Archives for 2009

Form – how to understand it

August 31, 2009 by Roy Johnson

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Form – definition

Form is a term which refers to the recognisable shape of a text or a speech act.

This shape may be either physical or abstract.

Examples

Spoken		Written
Conversation		Menu
Sermon		Letter
Announcement		Novel
Anecdote		Article
Joke		Poster

Use

The term ‘form’ is used in linguistics and in literary criticism as a technical term.

It is used when considering the shape, the construction, or the type of speech or writing.

An awareness of form can help to produce more efficient communication.

Keeping the ‘shape’ of writing in mind helps to clarify the type of end product required.

NB! An appreciation of form is developed via practice and experience.

Form is an important part of stylistic analysis – together with audience and function.

When studying a text we first try to identify its form. What type of writing is it? (Is it a letter, an advertisement, a timetable, or a novel?)

Then we might ask ‘To whom is it addressed?’ [audience] and ‘What is it doing?’ [function].

When thinking of linguistic or literary form, it’s sometimes useful to think in terms of material shape. For instance, a table is usually a rectangular horizontal surface supported by legs at each corner. That is the form of a table.

Similarly, a piece of writing which begins with a postal address and the words ‘Dear Sir’, then ends with ‘Yours sincerely’ – is likely to be a letter. This is the form taken by most letters.

It is possible for one form to contain another or several other forms. For example, a novel may contain a letter or a poem. A sermon may contain an anecdote.

Most poems have a form, but this varies a great deal. The sonnet is in part defined by its form which is the number of lines and the rhyme scheme.

Form in speech may be signaled by recognizable phrases, tone of voice, or choice of vocabulary.

For instance, ‘The train now standing in platform ten…’ would be recognised by most people as the start of a railway announcement.

Similarly, ‘O Lord, we beseech thee to …’ would easily be identified as the start of a prayer.

If someone says ‘My grandfather always told me that …’ we know that they are probably going to offer moral advice – a piece of homespun wisdom.

Beware! The term ‘formal’ has widened in its application to mean ‘serious’ — just as ‘informal’ has also extended its meaning to encompass notions of friendliness.

For instance, the greeting ‘Hi there!’ might be described by most people as informal. However, because it is part of a recognised verbal ritual, in linguistic terms [strictly speaking] it is ‘formal’ because it has a fixed shape.

The two terms, ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ therefore need to be used accurately when applied to linguistic or literary analysis.

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Fowler’s Modern English Usage

October 29, 2009 by Roy Johnson

reprint of the classic first edition

Fowler’s Modern English Usage was first published in 1926. It was an immediate commercial success, selling 60,000 copies in its first year, and it went on to become the most influential set of guidelines on grammar and the use of the English language of the twentieth century. There were later versions revised by Sir Ernest Gowers in 1965 and Robert Burchfield in 1996, but this is a facsimile of Henry Fowler’s original first edition, with an introduction by the linguist David Crystal that sets it in context.

It’s reproduced photographically from the original – so the entries are arranged in two columns on the page, which was the style for books of this kind at the time. This presentation strikes me as doubly appropriate, because it captures the old-fashioned nature of the original, and it accurately reflects the slightly pedantic tone of the contents. Fowler is not unlike his great lexicological predecessor Samuel Johnson in issuing his judgements wrapped around with ironic asides, which makes for interesting reading.

David Crystal’s introductory essay explains how the book came to be published, and how Fowler was an important transition figure between the old, traditional proscriptive grammarians and the new more tolerant descriptive schools which were to follow.

Strangely enough, Fowler, whose name has become a metonym for his Dictionary, is often used by prescriptivists as an authority to support their arguments – when the fact is that his work as a whole reflects a flexible, subtle, and relativist attitude to language and the way it is used.

Fowler deals with all the classic problems in English language, such as the which/that dilemma, the split infinitive, and ending sentences with a preposition. He covers issues that are difficult even for native speakers of English (such as the who/whom issue).

The central problem is the question of usage. If enough people say different from does that make it right? Fowler was working in the days before any giant collections of real data were being used as a source of evidence to support linguistic claims. And he was using printed sources, not spoken, which today are regarded as primary.

However, it’s difficult to predict if he is going to be prescriptive or relativist on any single topic. Crystal points out that there are plenty of inconsistencies within the Dictionary. On some issues Fowler accepts widespread common usage; at others he asserts that something is right or wrong based on nothing more than his own opinion.

It should be said that the Dictionary is not merely a listing of words and their definitions, as in the normal sense of the term. It’s a compendium of how terms are used grammatically, the problems they pose, and the cultural baggage that surrounds them. A typical entry which captures both his stern sense of what is right and his ironic attitude in trying to correct it is as follows:

aggravate, aggravation. 1. The use of these in the sense of annoy, vex, annoyance, vexation, should be left to the uneducated. It is for the most part a feminine or childish colloquialism, but obtrudes occasionally into the newspapers. To aggravate has properly only one meaning—to make (an evil) worse or more serious. The right & the wrong use are shown in: (right) A premature initiative would be calculated rather to a. than to simplify the situation; (wrong) The reopening of the contest by fresh measures that would a. their opponents is the last thing that is desired in Ministerial circles. It is in the participle (and a very stupid, tiresome, aggravating man he is) that the vulgarism is commonest.

You can probably find copies of the first edition Fowler in the few remaining second hand bookshops – but it’s nice to have this reprint to put it back into general circulation again.

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David Crystal (ed) Fowler’s Modern English Usage: The Classic First Edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.784, ISBN: 0199535345

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Franz Kafka greatest works

September 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

stories, novels, diaries

Beginners should start with the short stories of Franz Kafka before tackling his novels. Be prepared for writing which can be very philosophical, heavily symbolic, and full of strange images. In Franz Kafka’s greatest works there is often no plot or dramatic tension, but the prose style (even in translation) is truly original. Kafka’s work is also full of black humour; he often writes both about and from the point of view of animals; and some of his shorter pieces are in the form of parables, meditations, poetic fragments, and sketches.

Keep in mind that Kafka was one of many great writers who did not win the Nobel Prize for literature – along with Tolstoy, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, D.H.Lawrence, and James Joyce. His work was hardly known outside his native Chzeckoslovakia during his lifetime, and yet it had immediate and enormous impact once it was translated in the late 1920s. He is now regarded as one of the giants of twentieth-century literature.

Metamorphosis (1915) is truly one of Kafka’s masterpieces – a stunning parable which lends itself to psychological, sociological, or existential interpretations. It’s the tale of a man who wakes up one morning and finds himself transformed into a giant insect. His family are horrified, gradually disown him, and he dies of neglect, with a rotting apple lodged in his side. Franz Kafka is one of the most important and influential fiction writers of the early twentieth century. He was a novelist and writer of short stories whose works came to be regarded as one of the major achievements of twentieth century literature. Metamorphosis is one of his most stunning and memorable works.
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The Trial is Kafka’s one indisputably successful novel – a haunting and original study in existential anxiety, paranoia, and persecution. Joseph K is accused one day of being guilty – but not told what crime he has committed. He wrestles hopelessly with legal officials and a nightmare-like court which acts on arbitrary rules and refuses to give explanations. He spends the entire novel striving to find justice. In the end he fails, only to be killed ‘like a dog’. Kafka gave expression to modern anxiety three decades before most people even started feeling it. This is a novel which stands outside literary norms – a superb achievement of literary modernism. Be prepared for black humour as well as mind-bending contradictions and deeply etched literary expressionism. Read the stories and The Trial as a start and a minimum.
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The Castle is Kafka’s last work – a long, rambling, and unfinished novel in which the castle itself operates as a huge metaphor for authority and bureaucracy. If The Trial is about a hopeless search for justice, The Castle is often said to be about the search for grace and forgiveness. The setting is a remote village covered almost permanently in snow and a community fraught with tensions and sexual predators. It lies like a magnificent ruin amongst the many other fragments in Kafka’s oeuvre. This is strictly for the advanced devotee. Tackle this one only when you have read the other shorter works.

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Amerika (also known as The Man who Disappeared) is Kafka’s first attempt at a novel. He is renowned for documenting the horrors of modern life, but Kafka also had a lighter and amusing side. This novel is incomplete, like so much else he wrote. It’s the story of Karl Rossmann who after an embarrassing sexual misadventure is expelled from his European home and goes to live in an imaginary United States (which of course Kafka had never visited). The story is deeply symbolic – as usual – and an interesting supplement to the central texts. In fact it’s a reverse ‘Rags to Riches’ story, because Karl starts his engagement with the American Dream quite successfully – but by the end of the novel he is destitute. The first chapter is frequently anthologised as ‘The Stoker’.
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The Complete Short Stories is an amazing bargain, because this includes not only the stories, but also Kafka’s fragments, parables, and sketches. Many of these – although sometimes no more than jottings – contain the germs of ideas and images which Kafka worked up later into his major works. Kafka wrote on the boundaries between fiction and philosophy, and very often he blurrs the distinction between the two.
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The Diaries Kafka wrote to himself almost as much as he did to other people, and he communicated some of his most subtle and revealing ideas in fragments and notes made in the margins of his tormented life. Here there are the wrestlings with guilt and personal inadequacy, plus the aspirations to a a higher spiritual life. They cover the period from 1910 to 1923 and reveal the inner world in which he lived. He also describes the father he worshipped but feared, and the woman he loved but could not bring himself to marry. It is sometimes difficult to see where his fiction ends and his biographical notes begin, but they form an interesting contrast if they are read in conjunction with the letters and the notebooks. They also need to be read with care, because they conceal almost as much as they reveal.
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Letters to Felice Many of Kafka’s surviving letters were written to women with whom he was ‘in love’. The qualification of this term is necessary because they reveal a fascinating ambiguity in his attitude to the recipients. Thousands of words are spent analysing his feelings, arranging meetings then cancelling them, deciding to get married and making all the necessary arrangements for where and how to live – and then changing his mind, and writing endless further letters explaining his reasons. Other letters reveal his painstaking sympathy and scrupulous kindness to friends, his neurotic fastidiousness over what most people would regard as trivialities, and his amazing modesty in dealing with other figures of the literary world.
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The Complete Novels is a handy, good value compilation which includes Amerika, The Trial, and The Castle. One Amazon reviewer complains that the print is very small, but you can hardly complain when three major works are rolled into one volume of nearly eight hundred pages for less than the price of two cocktails. The translation used is that by Edwin and Willa Muir written in the 1930s.

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Franz Kafka – web links

Franz Kafka at Mantex
Biographical notes, book reviews and study guides on the major works, video presentations and documentaries, adaptations for cinema and television, and links to Kafka archives.

Franz Kafka at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of formats – in both English and German.

Franz Kafka at Wikipedia
Biographical notes, social background, survey of the stories and novels, publishing history, translations, critical interpretation, and extensive bibliographies.

Franz Kafka at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors, actors, production features, box office, film reviews, and even quizzes.

Kafka in Love
Video photomontage featuring portraits of Kafka, his friends and family, and locations in Prague – with a rather schmaltzy soundtrack in Yiddish and English.

Kafka-Metamorphosis
A public Wiki dedicated to Kafka and his work, featuring the short stories, interpretations, and further web links.

Kafka Society of America
Academic group with annual meetings and publications. Also features links to other Kafka-related sites

Oxford Kafka Research Centre
Academic group based at Oxford University that tracks current research and meetings. [Doesn’t seem to have been updated since 2012.]

The Kafka Project
Critical editions and translations of Kafka’s work in several languages, plus articles, literary criticism, bibliographies.

Tribute to Franz Kafka
Individual fan site (created by ‘Herzogbr’) featuring a collection of texts, reviews, and enthusiast essays. Badly in need of updating, but contains some interesting gems.

Finding Kafka in Prague
Quirky compilation of photos locating Kafka in his home town – with surrealist additions and weird sound track.

Who Owns Kafka?
Essay by Judith Butler from the London Review of Books on the contentious issues of ownership of Kafka’s manuscripts where they are currently held in Israel – complete with podcast.

The Kafka Archive – latest news
Guardian newspaper report on the suitcase full of Kafka and Max Brod’s papers released by Israeli library.

Franz Kafka: an illustrated life
Book review of a charming short biography with some unusual period photos of Kafka and Prague.

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Franz Kafka life and works

September 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

timeline, writings, social context

1883. Franz Kafka born in Prague, which was then part of the Hapsburg empire. Father prosperous Jewish businessman. Family speaks German. K successful as a schoolboy, but prone to ill-health.

1899. First early writings – all destroyed.

1901. Attends German University in Prague. Studies chemistry for two weeks, then changes to law.

1902. First meeting with Max Brod, who was to become his fiend, biographer, and literary executor.

1904. Working on a novel – The Child and the City [subsequently lost]. Writes first version of ‘Description of a Struggle’.

1906. First love affair. Successful degree in Doctorate of Law. Begins one year of legal training.

1908. Begins work in Accident Insurance offices in Prague. First publication of short ‘stories’.

1910. Starts to keep a diary. Further publication of short pieces. Trips to Berlin and Paris.

1911. Further travels. First spell in sanatorium for ill health. Working on another novel (Amerika].

1912. Meets publishers Ernst Rowalt and Kurt Wolff, and Felice Bauer at the home of Max Brod. Second visit to sanatorium. Writes Metamorphosis. Also writes his story ‘The Judgement’ in one single overnight sitting.

Franz Kafka: Illustrated Life is a photographic biography that offers an intimate portrait in an attractive format. A lively text is accompanied by over 100 evocative images, many in colour and some previously unpublished. They depict the author’s world – family, friends, and artistic circle – together with original book jackets, letters, and other ephemera. An excellent starting point for beginners which captures fin de siecle Europe beautifully.

1913. Makes first of several visits to Berlin to meet Felice Bauer, who becomes his fiancee (more than once). Kurt Wolff published The Stoker – which is the first chapter of Amerika. Travels to Vienna, Trieste, Venice and Lake Garda. First meeting with Grete Bloch in Prague.

1914. Moves into the first of many apartments to live alone. Takes leave of absence to work on The Trial. Writes ‘In the Penal Colony’. Official engagement to Felice is broken off.

1915. Resumes relationship and travels with Felice. Another visit to a sanatorium. Writes ‘Before the Law’. Metamorphosis published.

1917. Writes stories ‘The Great Wall of China’, ‘The Hunter Gracchus’, ‘A Report to an Academy’. Renews engagement to Felice and travels with her to Hungary – returning alone. Moves back into his parent’s apartment. Tuberculosis of the lungs diagnosed. Second engagement broken off.

1918. Continued illness. Works as a gardener at sanitarium. Returns to work, but contracts Spanish flu.

Kafka: A Very Short Introduction introduces Kafka’s life and cultural background, then traces a number of themes in his best-known works. It’s in an interesting and attractive format – a small, pocket-sized book, stylishly designed, with illustrations, endnotes, suggestions for further reading, and an index. If you’ve not studied Kafka before, this will give you pointers on what to look for. It covers Kafka’s biography, then interpretations of his work – including one quite original approach concerning the relationship between his writing and his body.

1919. Meets Julie Wohryzek and becomes engaged to her – but wedding postponed. Takes lessons in Hebrew. Receives letters from Milena Jesenska-Polak, who is translating some of his work. Writes ‘Letter to his Father’.

1920. Persistent illness. Begins writing the He aphorisms. Correspondence with Milena, who he visits in Vienna. Breaks off engagement to Julie Wohryzek, but continues seeing her. Returns to work – and to live in his parent’s apartment.

1921. Attempts to break off relationship with Milena. Back into sanitarium. Milena visits him in Prague. He shows her his diaries.

1922. Starts work on The Castle. Pensioned off by his employers. Writes ‘Investigations of a Dog’. Further illness.

1923. Further Hebrew studies. Spends lots of time in bed. Breaks off relationship with Milena. Goes to live with Dora Dymant in Berlin. Writes ‘The Burrow’.

1924. Fuel crisis in Berlin. K’s health deteriorates. Moves back to Prague. Writes ‘Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk’. Dora takes K to sanatorium in Austria. K instructs Max Brod to burn all his writings. Brod agrees, but disobeys instruction. K dies 3 June – buried in Jewish cemetery in Prague.