10:46, Wednesday 13 Oct., 2004 Link

Teaching Melville and style: a catalogue of selected rhetorical devices: To increase my students' sensitivity to Melville's language, therefore, I assembled and distributed an alphabetical catalogue of rhetorical devices with definitions and exemplifications from the Melville oeuvre. The catalogue continued to grow even after the course was finished; what follows is a considerably abbreviated version that nevertheless covers twenty-six grammatical, linguistic, and (mostly) rhetorical terms--with mini-essays.

I liked this: The difference is not a matter of subject, theme, character, or genre; it is those more "microcosmic" somethings that one artist can do so much more successfully than the other (f acial expression, musculature, sculpted veins, anatomical proportion). In literature, those "microcosmic somethings" are manifested at the sentence level.