Awards
- Winner of Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2017
- Winner of Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2018
Overview
A professor, critic, and insatiable reader, Jenny Davidson investigates the passions that drive us to fall in love with certain sentences over others and the larger implications of our relationship with writing style. At once playful and serious, immersive and analytic, her book shows how style elicits particular kinds of moral judgments and subjective preferences that turn reading into a highly personal and political act. Melding her experiences as reader and critic, Davidson opens new vistas onto works by Jane Austen, Henry James, Marcel Proust, and Thomas Pynchon; adds richer dimension to critiques of W. G. Sebald, Alan Hollinghurst, Thomas Bernhard, and Karl Ove Knausgaard; and allows for a sophisticated appreciation of popular fictions by Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Lionel Shriver, George Pelecanos, and Helen DeWitt. She privileges diction, syntax, point of view, and structure over plot and character, identifying the intimate mechanics that draw us in to literature's sensual frameworks and move us to feel, identify, and relate. Davidson concludes with a reading list of her favorite titles so others can share in her literary adventures and get to know better the imprint of her own reading style.
Full Product Details
Author: Jenny Davidson
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 14.00cm
, Height: 2.50cm
, Length: 21.00cm
Weight: 0.411kg
ISBN: 9780231168588
ISBN 10: 0231168586
Pages: 208
Publication Date: 24 June 2014
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Manufactured on demand 
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.
Language: English
Table of Contents
1. The Glimmer Factor: Anthony Burgess's 99 Novels 2. Lord Leighton, Liberace, and the Advantages of Bad Writing: Helen DeWitt, Harry Stephen Keeler, Lionel Shriver, George Eliot 3. Mouthy Pleasures and the Problem of Momentum: Gary Lutz, Lolita, Lydia Davis, Jonathan Lethem 4. The Acoustical Elegance of Aphorism: Kafka, Fielding, Austen, Flaubert 5. Tempo, Repetition, and a Taxonomy of Pacing: Peter Temple, Neil Gaiman, A. L. Kennedy, Edward P. Jones 6. Late Style: The Golden Bowl and Swann's Way 7. Disordered Sentences: Georges Perec, Roland Barthes, Wayne Koestenbaum, Luc Sante 8. Details That Linger and the Charm of Voluntary Reading: George Pelecanos, Stephen King, Thomas Pynchon 9. The Ideal Bookshelf: The Rings of Saturn and The Line of Beauty 10. The Bind of Literature and the Bind of Life: Voices from Chernobyl, Thomas Bernhard, Karl Ove Knausgaard Notes A Reading List Index
Reviews
This book restores the priority of the sentence to literary-critical reading. It seeks to elevate the sentence as a unit of reading, in order to return us to an immediate attachment to the feeling of literary prose -- and the forms of thinking done in prose, and the techniques of art that make up prose as brushstrokes and pigments do painting. -- Mark Greif, The New School
Jenny Davidson is the ideal reader every writer wishes for, who catches every nuance and every sly allusion, who is alive to rhythm and color and orchestration. She does not just read for that ostensibly load-bearing stuff that is labeled meaning, but detects all the layers of meaning that are conveyed purely by style. Her book is a gift and a deep pleasure, because what makes her such a virtuoso reader is that she's also a first-rate writer -- Luc Sante, author of Low Life Charming and erudite... Publishers Weekly 3/31/14
Author Information
Jenny Davidson teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She has published two books on eighteenth-century British literature, including Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century, and four novels. She blogs at Light Reading (jennydavidson.blogspot.com).
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