Learning to style finally : lateness in theory

Abstract

Other essays in this collection have stressed motifs of birth in their exploration of style in theory. For instance, they have drawn attention to themes of parturition and epenthetic accretion and their effect on the modulation of style in literary and theoretical texts (Jean-Michel Rabaté's and Marie-Dominique Garnier's do this in their analyses of Joyce and Deleuze respectively). They have also recalled the birth of the very idea of style and the generation of the language of literature (as in Gloria Lauri-Lucente's or Mario Aquilina's or Janice Sant's, which focus respectively on the impetus thereto of Petrarch and Blanchot and Cixous, or indeed in Chris Müller's, which considers the originality of language itself and cues reflection on whether being must always go before style). Additionally, they have looked at how style, once born as effect or affect, reproduces its own vitality (examples are Stefan Herbrechter's, which traces the la vie la mort theme and its trajectories in French theory, or Laurent Milesi's, which studies deconstruction's conceptual and compositional recasting of style's histories, or those of contributors like Stuart Sillars and Giuseppe Mazzotta and Saul Anton, which survey crucial filiations and compulsions in the thought of style).