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.

Proposal for SCMLA – Dallas, 2005: AMERICAN LITERATURE I

As the Union Army moves southward at the beginning of Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892), the ex-slave Robert Johnson observes “two things” about the Northerners: they “hate slavery and hate niggers.”[1] So while Northern troops bring emancipation, Southern slaves remain ambivalent about casting their lot with the North. Clearly, freedom is worth most any alignment, but slaves are entirely aware that freedom doesn’t necessarily entail equality. Or put another way, the abolition of slavery would do little to eradicate racism. This reality occasions Iola Leroy, which addresses segregation and discrimination by proxy: pondering racial uplift on the cusp of emancipation is a way of highlighting the absence of racial progress 30 years after the setting of the book. Within a decade (one marked by the emergence of Jim Crow laws), Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition would tackle the same issue in a contemporary setting. The problem with solutions offered in each of these books is that in representing reactions to racism, they contribute to the very logic of racism itself. Using Kwame Anthony Appiah’s analysis,[2] we could say these reactions were antitheses of white racialism and, thus, necessary steps toward overcoming racism. But insofar as they were racialist themselves, they stopped short of completing the dialectical process, and hence, they failed to enable the kind of progress their advocates envisioned.

So I've submitted the following to NCA for the November 15-19 conference. It's (obviously) a variation on the paper below that I read for my Early American Novel seminar.

Against the backdrop of riots in Muslim nations protesting the publication of renderings of Mohammed, we might consider Royall Tyler’s popular early American novel, The Algerine Captive (1797). Exposed to Muslim culture when captured by pirates, protagonist Updike Underhill carefully describes Islamic practices in Algiers. In a curious moment, Underhill writes, "the language of the alcoran is so ineffably pure, it can never be rendered into any other tongue." As opposed to the "miserable, vitiated translations of the christians," the scriptures of Islam remain unprofaned by remaining untranslated. This relation to text reveals fundamentalism, which Terry Eagleton describes as "a textual affair," an "attempt to render our discourse valid by backing it with the gold standard of the Word of words, seeing God as the final guarantor of meaning" (After Theory, 202-03).