I should clarify: I don't think the phrase a "barbarism"; it just seemed out
of place as an idiom in an essay on James Baldwin for a university
literature class. Part of teaching this sort of writing is letting students
in on the conventions of diction, etc.
jd
On 3/29/07, Caleb Cluff <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> All too true. When Patrick White, (who was the scion of wealthy landed
> gentry) dared to use urban dialect in literature here, he was
> alternately criticised for: (a) satirising it (b) daring to use it
> anyway - as it was 'bad language'. Now there's much of White I can't
> abide, but central to his work is a passionate desire to understand 'the
> flaw in the glass' as it were, and the exploration of dialect is central
> to that.
>
> A gift I was given many years ago was a very early edition of 'As I Lay
> Dying'. I treasure that book as one of the moments where writing opened
> the world's connections to me. The world of the Bundrens was not far
> removed of a family named the Suttons, who lived near us and yet in
> another era entirely. It was as though they spoke a different language.
> I'm still trying to write it, but I fear my world was so safe compared
> to theirs (infant - indeed general - mortality was never far from their
> life) that to get near it seems a kind of rural orientalism.
>
> caleb
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Poetryetc: poetry and poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
> Behalf Of Mark Weiss
> Sent: Friday, 30 March 2007 10:16 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: off of
>
> It hasn't come uncontested here either. Twain, for one, met a lot of
> hostility. And Huck Finn was an exception--rural dialect was humorous
> and sentimental, black rural dialect humorous, Irish dialect humorous
> or ugly, then sentimental. And it's still rarely the voice of the
> narrator--Faulkner's characters talk southren, his narrator usually
> doesn't.
>
> Mark
>
>
>
>
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--
Joseph Duemer
Professor of Humanities
Clarkson University
[sharpsand.net]
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