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Imitation of opaque style. Drafting guidelines. You’re not revising or re-writing the author’s work. The text stands as it is; don’t presume to be able to come up with something better.
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Imitation of opaque style Drafting guidelines
You’re not revising or re-writing the author’s work. The text stands as it is; don’t presume to be able to come up with something better. Your imitation should attempt to be faithful to the original setting and era, characters, language and plot. Select one of the designated writers and after reading it several times, set out to identify the characteristics of her or his style.
Be able to articulate the author’s use of diction, syntax, narrative mode, themes, type of figurative language. How well does your imitation match up? Does your episode demonstrate that you’ve paid careful attention to the original? For example, Joyce writes in the Dublin slang of 1904. In “An Encounter,” michin, swaddlers, totties, josser stand out specifically.
David Sedaris Genre: Sedaris writes humorous creative nonfiction. Narrative Mode: from his first person point of view. He uses self-deprecating humour alongside snarky, witty, incisive observations about his family, partner, neighbours. “As an added discomfort, they were all young, attractive, and well dressed, causing me to feel not unlike Pa Kettle trapped backstage after a fashion show.”
Show vs. Tell He uses gibberish to let the reader know that he hasn’t understood much of what his French teacher has said: “If you have not meimslsxp or lgpdmurct by this time, then you should not be in this room. Has everyone apzkiubjxow? Sedaris characterizes the teacher with a penchant for using sarcasm to humiliate students. “I thought that everyone loved the mosquito, but here, in front of all the world you claim to detest him. How is it that we’ve been blessed with someone unique and original as you? Tell us, please.”
The characterization also adds an element of tension to the essay, because we know that Sedaris and his classmates fear being a target for her ridicule. “Her rabbity mouth huffed for breath, and she stared down at her lap as though the appropriate comeback were stitched somewhere along the zipper of her slacks.”
“The teacher licked her lips, revealing a hint of the saucebox we would later come to know. She crouched low for her attack, placed her hands on the woman’s desk, and leaned in close, saying, “Oh yeah? And do you love your little war?”
I recalled my mother, flushed with wine, pounding the tabletop late one night, saying, ‘Love? I love a good steak cooked rare. I love my cat, and I love ...’ My sisters and I leaned forward to hear our names. ‘Tums,’ our mother said. ‘I love Tums.’” He uses familial anecdotes to serve as point of reference and to demonstrate how much he’s been shaped by his family.
“I absorbed as much of her abuse as I could understand, thinking—but not saying—that I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object incapable of disrobing and making an occasional fool of itself. Why refer to Lady Crack Pipe or Good Sir Dishrag when these things could never live up to all that their sex implied?”
“Though we were forbidden to speak anything but French, the teacher would occasionally use us to practice any of her five fluent languages. ‘I hate you,’ she said to me one afternoon. Her English was flawless. ‘I really, really hate you.’ Call me sensitive, but I couldn’t help but take it personally.” The use of understatement builds his comic style.
“Huddled in the hallways and making the most of our pathetic French, my fellow students and I engaged in the sort of conversation commonly heard in refugee camps. ‘Sometime me cry alone at night.’ ‘That be common for I, also, but be more strong, you. Much work and you talk pretty. People start love you soon. Maybe tomorrow, okay.’”
Hunter S. Thompson “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like, ‘I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive . . .’ And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about 100 miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas.”
“I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the shoulder of the highway. No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough.” “We had sampled almost everything else, and now -- yes, it was time for a long snort of ether. And then do the next 100 miles in a horrible, slobbering sort of spastic stupor.”
“ Jesus! Did I say that? Or just think it? Was I talking? Did they hear me? I glanced over at my attorney, but he seemed oblivious -- watching the road, driving our Great Red Shark along at 110 or so. There was no sound from the back seat. Maybe I'd better have a chat with this boy, I thought. Perhaps if I explain things, he'll rest easy. . .”
Gonzo-style Narrative Mode: first person Genre: personal experience more important than objectivity to get to the centre of an issue. Thompson offers the outrageous/surreal details of his trip with a simple “matter-of-factness.” Hallucinations are represented as factual or real. He displays a world-weary or experienced point of view. Diction and syntax choices revolve around the colloquial, conversational, informal. Humour often based on the absurd, profane, exaggerated observations.
Beckett’s “Dante and the Lobster” Narrative Mode: Third person limited. Genre: modernist. Prose should be as finely written and crafted as poetry. Beckett’s style in the story places emphasis on allusion; he makes references to The Divine Comedy, the Bible, Joyce’s Ulysses,Hamlet, and Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale.” Belacqua is characterized as methodical, detail-oriented, impatient, arrogant and yet naive.
The story opens with a meditation on literary interpretation. There’s also a degree of self-satire. Humour in the lunch preparation is found in Beckett’s diction, where he uses the language of combat to describe Belacqua’s efforts and point of view. The simple task is embellished with the dramatic words of battle. One major theme at work is how little empathy or pity life extends as well as the ambivalent nature of suffering.
Opening of Joyce’sFinnegans Wake(1939) riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. Sir Tristam, violer d’amores, fr’over the short sea, had passencore rearrived from North Amorica on this side of the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate
war: nor had topsawyer’s rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County’s gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatrick: not yet, though venissoon after, had a kidscad buttended a bland old issac: not yet, although all’s fair in vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone
nathandjoe. Rot a peck of pa’s malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface.
Take a cue from the plot for how to begin your imitation *What happens after the lobster goes in the pot? Does Belacqua sit down to dinner? *What happens when Hulga’s mother finds her in the hay loft? *What did one of the children taking a class with Miss Emily remember of her weekly hour in the house? *What happens on the last day of French class?
Third Section of the Final Quote Identification: Identify the author, the title, the speaker. Articulate in a short response (up to a paragraph) why the quote is significant.
“In order to secure my credit and character as a tradesman, I took care not only to be in reality industrious and frugal, but to avoid all appearances to the contrary. I dressed plainly ; I was seen at no places of idle diversion. I never went out a fishing or shooting ; a book, indeed, sometimes debauched me from my work, but
that was seldom, snug, and gave no scandal ; and, to show that I was not above my business, I some times brought home the paper I purchased at the stores thro the streets on a wheelbarrow. Thus being esteemed an industrious, thriving young man, and paying duly for what I bought, the merchants who imported stationery solicited my custom ; others proposed supplying me with books, and I went on swimmingly.
“I said long ago, you get you a signature and sign everything you do and keep a copy of it. Then you'll know what you done and you can hold up the crime to the punishment and see do they match and in the end you'll have something to prove you ain't been treated right.”
“Why!” she cried, “good country people are the salt of the earth! Besides, we all have different ways of doing, it takes all kinds to make the world go ‘round. That’s life!”“You said a mouthful,” he said.“Why, I think there aren’t enough good country people in the world!” she said, stirred. “I think that’s what’s wrong with it!”
“He felt strong enough to clear out the whole office single-handed. His body ached to do something, to rush out and revel in violence. All the indignities of his life enraged him.”
“He stood in the gloom of the hall, trying to catch the air that the voice was singing and gazing up at his wife. There was a grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to music a symbol of.”
“Before, I looked on the accounts of vice and injustice, that I read in books or heard from others, as tales of ancient days, or imaginary evils; at least they were remote, and more familiar to reason than to the imagination; but now misery has come home, and men appear to me as monsters thirsting for each other’s blood.”
“I do not speak it in vanity, but simply to record the fact, that I was not unemployed in my profession by the late John Jacob Astor; a name which, I admit, I love to repeat, for it hath a rounded and orbicular sound to it, and rings like unto bullion.”
