EN 1001 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Finnegans Wake, Parataxis, Hyperbaton
EN1001
June 6, 2018
Lecture 3
Review
● Tools at your disposal
○ The Oxford English Dictionary of Historical Terms
○ Theme and Topic
■ Theme is what the author is persuading
■ Topic is what you are talking about
○ Syntax - how it is being said; word order, sequence of words in a sentence
○ Lexis: vocabulary or word choice, OED will give you this
○ Right and Left branching sentence
■ Where is the main verb (not the auxiliary verb)
■ Left branching complete late
■ Right branching complete early
○ Hypotaxis
■ Subordinate clauses: which/who/that/if/since create dependent
clauses
○ Parataxis
■ Sentences are joined by punctuations or simple conjunctions (and, or)
○ James Joyce - Finnegans Wake
■ The more stoned you are the better it is
■ The prose is easy, the lexis is not
○ Genre
■ Prose
■ Fiction
■ Drama
■ Poetry
○ Subgenre - means inside prose there are many kinds of prose, and you have
been given a prose sample, of all of these subgenres, does my passage
connect with any of these, and does it help me understand what is going on in
the passage?
● How many sentences does this passage have?
● What does this have to do with what the text is saying?
● Some readability algorithms count a colon/semicolon as a separate sentence
● What percentage is parataxis/hypotaxis and left/right branching sentences
● Either it doesn’t matter, or it matters and you do not see it
● Make a mindset change: in the English department, we never talk about the author,
we never say the author intended to do this. You make it on an inference on the text,
you do not know what the author is thinking unless he told you what he was thinking,
or you see letters or drafts of the text.
● The Author is Dead: it doesn’t matter what the author intended, what matters is what
the text is doing. We personify the text: the text is trying to persuade, not the author,
because you cannot prove the author.
