety of the theological viewpoint of the author himself-a viewpoint here manifest, if not in actu secundo, then in actu primo proximo, for this volume is given over to an examination of the thought of five " clerical " or "official " theologians (Irenaeus, Pseudo-Dionysius, Augustine, Anselm, and Bonaventure) whom von Balthasar has chosen because they exemplify that aesthetic integration of theological insight which the author considers to offer the sole means of avoiding the dead ends of systematization, these being those logical culs-de-sac into which the clerical theologians of the medieval schools, with the exception 'of a few such as Bonaventure, were carried by their mistaken devotion to a new project, typified by Thomism and dominant by the end of the thirteenth century, of enclosing the free unity and rational integrity of the truth revealed in Christ within the transcendentally necessary structures of the sterile immanentist rationalism which von Balthasar considers to be constitutive of all systematic thought. It would doubtless be possible to read this second volume with some profit, apart from any acquaintance with the first, but it would be to miss the context in which the theologies chosen for examination become luminous. In any event, this volume, like the first, is not to be read at a sitting, or merely once: the product of a lifetime's study, The Glory of the Lord must itself be studied, and the study should follow the sequence of the work itself. Von Balthasar's literary style is highly allusive, while his thought is at once subtle and dense; the combination imposes upon the reviewer a task of interpretation which can be undertaken only with some diffidence, yet the importance of. providing some sort of prolegomenon to the easily bewildering richness of this masterwork in order that it be made more ac- BOOK REVIEWS 179 cessible to the readership for whom its author and editors intend it must warrant the risk indissociable from such interpretation. At first hand, much of the reviewer's work is already done by the author in an introductory section, which in turn states the goal of the entire enterprise, that of providing concrete historical (" dramatic ") realizations of the " form" of Christ, " the glory of the Lord," which the first volume set forth as the norm of all valid theology. The theologies which do this are " beautiful," and by being so have a factual impact upon the history and culture of the faith. Von Balthasar then explains what is meant by theological "style:" the freedom of the theologian manifesting itself in giving a particular free but obedient form to the content of the revelation, whose Form is the glory of God. The author then recites the decline of "official " or " clerical " style of theology from the end of the thirteenth century, and points to the emergence of a new "lay " style in the later medieval period, a style which was to become normative in consequence of the effective abdication by the official scholastic theology from the properly theological task of seeking to understand ever more profoundly the ecclesial tradition of the revelation in Christ, in favor of the sterile academic commentary upon St. Thomas wherein scholasticism languished until the Enlightenment, and then from the neoThomist revival in the late nineteenth century until its final defeat by biblical scholarship in the recent past... (shrink)

The significance of Plato s literary style to the content of his ideas isone of the central problems in the study of Plato. Thisvolume presents some of the most recent scholarshipon the wide range of issues related to Plato s dialogue form. The essaysaddress general questions concerning Plato s literary style, the relation of his style to other genres and traditions in Ancient Greece, and Plato s characters and his purpose in using them. ".

The significance of Plato’s literary style to the content of his ideas is perhaps one of the central problems in the study of Plato and Ancient Philosophy as a whole. As Samuel Scolnicov points out in this collection, many other philosophers have employed literary techniques to express their ideas, just as many literary authors have exemplified philosophical ideas in their narratives, but for no other philosopher does the mode of expression play such a vital role in their (...) thought as it does for Plato. And yet, even after two thousand years there is still no consensus about why Plato expresses his ideas in this distinctive style. Selected from the first Latin American Area meeting of the International Plato Society in Brazil in 2012, the following collection of essays presents some of the most recent scholarship from around the world on the wide range of issues related to Plato’s dialogue form. The essays can be divided into three categories. The first addresses general questions concerning Plato’s literary style. The second concerns the relation of his style to other genres and traditions in Ancient Greece. And the third examines Plato’s characters and his purpose in using them. (shrink)

Originally published: Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1954. With new introd.

One challenge involved in integrating so-called ‘non-Western’ philosophies into ‘Western’ philosophical discourse concerns the fact that non-Western philosophical texts frequently differ significantly in style and approach from Western ones, especially those in contemporary analytic philosophy. But how might one bring texts that are written, for example, in a literary, non-expository style, and which do not clearly advance philosophical positions or arguments, into constructive dialogue with those that do? Also, why might one seek to do this in the first place? (...) This paper addresses these questions by means of a case study involving the Daoist classic, theZhuangzi.L’un des défis posés par l’inclusion des soi-disant philosophies «non-occidentales» dans le discours de la philosophie «occidentale» a trait au fait que plusieurs textes philosophiques non-occidentaux diffèrent de façon significative, en termes de style et d’approche, des textes occidentaux, principalement ceux issus de la philosophie analytique contemporaine. Comment établir un dialogue constructif entre des textes écrits de façon littéraire, qui n’ont pas l’allure d’un exposé et qui n’avancent pas clairement des positions ou des arguments philosophiques et des textes qui, au contraire, prennent la forme d’un exposé avançant des positions ou des arguments? Pourquoi, de prime abord, voudrait-on ouvrir un tel dialogue? Cet article pose ces questions par le biais de l’étude du cas du classique taoïste, leZhuāngzǐ. (shrink)

While literature is often used as a source of examples and illustrations across disciplines, literary studies tends to be underrepresented in interdisciplinary exchanges. Perhaps the reason lies in a lack of understanding what actually is the expertise of literary studies and how this can be useful in interdisciplinary settings. In this article, I propose to outline the expertise of literary scholars through concepts of 4E cognition and to devise a proposal for how such expertise could successfully shape (...) the epistemic common ground of social cognition of experts in interdisciplinary dialogue. Literature involves metacognition centrally through its language style, the design of the narrative and its links to other texts, and literary scholars have the expertise in formulating exactly how this works – in a non-mimetic way – through the analysis and interpretation of literary texts. This very particular expertise and practice of literary scholars enables literary texts to be proposed as a boundary object in interdisciplinary dialogues through a shared epistemic common ground. For this argument, I build on earlier theoretical work in 4E cognition and predictive processing and my experience running interdisciplinary workshops on that model. (shrink)

The modern concept of ‘style’ – from which ‘stylistics’ is derived, a discipline that witnessed the quarrel between Linguistics and Literary studies in the 20th century – has inherited from Ancient Rhetoric its substance (figures and tropes) and was largely used as a direct translation from the Latin concept ‘elocutio’ (especially in Demetrius’ treatise De elocutione [Περὶ ἑρμηνείας]) and also as a translation for Greek concepts (usually indirectly), such as ἑρμηνεία, λέξις and φράσις. There are still some other concepts (...) that seem intimately connected to ‘style’, for instance ‘ornatum’ and ‘decorum’. Considering that classical references of ‘style’ present themselves essential to write the history of this modern concept, this paper seeks to present a catalog of ancient concepts that have found in ‘style’ (in English and French) their traditional translation, as well as attempting to build a short history of each of these translation paths. (shrink)

The literary scene of Kant’s day goes unmentioned by philosophical commentators. Yet some of its salient features have a clear relation to his problems and positions, not demonstrably causal in every detail, but too close overall to be coincidence in the random sense. Kant’s critical view of society and his establishing of an independent aesthetic realm parallel the themes, and the arguments in self-defence, of contemporaneous radical writing; his discussion of how to exemplify ethical arguments bears on the general (...) Enlightenment problem of how to embody abstractions persuasively, while his theoretical and practical difficulties over written style have consequences for the reception of his own work, and were responsible for divisions among writers of the day who might otherwise have made common cause. All this adds a valuable dimension to our understanding of both Kant’s aesthetics and his time. (shrink)

This essay explores the modernist aesthetic involved in creating a fictive, nostalgic, childhood experience. Evoking the experience of childhood through fiction is as close to actually reliving childhood as we can get. The author argues that it is possible to actually transport the reader into not only the idealized world of childhood, but more so into an embodied experience of childhood through the use of different kinds of narrative and stylistic configurations. In a stylistic and narratological analysis of three modernist (...) novels, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, Tarjei Vesaas’ The Ice Palace [Is-slottet] and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, the author explores the different ways that literature can create the very experience of childhood through literary style. The strategies involved in establishing a fictive experience of childhood extend from narratological choices such as free indirect style, strict focalization through a child in the narrative to the use of a child-like temporality, the hyperbolic use of phenomena, and an emphasis of the sensorial aspects of perception. (shrink)

The study of Plato's style as a writer has hardly kept pace with the study of his thought as a philosopher. Obviously he stands apart as the one original thinker in classical antiquity who also gives expression to his thought in a finished literary prose; and obviously his prose is worth studying for its own sake. What I would here suggest is that the close and continual relationship between the style and the content of his work may serve, in (...) various aspects, to elucidate his argument; and, further, that at certain points his style itself has a direct connexion with his philosophic thought. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reading Style In DickensRobert AlterIt is a sad symptom of the devolution of literary studies and of our culture’s relation to language that it should at all be necessary to explain that style is crucial to the experience of reading. As the language of literature has been variously designated a mask for ideology, an expression of the “poetics of culture,” or a medium of communication not different in (...) kind from menus and graffiti, the academic study of literature in many cases seems to have lost the essential sense that style has its unique enchantments, and that those enchantments can often be a privileged vehicle of insight, even of vision. As someone who is temperamentally a rationalist, I do not want to sound mystical, but I find it an empirical fact as a reader that great writers are able in a variety of surprising ways to tap into occult connections between words and social, historical, psychological, or moral realities. Saul Bellow has aptly stated this commingling of uncanny insight and deep satisfaction that style can give its readers:A small clue will suffice to remind us that when we hear certain words—“all is but toys,” “absent thee from felicity,” “a wilderness of monkeys,” “green pastures,” “still waters,” or even the single word “relume”—they revive for us moments of emotional completeness and overflowing comprehension, they unearth buried essences. 1A novel is a whole world reconstituted through words. Style in a novel is that world’s very air which we breath (I shall presently cite a rather literal illustration of this principle in Dickens), the rhythm of relation [End Page 130] of the represented objects and personages, the depth of field in which they are seen. When we read style in Dickens, or in any other novelist, we of course are reading all sorts of other things at the same time—plot, character, moral dilemma, historical predicament, and so forth—but we can see all these in their full complexity only if we attend to the illuminating play of style.Despite the great length of his major novels, Dickens deserves to be read slowly, with delectation, with occasional pauses to reread a choice passage, because he is one of the most inventive and vigorous stylists in the whole range of English literature. Style, as we know, has many facets, and Dickens’s powerful rhythms, his supple patterns of alliteration, the hammer-blows of the anaphoric insistence he often favors, the cunning interplay of different linguistic registers he sometimes introduces, are all worthy of attention. But he is above all the great master of figurative language in English after Shakespeare, and what I want to concentrate on here is how I focus as a reader on Dickens’s use of figurative language, and what it reveals to me about the world of his novels.Dickens is one of those novelists who is preeminently a rhetorical performer, and so there is a good deal of self-conscious display of virtuosity, sheer exuberant verbal high jinks, in his writing. The high jinks are there for the reader to enjoy—in historical context, to keep the reader’s interest from one monthly serial to the next—but as Dickens grows in mastery and gravity, they are more and more a means of what Bellow calls unearthing buried essences. Let me glance quickly at the operation of style in a passage from Dombey and Son (1848), an approximate midpoint in Dickens career, and then consider more closely the visionary power of his prose at two moments in his last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend (1861). Here is the description in chapter thirteen of the company office of Dombey and Son as its august proprietor enters:The wit of the Counting-House became in a moment as mute as the row of leathern fire-buckets hanging up behind him. Such vapid and flat daylight as filtered through the ground-glass windows and skylights, leaving a black sediment upon the panes, showed the books and papers, and the figures bending over them, enveloped in a studious gloom, and as much abstracted in appearance, from the world without, as if they were assembled at the... (shrink)

Martha Nussbaum is one among a number of contemporary American philosophers to suggest the writing of philosophy as central to its achievement. Nussbaum urges that philosophical writing is not neutral, that form and style centrally influence content. Like Richard Rorty, Nussbaum sees no sharp distinction between literary criticism and philosophy. Like Stanley Cavell, she finds in literature an edifying response to philosophical anxiety. Taking her pronouncements on philosophical style as its primary point of departure, this paper interrogates Nussbaum’s own (...) standing as “philosophical stylist.” This description is meant to signal both the centrality of language and writing to her conceptions of philosophy and her own writing as exhibiting flair and elegance as well as an irreducibility to paraphrase. With particular attention to Nussbaum’s Love’s Knowledge , I will argue that it is in the philosopher’s formal pronouncements or principles, rather than in her philosophical practice, that foregrounding of style is most apparent. In development of this argument, Cavell will emerge as a key figure of comparison. (shrink)