Quote:
Originally Posted by usuallee
I just read Louise Erdrich's The Round House. Pretty good book. But no quotation marks were used to denote dialogue. As far as I can determine, Cormac McCarthy started doing this and now lots of literary authors are mimicking the trend.
To me, there is no stylistic reason to omit quotation marks, except to self-consciously announce an author's intention that This Is A Literary Work. I find it utterly pretentious. Your thoughts....
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I've never encountered a book that completely omitted quatation marks, but I think it'd be annoying. What I do often observe, is that the closing quotation mark is missing, especially on a longer piece of dialog, like so:
"Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry.
"
"Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting.
<== Missing
"It remaining essentially unchanged.
"
"It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages.
"
Quote:
Originally Posted by teh603
Just another step in Modernism. They can't write anything harder to understand than James Joyce without breaking stylistic rules, so that's the next logical step. In a few years, they're going to be using random text generators to make stuff the author himself can't even understand.
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Karma for you, because I LOL-ed
