RV Young puts it this way: According to the reigning heterodoxy, absolutely nothing is “for all time”; and works of literature do not bespeak the “soul of the age,” so much as they conceal, even while embodying, its ideological and economic imperatives. Hence the clamor from powerful forces within the academy of the”opening up” or […]
Nature and Convention and the culture wars Read More »
When I was a child, my creative writing teacher (the immortal Mrs. Holm) mentioned a then current cigarette commercial that used the tag line, “Winston takes good, like a cigarette should. So what do you want, good grammar or good taste?” I had a way of being distracted from the point by the wonder of
In his classic On the Art of Writing Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (pronounced more or less “Killer Coosh”) said this: You have not been left altogether without clue to the secret of what Style is. That you must master teh secret for yourselves lay implicit in our bargain, and you were never promised that a writer’s
The first principle of style Read More »
