{"id":5695,"date":"2022-05-22T07:50:01","date_gmt":"2022-05-22T14:50:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5695"},"modified":"2022-05-22T07:50:58","modified_gmt":"2022-05-22T14:50:58","slug":"los-angeles-review-of-books-ward-farnsworths-guidebooks-to-english-virtuosity-and-ancient-philosophy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5695","title":{"rendered":"Los Angeles Review of Books: Ward Farnsworth\u2019s guidebooks to English virtuosity and ancient philosophy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Fifteen years ago, The<\/em> New York Times Book Review <\/em>put out a call<\/a> for readers\u2019 favorite literary sentences of the past quarter-century, intending to print a pageful of the best examples. This was meant to correct the \u201cblind spot\u201d of the then-new edition of the Yale Book of Quotations<\/em> (2006), with its seemingly inexplicable dearth of contributions from writers born after 1950. A month later, the Review<\/em>\u2019s editor Dwight Garner conceded defeat<\/a>: \u201c[M]ore than 400 people e-mailed us or posted lines on our Web site,\u201d but \u201c[m]any of the quotes weren\u2019t from writers at all, or were from quite old (or quite dead) ones.\u201d The few that qualified amounted to thin gruel indeed: from Jonathan Safran Foer: \u201cTry to live so that you can always tell the truth\u201d; from Irvine Welsh: \u201cIf things go a bit dodgy, ah jist cannae be bothered.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This did not surprise Ward Farnsworth. \u201cCurrent customs about rhetoric don\u2019t encourage the creation of great and memorable sentences that lend themselves to the kind of display the Times<\/em> proposed,\u201d he writes in Farnsworth\u2019s Classical English Style<\/em> (2020). \u201cUsually the apex of modern achievement is a sentence that sets new standards for informality.\u201d That book was the third and latest in a series beginning with Farnsworth\u2019s Classical English Rhetoric <\/em>(2010) and Farnsworth\u2019s Classical English Metaphor<\/em> (2006). In parallel, Farnsworth has also written two books on ancient philosophy, The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User\u2019s Manual<\/em> (2018) and The Socratic Method: A Practitioner\u2019s Handbook<\/em> (2021). All were published over the past decade, the same length of time he\u2019s held his formidable day job as dean of the University of Texas School of Law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These titles may collectively suggest a rather old-fashioned authorial intelligence at work. In our time, we seldom look for guidance to the likes of Socrates or (despite a recent Silicon Valley\u2013inflected revival<\/a>, duly subject to bien-pensant<\/em> sneering<\/a>) the Stoics. Still less do we set great store by virtuosity in the English language, especially in the countries that speak it natively. Elsewhere, educational industries trade lucratively on the promise of competence in what their advertisements claim to be the unchallenged medium of global communication. But in the speech to be heard and writing to be read in, say, the United States of America, competence is the highest state to which many aspire. As Farnsworth writes in Classical English Style<\/em>, \u201cA large share of books about prose style are about how to avoid mistakes. They explain why bad writing sounds that way. This book is about stylistic virtue.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read the whole thing at the<\/a><\/em> Los Angeles Review of Books<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fifteen years ago, The New York Times Book Review put out a call for readers\u2019 favorite literary sentences of the past quarter-century, intending to print a pageful of the best examples. This was meant to correct the \u201cblind spot\u201d of the then-new edition of the Yale Book of Quotations (2006), with its seemingly inexplicable dearth […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,72,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5695","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-language","category-los-angeles-review-of-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5695"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5695\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5699,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5695\/revisions\/5699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}