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  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."
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« NEAR AND DEAR TO OUR HEARTS | Main | WITH ALL THAT TIME TO THINK, THEY COULDN'T HAVE COME UP WITH A BETTER NAME? »

February 17, 2005

EAT ME

A Vanderbilt professor has won the prestigious Premio Casa De Las Americas Award for best socio-historical and literary essay of 2005 for his look at "the subject of cannibalism as a prominent metaphor in Latin American cultural history."

Casa de las Americas, established in 1959 in Havana by Hayde Santamaria, promotes, supports, awards and publishes the work of Latin American writers, artists, musicians and academics.

The panel of judges of the Casa de las Americas award praise Canibalia as "a remarkable contribution to the field of cultural studies" and "able to renew several of the most crucial debates in our cultural history.

Posted by TEV at 12:04 AM |

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