“The Origin Of Speech”+"Charles Hockett"
22 February 2012
21 February 2012
31 December 2011
13 December 2011
Using Viktor Shklovsky « BIG OTHER
Using Viktor Shklovsky « BIG OTHER
"...Let’s start at the start. Viktor Shklovsky (1893–1984) was one of the founders of the intellectual movement we today call Russian Formalism (along with Boris Eichenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Vladimir Propp, Yuri Tynianov, others). Broadly speaking, they wanted to understand artworks by breaking them down into their constituent parts, or devices (“priem”)—what we might call tropes or techniques or mechanisms. Different members of this circle studied different devices, and there was not always a clear consensus as to which devices mattered the most. Rather, what unified the Russian Formalists was their dedication to identifying devices, and to explaining how they worked in concert with one another—as well as how those arrangements changed over time. (Forgive me this oversimplification.)
Here is one such example: they distinguished between a narrative’s fabula (story) and syuzhet (presentation). The two need not line up exactly. If someone asks you what the movie Fight Club (1999) “is about,” you might say, “Well, it’s about a guy (Edward Norton) who invents an alternate persona, Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), in order to give himself the courage to break out of his mundane white collar existence.” But of course that’s not at all how Fight Club presents itself to the audience. The narrative’s presentation begins at its climax, which is interrupted, and only then proceeds to the the story’s chronological beginning. From that point on, the film contains a mix of chronologically-ordered scenes and bits of narrative exposition (Northon’s voiceover) that allow us, ultimately, to return to and understand the climax, which is then resolved in the final minutes of the movie. Furthermore, the narration conceals from us for most of the film’s running time the fact that Tyler Durden is the psychological creation of the nameless narrator/protagonist.
Formalism helps us explain this kind of narrative phenomenon. By separating story from presentation, we can begin to speak of them independently from one another, as well as to understand how they relate. From this follows many other concepts: for instance, we can see how exposition is back story that gets related (narrated) in the narrative present, whereas a flashback is a scene that’s chronologically embedded in the narrative present. And so on...."
20 October 2011
“We the people” vs. “us the people” | The Grammarphobia Blog
May 12, 2011
“We the people” vs. “us the people”Q: Populists often stress democratic values by invoking the phrase “we the people,” but lately they’ve taken to using it not just as a subject but as an object as well. Thus: “We must never allow [insert villain] to trample on we the people!”
A: “We the people” is a subject; “us the people” is an object. Here’s how they look in sentences:
“We, the people, elect our leaders. Our leaders are elected by us, the people.”
In both of those noun phrases, “the people” is an appositive. It identifies or explains the preceding noun or pronoun by using a different term (like the name in “My son, John”).
We’ve written on the blog before about appositives, which are sometimes surrounded by commas, as in our examples above.
An appositive never changes the case (that is, subject or object) of the pronoun it follows. That’s why the entire phrase “we the people” is always a subject and “us the people” is always an object.
The words “we the people” resonate with Americans because they introduce the preamble to the Constitution:
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
If ever a phrase deserved proper handling, it’s “we the people.”
It’s demeaned when misused as a grammatical object (as in, “Don’t trample on we the people!”).
Check out our books about the English language
16 October 2011
Florida Studies: Proceedings of the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Florida College English Association
Florida Studies: Proceedings of the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Florida College English Association
Editor: Paul D. Reich and Maurice J. O’Sullivan
Date Of Publication: Oct 2011
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-3275-5
Isbn: 1-4438-3275-8
This volume contains a variety of essays about Florida literature and history by scholars from across the state representing every kind of institution of higher learning, from community colleges to small liberal arts institutions to large universities. The first section, Pedagogy, explores the challenges facing Florida teachers at both the high school and undergraduate levels. The essays in Old Florida take on a myriad of texts that provide evaluations of Florida and its culture from the 1540s through the 1950s and include evaluations of Zora Neale Hurston, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and Pat Frank. The final section, Contemporary Florida, continues to identify the state’s place within larger literary, cultural, and political traditions.
Paul D. Reich is an Assistant Professor of English at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. His areas of teaching and research include late 19th and 20th century American literature, African American literature, the American West, and popular culture. His work has appeared in Teaching American Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, and Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction.
Maurice J. O’Sullivan is a Professor of English and the Kenneth Curry Chair in Literature at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. In addition to articles on literature and pedagogy, he has published The Florida Reader (1991), Crime Fiction and Films in the Sunshine State (1997), and Orange Pulp (2000).
Price Uk Gbp: 39.99
Price Us Usd: 59.99
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
