Sep
8
8
For they promptly enough felt these yearnings of thoughts and excursions of sympathy, the concussion that couldn’t bring them down–the arrest produced by the so remarkably distinct figure that, at Fawns, for the previous weeks, was constantly crossing, in its regular revolution, the further end of any watched perspective.
—Henry James, from The Golden Bowl
About
Poets think in lines, prose writers in sentences; the best of both work from sound to sense, with an ear for the music in their compositions. S for Sentence celebrates lyricism in prose, the play and craft at work in the artful sentence. We post a sentence a month along with comments by a guest writer on the craft that shapes it, on what makes it great. In one or two sentences.—Pearl Abraham, Editor
Such is the depth to which the “remarkably distinct figure”--her father’s wife and her husband’s lover—penetrates Maggie Verver. The sentence first situates us, too, as penetrants, who witness the assault on Maggie’s feelings, then the location of the action—consciousness--widens into movement; it is both within and without. Effect chases cause; the aftermath of affective interior leads to a wide shot of the symbolic, unnamed trigger roaming the chessboard and then walking off the page. The masterful hyphen binds one state of being to another; a porous, tenuous joint, it allows both to careen and float.
—Mandy Berry, author of "Desire Vomit Emptiness: Cymbeline's Marriage Time," published in Shakesqueer
—Mandy Berry, author of "Desire Vomit Emptiness: Cymbeline's Marriage Time," published in Shakesqueer