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Laura Lisabeth deposited The Fetish of Style: The Elements of Style and The Marketing of English Language Usage in the group
RCWS Literacy Studies on MLA Commons 5 years ago
I argue that The Elements of Style by Strunk and White comes out of a history connecting it to the nineteenth century “conversation handbook” (Connors) and other cultural guides to middlebrow identity formation including The Book-Of-The-Month Club. The Elements of Style is a guide to a genteel language performance rooted in the racialized, gendered and classed discourses of these middlebrow cultural objects.