William Rodney Herring

Now I know which dissertation chapter to write next. (Perhaps too ambitious) abstract follows:

Toward a Responsible Pedagogy: Linguistic Standardization and the Erasure of Language, 1878-2007

When it comes to speakers of different dialects, can “rhetorical pedagogies,” as this year’s CFP asks, “promote understanding and identification?” This paper suggests that the answer is yes only if we resist “the erasure of language” from the composition classroom, as Susan Peck MacDonald’s June CCC article of that title urges (though it traces the very process of erasure since the 1970s). Instead of ignoring language, our instruction in composition should provide our students with metalinguistic awareness—teaching, for instance, about grammatical choices.

In support of such a pedagogy, this paper looks back, proposing that we reinvestigate late-nineteenth-century grammar and rhetoric textbooks. The period was unusually concerned with dialect and grammatical deviance—as literature, newspapers, and the furious publication of both linguistic self-help and grammatical criticism books all attest. Scholars have traced to roughly this moment (Adams Sherman Hill’s Principles of Rhetoric appeared in 1878) the current-traditional rhetoric—which Sharon Crowley has critiqued for “its theoretical backwardness and its pedagogical limitations.” But this paper will argue that current-traditional’s pedagogical limitations, by ignoring the process of composition and remaining inattentive to language itself, effectively rewarded possessors of linguistic capital, legitimating their existing linguistic practices and hence enhancing their value on various markets (occupational, social, and economic). If the current-traditional pedagogy thus salved the linguistic anxiety expressed by the culturally refined in the nineteenth century, then its conservative thrust has remained underanalyzed.

We're studying the 1996-97 Ebonics controversy in RHE 310 right now. I asked students to read, initially, articles from the Washington Times and New York Times reporting the Oakland School Board's adoption of the Ebonics resolution and, then, the original resolution itself (as well as the amended resolution and the Linguistics Society of America's Resolution on the Oakland "Ebonics" Issue).

I asked my students to rhetorically analyze and respond to the reports in both Timeses. Many of their posts on our blog argued that, while we may justifiably concede that Ebonics is linguistically legitimate, we need to recognize that Standard English is required for success—and for circulating in middle-class America. Of course, I would suggest that this conclusion skips a step—and hence, misses the most crucial point. We should instead ask another question: should Standard English be required for success?

Of course, the other question we should ask—have asked, and answered—is what "the standard" looks like; and yet, even after concluding that we can't really say, except that it looks much like the language I use, whoever I am, students—and others—can't abandon the idea of the standard. I say others because in my dissertation writing group yesterday, readers of a conference paper I'm presenting in a few weeks asked whether my critique of a standard meant I wouldn't correct students' "mis-use." (While I wouldn't "correct" them for unconventional usage, I would make a rhetorical point about how they might expect their audiences to respond to a violation of convention.) Why is this always the reaction people have to challenges to the standard? I would suggest it has everything to do with imagining the standard as unchangeable, as too powerfully entrenched to be modified. Isn't this defeatist thinking at its worst? The equivalent to thinking one's vote in the presidential election doesn't matter? Of course, it doesn't, in either case, except that the aggregation of such attitudes does--and doing nothing effectively reproduces the status quo (in both cases).

Reading Jim Berlin’s monograph on nineteenth-century composition pedagogy (Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges), I recognized one of the struggles I’ve been having with my dissertation—with, that is, the point of it all. Berlin notes that as current-traditional rhetoric took root in the 1880s and 90s, figurative language, which had (almost) always been part of rhetorical analysis, fell less under scrutiny in rhetoric and more under the domain of literature departments—or the growing literary impulse in language departments. Rhetoricians and composition instructors were left, if they wanted to analyze language, with attending to grammar and usage. At the same time, the rise of the elective system nearly abolished the demand for classical languages, long the claim of distinction for the educated class. What replaced this mark of distinction was consistent and standard usage of the prestige dialect (72). And as the importance of prestigious usage filtered into composition textbooks, authors began to prescribe grammatical rules with the “conviction of the scientist, unconscious that they are reporting a class bias, not a physical law” (73).

It’s the degree of consciousness that’s tripping me up. As I explain my dissertation to non-specialists, the standard’s source in class bias is really news; it may even need evidence. But for my dissertation, they’re not my audience. And my audience more or less knows that grammatical standards are largely class markers. Of course, it’s not like non-specialists aren’t influential in manifesting attitudes and passing judgments that participate in exclusion, etc. It’s not even the case that such attitudes and judgments aren’t informed by what these non-specialists have learned in school. Thus, such people operate under the classical (“false conscious”) definition of ideology: “they do not know it, but they are doing it” (as Marx writes in Capital). But since it is the case that language teachers—at least those in the conversations I’d like to enter—know about their responsibilities to dismantle such attitudes and judgments, we would expect the effects of such attitudes and judgments to die out. And yet they aren’t—and if complaints about who can and can’t put a sentence together are any indication, neither is students’ grammar successfully being standardized. So what gives?

[For the William Dean Howells Society at the 2007 American Literature Association Conference. Also, it may help to know that Elsa Nettels was moderating the panel.]

As the Coreys adjust to the knowledge that their son loves Penelope Lapham, Bromfield asks, “what have I done nothing for, all my life, and lived as a gentleman should, upon the earnings of somebody else, in the possession of every polite taste and feeling that adorns leisure, if I’m to come to this at last?” (268). The “this” to which Bromfield Corey has at last descended, of course, is the marriage of his aristocratic family to the nouveau riche Laphams. And Corey’s lament here offers important grounds of distinction between the Coreys and the Laphams: whereas all his life, he has “done nothing,” Silas has worked hard—has done something. Indeed, this distinction isn’t unimportant in the values of the characters. When Corey pays a visit to Colonel Lapham’s office, Lapham by way of praising Tom tells his father: “His going through college won’t hurt him,—he’ll soon slough all that off,—and his bringing up won’t; don’t be anxious about it. I noticed in the army that some of the fellows that had the most go-ahead were fellows that hadn’t ever had much more to do than girls before the war broke out. Your son will get along” (142). So clearly, the difference between the Coreys and the Laphams is predicated upon the distinction between doing nothing and doing something—or, since doing nothing, insofar as it can be thought of as in some sense affirmative, means manifesting leisure: the difference between just being and doing. Certainly, Old Corey’s occupation reinforces this distinction: since “he had plenty of money…It was absurd for him to paint portraits for pay, and ridiculous to paint them for nothing; so he did not paint them at all” (70). In other words, to the extent that Bromfield Corey has an occupation, he is a painter, but one who doesn’t paint.

Greg wrote me the other day about "corporate grammar." Happily, he'd found "the iron-clad grammatical rules for talking about registered trademarks"! The "authority" in this case is Adobe, specifically the company's injunctions about Photoshop--prohibitions against verbing the title, abbreviating the title, or even using it in its possessive form.

Interestingly, a commenter (Prairieman) on Plastic's sidebar takes Adobe as a legitimate authority, even while noting how usage will always exceed prescriptions:

Read and have a chuckle. I mean, it is a really nice thought guys, but I think it is a little late to change the linguistic habits of the American people. Kind of like you're never supposed to say "ain't".

But the best thing about it is Adobe's rationale:

By following the below guidelines, you can help Adobe protect the Photoshop brand name.

Would that all claims to "proper usage" were so brazenly upfront about their interests.

Took my Three Area Exam yesterday, and I opened with the following statement, which plays off a column my friend Greg sent me on Sunday.

I want to begin by talking about a recent event, which is relevant to my topic, and which connects my dissertation to a larger political interest.

Last Wednesday, January 31, Joseph Biden, announced his presidential candidacy and immediately hit a hurdle when he called Barack Obama "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy."

Now, of course he apologized when he discovered he had unintentionally offended the black community. But it’s not clear he knew what he was apologizing for: for instance, he explained to Jon Stewart later in the week that he was trying to compliment Obama.

So in last Sunday’s New York Times, Lynette Clemetson explained the offense for him and for anyone who didn’t get it in her column “The Racial Politics of Speaking Well.” One line summarizes her argument:

When whites use the word [articulate] in reference to blacks, it often carries a subtext of amazement, even bewilderment.

While I don’t know that it’s “amazement” that characterizes such remarks about articulacy—and I hope it isn’t “bewilderment”—I think it certainly signals an encounter with the unexpected. Which is to say, being articulate is only remarkable if one doesn’t expect it from a person.

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.

My dissertation concerns a moment of intense anxiety about Standard English, the late nineteenth century in the United States, when popular, scholarly, and literary writers worried over the possibility that people with social pretensions could, by manipulating their language, masquerade as something they weren’t—that is, pass for a new and better class. Many of these writers found ways to dismiss such people by judging them to have bad grammar. Commentary on grammar, however, had paradoxical consequences: on the one hand, arguments for grammatical correctness revealed the secrets of speaking well to the emerging middle-class readers from whom such secrets were meant to distinguish the elite; on the other hand, texts supporting the tolerance of linguistic pluralism eventually informed the attitude elite readers used to distinguish themselves from the intolerant middle class. I argue for seeking the grounds of this paradox—or more accurately, double paradox—in social contradictions, such as the requirement that some people have “bad grammar” if others are to possess distinguished manners of speaking.

Dennis E. Baron. Grammar and Good Taste. New Haven: Yale UP, 1983.

In Grammar and Good Taste, Baron treads little new ground. In fact, he repeats some of the same examples and makes some of the same observations as Edward Finegan in Attitudes Toward English Usage. Both books helped me tremendously in my search for primary 19th Century sources and in reviewing some of those sources. However, both Baron’s and Finegan’s projects amount to histories of ideas (in grammatical criticism). They treat everything from spelling reformation movements to linguistic treatises to grammar textbooks to usage and pronunciation manuals. In other words, they both paint with fairly broad strokes, and that’s okay for their purposes: in Baron’s case, it’s examining “the history of language planning and reform in America” (3).

Aside from describing the major works of linguistic criticism in the 18th and 19th Centuries—primarily in the English speaking world—Baron notices two major publication trends. First and expectedly, there’s the school of thought that suggests a little (or lot) more education will save American usage from slipping into a unrespectable state of chaos (chapter 8). Grammarians such as Lindley Murray, Samuel Kirkham, Goold Brown, George Washington Moon, and Edward Gould all paid some lip service to usage as a guide to acceptable forms of speech, but in the end, each of these men favored some set of traditional rules, whether derived from etymology, from analogy between English and another language, or inferred from rules of logic. Hence, they could only reason that speakers had better learn etymology, the principles of other languages, or the rules each of these men offered—that is, speakers had better study these authors’ grammars—if they wanted to speak properly and avoid dragging the English language down into barbarism. Gould, especially, blamed the “partially-educated” (197), those aware enough of their ignorance to be linguistically insecure, but also aware enough of possibilities around them to try (and fail) at unfamiliar constructions. On particulars, many of these men disagreed, but on the whole, they reflect what might be called the intellectual crowd of grammar.

I'm reading Dennis Baron's Grammar and Good Taste, and I've encountered two fascinating insults that maintain currency even in present-day arguments about language usage--and other controversies. The two are unrelated--occurring six years apart and reported by an American and a Brit not in dialogue with one another.

First, in 1822, Charles Henry Wilson reveals the resistance he receives when complaining about American usage of English; he's told, "It's a good country, and let those who don't like it, leave it" (qtd at 31).

Second, James Fenimore Cooper criticizes the southern drawl, noting that "In Georgia, you find a positive drawl, among what are called the 'crackers'" (qtd at 26). "Positive," here, isn't praise.

This is noteworthy, in part, because of a recent conversation about ways academics insist that you can't be offended by the epithet "cracker."

But of course I'm also attuned to the ways that the latter of these insults is obviously connected with class(ism), while the former is certainly a reaction by those made to feel that their habits are ones of inferior taste. But what else connects these two insults? Also, is it clear that "love it or leave it" is always—or presently—a class-based reaction?

The Business of Marriage in The Rise of Silas Lapham

In a novel so intimately about, in small but intense moments,[1] true love's importance over the preservation of social status (from the Coreys' perspective) or self-sacrifice (which Penelope and periodically her mother and father seem committed to make), it's odd that romantic union is permitted to be figured under the trope of "business." As Silas instructs Penelope, when he first invites Corey over after the latter has revealed his love for Penelope, "Recollect that it's my business, and your mother's business, as well as yours, and we're going to have our say."[2] And if there's one thing the Coreys share with the Laphams, it's this metaphor for marriage (even if they take the opposite position): discovering the confusion everyone has over Irene and Penelope, Mrs. Corey says, "I could almost wish the right one, as you call her, would reject Tom. I dislike her so much," to which Bromfield Corey responds, "Ah, now you're talking business, Anna" (268). Is this why when the marriage finally happens, since Silas has lost his business, it is merely enervated denouement?