Walter Pater’s Dream Rhythms
Walter Pater’s Dream Rhythms
This chapter considers how Walter Pater, singing master of the aesthetes, constantly pushes language beyond the purely grammatical and expositional, in order to think through an idea which may not be simply recoverable as a ‘statement’. Many critics have pointed to Pater’s stylistic tricks of delay and postponement—terms which by their very nature suggest ‘something’ to be delayed or postponed. What is interesting, however, is the way that postponement might be in the very nature of Pater’s thinking, connected to his philosophical sense of life as a non-heuristic, passenger experience. In particular, the chapter looks at his oddly fussy punctuation, especially his dashes, both as a means to notate the rhythms of his writing, but also as a way to signal pauses which radically derail the logic of thought.
Keywords: Walter Pater, rhythm, dream, secondary, style, music, dash, list, thinking
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
