Standard Language: Spoken and Written, Vol. 5 Book

I've got a lot of conflicting feelings about this one: Riley's flair for description and poet's eye for diction makes the reading positively scintillating at times, and wonderfully compelling. On the other hand, the self-same verbal skills engender a growing weight to the book's verbal structure and, at times, begin to take on the sense of pure excessiveness, as if the critical project had fallen away somewhere. Similarly, I love what I believe Riley's doing with identity politics are crises in representation and self-understanding, but at times I feel like she's drawing circles where more straightforward lines and dots would carry her arguments and points across much more coherently. As a poetic exercise, that's all cool; but as pedagogical literature the approach has its limits, as well as its aforesaid strengths. Whatever else, it possessed me to read more of her work, as well as to sit up straight and listen to what she has to say. An effective exercise, to be sure.