Whereas references to Heraclitus’ doctrine of universal flux are abundant in Nietzsche’s works, remarks about Heraclitus’ style are few and appear to be limited to the early works. One striking assessment, given Heraclitus’ reputation of obscurity, features in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks: “Hardly anyone has ever written with as lucid and luminous a quality”. The chapter aims at clarifying the relationship between Heraclitus’ fragments, most of which can be described as “aphorisms,” and Nietzsche’s pronouncements about the aphoristic style he himself practices, and at showing why Nietzsche’s systematic reconstruction of Heraclitus’ doctrine takes the form of a cento, a literary form where originally disjoint Heraclitean aphorisms are brought together in a doxographic recomposition that makes of Heraclitus, at the cost of some important tweakings, the tragic, Dionysian philosopher he never ceased to be in Nietzsche’s eyes – as clear and as obscure as Nietzsche himself.

This chapter offers a historical introduction to the origins of the essay in sixteenth-century France. It examines the role of memory in the early-modern essay and attempts to identify the mnemonic affordances of the essay form. The author compares the essays of Michel de Montaigne to those of his English successors, Francis Bacon and William Cornwallis.

Meredith’s novels abound in sentences, understood not just as the verbal form that contains a subject and a predicate, ending in a period, but as sententiae or maxims, which express a general truth or opinion in striking and memorable terms. A long-time feature of argument and rhetoric, sententiae are intimately associated with the development of oral and written prose, though their presence in Meredith’s work has led to the accusation that his novels are excessively poetic. This essay adopts a genealogical approach to Meredith’s style by tracing the development of his earliest sententiae to their recognizably mature form. With roots in the “wisdom” tradition in ancient prophecy and philosophy, Meredith’s sententiae reflect an ideal of cultivated speech historically associated with intelligent conversation and drama, which he then assimilated to narrative fiction. The singularity of the Meredithian sentence – a metaphorically dense and syntactically complex assertion that blends idiosyncratic expression with judgments of common sense – thus arises from synthetic hybridity, overlaying didacticism with description and intellection with image.

The style of George Meredith represents an opposite extreme from Trollope: dense with epigram and ornament, it is frequently denigrated as extravagant and obscure, violating the realist conventions that Trollope worked hard to establish. However, Chapter 6 demonstrates how Meredith drew on the virtues of Asiatic and baroque styles to create a new form of psychological realism characterized by “fervidness,” the intensity that arises when contradictory principles are held in tension. On the one hand, Meredith gravitated to short forms like epigram to distill complex thoughts into memorable phrases; on the other, he delighted in the flights of fancy permitted by prosaic expansiveness. Through a consideration of major and minor work, this chapter reveals how fervidness is embodied structurally as a drama between conditions of freedom and constraint that impinge upon the development of central characters. In this way, Meredith’s “fervidness” formally replicates a dynamic that plays out thematically, making his style much more referential in terms of its relation to content than that of either Thackeray or Trollope before him.

This essay introduces Brecht’s oft-neglected interviews. First, it reviews efforts to incorporate these interviews in (or exclude them from) his body of work, before outlining Brecht’s own interest in the form as a both a source of material and a platform for his views. At the center of the article is an examination of Brecht’s interview with Die literarische Welt in 1926. Archival material is used to illuminate the process of construction behind the conversation, which contains Brecht’s first discussion of epic theater. Finally, the article sketches two key influences on the development of his interviews: his embrace of radio as a new medium and his commitment to Marxist media tactics.