DONALD
ROSS
210L Lind Hall, (612) 625-5585
rossj001@tc.umn.edu
Department of English, University of Minnesota
"Emerson and Thoreau: A Comparison of Prose Styles," Language
and Style, 6 (1973), 185-95.
By analyzing the "Spring" chapter from Walden, and "Discipline" from Nature,
the conclusion is that Emerson should be placed in the mainstream of essayists
in a tradition which built its style on the careful signaling of syntactic components
and the tendency to balance units at many linguistic levels. Thoreau's style on
the whole eschews the signals and the balance, and his doing these things is a
major cause of a feeling that his prose is unusual and idiosyncratic. His style
gives an outward air of ease and casualness, because of relatively simple phrases
and sentences, and because of the concreteness and specificity of the modifiers
he uses.
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Last revised 15 November 1999
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