stanley fish: you’ve been served!
From Joseph Epstein’s review of On How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One, by Stanley Fish:
I seem to have written more than three thousand words without a single kind one for How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One. To remedy this, at least partially, let it be noted that, at 165 pages, index and acknowledgments and biographical note on the author included, it is a short book.
Oooh!
From Epstein’s review: “‘It may sound paradoxical,” he [Fish] writes, “but verbal fluency is the product of hours spent writing about nothing, just as musical fluency is the product of hours spent repeating scales.” He adds: “For the purposes of becoming a facile (in the positive sense) writer of sentences, the sentences you practice with should have as little meaning as possible.’”
The snark, it writes itself.
krippendorf
June 5, 2011 at 10:42 am
@krippendorf: That esteem for vacuity as pedagogical method also accounts for why the New Historicism can be distilled to edutainment for the rich & privileged.
elizp
June 6, 2011 at 5:31 am