Vol. 63 No. 1 (2015)
Research Article

“The Course of a Particular”: Names and Narrative in the Works of Joseph Mitchell

PDF
  • Michael Adams
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1179/0027773814Z.00000000095

Published 2015-03-01

Keywords

  • Arabic,
  • ethnophysiography,
  • landform categorization,
  • landscape ethnoecology,
  • landscape features,
  • place names,
  • traditional environmental knowledge (TEK)
    • ...More
    Less

Copyright (c) 2015 Maney Publishing

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

Abstract

Joseph Mitchell (1908–1996) wrote about unusual New York people for The New Yorker. For journalists like Mitchell, a name identifies a “who,” an essential component of a news story even more central to a profile. For Mitchell, however, names are strangely significant: they are textual loci at which narratology, epistemology, and ontology enmesh. The balance of these categories and their mutual engagements are idiosyncratic and define Mitchell’s style. It is a style that proves how intellectually and emotionally powerful journalistic uses of names can be. A catalog of names confirms one’s knowledge of phenomena by reconstituting it narratively. Naming in narrative is a mode of knowing one’s experience. But maybe the stakes are higher: maybe names insist on the reality of the things named. Onomastic specificity underwrites our ontological confidence, but the ontological significance of names is never wholly persuasive, not even when justified within a narrative. Confronting its limitations, as Mitchell did, brings on melancholy. Joy and melancholy wrought of names are intimately related in Mitchell’s style and integral to it, as, after all, they are to living.

PDF

References

  1. Adler, Renata.1999. Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker. New York: Simon & Schuster.
  2. Allen, Irving Lewis.1988. “Sly Slurs: Mispronunciation and Decapitalization of Group Names.” Names 36(3–4): 217–224.
  3. Aloff, Mindy.1993. “Joseph Mitchell’s Secret.”The Threepenny Review 53: 17–19.
  4. Grice, Paul.1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
  5. Herman, David.2002. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
  6. Kripke, Saul.1972. “Naming and Necessity.” Semantics of Natural Language. Ed. Donald Davidson and Gilbert Harman. Dordrecht: D. Reidel,253–355.
  7. Macklin, Elizabeth.1997. “To Author Re: Insert.” The Threepenny Review 68: 5.
  8. Mitchell, Joseph.1993. Up in the Old Hotel. New York: Vintage.
  9. Mitchell, Joseph.2001. My Ears Are Bent. New York: Vintage.
  10. Mitchell, Joseph.2013. “Street Life.” The New Yorker (February 11 and 18): 62–69.
  11. Perrin, Noel. 983. “Paragon of Reporters: Joseph Mitchell.” The Sewanee Review 91(2): 167–184.
  12. Rogers, James Silas.2009. “Old Men in Graveyards: Joseph Mitchell’s Dialogue with Seumas O’Kelly.” The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 35(1): 47–52.
  13. Rundus, Raymond J.2005. “Joseph Mitchell Reconsidered.” The Sewanee Review 113(1): 62–83.
  14. Russell, Bertrand.1903. The Principles of Mathematics. London: Allen and Unwin.
  15. Sims, Norman.2007. True Stories: A Century of Literary Journalism. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
  16. Sims, Norman.2008. “Joseph Mitchell and The New Yorker Nonfiction Writers.” In Literary Journalism in the Twentieth Century. Ed. Norman Sims. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 82–109.
  17. Stevens, Wallace.1989. “The Course of a Particular.” In Opus Posthumous. 2nd edn. Ed. Milton J. Bates. New York: Knopf,123–124.