Description
Book SynopsisLee Clark Mitchell is Holmes Professor of Belles-Lettres at Princeton University, USA. He is the author of seven books, including
Mere Reading: The Poetics of Wonder in Modern American Novels (Bloomsbury 2017), a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year.
Trade ReviewMitchell's sustained insight pushes the literary beyond alphabetic letters by recovering punctuation as more than an interface between words and the grammar of their articulation. In its most telling deployments, punctuation marks the conversion of format to content, seam to semantic gesture. Reading gets closer than ever, and with new power, in this study's riveting cross section of examples. On both prose and poetry, it's a terrific book, period. * Garrett Stewart, James O. Freedman Professor of Letters, University of Iowa, USA, and author of The Value of Style in Fiction (2018) *
Mark My Words is a remarkable work that shows that `what we take away from both powerful prose and poetry are not the words themselves . . . so much as the suasions that typographical marks induce in our readings.’ Citing a compelling concatenation of writers--Nabokov, Dickinson, Baldwin, Cummings--this book provides fresh analyses that will be of interest to writers and readers. * Jennifer DeVere Brody, Professor of Theater and Performance Studies, and Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity, Stanford University, USA *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Prologue: What Can Punctuation Do? 1. Silence: Hemingway’s Periods 2. Hesitation: Baldwin’s Commas 3. Interruption: James’s Dashes 4. Rupture: Dickinson’s Dashes 5. Expansion: Woolf’s Semicolons 6. Hemorrhage: Joyce, Morrison, Saramago, Sebald 7. Enjambment: Cummings, Williams, Giovanni 8. Incarceration: Nabokov’s Parentheses 9. Plenitude: Faulkner’s Array Epilogue: Punctuation as Style
Bibliography Index
