The American Sentence: From Pulpit to Pulp Fiction

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A compelling quest to locate a history and poetics of the American sentence, this book applies four stages of communication to the story of American writing - the sermon, the telegraph, the newspaper and the screen - to ask what is an American sentence and how has it changed

While sentences have become the subject of their own form, literary histories, cultural narratives, and personal writings have not centred on the sentence as a singular object. There is no history of the sentence. This book addresses that absence, reviewing American style through American literary history for evolutionary moments in the development of the American sentence from the Puritans to the present day.

Reading sentences from writers as diverse as Benjamin Franklin, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Lydia Davis, Cormac McCarthy and Colson Whitehead, we find ourselves asking if a poetics of the American sentence actually exists, whether good sentences are the reason we read, and what the future of the American sentence might be.

Reviews

Ira Nadels study of the American sentence is wide-ranging, historically accurate, and above all, so interesting one thinks of the adjective fascinating. -- Linda Wagner-Martin, Frank Borden Hanes Professor of English & Comparative Literature Emerita, The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, USA
With wit, style and learning, Ira Nadel has produced a biography of the American sentence, from its infancy in the Puritan sermon to its complex adulthood in contemporary novels, screenwriting and the smartphone. This book is a quest for the sentence as it has been nurtured in America, for its moralistic passion, its sinewy strength, its plain-talking precision. Along the way, the reader is treated to familiar and surprising examples from many writers, each insightfully framed and explained. Why do Gertrude Steins sentences contain both unparaphrasable mystery and grammatical precision Why did Allen Ginsberg adopt the Japanese haiku as a model for his prose poems How did Ralph Ellison shape vernacular speech in complex sentences that rival those of William Faulkner Nadels ear for style and his fluent analysis make this book a delight to learn from. -- Robert Spoo, Professor of English, Princeton University, USA
An endlessly enjoyable meditation on the anatomy of the American sentence in American fiction. Approachable and absorbing from start to finish. Learned, quotable and memorable. Whether you are writing your first sentence of fiction or reading and critiquing the latest work of fiction by others, youll learn why sentences are the arteries of thought circulating through all kinds of writing, on the page and now online. -- Michael Earley, Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies, Institute of Continuing Education, University of Cambridge, UK

Author Bio

Ira Nadel is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a UBC Distinguished University Scholar and a winner of the Medal for Canadian Biography. Based at the University of British Columbia, he has lectured throughout Europe, North America and Asia. His works include Love and Russian Literature, From Benjamin to Woolf (2024), Philip Roth, A Counterlife (2021), Virginia Woolf (2016), Double Act: A Life of Tom Stoppard (2002) and Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen (1996).