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Melville's chaotic style and the use of generative models: an essay in method. (Herman Melville)

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From: Style
Date: 19960322
Author:Kearns, Michael

Melville's semantically or syntactically flawed sentences, for example "Ourselves are Fate" from White-Jacket, have not been adequately discussed by traditional or contemporary literary scholars. These sentences tend to clump together in textual positions of rhetorical emphasis and to arise from the human experience of phenomena that cannot be wholly circumscribed by verbal analysis, such as "the ineffable." Further, they give rise to critical paraphrases that cannot be unambiguously fled to the sentence elements yet that share general descriptive terms. Like the textual phenomena themselves, ...

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