^^^^^^ "Nor" is a conjunction.
How about saying "For me, this is great writing" ?
On Wed, Jun 18, 2014 at 10:09 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> Hannibal Hamlin writes: "Isn't it only (some) literature professors who are
> uncomfortable speaking about greatness? The vast majority of the population
> does it all the time. Publishers, of course, couldn't survive without the
> concept."
>
> I've been among those opposed to or at least uncomfortable with the use of
> evaluative terms in criticism. In fact I recently wrote on another list as
> follows:
>
> ***** Actually, "great" is at best a seriously useless critical term. It
> makes sense only in such contexts as "what a great day," "that was a great
> pass interception," "Wow, what a great chocolate cake," or "that was really
> great sex."
>
> If one were to pretend that it was a useful term in talking of writers,
> perhaps it could be confined only to those few writers whose work is of such
> importance as to make learning their language a deeply felt need. If we
> consider writers in English in this context, perhaps there are three writers
> we could apply it to -- Shakespeare, Milton, Austen. But applied to them it
> is redundant and sounds silly.
>
> The term probably should be avoided in speaking of literature.*****
>
> I think a recent post on that same list illustrates the redundancy of
> "great" in all the context in which it makes any sense. I had inquired about
> a sentence from Austen's Persuasion:
>
> "And there, as they slowly paced the gradual ascent, heedless of every group
> around them, seeing neither sauntering politicians, bustling house-keepers,
> flirting girls, nor nurserymaids and children, they could indulge in those
> retrospections and acknowledgments, and especially in those explanations of
> what had directly preceded the present moment, which were so poignant and so
> ceaseless in interest." (Chapter 23 or 2/11)
>
> I had been listening to a recording of Persuasion from Readers Service to
> the Blind, and this sentence had leaped out to me. I downloaded Persuasion
> from Gutenberg & had ZoomText read me the chapter. I thought perhaps Donald
> Davie's Articulate Energy would help & queried a list if anyone could scan
> the passage on "sweetness" and "strength" in that work. No one could but I
> got the following help:
>
> *** I don't have Davie, but the effect is a combination of specific kinds of
> parallelism: an opening adverb clause in asyndeton (a series with no
> conjunction) and in this case a series of participial phrases about the
> outer world that moves from the presumed important (sauntering politicians)
> to the presumed unimportant (nurserymaids and children); and it then moves
> inward to something deeply personal. This clause is also a series that moves
> from shorter to longer phrasing (so it is a gradated colon), and the whole
> sentence closes in another parallelism of adjectives that draw all together
> as "poignant and ceaseless in interest"--it becomes a world.
>
> That is a dryly technical rhetorical analysis, but it is the use of those
> ancient Greek patterns, so loved by the 18th century, in just the exactly
> right pattern.****
>
> Indeed. Not dry at all. And it would be inanely redundant to add to that
> analysis such empty terms as "great," "wonderful," etc. Critics use "great"
> to fill in when their description of a text is inadequate.
>
> Carrol
>
>
>
>
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>
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