Imagery, Symbolism, and Rhetorical Devices in 'Sister Carrie' and 'An American Tragedy' by Theodore Dreiser

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject Didactics - English - Literature, Works, grade: 1,7, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, course: Proseminar, language: English, abstract: Theodore Dreiser published his first novel, Sister Carrie, in 1900. His most famous work, An American Tragedy, was printed in 1925. Reading criticism on Theodore Dreiser's novels, one can get the impression that Dreiser's style is atrocious and chaotic. 'It is questionable whether he ever wrote a single sentence capable of giving pleasure to itself' (qtd. in Allen 81). Stoll quotes critics that maintain that Theodore Dreiser was never able to obtain a technique of narrative writing. They argue that his writings are poor or that he writes without structure and that his style influences his novels' quality in a bad way (cf. Stoll 4-12). 'Dreiser's writing inevitably suffered from his poor taste, inadequate attention to the niceties of diction and an ear insufficiently attuned to style and tone' (qtd. in Flanagan 289). However, these critics are not completely true. The following paper will show that Dreiser's writing is not entirely bad and that his diction was not completely arbitrary. Therefore, the novels Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy will be analyzed with respect to imagery, symbolism, and some rhetorical devices.