Category: words

The Search For A Gender-Neutral Singular Pronoun Has Gone On For Centuries

Yes, they has been used in the singular since the late Middle Ages, but people complained about it, and looked for a different solution, back then and ever since. The effort to come up with alternatives has engaged not only lexicographers, writers and teachers but also attorneys, judges, and legislators; the issue even played a role in the fight for women’s suffrage. – London Review of Books

‘Translationese’ — What Japan’s Most Important Modern Novelists Have In Common

Haruki Murakami famously wrote his first novel in English and then translated it into his mother tongue himself, resulting in a plainspoken, “neutral” (his word) style far removed from standard literary Japanese. Several critics referred to that style as “translationese.” Masatsugu Ono (both a translator and a novelist himself) makes the case that Murakami, Kenzaburo Oe, Yoko Tawada, Minae Mizumura all write in other languages and translate foreign literature into Japanese, and that this is what has made their work so distinctive. – The Paris Review

Our Literary Magazines Are Root-Bound

Behind the scenes, the media faced a genuine crisis over and above its ordinary instability. Publications folded, mass layoffs ensued, and with months of pre-written content suddenly obsolete, the remaining magazines were left scrambling for new material. A week into the pandemic, editors at every vaguely literary or intellectual outlet seemed to decide it had fallen to them to solicit first-person accounts of quarantine for the benighted historical record. – Drift Magazine

The ‘Novel Of Ideas’ Is A Gimmick, But One That Sometimes Works

The form of “novel” is young, but its conventions are mostly clear – and the novel of ideas is different. “Whether executed as science fiction, bildungsroman, or more recently, the satirical form Nicholas Dames calls the ‘theory novel,’ the novel of ideas is ‘artful,’ with all the equivocality this term brings. Willingness to court the accusation of relying on overly transparent stylistic devices is a consistent, perhaps even cohering feature of a notoriously unstable genre.” – The Paris Review