I am a doctoral candidate in the University of Texas's Department of English, writing a dissertation on class, language-arts pedagogy, and realism in nineteenth-century America. I teach in the Department of Rhetoric & Writing.
Here's one abstract of my dissertation:
A recent unit of my Intermediate Expository Writing (RHE 310) course considered language variation. My students read extensively in scholarship about Ebonics, or African American Vernacular English, discovering, for instance, that the Linguistic Society of America regards Ebonics as “systematic and rule-governed,” “fundamentally regular,” and, linguistically speaking, not in any way inferior to what we typically call “Standard English.” The students were persuaded that popular beliefs equating Ebonics with “bad English” are misguided, and they recognized that teaching Standard English as “correct” English or even as more socially functional reproduces the unfortunate, exclusionary, and factitious distinction between the “standard” and the “bad.” Nevertheless, these students overwhelmingly concluded that the best thing to do for Ebonics speakers, if they want to succeed, is teach them Standard English.
When I observed that discovering some practice to be flawed and continuing to do it anyway is not the traditional goal of education, my students expressed a feeling of impotence to change longstanding assumptions and habits about Standard English. Not only undergraduate writing students feel this way, but that they do presents us most immediately with a dilemma in the language arts discipline: as a precondition of conventional economic and social success, Standard English must be made available to our students, and yet in fulfilling our pedagogical mission, we help sharpen the distinction and increase the distance between those with access to privilege and those without. Hence the need for our discipline not to ignore the power of language standards in our culture.
As teachers who deal most intimately with the analysis and production of language, we have the means to teach not only the standard language but also about language standards and language variation. An important way of studying the implications of linguistic standards, my dissertation proposes, is to examine a historical moment with unusually frequent appeals for linguistic standardization: the late-nineteenth century in the United States.
Any historical moment both shapes and is shaped by the texts it gives rise to, and a responsible inquiry into arguments about nineteenth-century linguistic practices in the U.S. requires a careful consideration of historical conditions in the late-nineteenth-century United States. These conditions included increased immigration of non-English-speaking Europeans, an emerging working-class consciousness with a set of shared linguistic practices, and the threat of upward mobility by the petite bourgeoisie, which involved the expansion of various forms of popular culture and mass media. All these movements threatened the stability of the bourgeoisie, and appeals for stable linguistic standards were equally appeals for stable class distinctions. Investigating this constellation of history, class, and language can yield a better understanding of problems such as why some dialects appear superior to others, how linguistic capital is keyed to economic and social capital, and how linguistic capital is acquired and leveraged against others’ linguistic practices to obtain distinction.
Among various texts that registered an obsession with language usage, one important discourse involved self-proclaimed usage experts who regularly offered verbal criticism in newspaper columns. This type of work insisted, much as William Safire has for the past quarter century in The New York Times, on traditional meanings and etymological accuracy of words against variations in actual usage. When collected, these columns formed surprisingly popular books like Richard Grant White’s Words and Their Uses (1870), which went through over 30 editions before the end of the century. Intended to distinguish intellectually the elite from the emerging middle class, verbal criticism eventually and paradoxically reached rising middle-class readers who wanted access to elite manners of speaking, meaning such texts pragmatically functioned as linguistic self-help manuals, encouraging both the elite and the socially anxious to attend more to language practices.
Academically, linguistics emerged as a social-scientific discipline, with professional linguists advocating against the prescriptive measures of popular grammarians and usage experts. Although linguistic scholarship established the role of linguistics as that of describing the ways speakers actually use language and provided academic authority for the tolerance of linguistic difference, such scholarship is yet another index of concern over language variation. Furthermore, such scholarship was popular. Linguists like Thomas Lounsbury and William Dwight Whitney found an audience in newspaper readers, too, and as populist newspapers began to endorse the work of verbal critics, refined newspapers increasingly embraced Lounsbury’s and Whitney’s arguments for linguistic tolerance. In other words, not to have their distinction diluted, elite audiences sought new ways of attending to linguistic variation, distinguishing themselves from a petite bourgeoisie learning to enforce a standard form of English.
Within the academy, as language arts departments began to treat literary studies as distinct from composition, writing instruction enforced existing language standards. Harvard’s Adams Sherman Hill and Barrett Wendell established what has come to be called current-traditional rhetoric, a pedagogy that asks students to reproduce various modes of discourse (for instance, exposition, narration, and persuasion). Writing in the modes means students focus on style and arrangement, which are evaluated according to their correspondence with the standard. In practice, the standard was understood as grammatical, and instructors attended largely to grammatical exactness in grading.
Meanwhile, realist novels, while striving to represent dialogue as realistically as possible, were dramatizing the ways that linguistic practices mark one’s class. William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) uses the fact that sometimes Silas’s “grammar failed him” to signal the protagonist’s (and his family’s) lack of fitness for Brahmin society in Boston. John Hay’s 1883 novel The Bread-Winners views its eponymous workers as striking not because they have legitimate demands but because they are “lazy” and “shirks,” characteristics associated with their having a “savage tone” and a substandard dialect. And toward the end of the same decade, in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), Hank Morgan’s commitment to nineteenth-century standards—both linguistic and political—drives him to a blind obsession with “reforming” Camelot; enacting his reforms, Hank finally cares only to preserve the lives of the select few not habituated to Arthurian standards but trained, instead, in the “neat modern English” taught in Hank’s schools. These novels, like all of these texts about language, capture how intricately ways of speaking are tied to class, giving voice to the linguistic anxiety circulating around them.
To this point in our scholarship, the relation between the various discourses of linguistic anxiety and class conditions in late-nineteenth-century America has gone underanalyzed. Linguistic historians have traced attitudes toward language, ranging from descriptive to prescriptive, usually across multiple centuries. Rhetoricians have considered whether studying grammar makes students better writers or debated the importance of current-traditional pedagogy and its relation to the writing process. Compositionists have suggested that students have a right to their own language—or they have vehemently denied that right. And literary critics have investigated the gender, race, and class dynamics of dialect literature. But too little scholarship has pulled together questions about language variation, class, and composition. Not asking such questions leaves us, to repeat one important consequence, with a language arts pedagogy that does not allow us to provide students with facility in the standard dialect of English without reproducing the very structures of linguistic inequality.
