The Dialect of the Tribe: Speech and Community in Modern Fiction

Couverture
Oxford University Press, 5 mars 1987 - 320 pages
The bold careers of Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett--writers with profoundly unsettled cultural identities--spark Margery Sabin's investigation of values carried through inherited forms of speech. The Dialect of the Tribe offers fresh readings of such great novels as The Golden Bowl, Women in Love, Ulysses, and the Beckett trilogy which illustrate how complex attitudes toward the speech forms of language inform the most varied social, psychological, and aesthetic structures in modern fiction. Sabin explores the powerful tension in these writers between appreciation for the resources of common speech in English and contrary longings for a freedom associated with abstraction, system, and foreign or private language. Her own critical procedures transcend restrictive and reductive polarizations, as she lucidly analyzes the biases of both the Anglo-American critical tradition and the challenge to that tradition in French literary theory and practice. Written in a jargon-free, accessible style, The Dialect of the Tribe argues that the ambiguous cultural positions of the great modern novelists in English emerge as a major source of their strength--the rich traditions of the English language give enlivening power to writers also remarkable for their drive toward radical independence and skepticism.

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Table des matières

Introduction
3
1 The Life of English Idiom the Laws of French Cliché
10
2 The Community of Intelligence and the AvantGarde
43
3 Competition of Intelligence in The Golden Bowl
65
Speech and Will in Women in Love
106
5 Near and Far Things in Lawrences Writing of the Twenties
139
6 Postures and Impostures of English in Ulysses
179
7 Signs of Life and Death in Becketts Trilogy
241
Notes
292
Index
307
Droits d'auteur

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Fréquemment cités

Page 147 - Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherised upon a table...
Page 28 - Wonder does the news go about whenever a fresh one is let down. Underground communication. We learned that from them. Wouldn't be surprised. Regular square feed for them. Flies come before he's well dead. Got wind of Dignam. They wouldn't care about the smell of it. SaltAvhite crumbling mush of corpse: smell, taste like raw white turnips.
Page 199 - Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, 78 that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes.
Page 27 - He shook his constraint from him nervously. —And what is death, he asked, your mother's or yours or my own? You saw only your mother die. I see them pop off every day in the Mater and Richmond and cut up into tripes in the dissecting room.
Page 180 - He thought: —The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.
Page 114 - She listened, making out what he said. She knew, as well as he knew, that words themselves do not convey meaning, that they are but a gesture we make, a dumb show like any other.
Page 3 - I could give all to Time except— except What I myself have held. But why declare The things forbidden that while the Customs slept I have crossed to Safety with? For I am There, And what I would not part with I have kept.
Page 61 - Is my aura a blend of frankincense and orange pekoe and boot-blacking, or is it myrrh and bacon-fat and Shetland tweed?

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