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Author Davidson, Jenny, author.

Title Reading style : a life in sentences / Jenny Davidson.

Publication Info. New York : Columbia University Press, [2014]

Copies

Location Call No. OPAC Message Status
 Axe 2nd Floor Stacks  809 D283r 2014    ---  Available
1 copy being processed for Axe Acquisitions Order.
Description x, 196 pages ; 22 cm
text rdacontent
unmediated rdamedia
volume rdacarrier
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 177-183) and index.
Contents The Glimmer Factor: Anthony Burgess's 99 Novels -- Lord Leighton, Liberace, and the Advantages Of Bad Writing: Helen Dewitt, Harry Stephen Keeler, Lionel Shriver, George Eliot -- Mouthy Pleasures and the Problem Of Momentum: Gary Lutz, Lolita, Lydia Davis, Jonathan Lethem -- The Acoustical Elegance of Aphorism: Kafka, Fielding, Austen, Flaubert -- Tempo, Repetition, and a Taxonomy Of Pacing: Peter Temple, Neil Gaiman, A. L. Kennedy, Edward P. Jones -- Late Style: The Golden Bowl and Swann's Way -- Disordered Sentences: Georges Perec, Roland Barthes, Wayne Koestenbaum, Luc Sante -- Details That Linger and the Charm Of Voluntary Reading: George Pelecanos, Stephen King, Thomas Pynchon -- The Ideal Bookshelf: the Rings of Saturn and the Line Of Beauty -- The Bind of Literature and the Bind of Life: Voices From Chernobyl, Thomas Bernhard, Karl Ove Knausgaard.
Summary A professor, critic, and insatiable reader, Jenny Davidson investigates the passions that drive us to fall in love with certain sentences over others and the larger implications of our relationship with writing style. At once playful and serious, immersive and analytic, her book shows how style elicits particular kinds of moral judgments and subjective preferences that turn reading into a highly personal and political act. Melding her experiences as reader and critic, Davidson opens new vistas onto works by Jane Austen, Henry James, Marcel Proust, and Thomas Pynchon; adds richer dimension to critiques of W.G. Sebald, Alan Hollinghurst, Thomas Bernhard, and Karl OveKnausgaard; and allows for a sophisticated appreciation of popular fictions by Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Lionel Shriver, George Pelecanos, and Helen DeWitt. She privileges diction, syntax, point of view, and structure over plot and character, identifying the intimate mechanics that draw us in to literature's sensual frameworks and move us to feel, identify, and relate. Davidson concludes with a reading list of her favorite titles so others can share in her literary adventures and get to know better the imprint of her own reading style. -- Provided by Publisher.
Subject Readability (Literary style)
Literary style.
Grammar, Comparative and general -- Sentences.
Grammar, Comparative and general -- Syntax.
Criticism, Textual.
Literature -- Study and teaching.
Criticism, Textual. (OCoLC)fst00883762
Grammar, Comparative and general -- Sentences. (OCoLC)fst00946245
Grammar, Comparative and general -- Syntax. (OCoLC)fst00946258
Literature -- Study and teaching. (OCoLC)fst01000024
Readability (Literary style) (OCoLC)fst01090546
Literary style. (OCoLC)fst01136323
ISBN 9780231168588 (cloth : alk. paper)
0231168586 (cloth : alk. paper)
9780231537407 (electronic)
9780231168595
0231168594

 
    
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