Susan Sontag On Writing

Edited from LitHub here.

I like Sontag's approach: that it is important to be attentive and to be connected and to not be cynical.



To be a great writer:

know everything about adjectives and punctuation (rhythm)
have moral intelligence—which creates true authority in a writer.

    –from As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

On what good writers ought to do:

I’m often asked if there is something I think writers ought to do, and recently in an interview I heard myself say: “Several things. Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.”

Needless to say, no sooner had these perky phrases fallen out of my mouth than I thought of some more recipes for writer’s virtue.

For instance: “Be serious.” By which I meant: Never be cynical. And which doesn’t preclude being funny.

And . . . if you’ll allow me one more: “Take care to be born at a time when it was likely that you would be definitively exalted and influenced by Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy, and Turgenev, and Chekhov.

    –from Sontag’s “At the Same Time: The Novelist and Moral Reasoning”

On finding inspiration in daily life:

Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead.

    –from Sontag’s 2003 commencement speech at Vassar

On the morality of the writer:

Obviously, I think of the writer of novels and stories and plays as a moral agent. . . This doesn’t entail moralizing in any direct or crude sense. Serious fiction writers think about moral problems practically. They tell stories. They narrate. They evoke our common humanity in narratives with which we can identify, even though the lives may be remote from our own. They stimulate our imagination. The stories they tell enlarge and complicate—and, therefore, improve—our sympathies. They educate our capacity for moral judgement.

    –from Sontag’s “At the Same Time: The Novelist and Moral Reasoning”

On carving out a place in contemporary fiction:

I’m glad to be free of the kind of one-note depressiveness that is so characteristic of contemporary fiction. I don’t want to express alienation. It isn’t what I feel. I’m interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.

    –from a 1992 interview with Leslie Garis

On attention:

Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. It’s all about taking in as much of what’s out there as you can, and not letting the excuses and the dreariness of some of the obligations you’ll soon be incurring narrow your lives. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.

    –from Sontag’s 2003 commencement speech at Vassar

On the uses of the writer to the world:

One task of literature is to formulate questions and construct counter-statements to the reigning pieties. And even when art is not oppositional, the arts gravitate toward contrariness. Literature is dialogue; responsiveness. Literature might be described as the history of human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures evolve and interact with one another.

Writers can do something to combat these clichés of our separateness, our difference—for writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences—experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed.

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world. That means trying to understand, take in, connect with, what wickedness human beings are capable of; and not be corrupted—made cynical, superficial—by this understanding.

    –from Sontag’s speech after being awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2003

On art as salvation:

To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better. A better state of one’s feelings or simply the idea of a silence in one’s self that allows one to think or to feel. Which to me is the same.

    –from a 1992 interview with Leslie Garis

On how to be a writer:

It’s lunacy. . . You have to be obsessed. People write me all the time, or get in touch with me about “what should I do if I want to be a writer?” I say well, do you really want to be a writer? It’s not like something you’d want to be—it’s rather something you couldn’t help but be. But you have to be obsessed.

Otherwise, of course, it’s perfectly okay to write, in the way that it’s perfectly okay to paint or play a musical instrument, and why shouldn’t people do that? I deplore the fact that only writers can write, as it were. Why can’t people have this as an art activity? . . . But to actually want to make your life being a writer, it’s an auto-slavery, obviously. You are both the slave and the task-master, and it’s a very driven thing.

    –from a 1992 talk given at the 92nd Street Y

How Generative AI is Like Classical Receptions

 

        Image created using Ideogram. 

In a conversation with a work colleague, we discussed analogies to how generative AI impacts how we teach students to learn and how we assess student learning outcomes. What does it mean for scholarship?

Comparisons were offered with the introduction of the calculator, or Wikipedia, or talking to a well-read friend, or an actor, or the role Leonardo DiCaprio played in Catch Me if You Can. I pondered the new problem that after two and half thousand years of literary theory, we still can't measure what it is to write as a human. We have no basis for collecting data on the distinction between human writing and writing by a bot that mimics human writing. The first attempt was based on perplexity and burstiness. These are not normally regarded as literary terms. We can collect data to determine how to write in the style of Ernest Hemingway or Agatha Christie, measuring the occurrence of adverbs, exclamation marks, and distinctive words, as well as sentence length, for example. These are distant readings; the opposite of close readings (see Ben Blatt’s 2017 Nabokov’s Favourite Colour is Mauve on statistics on the craft of writing).

My colleague said that a producer creates an artifact which is the boundary between the producer and the responder. The responder assumes a human made the product. The text. This is a boundary - the artifact stands between the writer and the reader - but the reader understands that the text was created by a human. Now the human creator is unknown. With generative AI, that boundary is blurred. We think of this as something new, but I suspect we have been here before. I suggested that the blurred boundary already exists in the field of Classics. Generative AI is like the reception of texts from ancient literature; the passed down received meaning of texts that are lost, found, fragmented, translated with bias, and compiled with bias.

I said that my analogy would be to the corpus of extant ancient literature and explained why: fragments lost and found, references from other texts, fluid oral stories transcribed into an artifact, translations retranslated, the whole provenance over millennia, all the accidents of history; yet the claim is that these texts survived due to their value and their meanings as they have been passed down through generations of scholarship. We have no autograph copies of any ancient texts. We don’t know if Homer was an actual person; we only know that hymns, epic poems, and a comedy were assigned to him, if he existed. As for the known writers in ancient history, there is no assurance that a person we identify wrote these exactly as the texts have come to us. They do have value, but as tools to think with (as does everything) and we need to check our assumptions.

This is what Chat GPT says about the reception of ancient classical texts: 

    Classical texts have been revered and preserved over centuries due to their cultural and historical significance. They often reflect the values, beliefs, and ideas of the time in which they were written. They have been studied, analysed, and interpreted by scholars, and their influence has been acknowledged and passed down through generations.

But that’s not exactly true.

The texts that have survived from ancient times did not necessarily survive because they were the best. If that were true then the Roman graffiti that survives does so because it is excellent and important, rather than because it was written on stone walls rather than papyrus. Most texts that have survived are due to accidents of history. Socio-religious or geo-political factors may play their roles in specific times and places but generally the survival of most, perhaps all, texts are purely by chance. We know about some texts that did not survive because they are recorded in texts that did survive, but, with fragments, it is difficult to identify what the text was: it could be a joke, satirical, critical, and the references are to people and characters we can only speculate about. There is no way to discern the significance. Most references are like 'the poor cat in the adage'; we don't know the adage that Lady Macbeth is referring to so we don't know the significance of the comparison. Ask Classicists what texts they most want to be found and responses might include: Homer’s lost comedy; Aristotle’s second book of Poetics which covered comedy; Euclid’s book of logical fallacies; Ovid’s Medea; the plays that beat the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides in competition; and Longinus’ works on Homer. And, of course, the whole Library of Alexandria, which, if it had survived, would have altered the course of human history. Sigh.

Texts have been lost because they were deliberately destroyed but also due to fire, corruption, neglect, reuse as another text or reuse as toilet paper. Texts have been found when used as packing paper, in sealed storage containers, among debris, or written over which come to us as palimpsests. The stories of these texts’ survival are mostly an ongoing process spanning millennia. (See Josephine Balmer’s 2017 The Paths of Survival for a poetic exploration of the provenance of an ancient text.)

When you read ancient classical texts you need to adjust yourself to becoming comfortable with ‘the rest is lost’. For good translations of fragments the translator aims to replicate the source, not just translating words and mimicking the sounds, wordplay, and other literary devices, but also the gaps in the text, indicated by brackets or the layout on the page.

In 2014 US Professor of Classics, Diane Rayor, was about to publish her translations of the ‘complete’ works of Sappho when new fragments were found. She needed to re-evaluate what she thought she knew to incorporate these new pieces of the puzzle. She says that fragments offer intriguing possibilities, echoing broken conversations, trailing voices. Australian Professor of Classics, Marguerite Johnson, agrees there is a pleasure in working with fragments: ‘I really don't want them ever to be completed, filled in, finalised. Their fragmentary condition makes them special, unique, and I really can't image Sappho actually composing anything complete.’ (This quote is from personal correspondence. You can check all other references in books or online academic journals written by experts, who became experts due to scholarship).

We need to challenge assumptions and check the facts and check the sources for the facts. What do we know and how do we know it? What is the provenance? Not just in the light of generative AI, but for everything. And when we talk about bias, we need to consider the audience, purpose, and context of the producer. What was their agenda? What were they aiming to do? What do they value? What do they disregard? This is more difficult when applied to texts generated by AI.

And when we observe that history can be rewritten, texts can be rewritten, and that news reports of current events can be inaccurate, biased, and just wrong, then how do we check that we understand the events of history and the development of ideas? In my own lifetime I have witnessed how the music of the 1980s has been misrepresented; the nostalgia radio stations playing ‘the best’ music of that decade is certainly not the music that was valued at the time and was actively despised in the share houses I lived in during the 1980s.

Generative AI writes the commonly held ideas from all sources. Those sources are not consistent, not authorised, not experts, and not challenged. It is like the passed down received meaning of texts that are lost, found, fragmented, translated, and compiled with bias. It mimics human writing but is not human.

Humans bring their whole selves, influenced by all the factors that make that person an individual. We share a collective humanity. We want to engage with scholarship; we want to pursue our intellectual curiosity; we want to use texts as tools to think with; we want to share our thinking and test our thinking. We want to engage as humans, and we want students to engage as humans. And we know that people are more valuable than bots for doing this thinking together. So long as we check our sources, this is what scholarship is.

Using double-barreled literary terms to increase sophistication of analysis

Your teachers might ask you to use evaluative adjectives for your literary terms, so that you describe an image as distinctive or a metaphor as powerful. You can include these in your writing, although it would be more accurate to use these descriptors for the effects and the impact on readers. And you should use adjectives to describe voice and tone, perspective and point of view, and describe the impacts of literary devices as subtle or blatant, for example.

 
More genuinely, you can elevate your writing by turning a literary device from a noun to an advective and using a double-barreled literary term. This adds sophistication to your writing. Your marker will be impressed.

It looks like this:

• Alliterative parallel construction
• Ironic foreshadowing
• Metaphorical metonymy
• Symbolic synecdoche
• Ironic euphemism
• Synesthetic oxymoron
• Understated metaphor
• Poetic synesthesia
• Metaphorical paradox
• Juxtaposed anaphora
• Symbolic metonymy
• Paradoxical allegory
• Hyperbolic simile
• Metaphorical irony
• Allusive symbolism
• Juxtaposed personification
• Dissonant anaphora
• Surreal synesthesia

How Literary Devices Create Humour

Humour in literature can be achieved through a variety of literary devices and techniques. Here are some common literary devices that authors use to create the effect of humour:

Irony: Irony involves saying one thing while meaning another. There are several types of irony, including verbal irony (saying one thing and meaning the opposite), situational irony (when the opposite of what's expected happens), and dramatic irony (when the audience knows something the characters don't). Irony often leads to humorous situations or remarks.

Satire: Satire is a form of humour that uses sarcasm, ridicule, or exaggeration to criticise and mock people, institutions, or societal issues. Satirical works employ satire to highlight absurdities and provoke laughter while making a point.

Wordplay/Puns: Clever wordplay and puns involve using multiple meanings of words or words that sound similar but have different meanings to create humor. If a word is being used to have both a literal and figurative meaning , then it is zeugma. 

Hyperbole: Hyperbole involves extreme exaggeration to emphasise a point or create a comical effect. For example, saying "I'm so hungry I could eat a horse" is hyperbolic and meant to be humorous.

Incongruity: Incongruity humour arises from the unexpected or absurd juxtaposition of elements. It involves placing two or more incongruous ideas or situations together to create humor. The element of surprise plays a crucial role in incongruity humour.

Parody: Parody involves imitating or mimicking a style, work, or genre in a humorous way, often by exaggerating its characteristics or making it appear ridiculous. Parodies can be found in literature, films, and other forms of media.

Sarcasm: Sarcasm is a form of verbal irony that involves saying the opposite of what one means, often with a mocking or scornful tone. Sarcasm is frequently used to convey humor, although it can sometimes be biting or caustic.

Comic Timing: Just as in comedy performances, comic timing in writing involves the precise delivery of jokes or humorous elements to maximise their impact. This includes pacing, pauses, and the placement of punchlines.

Absurdity: Absurdist humour relies on creating situations or characters that are illogical, nonsensical, or completely out of the ordinary. The humor often comes from the sheer absurdity of the circumstances.

Characterisation: Well-developed, quirky, or eccentric characters can be a source of humour. Readers find humour in the idiosyncrasies, quirks, and foibles of characters in a story.

Misdirection: Authors can lead readers or characters to expect one outcome and then surprise them with something entirely different, creating humor through misdirection.

Comic Relief: Sometimes, humor is used as a break from more serious or intense elements in a story, providing relief to the reader. This is common in tragic or dramatic works. Shakespeare used this. 

These literary devices can be used individually or in combination to create humour in literature. The effectiveness of humor often depends on the context, the author's skill, and the reader's sensibilities. Humour in literature can serve various purposes, from entertaining the reader to critiquing society or human nature.

Words to describe tone

Tone is an effect of a writer's work. However, teachers rarely share examples of how to describe tone.

 Here are links to resources that provide many words to describe tone. 

This is a site for writers that explains how tone is different from voice and from mood.

It provides 155 words in alphabetical order.  

https://www.writerswrite.co.za/155-words-to-describe-an-authors-tone/

This is another site for writers that categorises the tones (positive, negative, sad, neutral) and suggests 175 words with their definitions.

https://authority.pub/list-tone-words/

This is a teaching/tutoring site that lists 319 words in alphabetical order with their definitions. 

https://www.albert.io/blog/ultimate-list-of-tone-words/

The Hierarchy of Literary Devices

In literary analysis, some devices and elements are often considered more fundamental or foundational than others. Here's a hierarchy, taking into account their typical importance in the analysis process. In studying a literary work it is helpful to consider these elements and where you would place them in a hierarchy of literary devices. 

Imagery: Imagery is often considered foundational because it provides the sensory details and vivid descriptions that form the basis for deeper analysis. It sets the stage for other devices to operate.

Figurative Language:

Metaphor: Metaphors are often analysed for their symbolic and thematic significance.
Simile: Similar to metaphors, similes are analysed for their use in drawing comparisons.
Personification: Analysed for its role in humanising non-human entities.
Hyperbole: Examined for its impact on emphasis and exaggeration.
Irony: Irony is crucial for exploring contrasts and subtext in the text.

Symbolism: Symbolism plays a critical role in uncovering deeper meanings and themes in a literary work.

Allusion: Allusions are analysed to understand intertextuality and the author's intent in referencing other works or ideas.

Foreshadowing: Foreshadowing is important for predicting and interpreting future events and themes in the narrative.

Theme: Identifying and analysing the central themes of a work is a fundamental aspect of literary analysis.

Allegory: Allegories are examined to reveal underlying moral, political, or philosophical messages.

Tone: Analysing the author's tone helps in understanding their attitude toward the subject matter and the audience.

Mood: Mood analysis explores how the author creates emotional atmospheres and affects the reader's experience.

Rhetorical Devices: at the sentence level (rhetorical devices can be higher level)

Anaphora: Analysed for its impact on rhythm and emphasis.
Epiphora: Examined for its contribution to pacing and emphasis.
Antithesis: Analysed for its role in contrasting ideas.
Parallelism: Explored for its impact on readability and rhythm.

Narrative Techniques:

Point of View: Examined for its influence on the reader's perspective and engagement.
Flashback: Analysed for its role in revealing character backstory and plot development.
Foreshadowing: Reiterated for its function in building anticipation.

Style: Style analysis delves into the author's unique voice and writing choices, including syntax, diction, and sentence structure.

Genre-specific Devices: Depending on the genre, certain devices like satire, irony, or suspense techniques may take precedence in the analysis.

Sound Effects (Prosody):

Rhyme: Examined for its impact on rhythm and emphasis.
Rhythm: Analysed for its contribution to the pacing and mood of a poem or text.
Alliteration: Explored for its role in creating musicality and emphasis.

Onomatopoeia: Analysed for its ability to evoke sensory experiences through sound.

This is the criteria for formulating the hierarchy. Consider these elements and how you would rank them in the hierarchy. 

Foundational Role: Devices that serve as foundational elements in understanding and interpreting a text are placed higher in the hierarchy. These are often the building blocks upon which more complex analyses are constructed.

Thematic Significance: Devices that contribute significantly to the development and exploration of the work's themes and messages are given higher importance.

Narrative Impact: Devices that have a substantial impact on the narrative structure, character development, and plot progression are positioned higher in the hierarchy.

Interpretive Depth: Devices that invite deeper interpretation, symbolism, and subtext tend to be ranked higher.

Authorial Intent: Devices that reveal the author's intent, style, and purpose in writing are considered essential.

Emotional and Stylistic Impact: Devices that strongly affect the emotional resonance and stylistic qualities of the work are emphasised.

Consistency with Genre: The hierarchy acknowledges that certain devices may hold greater importance in specific literary genres, and this is considered when ranking them. Writers can create works consistent with the conventions of genre, but can also challenge the conventions of genre. 

Rhetorical and Stylistic Techniques: Devices that are closely tied to the art of rhetoric and writing style are given their place in the hierarchy, especially when they enhance the overall quality of the writing.

Sound Effects (Prosody): Sound devices like rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, and onomatopoeia are important in poetry and are included in the hierarchy due to their role in shaping the aesthetic and auditory aspects of the text. Will be of lesser importance in prose works. 

While this hierarchy can provide a general framework for literary analysis, it's important to remember that the significance of each device can vary depending on the specific text and the analytical approach being used. A thorough analysis often involves considering multiple devices and their interplay to uncover the depth of meaning in a literary work.

This provides an argument against the expectations that students solely use quotes from texts as evidence in their essays. Literary analysis involves consideration of all aspects of a text; much more than quotes. 

Effects

 In the TEE paragraph you are required to state the effect of the technique you have identified. This is often the trickiest part of writing TEE paragraphs. The effect is not just how the device impacts you, the reader, but how it contributes to the meaning of the whole text.

I am providing here a list of possible effects. Some are fairly general, while others might be specific to the text.

In Rhetoric (as a subject) literary devices are chosen for the purpose of emphasis, or in order to persuade, inform, express or entertain. You may have been taught about Ethos, Pathos and Logos, so you can use them too.

However, you can use the following as effects:

• contribution to structure
• creates amusement
• prompts pleasure
• prompts surprise
• prompts empathy
• contributes to voice
• adds to tone
• creates an image
• sound effects
• suggests connotation
• reinforces the theme
• creates a contrast
• creates drama
• build or releases tension
• builds characterisation
• contributes to establishing setting
• creates irony
• contributes to mood or atmosphere
• contributes to pace (either speeds up or slows down reading)
• creates verisimilitude or mimesis (the appearance of being real or true)
• foreshadowing
• the effect is accumulative
• creates an original or distinctive image/comparison/experience
• emphasis
• creates an impression of immediacy/ad libbing
• understatement or hyperbole
• contributes to representation of something
• presents a paradox 
• presents ambiguity
• contributes to textual cohesion or unity
• how form supports function

If you find the device is ineffective, or you judge it as unsuccessful, you might name the effect as:

• bathos
• cliche
• purple prose
• droll

You might call the character flat rather than round, or a stereotype.

You can comment on how the device relates to other elements of the text to contribute to the whole meaning of the text. That may be in terms of accumulation of effects, forming a motif or a series of sounds, or a lexical chain, either continuing or contrasting.

Overall, you can say how the use of the device contributes to creating an experience for the reader, whether that experience is to follow the logic of a non-fiction piece, or, for fiction, to allow the reader to feel they were present at an event that is presented by the writer.