Transcript of USA discussion

MICK:

We thought that probably the best way to give you some feedback on this exercise where you've just tried to put together these various acts extracts into five different styles would be if Dawn and I discuss them together. Dawn actually has never looked at this text before, so in a way She's just like you. Dawn lets, before we start, make sure what the nature of the exercise is

DAWN:

That would be good

MICK:

I've jumbled together five different extracts which have five different styles of writing associated with them and the idea is that you work out which of these thirty one extracts goes with which of the five styles. OK so I've given you a start, so style A is number one, style B is number two, style C is number three, style D the first example of that is number five, as four is an example of something else, and then style E, the first example of that is number six. OK so what we are going to do is, you have to go through, you have to work out which extracts go with which style, what makes them . . . which ones go together, in other words.

DAWN:

OK, right, match them up.

MICK:

If you think they come from the same text or from the same style

DAWN:

Uh-huh

MICK:

And then you need to characterise that style, say what its like, say what you can about it and then last of all what you are going to have to do is to look at the particular features of the text, the language features which you think contribute to the impressions you've got.

MICK:

Ok so lets do style A. First of all pick out the items that you think go together to form style A

DAWN:

Ok so Paris Shocked at Last is my clue.

MICK:

Right

DAWN:

This one seems quite an easy one because the graphological clues are obvious, it's capitalised an emboldened so I'd say seven 'Harriman', twelve 'Noted Swindler', thirteen 'Mob Lynches After Prayer', sixteen 'Teddy Wields Big Stick', twenty-three 'Praise Monopoly' and thirty one 'Straphangers Demand Relief'.

MICK:

So they all go together, you know they go together because of the graphological consistency, what sort of style are they? What kind of language do you think they are?

DAWN:

They other thing that they all have in common is that they are telegraphic aren't they? What I mean by that is that they don't have the auxiliaries and also . . . let me find an example. The 'Teddy Wields a Big Stick', you wouldn't expect to find an auxiliary there but you would (expect) something like what I just put in, a or the big stick, so they've not got the determiners either.

MICK:

So newspaper language is telegraphic in the sense that it misses out those little bits of grammatical glue that you need to make everything explicit. So the auxiliaries and the articles tend to go.

DAWN:

So it's a newspaper then.

MICK:

Sorry, yeah, I shouldn't have said that

DAWN:

No I thought it was a newspaper, headlines as well that's what I'd go for.

MICK:

So we've got the graphological features, we've got the telegraphic language. Anything else that makes them newspaper headlines?

DAWN:

They seem to be recording specific events in time, which is very typical of newspaper headlines but also they do it in a way that is assuming that we know what they are talking about. Like that, I like this one, 'Teddy Wields a Big Stick'. A Teddy could be a little cute thing that you cuddle, but given that this is the USA novel and my knowledge of history. . . is this Teddy Roosevelt.

MICK:

That's right it's an ex-president of the United States and Harriman in seven 'Harriman is Shown as Rail Colossus' is Avril Harriman who is another political figure.

DAWN:

Ok I didn't pick that one up but they tend to do that a lot don't they? They use these pet terms almost or they have ways of referring to things that assume knowledge.

MICK:

That's right it's the kind of specific knowledge about individuals and places and events that would have been common at the time that the newspaper came out, but which even a few months later might be quite difficult to remember and of course this is a novel written some time ago. I guess the other obvious thing would be the kind of subject matter. They're the subject matter of politics and disasters or robberies, things of that sort, which is what you'd expect to get and of course you see that being indicated in the lexical items that you get.

DAWN:

Yeah.

MICK:

But you've actually missed one

DAWN:

Ah, Ok.

MICK:

Because there was one that doesn't have block capitals. So there's a newspaper headline in here that doesn't have block capitals. That's not my fault.

DAWN:

I was going to say that's not nice.

MICK:

Dos Passos did it, not me. I think it was probably supposed to be a sub-heading rather than a block front-page headline

DAWN:

So you can't always go on graphological clues.

MICK:

That's right

DAWN:

Ok, so we'll go on the others then. I'm looking for something telegraphic and specific subject matter. I think four because it . . . you know you said about subject matter… 'Industrial Foes Work For Peace' seems to be the sort of thing that they would say.

MICK:

This is number four isn't it?

DAWN:

Yes, although I have no idea who Mrs Potter Palmers is, it seems to be the right subject matter. It seems to have that telegraphic feel and its assuming knowledge.

MICK:

That's right. So know you've got the set and in doing that you've begun to isolate what newspaper headline language is like.

MICK:

Now what about style B, the first example of that is number two 'we were sailing along on moonlight bay'.

DAWN:

Right this is going to be an easy one, I must confess, because my dad likes this. Do you want me to pick them out and then say what it is? First one is two obviously, second one is 'you can hear the voices ringing'.

MICK:

Number eight

DAWN:

Then we would go to 'they seem to say you have stolen my heart, now don't go away' number seventeen and then number twenty 'Just as we sang love's old sweet songs on moonlight bay' and then number twenty-six 'love's old sweet song' that's repeated. There's some repetition in there. Number twenty-eight, another repetition, 'we were sailing along on moonlight bay'

MICK:

Ok so you've got them all and you know this one so it's easy.

DAWN:

Yes I do. If I didn't have known it I would have more or less thought it was either what it is or a poem, but it's a song isn't it?

MICK:

That's right. How do you know it's a song or a poem?

DAWN:

The most obvious thing is the use of rhyme and repetition. I think I pointed out two of them as I went through them, 'love's old sweet song' and 'we were sailing along on moonlight bay' bay. Then you get a lot of the 'a' sounds repeated don't you? So its sailing, bay, they seem to say, now don't go away. It's quite common in poetry and songs.

MICK:

That's number seventeen you've just been referring to isn't it? In fact if you look at this you can see that I actually tried to make the task a bit harder because I thought that everybody would work this.

DAWN:

Yes you've changed the lineage.

MICK:

That's right the lineation has gone hasn't it? They seem to say, line, you have stolen my heart now don't go away and then of course the say/away rhyme would have been clearer.

DAWN:

I suppose the other thing that you notice is the difference. We talked about subject matter for the last one and this is talking about love isn't it? That's so typical of most songs that the subject matter is love, so that's another big clue I would say.

MICK:

Yeah and of poetry too, of course. Notice the things to do with rhyme and so on that you've been talking about also occur quite often in poetry. Poetry actually has relatively restricted subject matter. There's love and sex, which is related to love, and death and nature. Then you're beginning to run out actually, there aren't very many more

DAWN:

We don't have poetry about politics.

MICK:

Well not often anyway, there are some but there aren't very many. How do you know this is . . . I mean if you didn't already know it was a song I think you could still guess it was a song not a poem. Why is that?

DAWN:

It has a very strong rhythm but you only get that if you actually follow it through so it's very difficult to pick that up when its broken up. But 'we were sailing along on moonlight bay' it almost prompts you to sing it.

MICK:

Yes that's right it's rhythmically highly metrical and of course the rhymes are occurring fairly frequently and its similar rhymes

DAWN:

Yes mid and end line.

MICK:

That's right and lots of quite big repetitions. I guess for me the other clue would be the fact that, well A it's talking about love and practically all songs talk about love. There aren't many other topics. But also this one is fairly sentimental isn't it?

DAWN:

Very.

MICK:

That makes it look a bit more like a song than a Shakespearian sonnet

DAWN:

I mean it actually claims to be singing doesn't it as well at number twenty 'just as we sang love's old sweet songs'.

MICK:

So there are a fair number of linguistic indicators that this is a song.

DAWN:

Yes so probably if I wouldn't have known . . . but given that my dad used to sing it, I do know it.

MICK:

Lets go for style C then, this is the first of three styles which in a way are rather similar because they are all bits of prose. The first two are distinctive, aren't they, because the headlines are distinctive graphologically and the song would be distinctive because of the way in which it would be lineated and indeed in the original text it's in italics. I took out the italics because that would be too easy.

DAWN:

So it's three, C. Ok this is prose isn't it? I would say number nine 'to the right of the furnace' but what I'm going on now isn't the obvious clues that we had before, its that furnace has been repeated.

MICK:

That's right. Although I've layered the texts in with one another, I haven't actually altered the order of the sentences in which they occur in the novel. So what you're picking up on are inter-sentential connections aren't you?

DAWN:

That would be the way that I would do this one. So looking down I would say eighteen 'apparently some of them had been injured when the explosion occurred'. We know that there's been an explosion. Then I'd pick out 'the hot metal' because they're in a furnace, which is twenty-two and that's it isn't it?

MICK:

That's it, that's the lot. So there's not so many of these. What could you say about this piece of writing? What sort of style is it? What does it remind you of? How do you know?

DAWN:

The most obvious thing is that it's first person, past tense. It seems very descriptive, its narrative, its very sequential which was one of the clues that I used, as you said I was referring back. It seems to be reporting an event, which makes me think that we're back to a newspaper, but a newspaper item rather than a headline.

MICK:

Yes that's right it looks like a news story doesn't it? What about the subject matter? What is the subject matter? How is that reflected in the lexis?

DAWN:

Well again it is a terrible disaster really isn't it? We're talking about an explosion at a furnace and men being burned and then you've got this repeated. You've got key terms repeated- furnace, you've got the metal, then you've got the hot liquid that pours over them, you've got the idea that they're running away. So there's those things that keep being repeated.

MICK:

As you say it's a straightforward narrative and also the grammar of it is pretty straightforward too, isn't it? You don't get long complex sentences here. So this looks like first person eyewitness report, essentially. At this time you would have found it in newspapers. These days you might get it in television reports for example, as well, or radio reports

DAWN:

Mmmm

MICK:

Anything else you could say about it? Could you say anything about the person doing the narrating?

DAWN:

Well yeah, I suppose it's not very emotional is it? It's not very emotive language that they use. The only clue that you've got that this has affected the narrator or the person reporting it in any way is on twenty-two where he calls them 'the poor men'- 'The hot metal ran over the poor men in a moment' I mean that must have been an horrific thing to see and all you get is this sense that he felt compassion for these poor men. So it's very objective.

MICK:

Yes that's right. You are getting little hints of emotional response, but by and large that emotional response appears to be being toned down doesn't it? And that's presumably because it's news report. I mean he's reporting what happened after the event and he's trying to do it in a way that is sort of quasi-objective at least. People often do that don't they? They go on their best behaviour when they are confronted by the media, they do tend to strip things down to what they think the essentials are. So you can see that that's part of this style of writing as well.

DAWN:

Yes. Definitely.

MICK:

Ok now, lets have a look at the next one. So this is… number five is the first one, style D.

DAWN:

This is even more complicated. 'Skating on the pond next the silver company's mills where there was a funny fuzzy smell from the dump whaleoil soap'. It doesn't make sense

MICK:

That's right. I think this is the hardest one to understand, although it's probably not that difficult to group them together

DAWN:

I could group them together. If I do that first it might help. They seem jumbled, so basically at the minute I'm picking them out because they seem to be all over…there seems to be that many topic shifts. So given that, the ones that seem to suit that description are ten 'somebody said it was that they used in cleaning the silver knives and spoons' and then I'd probably pick out fourteen 'there was a shine on the ice'…oh right well… Ok it's getting easier because we've had skating mentioned before and in fourteen skating is mentioned again and you've got 'a shine' and 'shine' mentioned. So then I'd go for nineteen because skate is mentioned 'I couldn't learn to skate'. Oh so we know it's a first person narrative. First person something or other anyway.

MICK:

Yes its first person, past tense again isn't it. So in that respect it is the same as the last one.

DAWN:

It's similar to the last one, but not the way it's written it isn't. Ok, twenty-four then because although skating is not mentioned snowballs are. So I'm assuming there's a link.

MICK:

And you get the mills of course

DAWN:

And the mills yeah. Then because they've just mentioned dirty things, and presumably the kids are dirty, so then I'd go for number twenty-seven 'we clean young American Rover Boys' which is making a contrast

MICK:

Because you've got a contrast that's right.

DAWN:

And then we've got ice mentioned anyway. Oh and then again skating and the idea of kept falling down because I think he said he kept falling down before.

MICK:

This is number thirty you're talking about.

DAWN:

Number thirty, yeah

MICK:

Achilles, Ajax, Agamemnon

DAWN:

And it seems to refer back to nineteen again. Yeah, so those.

MICK:

Ok maybe if I read it out as a complete little text that might help.

Skating on the pond next the silver company's mills where there was a funny fuzzy smell from the dump. Whaleoil soap somebody said. It was that they used in cleaning the silver knives and spoons and forks putting shine on them for sale. There was a shine on the ice, early black ice that rang like a sawblade just scratched white by the first skaters. I couldn't learn to skate and kept falling down. 'Look out for muckers' everybody said 'Bohunk and Polak kids put stones in their snowballs, write dirty words up on walls, do dirty things up alleys, their folks work up in the mills'. We clean young American Rover Boys handy with tools, Deerslayers, played hockey, Boy Scouts and cut figure eights on the ice. Achilles Ajax Agamemnon I couldn't learn to skate and kept falling down.

DAWN:

It did help reading it, didn't it? I'm starting to make sense of it because from how you've read it, the last two sentences twenty-seven and thirty… Achilles, Ajax are they types of moves you can do on the ice then?

MICK:

Well certainly that's possible; I mean I don't actually know but Achilles, Ajax, Agamemnon are all characters in Greek mythology aren't they?

DAWN:

Yeah but they don't go…I'm trying to make sense.

MICK:

That's right so either they're some names of different kinds of skates or something like that or they look as if they must be names for particular kinds of patterns that you can skate on the ice.

DAWN:

When you read it, it made more sense but I noticed that this topic shifted. I understood what whalesoap was that it was going forward this time and that it was referring to what they used to clean the knives and is it spoons or something? But it's not a straight narrative is it, because it's jumping about too much to be a straight narrative.

MICK:

That's right. What does it remind you of? So you've said what its not, now lets try and see what it is.

DAWN:

Ok. I don't think it is but I suppose it could be a conversation that you could have with a very close friend. Maybe somebody telling you about something they are remembering from the past, but you'd have to know one another very well for that to work because, you know the assumed knowledge we talked about with the newspaper headlines. There is too much assumed knowledge going on here for anybody outside to make sense of it.

MICK:

And if it was that then you'd also have to, I think, assume that his person had a rather jumbled conversational style. It's not just a matter of making assumptions is it?

DAWN:

No, it jumps about. The other thing then that it springs to mind is that it is somebody not speaking but thinking it

MICK:

Yes that's right. I think what this looks like in all sorts of ways is the kind of thing that is often referred to by the critics as stream of consciousness narrative. Where you are getting a representation of the thoughts of somebody. So it's as if it's somebody thinking about what it was like when they were a child.

DAWN:

So one key term then like the dump relates for some reason to soap that then relates to another memory. So that explains the topic shifts as you work your way through the text.

MICK:

Yes one of the things that's typical in stream of consciousness writing is that you get big topic shifts and it's your job as a reader to work out the relationship between the topics where the shifts have occurred and that enables you to do just what you did then, namely to infer what it was that made the shift happen. So you say well he thought of this and that reminded him of that and so he switched over into this new place.

DAWN:

Yeah, you feel like you want to do that all the way through don't you? You want, even though it doesn't make sense, you want him to make it make sense so that we can process and understand it.

MICK:

That's right but you assume that because it's a piece of writing, even if you can't make sense of it, it must be intended to make sense. So you feel you have to work at it.

DAWN:

So you'll make the connections.

MICK:

That's right and what you are doing is what linguists often call pragmatic inferencing. So you're inferring meaning that's not the meaning of the sentences but meanings that you can infer on the basis on rules that you have in your head for inferring meanings in context. That's what they call pragmatic inference and we'll look at that a bit later on in the course when we look at drama because it's particularly helpful there. You can see here that this filling in the spaces is quite important and it's the sort of thing that critics sometimes refer to as being the meaning between the lines in dramatic texts in particular. What would be an example of that?

DAWN:

The one I did was the whaleoil soap wasn't it? Because I couldn't seem to make sense of it going backwards which I did with a sequential narrative that we looked at, I was always going back. So furnace referred to the furnace before. Whaleoil soap didn't seem to connect with dump in anyway so I referred it back to the knives and spoons being washed. Cleaning the silver in ten and then shine it puts a shine on them in ten and then in fourteen that shine for whatever reason seems to remind him of the shine on the early black ice. So it makes another… and then we get back to the skating again.

MICK:

That's right. Another good obvious example would be number twenty-seven. You've got the word Deerslayers- 'we clean young American Rover Boys handy with tools Deerslayers played hockey Boy Scouts'. What do you think Deerslayers are?

DAWN:

I know the movie Deerslayer.

MICK:

This is obviously before that.

DAWN:

So slayers of deer? No?

MICK:

Yeah, well look at what comes before Deerslayers.

DAWN:

Ok handy with tools.

MICK:

So what might Deerslayers be?

DAWN:

Butchers? Somebody… I don't know.

MICK:

Well they could be a kind of knife. I think that's the most obvious thing. I don't actually know but you can see there how you've inferred the connection between the two parts

DAWN:

With tools as the Deerslayer. Right or it could be somebody who uses tools, I suppose, but you will link them

MICK:

Lets move on to the last style then, style E. The first example of that is number six 'Luther Burbank was born in a brick farmhouse in Lancaster Mass'

DAWN:

Ok this is going to be easier isn't it? It's obviously not Lancaster England. Lancaster Massachusetts and we've only got a few left so its six, fifteen, oh no I've missed one, eleven 'he walked round the woods one winter'. 'He' going back to Luther Burbank presumably so its third person narrative

MICK:

This is the only one of the narratives that's third person so that makes it easier to get.

DAWN:

Ok, good. Fifteen 'stumbled into a little dell where a warm spring was
and found'

MICK:

Right

DAWN:

It's not all simple though is it. Twenty-one 'he went home' so we've got he again 'and sat by the stove and read Darwin'.

MICK:

Right

DAWN:

Twenty-five he's mentioned isn't he 'Luther Burbank ceased to believe moved to Lunenburg' and Darwin's mentioned again in twenty-nine 'found a seedball in a potato plant
sowed the seed and cashed in on Mr Darwin's Natural Selection'. Is that it?

MICK:

That's right lets just read it out. I think it will be easier to see what's going on then.

DAWN:

Right

MICK:

Luther Burbank was born in a brick farmhouse in Lancaster Mass. He walked round the woods one winter crunching through the shinycrusted snow stumbled into a little dell where a warm spring was and found the grass green and the weeds sprouting and skunk cabbage pushing up a potent thumb, He went home and sat by the stove and read Darwin
Struggle for Existence, Origin of Species, Natural Selection that wasn't what they taught in church, so Luther Burbank ceased to believe moved to Lunenburg, found a seedball in a potato plant sowed the seed and cashed in on Mr Darwin's Natural Selection on Spencer and Huxley with the Burbank Potato.

Ok now tell me about this one.

DAWN:

Ok we know it's third person, its narrative, it could actually be factual.

MICK:

Tense?

DAWN:

Past tense.

MICK:

Third person past tense. It is factual, it tells the story, in rather an odd way, of something that did actually happen. There was a man called Luther Burbank, he did work with potatoes, he did find a variant of a seed, which produced a new form of potato and he made his fortune with that potato.

DAWN:

Wow

MICK:

He made a lot of money and he was one of those people who gave money away to good causes, particularly education causes. So quite a lot of colleges, for example, in the USA are named after him.

DAWN:

So it's a…I was going to say its an encyclopaedic account and I'm not sure now because when you see it written down together… I would have done if we'd have gone on just those bits but when you see it together it does odd things doesn't it? It's not… the layout is not what you would expect. In fact the layout is similar to a poem rather than an encyclopaedic account.

MICK:

That's right and there are other things in the tone that suggest that it's not just a straight description of history.

DAWN:

Yeah

MICK:

So what are they?

DAWN:

There is some personification going on isn't there? He found 'the weeds sprouting
and skunk cabbage pushing up a potent thumb' and that's quite poetic really, you wouldn't find that in an encyclopaedic account.

MICK:

That's right, this has got a definite literary feel to it hasn't it? Although it's not stream of consciousness writing like the last one was.

DAWN:

Also sometimes it's difficult to read. It made more sense when you read it out loud: 'He went home and sat by the stove and read Darwin' and then you get all of, well not necessarily all, the books that he wrote. You get a list in structure without the aid of commas, which is relying on you having the knowledge to know that these are Darwin's writings.

MICK:

And as you say the fact the you're not getting the punctuation is making it harder for you to work out where the boundaries are and so that is a bit like the kind of effect you were getting in the little bit of stream of consciousness writing wasn't it. So this is a narrative that by and large is pretty simple, Ok. It's simple orderly narrative, it's written in relatively simple grammar but then in particular places he does odd things and those places look as if they're rather important places.

DAWN:

Yeah

MICK:

So all this stuff to do with

DAWN:

With Darwin

MICK:

It's at the point when he learns about the thing that's going to change him, that's going to make his fortune for him. So that's the significant narrative moment and it's being picked out by extra patterning. It's a third person past tense narrative of the sort that you'd expect to find in storytelling.

DAWN:

What about that bit then? After the bit that you say is the crucial bit you get the list of Darwin's works and the way you read it 'that wasn't what they taught in church', you read it with a meaning that suggested it might not be the third person narrator saying it.

MICK:

I think that's certainly true, that looks as if that little bit is or could well be a representation of his thought and that was why I read it in the way that I did.

DAWN:

So we're back, again, to the stream of consciousness or similar to. You're getting another voice. Its not the narrators voice.

MICK:

We'll learn a bit about that later on in the course but it's probably a bit early yet to be doing that here.

DAWN:

The other bit, as well, that we're getting is all the intertextual links aren't we? Because just from Darwin and 'that's not what they taught in church' and then they have this play on the idea of sowing a seed which is both important to evolutionists and to Christians as well about sowing and reaping so there's a lot more going on. There's a lot more meaning underneath the meaning. Similar to the meaning between the lines you were talking about.

MICK:

Oh yes, there's a lot of play going on in this. That's one of the things, I think, that marks this text off. You can see it with 'cashed in on Mr Darwin's Natural Selection'. The reference to 'Mr Darwin's Natural Selection' looks like a sort of stage reference, but actually Darwin was a real person and natural selection is an important thing in biology. So you can see that it's not a straightforward narrative. That relates to the point you made before about it not being an encyclopaedia entry because it's got these extra ironic tones going on in it and what you're beginning to notice are the linguistic characteristics of that tone that makes this piece of writing different.

DAWN:

I wouldn't like to say where I thought it came form though. I think that would be really difficult.

MICK:

That would be hard, I agree

MICK:

Ok let's sum up then. What we've got here are all these extracts which you've managed to put together into different text types and you've been able to say quite a lot about those text types and how the language, the features of the language helps you to do that. This is a kind of intuitive ability that we all have and we've begun to notice that by this particular exercise. I guess the other thing that's worth noticing is that the jumbling effect, although its very big in the exercise, is actually in a way quite important for Dos Passos in the novel USA itself because what you find in the novel is that you get lots of different styles put next to one another and you keep shifting from one style to another. So these five different styles all occur over a two-page stretch of that novel. You don't get, for example the song, just in one place. The song is broken over two parts and the newspaper headlines turn up in different places. So you can see that he is producing that kind of effect where you're moving from one thing to another which was actually in the exercise too, only more so in the exercise. You can then infer using pragmatic inference again the kind of writerly intent that he has. He is wanting to give you a number of different kinds of language all of which represent a little bit of America.

DAWN:

Like a patchwork quilt.

MICK:

That's right, so you've got a pushing together of all of these different styles and there's a sense in which what he's saying with the novel is 'this is what America is, America is all these different things'. It's got to do with that idea of America being the melting pot where all of these different races and nationalities come together to form a new nation. That's being celebrated in a way in this novel.

DAWN:

That's cever.

MICK:

It makes it hard to read at times, but interesting none the less.