A twentysomething bus rider with a long, skinny neck and a goofy hat accuses another passenger of trampling his feet; he then grabs an empty seat. Later, in a park, a friend encourages the same man to reorganize the buttons on his overcoat. In Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, this determinedly pointless scenario unfolds 99 times in twice as many pages. Originally published in 1947 (in French), these terse variations on a theme are a wry lesson in creativity. The story is told as an official letter, as a blurb for a novel, as a sonnet, and in "Opera English." It's told onomatopoetically, philosophically, telegraphically, and mathematically.
The novel, "Living with the Senecas: A Story about Mary Jemison", follows Mary Jemison's story from the time she is taken captive by Shawnees up through her death at age 80+ years old. The book highlights the key events in Mary's life as she transitions from the 15 year-old girl raised in the "white man's world" to an adult that fully embraces the culture of the Senecas that adopted her. The text is easy to read and very informative. The illustrations really give the reader an added sense of what Mary Jemison went through.
One of our most valuable capacities is our ability partly to predict what will come next in a text. But linguistic understanding of this remains very limited, especially in genres such as the short story where there is a staging of the clash between predictability and unpredictability. This book proposes that a matrix of narrativity-furthering textual features is crucial to the reader’s forming of expectations about how a literary story will continue to its close. Toolan uses corpus linguistic software and methods, and stylistic and narratological theory, in the course of delineating the matrix of eight parameters.
