The American Sentence
- Issue:
- УДК / UDK: 821.111(73).0
- DOI:
- EDN:
- Abstract:
The nature, history and transformation of the American sentence in XX century American fiction is the focus of the current essay which examines the shift from the oracular to ordinary style. This is the contrast between Henry James and Ernest Hemingway, or Thomas Wolfe and Cormac McCarthy. It is a shift in tone and syntax from an elaborate rhetoric and rhythm to a pointed, direct style that wastes no words. It suggests an impatient style reflecting an age of intensity, speed, and thrust. The leisurely and intricate style of late XIX and early XX century American writers loses its energy, although individual authors experiment and, within the body of their work, shift from an initial, ornate method to one that is immediate and precise. A new, fragmented cogency takes over, although this is not a prescriptive formula. There is a stylistic pendulum at work alternating between, say, the elaborate writing of David Foster Wallace or Don DeLillo and that of Raymond Carver or Jennifer Egan. The dynamics of this shift is the center of this discussion. Examples of XX century writers include Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, J.D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy and Jennifer Egan. Overlooked, the sentence remains the core of literary expression but it is a problematic form associated with such cultural changes as the telegraph, World War II and crime writing, as much as the literary imagination. Its permutations may, in fact, represent the “moral history” of America, its shifts in style reflecting the conflict between traditionalism and innovation, conservatism and experimentation.
- Keywords: American literature, style, rhetoric, telegraph, World War II, language.
- For citation:
Nadel, Ira. “The American Sentence.” Literature of the Americas, no. 14 (2023): 51–74. https://doi.org/10.22455/2541-7894-2023-14-51-74
- References:
Armatage 2007 — Armatage, Kay. “Gertrude’s Stein’s Radical Grammar.” Walrus (12 February 2007). https://thewalrus.ca/2007-02-language/.
Bercovitch 1975 — Bercovitch, Sacvan. The Puritan Origins of the American Self. New Heaven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975.
Denby 2022 — Denby, David, “The Making of Norman Mailer.” New Yorker (19 December 2022). https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/12/26/the-making-of-norman-mailer
Dirda 2013 — Dirda, Michael. “William H. Gass’s Middle C,” Washington Post 20 March 2013. https://web.archive.org/web/20130404083957/http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-03-20/entertainment/37873322_1_gassmiddle-age-college-credentials/2
Ekstein, Modris. Rites of Spring, the Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age. Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1989.
Fussell 1989 — Fussell, Paul. Wartime, Understanding Behavior in the Second World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Gabler 1988 — Gabler, Edwin. The American Telegrapher, A Social History, 1860–1900. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988.
Glück 2017 — Glück, Louise. American Originality. Essays on Poetry. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.
Griffin 1985 — Griffin, Peter. Along With Youth, Hemingway, The Early Years. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Hochfelder 2012 — Hochfelder, David. The Telegraph in America, 1832–1920. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012.
Jones 1934 — Jones, Howard Mumford. “American prose style 1700–1770.” Huntington Library Bulletin no. 6 (Nov. 1934): 115–151.
Julavits 2010 — Julavits, Heidi, “Jennifer Egan,” BOMB magazine (Summer 2010). https://bombmagazine.org/discipline/literature/.
Kazin 1956 — Kazin, Alfred. On Native Grounds. An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (1942). New York: Anchor Books, 1956.
Landon 1980 — Landon, Brooks. “‘Not Solve it but be in it’: Gertrude Stein’s Detective Stories and the Mystery of Creativity.” American Literature 53, no. 3 (1980): 487–98.
Logan 1901 — Logan, J.D. “American Prose Style.” Atlantic LXXXVII: 523 (1901): 689–696.
Longenbach 2019 — Longenbach, James, “How do you make a poem?” University of Rochester News Center. 9 April 2019. https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/how-to-make-a-poem-371782/
McGurl 2011 — McGurl, Mark. The Program Era, Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 2011.
Muller 2016 — Muller, Stefan. Grammatical Theory, from Transformational Grammar to Constraint-based Approaches. Berlin: Language Science Press, 2016.
Paul, Hendrickson 2018 — Paul, Steve, and Paul Hendrickson, Hemingway at Eighteen: The Pivotal Year that Launched an American Legend. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2018.
Perelman 1993 — Perelman, Bob. “Parataxis and Narration: The New Sentence in Theory and Practice.” American Literature 65, no. 2 (June 1993): 313–324.
Perloff 2002 — Perloff, Marjorie. “Gertrude Stein’s Differential Syntax.” Proceedings of the British Academy , no. 117 (2002): 401–427.
Peterson 2014 — Peterson, Britt. “The Golden Age of Telegraph Literature.” Slate (11 Nov. 2014). https://slate.com/technology/2014/11/telegraph-literature-from-19th-century-was-surprisingly-modern.html
Silliman 1987 — Silliman, Ron. The New Sentence. New York: Roof Books, 1987.
Simpson 2001 — Simpson, Natalie. “What is a sentence: Gertrude Stein and sentence theory,” Unpub. MA thesis, Univ. of Calgary, Prism, University of Calgary’s Digital Repository, 2001. https://prism.ucalgary.ca/bitstream/ handle/1880/41075/65053Simpson.pdf;jsessionid=60B6BE1FBB6853E42C1998946E306513?sequence=1.
Slawenski 2010 — Slawenski, Kenneth. J.D. Salinger, A Life. New York: Random House 2010.
Smith 2009 — Smith, Zadie. Changing My Mind, Occasional Essays. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2009.
Steensen 2014 — Steensen, Sasha. “With Pleasure: Gertrude Stein and the Sentence Diagram,” Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art, no 5 (10 September 2014).
Stein 1993 — A Stein Reader. Edited by Ulla Dydo. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1993.
Telegram Writing — “Telegram Writing,” Pearson Longman textbook. https://pdfslide.net/documents/telegram-writing-pearson-writin1-telegram-writing-whenthere-is-requirement.html?page=1.
Trotignon 2016 — Trotignon, Béatrice. “Textual Borders in Cormac McCarthy’s Novels: The Poetics of Paragraph Breaks.” Cormac McCarthy’s Borders and Landscapes, edited by Louise Jillett. New York; London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016: 123–142.
Wood 2022a — Wood, James. “The Numbers Game.” The New Yorker (19 December 2022): 60–65.
Wood 2022b — Wood, James. “Cormac McCarthy Peers Into the Abyss.” The New Yorker (19 December 2022). https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/12/19/cormac-mccarthy-peers-into-the-abyss-the-passenger-stella-maris.
Yang 2020 — Yang, Andrew. “Words on the Wire.” UX Collective (1 April 2020). https://uxdesign.cc/words-on-the-wire-8ee91b75e894.
