Wednesday, September 09, 2009

Joan Didion “Her prose is her servant”

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Joan Didion “Her prose is her servant” http://tinyurl.com/le6r5e

Technically, Didion is immaculate and original. As early as 1963, literary critic Guy Davenport could say, "Her prose is her servant" (371). She understands grammar as a source of "infinite power":

To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.... The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind.... The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what's going on in the picture. (Didion 1986, 7)

“If I could believe that going to a barricade would affect man's fate in the slightest I would go to that barricade, and quite often I wish that I could, but it would be less than honest to say that I expect to happen upon such a happy ending” Joan Didion, Morning, After the Sixties 1979 p208


From “Joan Didion” by Sandra Braman
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~despey/didion.htm
Retrieved September 9, 2009
20090909 nd Joan Didion by Sandra Braman
http://twitpic.com/h424s Joan Didion “Her prose is her servant” http://tinyurl.com/le6r5e

http://kevindayhoff.blogspot.com/2009/09/joan-didion-her-prose-is-her-servant.html http://tinyurl.com/le6r5e
*****


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