Editorial
Almost Island has always wanted to examine certain aspects of literature closely, and find ways to get at them that are meaningful and fundamental without being narrow or reductive.
To start with, we’d like to build an issue that revolves around style.
What do we intuit about (in this case, verbal) style? In the work of its most skilled and forceful practitioners, it appears immediately. It is somehow obvious. It might be perceived as an excess, a haunting, an intrinsic uncertain, but – equally – a definite contour. It is an indisputable suffusing presence, but remains nearly impossible to describe.
Style is grainy; it will not be reduced, it will not be easily scaled. It may follow the rules, but no rule can generate it. Style changes, moves through time, inverts; it cannot by definition be predicted. We might hold fast to style as evidence of the individual, the distinctive; yet it can never shake the link to another shore, to imitation, convention, recognition, mask, transmission. Style seems to act as some kind of conduit or bond between private and public meaning. It seems to step in where simple communication fails.
Most importantly, style cannot be “peeled off”.
We are aware that there has been a fertile if ultimately unresolved and sometimes overly microscopic debate on style within literary studies and art history, a perplexing and possibly contentious one in philosophy. However, we want to go further and ask, what is the nature of written style as a possibility that “literature” – as it has so far established itself – might offer to and take from the world, and a range of other modes – philosophy, social science, the humanities, even mathematics? What sparks might we trace between the oral and the written in our intellectual traditions, between performance and truth? We’re interested in
the role of style at the level of the sentence or the statement, but also in the destruction and/or rebuilding of disciplines, professions and genres. (Note that we do not presuppose that “literature” represents freedom and that the others do not.) Put simply, what would be the consequences of genuinely acknowledging the peculiar existence of style? We want to know it as the core of being in writing.
– Editors