Reading Style
A Life in Sentences
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- 23,99 €
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- 23,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Although this charming and erudite collection of essays originated in a series of lectures delivered at Columbia University, professor and critic Davidson (Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century) thinks of it more as "a field notebook," a sampler of sentences, and a "modest manifesto." She studies sentences that have "a high glimmer factor," with examples by writers ranging from Jane Austen to Harry Stephen Keeler. Davidson understands that reading is largely a matter of taste, and offers both apologies and helpful instructions for reading her book, freeing readers to nibble off corners of essays and move on if necessary. Readers familiar with the works discussed will have an edge over those encountering Henry James or Georges Perec for the first time. However, Davidson's lengthy quotes and in-depth analysis provide enough context to understand the intricacies of The Golden Bowl, or the challenges and pleasures of a novel that completely avoids the vowel "e," or a novella whose only vowel is "e." Most valuably, Davidson stresses the importance of reading for both enrichment and something many of us may have forgotten: pleasure.
