For writers that have earned status as cultural legends, like Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000) and Orham Pamuk (1952-), the respective cities where they themselves resided serve as both setting and muse. In the writings of Amichai, the holy city Jerusalem assumes the role of both a backdrop for his poetry as well as an all-encompassing symbol of Israel…

The purpose of my proposal is to present a comprehensive look at the specific needs of military students who are actively deployed globally, and who are entering the "virtual classroom" for the first time. Additionally, I have drawn upon my own experiences as an educator of more than 15 years, as well as someone who has developed course curriculum…

An author of books for young adults discusses the need for realism in adolescent literature as a means of helping teenagers to cope with real problems and describes her most recent book, which deals with euthanasia. (CLB)

Everything taught as rhetoric today can be traced to Aristotle, but his rhetoric needs to be updated. The five elements of his rhetoric--invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery--were designed for public orators, but rhetoric has since come to mean the written rather than the spoken word. Peter Ramus redefined rhetoric in the sixteenth…

Objectivity in style description is desirable, but three elements of any literary work make objectivity difficult: subject matter, context, and audience. Keeping aware of these subjective factors can help in achieving a measure of objective description. Two methods of stylistic analysis can be conducive to objectivity: propositional reduction and…

Stylistic analysis by both rhetoricians and literary critics is incomplete, often subjective, impressionistic, and sometimes misleading. The ideal method is objective analysis, based on adequate verbal samples, which identifies and describes the style of any writer or speaker as distinctive to that person alone. In order to do this, the theories…

The role of the reader in how the meaning of a text is formed has been a nearly obsessive concern of recent critical thought. While theories of reader-response or deconstruction may seem to have had little effect on the practice of teaching literature, they do hold much in common with the way many teachers try to teach writing. The works of Roland…

Grammar and style contribute to a matrix that expresses the writer's thinking and the values of the academic community. Writers uphold the matrix while presenting their own ideas through a system of "deixis" (to refer to or point to things or ideas not actually present or stated). Nonlinguistic deixis coordinates expression and context…

What is the difference in the stories that literary artists tell and the stories others tell? Some writers feel literary artists are able to realize the meaning of experience in a fuller way and shape their realizations into a work of fiction. Others feel that the writer does not invent the work but rather discovers it. Using fiction in…

Use of imaginative literature to inculcate a heightened awareness of stylistic choices can tangibly benefit student writing. One technique that can instill in students some sense of the work of writing as well as the power of stylistic choice and the resonance of English is to provide them with questions to be answered using passages from works…

One of the central problems in the study of fictional prose is that of distinguishing between mere linguistic regularity, which in itself is of no interest to literary studies, and regularity which is significant for the text in which it is found. General criteria for determining whether any particular instance of linguistic prominence is likely…

The narrative conventions of romance which flourish in Lawrence Cremin's "Transformation of the School" show that stylization does occur in historical writings. People often talk about stylization in visual forms; but stylization in the verbal arts is relatively undefined. To structure his recounting of the progressive story, Cremin drew…

"Dust Tracks on a Road," author Zora Neale Hurston's autobiography, is not a typical black autobiography. Hurston is a complex woman and author who addresses both black and white audiences, shifting the cadences of her voice to invoke a readership that can hear the textures of many voices and respond to an underlying call to a world…

The papers in this book were presented at a Symposium in Rhetoric at the Texas Woman's University, in Denton, Texas, on April 26, 1974. "Searching for a Romantic Rhetoric" by Gary Tate argues that authors of textbooks have failed the contemporary student of writing by ignoring the spaciousness of rhetoric. Rhetoric has also served writing students…

Notes that style is important in technical writing and is affected by content, audience, and the writer's purpose. (TJ)