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On Style
As you study this collection of American literature, you will be introduced to some of America’s most important writers. Almost certainly, you will not like them all, but each author has a unique message to send and a distinctive way of sending it. Whether in clothing, music, visual art, or literature, style is easy to see but hard to define. You might think of style in writing as the way thoughts are dressed. Analyzing style will make you a more perceptive reader and help you develop your own writer’s voice. A good definition of style for this book is that it is the author’s distinctive manner of expression, or voice.
Often writers of the same time share specific qualities and use similar literary techniques. Their writing is categorized within a literary movement, and this anthology divides the units likewise. However, it is important to note that while some literary movements, such as Transcendentalism discussed in Unit One, were defined by members within it, many of these classifications were prescribed years after the movement’s existence. Therefore, when you discuss a writer’s style, you should consider the individual choices he or she makes in the text as well as how his or her work exhibits the defining characteristics of the literary movement in which it resides. This is especially important as you look at modern writers who intentionally emulate the stylistic choices of past movements.
An author’s style, in general, is hard to describe because part of it is a certain indefinable uniqueness. Style is a product of the writer’s background, gender, race and/or ethnicity, beliefs, and experiences as well as the world in which he or she lives. Writers reflect their style through their intentional use of language to create meaning in the text. Some writers have such distinctive styles that they have spawned imitators. The works of authors who follow paths blazed by Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner are sometimes called “Hemingwayesque” or “Faulknerian.” Hemingway probably would have been startled by such praise. He once wrote, “In stating as fully as I could how things were, it was often very difficult and I wrote awkwardly and the awkwardness is what they called my style.”
Hemingway is not alone in implying that he never deliberately set out to create a style but only wrote as well as he could instinctively. Katherine Anne Porter once complained, “I’ve been called a stylist until I really could tear my hair out. And I simply don’t believe in style. Style is you.”
On Style
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