Style articles

Recent articles from Style

A mind enslaved?: the interaction of metaphor, cognitive distance, and narrative framing in Chesnutt's "Dave's Neckliss".
December 22, 2008... Charles Chesnutt--African-American novelist, essayist, and short story writer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries--has become the subject of intense scholarly interest in recent years, particularly for his "conjure tales," which Robert Bone once called "the most important product of the...

Unreadable minds and the captive reader.
December 22, 2008... Alan Palmer, Lisa Zunshine, George Butte and others have been building the case for reframing the action of novels as a busy, collective reading and misreading of minds. Their work at once draws on and supports the idea that we have an evolved craving to read the minds of others and a...

Text-alteration as an interpretive teaching strategy: the case of "The Snow Man".(The Pedagogy of Literature)
December 22, 2008... However problematic interpretation is, it remains essential, even if close reading is now too often only a prelude to some more distant kind of reading. I will not quite argue here, with Rob Pope, that "The best way to understand how a text works... is to change it: to play around with it,...

Updike gets his mojo back.
December 22, 2008... Stacey Olster, ed. The Cambridge Companion to John Updike. New York: Cambridge UP, 2006. Xvi + 193 pp. Hardback $75.00; paperback $24.99. Once upon a time, John Updike lost his mojo. For me, anyway. Back in the mid-1960s, just out of graduate school and reading Updike for the first time,...

Narrative and the minds of others.
December 22, 2008... Daniel D. Hutto, Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding Reasons. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. xxiv + 343 pp. Theorists of narrative have recently begun drawing on developments in the cognitive sciences, including cognitive, evolutionary, and social...