Also in the 1920s, whites were given preferential immigration treatment when Congress established a national origins quota system, "a formulaic device designed to ensure stability in the ethnic composition of the United States," wrote Johnson.
Yet Garland's writerly abilities make it clear that she could just as easily have dispensed with these somewhat formulaic narrative devices.
The story is formulaic -- the device of alternating between reality and dream goes at least as far back as Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd's 1942 classic, "The Runaway Bunny" -- but Banks's writing is spry and lively.
A common plot device in these formulaic tales is that someone can't get over the loss of a loved one.
While Todd McCarthy in Variety praised the initial set-up and conceit of the plot device, he criticised the formulaic approach leading to a "cornball denouement".
It has its formulaic moments, including a reliance on a structural bookending device emphasizing the idea of community.
They use the common devices of oral literature such as repetition and enumeration and formulaic expression.
Reacting, like many of his contemporaries, against the cold and often formulaic Modernist buildings that had begun to dot many cityscapes, Gehry began to experiment with unusual expressive devices and to search for a personal vocabulary.
