On Thu, Jun 19, 2014 at 8:18 AM, Charles Brown <cb31450 at gmail.com> wrote:
> "...an opening adverb clause in asyndeton (a series with no
> conjunction) "
>
> ^^^^^^
> "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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