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TIME OUT FROM ENGLISH GRAMMAR
This section features wide-ranging, thought-provoking articles in English on any subject under the sun. Its objective is to present new, mind-changing ideas as well as to show to serious students of English how the various tools of the language can be felicitously harnessed to report a momentous or life-changing finding or event, to espouse or oppose an idea, or to express a deeply felt view about the world around us.
The outstanding English-language expositions to be featured here will mostly be presented through links to the websites that carry them. To put a particular work in better context, links to critiques, biographical sketches, and various other material about the author and his or her works will usually be also provided.
I hope you’ll enjoy the new selections that will be presented here each week.Joe Carillo
Epigraphs: Simply labels or motive engines for literary narratives?
The word “epigraph,” of course, means a quotation set at the beginning of a literary work or one of its divisions to suggest its theme. But in a delightful essay that he wrote for the March 11, 2010 issue of The Millions website, Andrew Tutt, an Armenia-based writer working for Transparency International as part of a one-year postgraduate fellowship, asks: “Should epigraphs be thought of as part of the text, a sort of pre-modern, post-modern device, like tossing a newspaper clipping into the body narrative? Or are they actually a direct invitation by the author, perhaps saying, ‘Look here, for from this inspiration came this tale?’”
Tutt proceeds to analyze epigraphs in several famous works over the centuries, from William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale to Miguel Cervantes’s Don Quixote, from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels to Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and from Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita to William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice. He attempts to classify the epigraphs from these and other notable works into “bad” and “good” epigraphs, describing a good one as “that quote which seems to connect in a fundamental way with the text.”
“So epigraphs abide by certain principles,” Tutt explains, “and they do not always work. Quite often they come across like throat clearing, sort of a ‘here it goes’ before the author gets into the work… So when searching for an epigraph, the most important part of the endeavor should be how the quote integrates with the novel as a whole. Does it fit the tone, and does it take on a deeper meaning, or lend a deeper meaning, because it’s there?”
Tutt cites several epigraphs in English literature that meet the grade, and others that he considers simply a form of authorial vanity or needless embellishment.
Read Andrew Tutt’s “On Epigraphs” in The Millions now!
