Controversy on distinguishing between the target concepts

Drama.

Bronson Howard (1842-1908) the first important realist in American drama. Studied 2 areas of American society: marriage and business. He made the audiences “think uncomfortable thoughts”. His dramatic technique was old-fashioned melodrama: “The Banker’s Daughter” (1878), “The Henrietta” (1887), etc.

2. The “Telling detail” as a manifestation of implicit information.

3. Nonce-words («Окказионализмы») and their linguistic and extralinguistic message.

TELLING DETAIL AS AN INDICATION OF SUBTEXT

Their implying impact may be connected with BK or may be suggested by the text itself. But awareness of how modern psychological prose achieves its effect is also a kind of BK!

Художественная деталь = “telling” detail”, as different from «подробность» (a factual detail) = always suggests more than it actually says!

(Though sometimes the effect is due to accumulation. Then we have synergy – all the elements together have a greater significance than a mere sum of the same elements taken separately.

И равно беспредельны просторы// для микробов людей и планет (the three objects placed in the order of their size represent every kind of matter – small or great, living or inanimate).

Types of telling details:

¨ representational (=Изобразительная): descriptive or narrative creates a sensual image, mostly a visual one

¨ characterizing tells us more about a person than a lengthy explanation. It can be a detail of the person’s clothing or speech or specific gesture or pose or typical behaviour.

¨ specifying (for the sake of verisimilitude: “I’m telling a true story! Or to create the effect of the reader’s presence inside the narrative)

¨ implying (a vague term, because any other detail can become a detail of implication: the lumber mill in “The End of Something”. Dr.Eckleberg’s eyes in “Gatsby”). An implying detail may first seem mere trivia (Holden’s red hat) but later it emerges as a symbol.

Maybe, by detail of implication K. means a detail that is relevant to the main message of a story. Thus, in the story “A Friend in Need” the author emphasizes the kindly smile and the mild voice and the innocent blue eyes of the main character, Mr. Burton, who deliberately sent another man to death by promising him a job if he swam round the beacon. The contrast between his appearance and deeds is emphasized by a neutral phrase which sounds horrible in the context:

- When you promised him a job if he swam round the beacon, did you know he would be drowned?

He looked at me with those kind blue eyes of his and answered:

- You see, I didn’t have a vacancy at my office at the moment.

“Are you English?” I asked, perhaps tactlessly.

“Rather. You don’t think I look like an American, do you? British to the backbone, that’s what I am”.

To prove it, Mr. Kelada took out of his pocket a passport and airily waved it under my nose.

King George has many strange subjects. Mr. Kelada was short and of sturdy build, clean-shaven and dark-skinned, with a fleshy hooked nose and very large, lustrous and liquid eyes. His long black hair was sleek and curly. He spoke with a fluency in which there was nothing English and his gestures were exuberant. I felt pretty sure that a closer inspection of that British passport would have betrayed the fact that Mr. Kelada was born under a bluer sky than is generally seen in England.

…As soon as he was out of the wood, in the free open meadow, where he could breathe, he started to run as fast as he could. (D.H.Lawrence. Suns and Lovers)

I knew Salvatore first when he was a boy of fifteen, with a pleasant ugly face, a laughing mouth and care-free eyes. (Maugham)

The hills and the sky were clean and cold. Everything looked washed, rather hard. Miriam glanced at Paul. It seemed cruel to her that his eyes and brows, which she loved, could look so hurting. (D.H.Lawrence. Suns and Lovers)

World War I. A convalescent lieutenant is suffering from insomnia. To lull himself into sleep, he tries to recollect, in every detail, what he loved best before the war – fishing trips.

Sometimes I found worms that slipped into the ground as soon as the log was raised. Once I used a salamander, small and neat and agile, and a lovely color. He had tiny feet that tried to hold on to the hook, and after that one time I never used a salamander again, although I found them very often. Nor did I use cri-ckets (сверчки) because of the way they acted about the hook.

They sat enjoying the ice-cream wrapped at the core of the deep quiet summer night …They both sat listening to the night …and complete silence because the radio needed a new battery and they had played all the records to exhaustion.

… Ice-cream lived again in his throat, stomach, spine and limbs; he was instantly cold as a wind out of December gone …Suddenly both of them realized that something was wrong. The crickets had stopped chirping. Silence was complete.

(Details of precision + implication):

… Doctor Webster Civet, who was drowned last summer up in Maine. And Edgar Beaver, whose hair, they say, turned cotton-white one winter afternoon for no good reason at all….Snell was there three days before he went to the penitentiary, so drunk out on the gravel drive that Mrs. Ulysses Swett’s automobile ran over his right hand. …And G. Earl Muldoon, brother to that Muldoon who afterward strangled his wife. and the young Quinns, divorced now, and Henry L. Palmetto, who killed himself by jumping in front of a subway train in Times Square….and young Brewer, who had his nose shot off in the war...

We were all at the hospital every afternoon, and there were different ways of walking across the town through the dusk to the hospital. Two of the ways were alongside canals, but they were long. Always, though, you crossed a bridge across a canal to enter the hospital. There was a choice of three bridges. (Hemingway. In Another Country)

Implication achieved by accumulation of descriptive details

It was cold in the fall in Milan, and the dark came very early. (…) It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains (…) On one of the bridges a woman sold roasted chestnust. It was warm sitting in front of her charcoal fire and the chestnuts were warm afterwards in your pocket.

Замятин. «МЫ»

В моем присутствии она должна была дать свои показания. Эта женщина упорно молчала и улыбалась. Я заметил, что у ней острые и очень белые зубы и что это красиво.

Затем ее ввели под Колокол. У нее стало очень белое лицо, а так как глаза у нее темные и большие - то это было очень красиво. Она смотрела на меня, крепко вцепившись в ручки кресла, - смотрела, пока глаза совсем не закрылись. Тогда ее вытащили, с помощью электродов быстро привели в себя и снова посадили под Колокол. Так повторялось три раза - и она все-таки не сказала ни слова. Другие, приведенные вместе с этой женщиной, оказались честнее: многие из них стали говорить с первого же раза.

Implication of priority (e.g.,)

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