Joan Didion : Substance and Style

Explores how Didion’s nonfiction prose style, often lauded for being beautiful and poetic, also works rhetorically. Much acclaimed and often imitated, Joan Didion remains one of the leading American essayists and political journalists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The lone woman writer among the New Journalists in the 1960s and ’70s, Didion became a powerful critic of public and political mythologies in the ’80s and ’90s, and was an inspiration for those, particularly women, dealing with aging and grief and loss in the early 2000s. An iconic figure, Didion is still much admired by readers, critics, and essayists, who speak of looking to her prose style as a model for their own. In Joan Didion: Substance and Style , Kathleen M. Vandenberg explores how Didion’s nonfiction prose style, often lauded for its beauty and poetry, also works rhetorically. Through close readings of selected nonfiction from the last forty years―biographically, culturally, and politically situated―Vandenberg reveals how Didion deliberately and powerfully employs style to emphasize her point of view and enchant her readers. While Didion continues to publish and the “Cult of Joan,” as one author calls it, grows seemingly stronger by the day, this book is the only extended treatment of Didion’s later nonfiction and the first sustained and close consideration of how her essays work at the level of the sentence. 2022 CHOICE Outstanding Academic TitleMuch acclaimed and often imitated, Joan Didion remains one of the leading American essayists and political journalists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The lone woman writer among the New Journalists in the 1960s and'70s, Didion became a powerful critic of public and political mythologies in the'80s and'90s, and was an inspiration for those, particularly women, dealing with aging and grief and loss in the early 2000s. An iconic figure, Didion is still much admired by readers, critics, and essayists, who speak of looking to her prose style as a model for their own. In Joan Didion: Substance and Style, Kathleen M. Vandenberg explores how Didion's nonfiction prose style, often lauded for its beauty and poetry, also works rhetorically. Through close readings of selected nonfiction from the last forty years—biographically, culturally, and politically situated—Vandenberg reveals how Didion deliberately and powerfully employs style to emphasize her point of view and enchant her readers. While Didion continues to publish and the'Cult of Joan,'as one author calls it, grows seemingly stronger by the day, this book is the only extended treatment of Didion's later nonfiction and the first sustained and close consideration of how her essays work at the level of the sentence. 2022 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Much acclaimed and often imitated, Joan Didion remains one of the leading American essayists and political journalists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The lone woman writer among the New Journalists in the 1960s and '70s, Didion became a powerful critic of public and political mythologies in the '80s and '90s, and was an inspiration for those, particularly women, dealing with aging and grief and loss in the early 2000s. An iconic figure, Didion is still much admired by readers, critics, and essayists, who speak of looking to her prose style as a model for their own. In Joan Substance and Style , Kathleen M. Vandenberg explores how Didion's nonfiction prose style, often lauded for its beauty and poetry, also works rhetorically. Through close readings of selected nonfiction from the last forty years-biographically, culturally, and politically situated-Vandenberg reveals how Didion deliberately and powerfully employs style to emphasize her point of view and enchant her readers. While Didion continues to publish and the "Cult of Joan," as one author calls it, grows seemingly stronger by the day, this book is the only extended treatment of Didion's later nonfiction and the first sustained and close consideration of how her essays work at the level of the sentence. Contents 8 Acknowledgments 10 Introduction: To Shift the Structure of a Sentence 12 Chapter 1 Language and the Mechanism of Terror: Salvador 40 Chapter 2 Preferred Narratives: New York City after the Central Park Jogger 64 Chapter 3 Lifting the Curtain: The Rhetoric of Politics 84 Chapter 4 Terra Incognita: On Loss and Memory 114 The Year of Magical Thinking 121 Blue Nights 135 Conclusion: What Remains 144 Notes 158 Bibliography 174 Index 180 "The only book to offer an extended treatment of Joan Didion's nonfiction writing, and the first to offer extended analysis of her prose style"-- Provided by publisher __Explores how Didion’s nonfiction prose style, often lauded for being beautiful and poetic, also works rhetorically.____Joan Didion: Substance and Style__