(New to) Great Regulars: Bliss Street

by Ange Mlinko

from Ange Mlinko: The New Yorker: Bliss Street

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"Influence" was once felt to be a kind of ether that emanated from the stars: an intangible. When Alter takes up the delicate task of assessing the King James Version's perdurance in the American language, he is at pains to remind us that a text can't be measured the way a sheet's thread-count can be:

Rather than tracing the "influence" of the Bible on American writers, I should like to try to see how the language of the King James Version is worked into the texture of the writing, making possible a kind of strong prose that would not have existed otherwise, and I shall seek to understand how this prose serves as the vehicle for certain distinctively American constructions of reality.

from Ange Mlinko: The Nation: Pleasures of the Tixte

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