Word: prose
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Essentially, Hallmark is abandoning the high ground of prose and pictures for a frontal assault. Although the company still sells premium-priced (about $5) cards in its own shops and franchised outlets, the real battle has shifted to the mass-market stores, such as supermarkets and discounters. There the cardmakers are left slugging it out over exclusive contracts for coveted shelf space. The aggressive deals cut by retailers, combined with slowing sales volume, have put the squeeze on profits...
...work, a patternbecame evident, and I think it would not be unfairto say that if Hemingway's legacy is determined inlarge part by which of his works are read andvalued and thought beautiful or useful--aneffective definition of the canon expressed at theConference by the novelist Francine Prose--thenHemingway as a writer has been dramaticallyreduced...
...logical continuation of the worship ofHemingway for his style alone was Francine Prose'sfinal comment to the closing plenary session ofthe Centennial conference. Sitting on a podiumalongside Saul Bellow, Henry Louis Gates and DerekWalcott, and Hemingway aficionados, Prose did notblink at asserting the necessity of the totallyinconceivable: "You have to ignore the content"she counseled, "and focus on the style." Not onlyhas Hemingway's valuable work been whittled downto a novel and some stories, but one is obligatedeven to sift away the bulk of those works,searching for what is valuable in the style alone...
...dumbfoundingly naive notion that form andcontent can be neatly separated was hardly uniqueto Prose: remarkably--and despite the earlierassertions of the writer E. Annie Proulx and thecritic Seven Birkerts that style is not merely thearrangement of words but rather expressive of andinextricable from the author's entireworldview--nobody sitting on the podium with Proseseemed immediately bothered by her assertion. And,in Hemingway's case, perhaps it is not hard tounderstand why: if one can separate style fromcontent, one can perhaps remove from the text andfrom literary legacy the offensive of ErnestHemingway...
...question of what this behavior meant, andmeans, is exactly as simple as Hemingway's prose:what is implied runs deeper than most otherwriters could ever state, Cowley explains thatHemingway's "heroes live in a world that is like ahostile forest, full of unseen dangers, not tomention the nightmares that haunt their sleep.Death spies on them from behind every tree. Theironly chance of safety lies in the faithfulobservance of customs they invent for themselves...