Bill Clintons Inaugural Speech

Bill Clinton Inaugural speech is filled with many complicated, multilevel sentence structures. He moves through his speech with a suspension not only trying to seemingly, but modestly build up his ideas to making him seem as if he a reflective thinker. He uses perfect a combination of anaphora with a heavy usage of asyndeton. For example:

“But when most people are working harder for less; when others cannot work at all; when the cost of health care devastates families and threatens to bankrupt many of our enterprises, great and small; when fear of crime robs law-abiding citizens of their freedom; and when millions of poor children cannot even imagine the lives we are calling them to lead—we have not made change our friend.”

His tone is a tone of reassurance and optimism for what’s to come. He manages to mix elements of anaphora with a hypotactic style as well.

“Communications and commerce are global; investment is mobile; technology is almost magical; and ambition for a better life is now universal.”

“…global; …mobile;…magical;…universal”

Again he also asserts a hypotactic style with another line

“Thomas Jefferson believed that to preserve the very foundations of our nation, we would need dramatic change from time to time. Well, my fellow citizens, this is our time. Let us embrace it.”

He educates his audience with logic – historical context – then readily moves to his assertion that the time for change is now.

His steady pacing is building to a larger and overall idea which is what he concludes with at the end of his speech.

Anaphora can again be found in this sentence:

“Profound and powerful forces are shaking and remaking our world, and the urgent question of our time is whether we can make change our friend and not our enemy.”

“shake and remake” with the use of conjunction

A reflective periodical sentence structure:

“And so today, we pledge an end to the era of deadlock and drift—a new season of American renewal has begun.”

Lolita

"My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set..."

In this passage, Nabokov exemplifies the post modernistic techniques found throughout Lolita. The death of his mother, historically depicted as a tragic ordeal, is given nothing more than a passing mention":(picnic,lightning)". Evoking the characteristic fragmentary experience of Postmodern writing, the details of her death are abstract at best. The narrator,Humbert Humbert(the name itself a reference to Poe's William Wilson, in which the character is haunted by his doppelganger.In the case of Lolita, it is Clare Quilty) refutes the objectivist writing of the earlier Modernist period. Humbert Humbert is the classic unreliable narrator,utilizing his skillful wordplay to elicit sympathy from the reader. Humbert graciously asks the reader if they "can still stand his style", and sentimentally tells his story of a deprived/traumatic childhood.

Assignment 3

"Take this matter of mourning, and take it against a contemporary background. How, against a contemporary background, do you mourn an octogenarian father, nearly blind, his heart enlarged, his lungs filling with fluid, who creeps, stumbles, gives off the odors, the moldiness or gassiness of old men."

Since this sentence uses connectors it would be considered asyndetic. His use of sarcasm is what helps to connect his view points on death in contemporary times. He asks the reader in the most exaggerated way, are you desensitized toward death by old age when more glamorized ways to die is the forefront of what everyone wants to see.

"Thanksgiving turkey was stuffed with hashish. This was much enjoyed. That was practically the last feast at which Pop, who also relished risk or defiance, was present."

Bellow also moves quickly from asyndetic to polysyndetic pretty swifty. This sentence justifies itself by not creating any space for opinion about the food, how it was enjoyed, and the importance of the dinner to "Pop" and exaggerates that he isn't a person whos is hard to satisfy.

"In and out of the hospital, he dwindled, his mind wandered, he couldn’t even concentrate enough to complain, except in exceptional moments on the Sundays Woody regularly devoted to him."

This is a clear example of parataxis and a moving action. Bellow describes his mind as well as his body is moving in a downward flux. The connecting sentences makes it a moving actions making it appear as if time wasn't a factor and these events were quickly happening. It makes it appear monotonous but still an important motion.

Introduction

Vladimir Nabokov is one of my favorite prose writers. I admire him for his many literary tricks and allusions to literary works. He writes in heavy detail on note cards using the fragments of his story to assembles his compositions. For style he uses a lot of lyrical sentences, riddles and word play to form elegant solutions. Lastly, his writing is more of a phenomena of design sacrificing plot and lofty ideas in favor of aesthetic bliss.