><< Would you examine the grammar of Poe's "The Tell-tale Heart" with
>such gusto?>>
Jim responded
>
>Absolutely, if someone claimed Poe was really writing a scientific text about
>how the heart survives outside the body. If someone claimed Poe was writing a
>real history of someone's actual heart, then, of course it becomes important.
>And if one went on further, and said the opening sentence of the story was an
>executive summary of the entire text, different in kind from the second
>sentence, a grammarian might step in and cry foul.
I had a thought on this issue during the lunch hour. Normally we wouldn't
carefully analyze the grammar of a Poe story, because we're familiar with
the genre of literature he wrote. In essence, even though he lived a
number of years ago, he's part of our culture. But suppose the text we're
trying to understand it Josephus' "The Wars of the Jews." Here is a text
that claims to be history, written by a man who lived in another day and
was part of a different culture. Historians trying to assess the veracity
of his account have indeed studied the grammatical constructs very
carefully.
Bill Hamilton | Vehicle Systems Research
GM R&D Center | Warren, MI 48090-9055
810 986 1474 (voice) | 810 986 3003 (FAX)
hamilton@gmr.com (office) | whamilto@mich.com (home)