On literary devices. Continuing from "The New Journalism," by Tom Wolfe,
edited by Wolfe and E.W. Johnson, New York: Harper and Row, 1973.
...record the dialogue in full, (emphasis added) which was device No. 2.
Magazine writers, like the early novelists, learned by trial and error something
that has since been demonstrated in academic studies: namely, that realistic dialogue involves the reader more completely than any other single other device. It also establishes and defines
character more completely than any other single device. (Dickens has a way of
fixing a character in your mind so that you have the feeling
he has described every inch of his appearance—only to go back and discover that
he actually took care of the physical description in two or three sentences;
the rest he has accomplished with dialogue) Journalists
were working on dialogue of the fullest, most completely
revealing sort in the very moment when novelists were cutting back, using dialogue in more and more cryptic, fey and curiously abstract
ways."
Next: Point of view
Comments