ENGL2035: Modernism
Assessment key

These are some notes on miscellaneous matters of style and terminology which arise quite frequently in essays.  I may refer to them in the course of my comments on your essay. 

The links beneath some entries are to other sites dealing with issues of writing skills, grammar and punctuation, and citation styles for documenting electronic resources. They are to Paul Brians's page on Common Errors in English (Washington State University), Jack Lynch's  Grammar and Style Notes (Rutgers University), the NASA Handbook for Technical Writers and Editors, Charles Darling's Guide to Grammar and Writing (Capital Community-Technical College, Hartford, Connecticut), and the Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Perdue University, all of which are highly recommended if you're not sure of a point or want a quick ruling on a nicety.  

Don't get them confused:

• Acronyms are made up of the initial letters of a name or phrase.  They appear in uppercase, without full stops between the letters.
• Abbreviations are generally a shortened form of a single word.  They usually appear in lowercase, with an initial capitalisation if needed.  Modern practice is not to put a full stop after an abbreviation if its last letter is also the last letter of the original word (hence Mr and Dr, not Mr. and Dr.).

• NSW (acronym), but Qld (abbreviation--not QLD)
• Pty Ltd, not PTY LTD, and certainly not P.T.Y. L.T.D. 

There are two main uses for the apostrophe: contractions and possessives. 

In contractions, the apostrophe indicates missing letters: don't, shouldn't, she'll. 

To form a possessive from a singular noun, in most cases you just add 's, whether or not the noun already ends in an s: a knight's move, the boss's desk, Henry James's novels. If the noun is a plural ending in s, just add an apostrophe: students' rights. Plurals which don't already end in s take 's, as in children's toys. Possessive pronouns don't take apostrophes at all: hers, his, its, yours. 

Don't confuse it's, the contraction (It's a fine day) with its, the possessive pronoun (The government defended its actions). It's means it is. 

Don't use apostrophes for plurals, even the plurals of acronyms: several visiting VIPs, a list of URLs. Make an exception only if there would be an ambiguity without an apostrophe: minding your p's and q's. In particular, don't use apostrophes to mark the plural in decades: the 1980s, or the '80s (a contraction), but not the 1980's or the '80's. 
 

Be wary about labelling pairs of terms binary oppositions. Horse and carriage may go together, but they are not a binary opposition. 

A binary opposition is a pairing of terms defined in relation to something which is present in the first, absent in the second. 

Your essay assignments require you to show that you've read something in the relevant areas. The most obvious way to do this is to cite. But the mere fact that you've cited something isn't enough in itself. What you do with the citation can be a very clear indicator of your knowledge of the area—or your lack of it. Don't short-change yourself. 

When you cite a passage from another text: 

• Do you use it after you've cited it? If not, it probably gives the impression you've only put it there to show you've done some further reading.
• Is it just a definition of a basic term, something you should know anyway from the course? Obvious padding.
• Does it tell you anything you didn't already know? If it doesn't, leave it out. If it does, make sure you do something with it.
• Can it be omitted? If it can, do so.

And of course, whenever you cite or use anything someone else wrote, you must observe all the scholarly protocols of accurate documentation. See the Statement on plagiarism on this site.

Don't confuse them. 

A colon indicates an apposition: what follows it explains or provides an example of what goes before it. The sentence you have just read is an example of this use. The colon may also introduce a list (which is a series of terms in apposition). 

A semicolon has two main uses: 

• It separates items in a list introduced by a colon
• It links two independent clauses into the one sentence. The elements on either side of the colon must make sense as separate sentences; all the colon does is indicate they are closely linked. The sentence you have just read is an example of this use. 

A whole comprises, or is composed of, its parts. Parts do not comprise a whole. An essay comprises an introduction, body, conclusion and bibliography. 

There are three horizontal marks which are often confused: from shortest to longest, they are the hyphen (-), the en-dash (–) and the em-dash (—). If you can't get your word processor to do them, use a single hyphen to represent an en-dash, and two hyphens without spacing for an em-dash. 

A hyphen separates two parts of a word: holiday-makers. 

An en-dash separates elements of a range, such as page numbers (320–324) or destinations (a London–Sydney flight).  If you're using Microsoft Word, you can make an en-dash by pressing <Ctrl> and the minus key on the right-hand numberpad of your keyboard.

An em-dash marks an interruption in a sentence, a qualification, or a parenthetical remark: Media ownership laws—such as they are—nominally serve to protect against monopolies.  If you're using Microsoft Word, you can make an em-dash by pressing <Alt><Ctrl> and the minus key on the right-hand numberpad of your keyboard.
 

The term has quite specific and complex meanings in philosophy and literary criticism, in both cases referring to the work of Jacques Derrida. "Deconstruct" is not a synonym for analyse, criticise, critique, problematise, ironise, look at or examine. 

I know the term's generally used in that sense in a lot of high school textbooks, but a large number of wrong uses don't make it right. Here's one example of what it doesn't mean:

Deconstruction is a critical process whereby the text is broken down into its various components to analyse the way in which meaning is created at each level. The text is interpreted in light of both its production (i.e. the author) and its consumption (i.e. the reader). ...

Emma Robinson and Sophie Robinson, What Does It Mean? Discourse, Text, Culture: An Introduction (Sydney: McGraw-Hill, 2003), 6.

No, that's analysis.

(So what is deconstruction? Two answers will have to suffice here, one short, one long.

The short answer: A neat one-line description of deconstruction would be:

Deconstruction is the relentless pursuit ... of things whose possibility is sustained by their impossibility, of things which, instead of being wiped out by their impossibility, are actually nourished and fed by it.

John D. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 32

Think of a signature. A signature has to be (a) absolutely unique and unrepeatable, and (b) infinitely repeatable. It has to be both at once. A signature which anyone can repeat is no signature at all; neither is a signature you can't repeat on demand, indefinitely. The signature is impossible, as it has to be two mutually exclusive things at once, unique and repeatable. The lesson from this is not that there's no such thing as a signature. On the contrary, they're everywhere, in the most obvious sense: try getting through the day without them. The point to be made is the much more interesting one that signatures work because they're impossible. A consequence: this impossibility means that there will never be a perfect signature, that forgery is an ineradicable possibility for all signatures. (This argument about signatures is the one Derrida makes in "Signature Event Context", which you'll find in his Margins of Philosophy and Limited Inc.)

So what other things are there whose possibility is sustained by their impossibility? Friendship, democracy, love, the gift, the ethical, justice, mourning, respect,... Pretty much all of being human, in short.

The long answer: You might want to think of enrolling in ENGL2420: Critical Theory: Lacan, Derrida, and Since, which takes a semester to explore this and related issues.

Don't cite definitions of basic terms unless you want to do something with them—such as query, contest or modify them. It doesn't show you know what the term means: it suggests you had to look it up and are stalling for time. Beginning an essay on X with a statement such as "The Macquarie Dictionary defines 'X' as ..." is utterly, utterly leaden. 

I'm a stickler for style conventions. Part of your own professionalism as a student, and later on as a graduate in employment, is the ability to document your work according to a house style.

This isn't just a matter of academic niceties, to be abandoned once you've got a degree. Any workplace will have its own house style, to which its publications conform. Documents which are inconsistent or in a variety of different styles and conventions simply look unprofessional. If you submit a document which is not in house style for publication, one of two things can happen:

• It gets sent back to you, with a request to do it properly this time; or
• One of your colleagues gets to do what you should have done the first time through.

Either way, you're in bad odour.

In EMSAH, the house style is a modified version of MLA style, and is set out in the EMSAH Style Sheet. By the time you reach an advanced undergraduate course such as ENGL2035, you should be able to do this flawlessly. There's no excuse for not being thoroughly competent in such a basic skill at this point in your degree. This is why you don't get the ticks under "Documentation" on the criteria sheet unless you get it right, and why a vague guess isn't good enough.

The most common mistakes:

• MLA does not use footnotes for documentation; it uses parenthetical references.
• Parenthetical references are not to dates, but to page numbers.
• The list of works consulted does not use bullets or numbering for its entries. Entries should be in alphabetical order by author, with each entry given a hanging indent.
• Punctuation in both parenthetical references and the list of works consulted should follow exactly the examples in the Style Sheet.

So call me a pedant.

E.g. means for example. I.e. means that is. They are not synonyms.  

The three dots of ellipsis (…) stand for something left out of a quotation. You do not need to put them at the beginning and end of every quotation you make: it can generally be taken for granted that the source you're citing from does have other words than the ones you're citing.

Ellipses are for use only in cases where an omission wouldn't otherwise be clear. In particular, you do need to use them whenever you're omitting words from the middle of a cited passage.

You don't need to use them:

1. for a phrase or clause cited on its own;
2. at the beginning of a citation (if the first letter of a citation is in lowercase, it's obvious that something came before it in the original sentence)

Using the word entity will not often make your argument sound more precise, objective or profound, or like Heidegger.  Most of the time it will make you sound like the robot in Lost in Space ("Danger, Will Robinson! Hostile entity approaching!").   This may not be the effect you're after.  

One is frequently warned against the dangers of pulling apart a work of literature, lest one is left with a rather incoherent jumble, and is admonished by the writer that such practice is detrimental to both the reader and the work. (from an essay)

The real meaning of a poem—so essays very frequently argue—is only to be found if you disengage any tendency you might have to think about it: don't worry about what the words might be saying, just open your heart to the music.

As if.

Nobody has any argument with taking pleasure in a text. For most of us, that's a major reason for being here in a literature subject; for some of us, that's even a reason for making an overworked and underpaid career of it. But to suggest that examining a text closely and carefully somehow compromises its integrity or the pleasure one can get from it may be simply to shortchange both the text and your experience of it. An experience which falls apart at the first touch would seem to be a pretty flimsy one to begin with. The really interesting ones might be those which reveal more the more you look, and which actually surprise and move you with what you find there. Poems, after all, are made of words, and words have meanings; they've been painstakingly put there to take advantage of those meanings as well as the sounds they make and the rhythms of their syllables: poems aren't just somehow humming a tune. Words have their passions, and so do thoughts, not a whit the less when they're sustained, complex, intricate or difficult ones. Eliot and his famous "dissociation of sensibilities" aside, there's something more than faintly ridiculous about the suggestion that you can't think and feel at the same time—-as if we weren't already doing just that every moment of our lives.

There are lots of cliches about how the heart is wiser than the head, or about how thinking is bad and gets us into all sorts of troubles, but feeling is good and something we should trust. All of which overlooks the point that the heart is just as capable as the head is of being an idiot, a moral imbecile or a thug, and of asking you to believe, think or do terrible things. Worse, it's capable of reassuring you smugly that those things are quite all right and don't need any reflection just because they're done with genuine passion and conviction.

English has gendered pronouns (she, he, her, etc.) and ungendered pronouns (it, its), but is short on gender-neutral pronouns, ones which can stand for either gender. We have them in the plural (they, them, their, theirs) but not in the singular. What do you do when you want to indicate the general case? Using the masculine as the general case is offensive and just inaccurate. He/she, his/her, him/her are awkward, especially after a few occurrences, and slashes are best left out of a prose style anyway (see Slash).  

The simplest solution may be to use both masculine and feminine pronouns for the general case. Use she or he (or he or she) in the first instance, and after that use one or the other, he or she with roughly equal frequency.  

Keep the pronouns consistent within any given example: The viewer is asked to suspend her disbelief and draw on his knowledge of the genre suggests there are two people there, or that there's a different set of demands for male and female viewers, or the viewer's had a midsentence sex-change. If using she for the general case really does look odd (as against just unfamiliar), think of whether what you're saying is actually gender-specific: if it is, treat it as such.  
 

Keep in mind that "Modernism" is not the name for a school or movement with a common body of aesthetic doctrine or practices. The term is something that only came into wide use several decades after the period we are looking at in this course. Even then, it's used to describe a number of writers who never at any stage saw themselves as a group, or even as having similar aims: many of them intensely disliked each other's work.

Modernism is not a chronological block, something which happens after writers and artists stop being "Victorians". It's not a single massive gear-shift, something everyone does in this period: more don't than do. Modernism refers to a self-conscious avant-garde.

There is no such thing as "the traditional novel", and particularly not as a homogeneous thing which can be contrasted to "the modernist novel". There are a number of traditions of novel-writing, some of which get taken up with a lot of interest by some modernist writers (think of Conrad and the sea -going adventure story).  

However is not a synonym for but or although. If you can substitute either of these for it, do.  

The show is to be cancelled next season, however it may fare in the ratings is fine. It means the show will be cancelled no matter how it may rate.  

The show is to be cancelled next season, however there is still hope for fans is not. It needs to be rewritten with but or although:  

To say that a particular form of behaviour is "human nature"-and more so, to attempt to explain it as "just human nature" can be intensely problematic. Of course, as a species, human beings all have a common biology. But behaviour is never reducible to that. Behaviour is something that always takes place in a world which is from the outset never just some blind inheritance from nature, but cultural and social, through and through. That's the texture of the world we live in every instant of every day of our lives. It's all pervasive and ever-present, and any view of what human beings are and do which overlooks that is somewhat less than adequate. Unfortunately, that's what a good deal of published literary criticism does. It's very common in work from the 1950s and 1960s, and it's still found now. Be very suspicious of the claim whenever you come across it.

At best, the explanation by "human nature" relies on an imaginary human being which in practice never exists and never has. At worst, it can be a way of deliberately and actively excluding pressing social or cultural concerns from the discussion. (How often do you hear politicians use it in this sense? "It's simply human nature to be suspicious of those who are not like us," or "to look after one's own interests at the expense of others," or even "to want to make obscenely large sums of money." See entry on society.) "Human nature" is a term every society delineates in its own way, generally to designate those social and cultural values it takes for granted in itself, or wants to take for granted. "Human nature," if you like, is always to be something other than just nature—to be profoundly unnatural.

These issues are compounded in so much of the modernist writing we're looking at. If, to take Ezra Pound's catchphrase, modernism is to "make it new", one of the things it makes new is the very concept of what human beings are. Remember Virginia Woolf's statement of amazement: "On or about 10 December 1910, human nature changed." "Human nature" is not a given for modernist writing: it's a question, often a deeply worrying one. One of the things that makes Lord Jim or Ulysses or To the Lighthouse or Women in Love modernist is that in them what human beings are and how they're seen as working are often so utterly and radically different from ways in which these things have been treated in earlier fiction. The sheer difficulty of reading these texts is often an index of that: on a hasty reading, they can so easily appear simply not to have the clear sense of character and its development and complexities one finds in George Eliot or Stendhal. That Conrad's Jim is repeatedly called "one of us" is not a statement of the humanity he shares with the listening "us" (who are not "humanity" as such, but a crucially specific subset of it); it's an index of the profound unease about just who that "us" might be, of the speakers' and listeners' very sense of themselves as members of a particular culture, in a particular time and place. The very idea that Jim is "just a human being" like all of them is simply a reassurance they offer each other: the very repetition and insistence of it indicates that it's never enough, whistling in the dark while skating over all those anxieties which remain unsaid.

A statement implies, a reader infers. They are not synonyms.  

Fewer means "not as many". It refers to a smaller number of things, and is therefore used with plural nouns: fewer people, fewer ways around the system, fewer cars on the road. 

Less means "not as much". It refers to a smaller quantity of something, and is therefore used with singular nouns: less work to do, less sugar in your coffee, less money to go around. 

I know what the signs say in the fast lines in supermarkets. You're not a supermarket.
 

To begin a sentence like this--

In the chapter entitled, "Innocence Lost and Imagined: Ritual and Hypocrisy in Old New York" in Arnold D. Governor's 1989 book on Edith Wharton entitled Love and Money: Edith Wharton and the Social Imaginary, the author states about innocence that, in Edith Wharton's view, …

--may bring you some 45 words closer to the word-limit, but it also takes you 45 words closer to convincing me that you have nothing to say and are making noises to try to look busy.

The problem with a 2,000-word essay is not getting up to that limit, it's keeping down to it.

Work on the principle that padding is very, very obvious and fools no one.

See Apostrophe, Colon and semicolon, Dashes and hyphens, Scare quotes, Slash.   

It seems to be a common but mistaken belief that the distinction between single and double quotation marks is that the double marks are used for direct quotation and the single ones for everything else. Lynne Truss, for example, cites this one in her recent bestseller Eats Shoots and Leaves: The Zero-Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. But it simply isn't so. If you don't believe me, take a book at random from your shelves and check it. Although you will find it occasionally in older books, no publisher on either side of the Atlantic now uses that convention. Not one. It's a furphy. Use one sort of quotation mark—single or double, whichever you prefer. Use the other one only for internestled quotations-within-quotations, to distinguish the level:

To the Lighthouse begins in the middle of a conversation: "'Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow,' said Mrs Ramsay. 'But you'll have to be up with the lark,' she added" (Woolf 7).

or

To the Lighthouse begins in the middle of a conversation: '"Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow," said Mrs Ramsay. "But you'll have to be up with the lark," she added' (Woolf 7).

British publishers tend to use single quotation marks as their default, US double—but in these days of multinational publishing, where US and British editions may in effect be printed from the same plates, even that's not hard and fast.

1. A quotation is the citation of someone else's words. It is generally marked off by quotes, a.k.a. quotation marks. (Scare quotes are used to mark phrases or words as somehow not being true or adequate terms for the job.)
   
   A quote is an estimate on how much a job will cost.
   
   Don't get quote and quotation confused just because they both begin with quot-.
   
   
2. To quote is not a synonym for to say or to state. Quotation (and even less, quote) is not a synonym for statement.
   
   When, for example, in Heartbreak House Hesione says of the bombers "I hope they'll come again tomorrow night," she is not quoting anything or anyone. She is just making a statement. This means her words should not be referred to as

Hesione's quotation [or quote], "I hope they'll come again tomorrow night".

They are Hesione's words or Hesione's statement, and your quotation (of her words).

Scare quotes indicate irony, not emphasis. The 'real' situation is not the real situation at all, but one which only pretends to be.

Use scare quotes sparingly.  Frequent use of them has much the same effect as frequent use of the slash: it suggests you know you haven't really got the right words, but either couldn't be bothered to get them or suspect the argument you want them to make doesn't really work after all. A good argument doesn't have to pick up its terms with typographical tweezers for fear of contamination.

Slashes are sloppily used to link words together when another mark (comma, hyphen) or word (and, or) would be far more precise. Think of what you actually mean the relationship to be, and say so. Social/economic factors are simply social and economic factors, or, if you really want to emphasise their interrelatedness, socio-economic factors. 
  
Don't string synonyms or near-synonyms together with slashes (the rights/demands/needs of minorities): that only suggests you couldn't figure out which one it is, or couldn't be bothered to, so you gave up and loaded everything into the shotgun.  It gives the impression that what you've written is still in note form. 

And/or is pedantic or lazy. In nearly every case, a simple and or an or will do: those where it won't are very rarely found outside legal drafting. 

Even he/she is one of the more awkward ways of being gender-neutral. 

The slash does have legitimate uses, where it indicates a genuine choice to be made, or a pairing such as a binary opposition. Or, of course, in URLs (Web addresses). But there aren't many more. 

Your computer keyboard has a backslash (\) because UNIX programmers need it. Don't use it unless you are writing your assignment in UNIX.  Please don't write assignments in UNIX.

 Lynch's Grammar and Style Notes | 

Society is not homogeneous. Neither is it consensual. It is the site of conflicting opinions, not just one, even if that should be a dominant one. Statements such as the following are either naïve or trying to pull a fast one: 

To be eccentric, antisocial, or a member of a minority is not to be outside of society. It's to have a very particular and perhaps highly problematic place in a social structure. Think of what that place might be, and state it. 

Society is not a person. Avoid giving it personal attributes (Society thinks ... society believes ... society vents its anger at ...). Instead, think carefully about what might actually be happening. 

Above all, it's utterly reductive to see the relationship between individuals and their society as essentially one of repression, where a cruel and rule-bound society keeps saying "No" to individuals who would otherwise be free to do what they really want. This is a no-brainer. Nobody who studies what societies actually do (in sociology, politics, cultural studies, and so on) would take that seriously. What we're surrounded by today is incitement, not repression. Think of the big ideological keynotes of our present time. They don't say, Do as I say or suffer the consequences; they say, Where do you want to go today? and Just do it!  Individualism and the individual's pleasures aren't the slightest bit subversive, certainly in late-capitalist liberal democracies. On the contrary, that's precisely the sort of subject they thrive on. And it's not only late capitalism. Think of Wharton's The Age of Innocence, in which Newland Archer thinks his scepticism about his society is something which sets him apart from his peers, who he thinks blindly follow the dictates of their social world. It's precisely that belief which makes him indistinguishable from any young man of that class: seeing yourself as ever-so-slightly superior to the world you move in is exactly what lets everybody carry on as usual. It's also—and this is what gives the book so much of its devastating irony, and makes it so deadly a trap—what makes him so completely and confidently blind to what's going on under his nose.

We should also beware of a self-congratulatory variation on this idea of society as repression: that while today we may all be individuals, it isn't long ago that everyone buckled down under the iron hand of social repression.

Brians's Common Errors in English | 

No criticism can do without a certain amount of paraphrase. Paraphrase in itself, however, is not criticism.

To do no more than paraphrase may even be highly misleading. It runs the risk of utterly missing the effects of the way the novel tells this story, which may work a major qualification or even a complete reversal of its meaning. What do you leave out of Lord Jim, for example, if you don't pay attention to the fact that it's narrated by Marlow, and that Marlow is himself deeply disturbed by this story? What do you leave out of The Age of Innocence if you don't take into account that it's all seen as if from Newland's position? And what on earth is left of Ulysses if you stick to a plot summary?

(Well, here's how Blake Morrison did it in The Guardian on 26 June 2003, in a story on big books:

To cut a long story...
A day in the life of middle-aged Dublin ad-salesman Leopold Bloom, during which he has a shit, faces down a racist bigot, masturbates and saves a drunk would-be writer from chippy British soldiers, taking him home where his wife lulls herself to sleep with the longest unpunctuated sentence in literature.

See what I mean?)

A much-abused word.

Here is a sentiment found fairly often in essays:

The meaning of poetry is subjective. It depends on what the individual reader makes of it. No two people will see it in quite the same way.

Well, no two people see a bus ticket in quite the same way for that matter. A statement like that isn't really much help in figuring out just what poetry does. It's not even really true. If poetry were just a matter of what the individual sees in it, why would we ever need more than one poem? You'd just read it over and over again, and turn it into whatever you want it to be this time. (And if that's the case, why bother with even one poem? Any words will do. For example, a bus ticket.)

Poetry is never just a purely individual, subjective thing, for the simple reason that language itself isn't. Language is already there, something you're born into, not something you invent to express your inner self. It has its own history, which is independent of any particular user of it. It works through conventions which by their very nature are other than personal: we may all think of different things when we think of a rose, but we all know that "rose" is the name of a flower.

What we're asking you to do in this course, and in literary study in general, is to look at the ways in which poetry is obviously not just subjective. Yes, of course, if it's a good poem it has some sort of effect on you. That's what we're all here for. But what produced that effect is a set of words on a page, on a piece of paper, on a screen, in a book or magazine. Those words have a real, objective existence in the world, a real history which is not dependent on our individual take on it. They seem to be saying some things and not others—though we can, of course, always be surprised by how fuzzy, unstable and endlessly shifting the boundary is between those two.

Your job is to find out something of how those black marks on white paper do all of that.

These words imply causality: what follows them is caused by what went before them. They are not synonyms for and.