Elliptical Orality: Rhetoric as Style in Conrad

Abstract

Abstract:This essay links two concurrent literary trends that unfolded in Britain between the 1850s and 1890s: a turn in novelistic practice against the convention of the chatty, rhetorical author, and a new critical enthusiasm for theorizations of prose style. In these decades, a new concept of style emerged in which the author s persona was abstracted and diffused into the intimate details of composition. This understanding of style was incompatible with an earlier sense of the author as a rhetorical, speaking presence in the text. Style and narrative, then, are not separable or opposable terms; rather, style s historical dispensations are inextricable from the history of narrative forms. By tracking the oral aesthetic of Joseph Conrad s early work, this paper traces the ways in which the markers of orality and rhetoric were repurposed into the intricate, telling details of style.