Transcript Slide 1

Imitation of opaque style
Drafting guidelines
You’re not revising or re-writing the author’s work.
The text stands as it is; don’t presume to be able to
come up with something better.
Your imitation should attempt to be faithful to the
original setting and era, characters, language and
plot.
Select one of the designated writers and after
reading it several times, set out to identify the
characteristics of her or his style.
Be able to articulate the author’s use of diction,
syntax, narrative mode, themes, type of
figurative language.
How well does your imitation match up?
Does your episode demonstrate that you’ve paid
careful attention to the original?
For example, Joyce writes in the Dublin slang of
1904. In “An Encounter,” michin, swaddlers,
totties, josser stand out specifically.
David Sedaris
Genre: Sedaris writes humorous creative nonfiction.
Narrative Mode: from his first person point of view.
He uses self-deprecating humour alongside snarky,
witty, incisive observations about his family,
partner, neighbours.
“As an added discomfort, they were all young,
attractive, and well dressed, causing me to feel
not unlike Pa Kettle trapped backstage after a
fashion show.”
Show vs. Tell
He uses gibberish to let the reader know that he hasn’t
understood much of what his French teacher has said:
“If you have not meimslsxp or lgpdmurct by this time,
then you should not be in this room. Has everyone
apzkiubjxow?
Sedaris characterizes the teacher with a penchant for
using sarcasm to humiliate students. “I thought that
everyone loved the mosquito, but here, in front of all
the world you claim to detest him. How is it that we’ve
been blessed with someone unique and original as
you? Tell us, please.”
The characterization also adds an element of
tension to the essay, because we know that
Sedaris and his classmates fear being a target
for her ridicule.
“Her rabbity mouth huffed for breath, and she
stared down at her lap as though the
appropriate comeback were stitched
somewhere along the zipper of her slacks.”
“The teacher licked her lips, revealing a hint of
the saucebox we would later come to know.
She crouched low for her attack, placed her
hands on the woman’s desk, and leaned in
close, saying, “Oh yeah? And do you love your
little war?”
I recalled my mother, flushed with wine,
pounding the tabletop late one night, saying,
‘Love? I love a good steak cooked rare. I love
my cat, and I love ...’ My sisters and I leaned
forward to hear our names. ‘Tums,’ our
mother said. ‘I love Tums.’”
He uses familial anecdotes to serve as point of
reference and to demonstrate how much he’s
been shaped by his family.
“I absorbed as much of her abuse as I could
understand, thinking—but not saying—that I
find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an
inanimate object incapable of disrobing and
making an occasional fool of itself. Why refer
to Lady Crack Pipe or Good Sir Dishrag when
these things could never live up to all that
their sex implied?”
“Though we were forbidden to speak anything
but French, the teacher would occasionally
use us to practice any of her five fluent
languages. ‘I hate you,’ she said to me one
afternoon. Her English was flawless. ‘I really,
really hate you.’ Call me sensitive, but I
couldn’t help but take it personally.”
The use of understatement builds his comic
style.
“Huddled in the hallways and making the most
of our pathetic French, my fellow students and
I engaged in the sort of conversation
commonly heard in refugee camps.
‘Sometime me cry alone at night.’
‘That be common for I, also, but be more strong,
you. Much work and you talk pretty. People
start love you soon. Maybe tomorrow, okay.’”
Hunter S. Thompson
“We were somewhere around Barstow on the
edge of the desert when the drugs began to
take hold. I remember saying something like, ‘I
feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive
. . .’ And suddenly there was a terrible roar all
around us and the sky was full of what looked
like huge bats, all swooping and screeching
and diving around the car, which was going
about 100 miles an hour with the top down to
Las Vegas.”
“I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark
toward the shoulder of the highway. No point
mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor
bastard will see them soon enough.”
“We had sampled almost everything else, and
now -- yes, it was time for a long snort of
ether. And then do the next 100 miles in a
horrible, slobbering sort of spastic stupor.”
“ Jesus! Did I say that? Or just think it? Was I
talking? Did they hear me? I glanced over at
my attorney, but he seemed oblivious -watching the road, driving our Great Red
Shark along at 110 or so. There was no sound
from the back seat.
Maybe I'd better have a chat with this boy, I
thought. Perhaps if I explain things, he'll rest
easy. . .”
Gonzo-style
Narrative Mode: first person
Genre: personal experience more important than
objectivity to get to the centre of an issue.
Thompson offers the outrageous/surreal details of
his trip with a simple “matter-of-factness.”
Hallucinations are represented as factual or real.
He displays a world-weary or experienced point of
view. Diction and syntax choices revolve around
the colloquial, conversational, informal. Humour
often based on the absurd, profane, exaggerated
observations.
Beckett’s “Dante and the Lobster”
Narrative Mode: Third person limited.
Genre: modernist. Prose should be as finely
written and crafted as poetry.
Beckett’s style in the story places emphasis on
allusion; he makes references to The Divine
Comedy, the Bible, Joyce’s Ulysses, Hamlet,
and Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale.”
Belacqua is characterized as methodical, detailoriented, impatient, arrogant and yet naive.
The story opens with a meditation on literary
interpretation. There’s also a degree of selfsatire. Humour in the lunch preparation is
found in Beckett’s diction, where he uses the
language of combat to describe Belacqua’s
efforts and point of view. The simple task is
embellished with the dramatic words of
battle. One major theme at work is how little
empathy or pity life extends as well as the
ambivalent nature of suffering.
Opening of Joyce’sFinnegans Wake
(1939)
riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of
shore to bend of bay, brings us by a
commodious vicus of recirculation back to
Howth Castle and Environs.
Sir Tristam, violer d’amores, fr’over the short
sea, had passencore rearrived from North
Amorica on this side of the scraggy isthmus of
Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate
war: nor had topsawyer’s rocks by the stream
Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens
County’s gorgios while they went doublin their
mumper all the time: nor avoice from afire
bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf
thuartpeatrick: not yet, though venissoon
after, had a kidscad buttended a bland old
issac: not yet, although all’s fair in vanessy,
were sosie sesthers wroth with twone
nathandjoe. Rot a peck of pa’s malt had Jhem or
Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the
regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the
aquaface.
Take a cue from the plot for how to
begin your imitation
*What happens after the lobster goes in the
pot? Does Belacqua sit down to dinner?
*What happens when Hulga’s mother finds her
in the hay loft?
*What did one of the children taking a class with
Miss Emily remember of her weekly hour in
the house?
*What happens on the last day of French class?
Third Section of the Final
Quote Identification:
Identify the author, the title, the speaker.
Articulate in a short response (up to a
paragraph) why the quote is significant.
“In order to secure my credit and character as a
tradesman, I took care not only to be in reality
industrious and frugal, but to avoid all
appearances to the contrary. I dressed plainly ;
I was seen at no places of idle diversion. I
never went out a fishing or shooting ; a book,
indeed, sometimes debauched me from my
work, but
that was seldom, snug, and gave no scandal ;
and, to show that I was not above my
business, I some times brought home the
paper I purchased at the stores thro the
streets on a wheelbarrow. Thus being
esteemed an industrious, thriving young man,
and paying duly for what I bought, the
merchants who imported stationery solicited
my custom ; others proposed supplying me
with books, and I went on swimmingly.
“I said long ago, you get you a signature and sign
everything you do and keep a copy of it. Then
you'll know what you done and you can hold
up the crime to the punishment and see do
they match and in the end you'll have
something to prove you ain't been treated
right.”
“Why!” she cried, “good country people are the
salt of the earth! Besides, we all have
different ways of doing, it takes all kinds to
make the world go ‘round. That’s life!”
“You said a mouthful,” he said.
“Why, I think there aren’t enough good
country people in the world!” she said,
stirred. “I think that’s what’s wrong with it!”
“He felt strong enough to clear out the whole
office single-handed. His body ached to do
something, to rush out and revel in violence.
All the indignities of his life enraged him.”
“He stood in the gloom of the hall, trying to
catch the air that the voice was singing and
gazing up at his wife. There was a grace and
mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol
of something. He asked himself what is a
woman standing on the stairs in the shadow,
listening to music a symbol of.”
“Before, I looked on the accounts of vice and
injustice, that I read in books or heard from
others, as tales of ancient days, or imaginary
evils; at least they were remote, and more
familiar to reason than to the imagination; but
now misery has come home, and men appear
to me as monsters thirsting for each other’s
blood.”
“I do not speak it in vanity, but simply to record
the fact, that I was not unemployed in my
profession by the late John Jacob Astor; a
name which, I admit, I love to repeat, for it
hath a rounded and orbicular sound to it, and
rings like unto bullion.”