William Rodney Herring

I am a doctoral candidate in the University of Texas's Department of English and an assistant instructor both in the Department of English and in the Department of Rhetoric & Writing.

My dissertation analyzes late-nineteenth-century American obsession with grammar and linguistic standardization—an obsession revealed in the proliferating publication of verbal criticism and linguistic self-help manuals, the popularity of realist novels that dramatize the ways that linguistic practices mark one's class, and, I will argue, the emergence of current-traditional rhetoric because, due to its inattention to invention, it rewards students who possess the greatest store of cultural and linguistic capital. The obsession, finally, registers a reaction against both an emerging working-class consciousness (with its developing set of shared linguistic practices) and the threat of upward mobility by the petite bourgeoisie. Only through a careful examination of the specific set of historical conditions of the late-nineteenth-century U.S. can we move toward a responsible understanding of that moment's linguistic anxiety and all its complexity.

My primary readings comprise:
1. works of verbal critics, the more or less amateur and pedantic linguistic authorities such as Richard Grant White, Edward Gould, and Alfred Ayers, the first two of whom regularly wrote for the New York Evening Post while William Cullen Bryant was its editor;
2. work in the newly forming discipline of linguistics by people like Thomas Lounsbury and William Dwight Whitney;
3. novels overtly about language and class, such as several by William Dean Howells (The Rise of Silas Lapham, The Minister's Charge) and Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, as well as novels about labor (John Hay's The Bread-Winners, Howells's Annie Kilburn, Mary Wilkins Freeman's The Portion of Labor);
4. works of composition pedagogy by Adams Sherman Hill and other current-traditionalists, as well as those by Fred Newton Scott.

<!-- Old content: construction of the self, the individual, and ideas of identity through rhetoric, and I'm especially interested in how 19th Century American literature contributed to the formation of a cult of autonomy, as well as how the consequent view of the identity enabled a politics based on the discrete individual.

In other words, what's the connection between how we come to understand what constitutes a person (who s/he is, what h/er essential person-ness is) and the different ways we find to (mis)treat people (enslave them, impoverish and exploit them, ignore them and their privation, expect them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps)? -->