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 Some samples from the course readings
To give you some idea of the power of style -- of how much
difference practical changes in sentence structure can make to the way readers understand
prose -- we present three short samples from the course readings that students are asked
to analyse and imitate.
From Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire
The condemnation of the wisest
and most virtuous of the Pagans, on account of the ignorance or disbelief of the divine
truth, seems to offend the reason and the humanity of the present age. But the primitive
church, whose faith was of a much firmer consistence, delivered over, without hesitation,
to eternal torture the far greater part of the human species. A charitable hope might
perhaps be indulged in favor of Socrates, or some other sages of antiquity, who had
consulted the light of reason before that of the gospel had arisen.
From Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night
Lowell, drawn to hypnosis, would resist it, resist
particularly these abstract clackety sounds like wooden gears in a noise-maker.
"Hari, hari, hari, hari, rama, rama, Krishna, hari, rama, Krishna," and the
whoop of wild Indians in "out, demons, out!" Nothing was more dangerous to the
poet than hypnosis, for the style of one's entrance to that plain of sleep where
all ideas coalesced into one, was critical--enter by any indiscriminate route, "Om,
Om, Om," and who knows what finely articulated bones of future prosody might be
melted in those undifferentiated pots--no, Lowell's good poetry was a reconnaissance into
the deep, and for that, pirate's patrols were the best--one went down with the idea one
would come back with more, but one did not immerse oneself with open guru Ginsberg arms
crying, "Baa, baa, slay this sheep or enrich it, Great Deep," no, one tiptoed in
and made a raid and ideally got out good. Beside, the Fugs and Hindu bells and exorcisms
via LSD were all indeed Allen Ginsberg's patch; poets respected each others' squatter's
rights like Grenadiers before the unrolled carpet of the King.
From Joan Didion, The White Album
At San Francisco State College on that particular morning
the wind was blowing the cold rain in squalls across the muddied lawns and against the
lighted windows of empty classrooms. In the days before there had been fires set and
classes invaded and finally a confrontation with the San Francisco Police Tactical Unit,
and in the weeks to come the campus would become what many people on it were pleased to
call "a battle field." The police and the Mace and the noon arrests would become
the routine of life on the campus, and every night the combatants would review their day
on television: the waves of students advancing, the commotion at the edge of the frame,
the riot sticks flashing, the instant of jerky camera that served to suggest at what risk
the film was obtained; then a cut to the weather map. In the beginning there had been the
necessary "issue," the suspension of a 22-year-old instructor who happened as
well to be Minister of Education for the Black Panther Party, but that issue, like most,
had soon ceased to be the point in the minds of even the most dense participants. Disorder
was its own point.
How do they do that? Take
the course to find out!
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