Polysyndeton and Parataxis
In a brief search to see if I could find a copy of Joan Didion's "Goodbye to all that" online (I didn't, at least not yet), Google offered me a reference to an article about Didion's essay: "Place and Polysyndeton in Didion's "Goodbye to All That"By Richard Nordquist,which of course piqued my interest and which turns out not to be an article as far as I can tell so much as just an excerpt (but with links to other excerpts and the tantalizing topic of "participial phrases in Momaday" , and so I looked up polysyndeton itself and found not only a definition but more interestingly, some examples from Hemingway and others, and which, in the way that grammar and sentences have of going on and on, led to parataxis and some examples of parataxis in Steinbeck's piece on the American Dream (which I could use for WR 222 Argumentation and WR 323 Writing with Style), and interestingly, it would seem that both styles were popular in the 1930's to 1950's especially, and would be a natural for me, fond as I am of more. However, Noah Lukeman's book A Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation seems not to mention either as far as I can tell and without an index - imagine, no index. So, anyone teaching WR 330 Grammar could have lots of fun with this. What got me to thinking of Didion was reading Zinsser's On Writing Well, in which he calls Richard Burton's sentence about rugby the longest he (Zinsser) had read, at 183 words, but that's nothing compared to the famous "when" sentence in Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" at 302 words, built in a series of when clauses, or hypotaxis. Well, it's fun, isn't it.
Didion photo from http://grammar.about.com/od/shortpassagesforanalysis/a/Didiongoodbye.htm
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