About the Book
Tone is often decisive in whether we love or dislike a story, novel, or even critical essay. Yet literary critics rarely treat tone as a necessary or important element of literary style or critique. There are surprisingly few analyses of what tone is, how texts produce tone, or the ways tone--as an essential element of narration--contributes to character, story, mood, and voice.
Tone's 24 micro-chapters offer a playful, eclectic, and fast-paced guide into the creation of tone in a variety of modern and contemporary works of literature by such varied writers as Hemingway, Woolf, and Sedaris, as well as in criticism, advertising, and machine-authored texts. Judith Roof shows how tone is a crucial element in all writing, as it produces the illusion of a telling voice; creates a sense of character, personality, and attitude; inflects events recounted; anticipates certain directions and possibilities; and creates an ambiance that simultaneously produces, enables, and shapes narratives and characters. Tone gives us a lively and original way to rethink the practice of literary criticism.
Table of Contents:
Preface-Key Tone
Acknowledgments
1. Setting the Tone
2. Toning Up
3. Tone Jam
4. Intoning
5. Taking That Tone
6. Two Tone
7. Two Tones
8. Atonement: The Sound a Tree Makes When It Falls
9. Tone Down
10. Touch Tone
11. Tense Tone
12. Tone "R" Us
13. We-Tone
14. The Tone “We” Tell
15. Tonal Dialogics
16. Inscribing Tone
17. Moebius Tone
18. Telling Tones
19. iTone
20. Toning Fork
21. Dissonant Tones
22. Toning Up/Toning Down
23. Tone-ads
24. RoboTone
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
Judith Roof is the William Shakespeare Chair in English at Rice University, USA. She is the author of The Comic Event: Comedic Performance from the 1950s to the Present (Bloomsbury, 2018), What Gender Is, What Gender Does (2016), as well as five other monographs, six edited (or co-edited) books, and more than 80 essays on topics ranging from modern drama to The Big Lebowski, Ethel Merman, Posthumanism, the novels of Percival Everett, the work of Rabelais, Beckett, Pinter, Duras, psychoanalysis, narrative theory, film studies, genetics, critical legal studies, and secondary characters.
Review :
Through close readings of a great variety of recent literary texts approached from the innovative angle of 'tone,' this book sheds new light on the inseparable processes of reading and narrating. Its brilliant analyses of tone, while further exploring the interactions of rhetoric and politics, allow to thoroughly revisit literary genres and categories as well as the definitions of some of the basic terms of criticism.
In scrutinizing and dramatizing the inner workings of tone via the insights of narrative theory, Judith Roof's splendid book takes us where few have traveled before. Tone demonstrates--with vim, vigor, playfulness, and humor--how one might become a better reader, audiator, and imaginary listener of complex texts, whether comic, tragic, gloomy, sanctimonious, confessional, propagandistic, ironic, parodic, or satirical.
Judith Roof's utterly original monograph promise to turn 'tone' and 'audiation,' the procedures of close reading through which tone can be discerningly 'heard,' into indispensable terms of literary analysis-and powerful obstacles to the protocols of surface reading.
