11.4.12

The Politics of the Polysyllabic

Un'interessante intervista a Mark Dery sull'uso ricercato della lingua - delle parole polisillabe, appunto - in inglese. "Poetic excess takes the devil's side, in the Anglo-American mind, of the Artificiality/Authenticity binary, and thus is highly suspect. In the same way that English fiction used the polymorphous perversity of gothic ornamentation in Italian architecture and art, as well the operatic excesses of the Catholic mass, to signify decadence and depravity, Anglo-American culture, from Samuel Johnson through Orwell's Politics and the English Language and on, into Strunk and White, and those 'Rules for Writing' manifestos from bestselling novelists that get handed around the Web, views with deep-dyed suspicion prose style that embraces arcane vocabulary, self-conscious wordplay, linguistic experimentation (for example, neologisms), complex Proustian syntax, lengthy Jamesian paragraphs, arch or ironic tone, and a discursive, flaneur-like approach to getting from here to there, rather than the shortest distance between point A and point B preferred by our age of time famine, Twitter attention spans, and corporatist, PowerPoint pedagogy". acceler8or.

Di Mark Dery è appena uscito un libro sull'argomento, dal titolo I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-By Essays on American Dread, American Dreams (University of Minnesota Press).

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