Reading Style
A Life in Sentences Jenny Davidson
A n ov elist reco un ts her idiosyn crat ic a ffa ir w i t h t yp es o f writ in g a n d t he p ower o f li t e r at ure to move us a ll in differen t ways.
A professor, critic, and insatiable reader, Jenny Davidson investigates the passions that drive us to fall in love with certain sentences over others and the larger implications of our relationship with writing style. At once playful and serious, immersive and analytic, her memoir/critique shows how style elicits particular kinds of moral judgments and subjective preferences, which turn reading into a highly personal and political act.
Melding her experiences as reader and critic, Davidson opens new vistas onto works by Jane Austen, Henry James, Marcel Proust, and Thomas Pynchon; adds richer dimension to critiques of W. G. Sebald, Alan Hollinghurst, Thomas Bernhard, and Karl Ove Knausgaard; and allows for a sophisticated appreciation of popular fictions by Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Lionel Shriver, George Pelecanos, and Helen DeWitt. She privileges diction, syntax, point of view, and structure over plot and character, identifying the intimate mechanics that draw us in to literature’s sensuous frameworks and move us to feel, identify, and relate. Davidson concludes with a reading list of her favorite titles so others can share in her literary adventures and get to know better the imprint of her own reading style.
“This book offers a lively, unusual, and highly intelligent set of comments on the pleasures of reading—which are in Davidson’s view not quite the joys or benefits of close reading in the received academic sense but are definitely those of reading closely, paying precise attention to details of style and reflecting on the mixture of meaning and delight that such details give to anyone who cares about them.” —Michael Wood, Princeton University
Jenny Davidson © elizabeth hyman for the columbia spectator
$25.00* / £17.50 cloth 978-0-231-16858-8 $24.99 / £17.00 ebook 978-0-231-53740-7 J u n e 208 pages L i t e r a r y Cr i t i c i s m
World English-language Rights: Columbia University Press; All Other Rights: Anderson Literary Management, LLC.
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teaches in the Department of
English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She has published two books on eighteenth-century British literature, including Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century, and four novels. She blogs at Light Reading (jennydavidson.blogspot.com).