Style Degree Zero: Incommensurable Bonds in Cather and Cameron

In her latest book, The Likeness of Things Unlike (2025), Sharon Cameron explores American writing that fashions unlikely bonds between elements of a text we often assume bear no relation to one another. Cameron’s striking discussion of Willa Cather’s prose style, for instance, tracks changes in perspective, intensities of feeling, and revelatory insights that slip free from predictable alignments with plot or character. At once thrilling and destabilizing, such moments illustrate that style forms the connective tissue linking experiences that might otherwise appear incommensurable. By tracking linked features in works that resist stable arrangements, Likeness advances the interpretive method Cameron developed in The Bond of the Furthest Apart (2017). Both books aim to realign our sense of a what a text can reveal by tuning in to the ways obverse states nevertheless seep into one another. Using her chapter on Cather as a guide, this essay tracks the techniques central to Likeness and The Bond, describing their place in Cameron’s wider contribution to literary criticism.