Hendiadys

This essay considers sentences as co-dwellings, spaces of relation in which we diagram and map and work out how to live with others. Garielle Lutz says the ‘sentence is the loneliest place for a writer’. But eventually, she muses, those lonely words will ‘settle in’, get to know their neighbours, even, come to ‘swap alphabetary vitals and viscera’. Jonathan Kramnick offers a similarly intimate picture of grammatical contact: in our in-sentence quoting as literary critics, he says, we weave ‘another person’s words with [our] own so we gently alter both’. If these syntactic intimacies are possible, I ask, what sort of communal space is the sentence? How are we teaching – and learning – collaboration, intellectual community, poetic rapprochement using the structures and affordances of the sentence? Sentences, I suggest, might be classrooms, community centres, confederations, linguistic commons and crucibles, and above all else, infrastructures for generosity and reciprocity: coordination, not subordination. Moving through forms of syntactic cooperation and finally landing on the syntax of hendiadys, an old rhetorical device for coordination and balance, this essay imagines the possibilities that open up when we see the expansive architecture of the sentence as an invitation to community.