Saturday, April 29, 2006

Style In Fiction

On and off over the years, I have been studying a book called 'Style In Fiction' by Leech & Short (Longman 1981) which explores paragraphs by Conrad, Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Henry James etc, examining graphological, phonological, syntactic and semantic nuances and patterns, discussing how they affect the meaning etc.

Do we miss all this? Or do we instinctively absorb it, however fast we read? Does it apply to all genres of literature? And does the writer intend these effects (in a slow laborious fashioning?) or instinctively produce them (at speed?)?

I myself feel both reader and writer 'do' this thing together - instinctively and at speed.

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