Word: dialectic
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...bottomlessly downcast, he is listless. On the other hand, John B. McKean, who plays Oakapple's foster brother, is ceaselessly, aimlessly and rather awkwardly energetic. He is always swirling, prancing and dance-stepping. His good intentions and obvious relish for the part can neither overcome nor excuse the peculiar dialect in which his lines are delivered. There is no saying for sure, but, perhaps, a boy from a good neighborhood somewhere in the South trying to imitate a boy from a bad neighborhood in Liverpool could sound as he does. His voice, like Kessler's, is adequate for the demanding...
...same is true of Sagarana (U.S. edition: 1966), a cycle of stories in which Guimarāes Rosa's Joycean prose turns the folklore and rough-and-tumble of backwoods life into a fresh order of experience. Unfortunately, much of the wordplay, coinages, dialect and rhythms are lost in the passage from Portuguese to English...
McCarthy's re-creation of the local dialect is surpassed by his poetic descriptions of the land and its people. His is an Irish singing voice imbued with Southern Biblical intonations. The result is an antiphony of speech and verse played against a landscape of penance. And, finely controlied as it is, his simple narrative with its suspenseful qualities becomes a profound parable that ultimately speaks to any society in any time...
...characterizations based on traditional Southern regional cardboard stock. Mike Thelwell, a teacher at the University of Massachusetts, reasonably suggests that black slaves developed two languages, "one for themselves and another for white masters," and that Styron has captured neither. Thelwell argues that the more public form is the familiar dialect found in the works of Southern-dialect humorists. The other, "the real language," was the stuff of spirituals that has informed the sermons of preachers from the earliest days down to Martin Luther King; this undoubtedly was the diction used by Turner and his fellow insurrectionists. Thelwell charges that Styron...
Author Bradford, 36, is the son of the late Roark Bradford, whose fanciful Negro folk tales about the creation, Of Man Adam an' His Chillun, were adapted by Marc Connelly into Green Pastures. He obviously has inherited his father's ear for dialect. On his own, he has the spontaneous gait and happy tone of a natural-born-if derivative-storyteller...