William Rodney Herring

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.

Steven Mailloux. Rhetorical Power. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989.

I’ve taken to describing my project as asking the following question: when we look at realist and naturalist novels that are aware of the importance of grammar in class mobility, what rhetorical power do these novels have? It sounds catchy (I think), and it anchors my project in a rhetorico-literary tradition, but it certainly shouldn’t be modeled on Mailloux’s book, as the latter is not so much invested in describing or exhibiting rhetorical power as it is in providing rationale (among rhetoricians as well as literary scholars) for rhetorical contributions to discussions about novels and about the discipline of literary studies. And yet this last, insofar as it provides a rationalized methodology, is precisely what is useful about Mailloux’s work, as well as the explanatory potential of its terms like “rhetorical hermeneutics” and “reception history.”

Mailloux’s first section (comprising two chapters) articulates his rationale of a rhetorical theory (not to say Theory), by describing the first of these terms, and historicizes three twentieth century disciplinary formations (philology, formalist New Criticism, and reader-response criticism); this historicization occurs under a rhetorical aegis because “rhetorical hermeneutics” involves “theory and rhetorical histories” (18). With particular reference to a literary disciplinary genealogy, we must see that (and how) each new iteration of theoretical approach to reading was not only a response to what came before, but also to particular political contexts outside the discipline itself.

James Aune. Rhetoric and Marxism. Boulder: Westview, 1994.

In the United States, of all countries, no party could intelligently expect to carry its point without first winning over to its ideas a majority of the nation...
* * *
It was not till a rearrangement of the industrial and social system on a higher ethical basis, and for the more efficient production of wealth, was recognized as the interest, not of one class, but equally of all classes, of rich and poor, cultured and ignorant, old and young, weak and strong, men and women, that there was any prospect that it would be achieved. (Looking Backward: 2000-1887, 193)

Although there's something bizarre about opening one's writing by citing one work and immediately quoting from another, there's a strange appropriateness to doing so in this post. Jim Aune's claim in Rhetoric and Marxism is that if we try to identify Marxism's own "nuclear contradiction" (Aune takes the term from Alvin Gouldner), we can see the absence of rhetoric – its understanding of audience, appeals, and persuasion – as the fundamental cause. This isn't a surprising absence, given Marxism's emergence in an antirhetorical historical moment, but its result was "an implicit theory of language and communication that was an unstable mixture of romantic expressionism and a positivist dream of perfectly transparent communication" (143). And thus if we want to learn something about Marxism's failures (note that the book is haunted by the events of 1989), we need to take note of its lacunae, specifically its traditional refusal to adequately theorize mediation. The problem of alienation thoroughly troubles Marxist theory – consider workers' separation from the product of their labor, the human alienation from her species being, the very denial of the centrality of this "humanist" element in the division between the early and late Marx (or between Marxism and Humanism), the gap between theory and praxis, and what Aune cleverly terms the contradiction between "struggle and structure" (i.e., where's the place for agency if history is more or less determined?). Mediation is thus the need – and rhetoric just the remedy.

Dana Anderson. "Questioning the Motives of Habituated Action: Burke and Bourdieu on Practice." Philosophy and Rhetoric. 37:3 (2004). 255-74.

How does one account for unconscious action in Burkean dramatism? Given that Kenneth Burke's humanism—he defines humans as "the symbol-using animal"—draws a sharp distinction between action and motion ("things move, persons act"), how do we begin to describe motive when actions effect unintended purposes?

These are precisely the questions that drive Dana Anderson to Pierre Bourdieu in search of an explanation for habituated action. In fact, Anderson shows that for Burke actions don't really have to be conscious to be analyzable—they simply have to be purposive. In other words, what we want to know is how we can wrest purpose from the agent’s ability to anticipate the outcome of her act.

But what is meant by purpose is nearly as unclear in Anderson’s article as it is in Burke (take A Grammar of Motives, for instance, wherein Burke lumps agency and purpose together—unlike his separate discussions of scene, agent, and act—a peculiar grouping, given that agency and purpose basically equate to means and ends). By purpose, do we mean intended effects (as in when something is done “on purpose”)? Or do we mean simply results (as in when something is done “to no purpose”)? If we mean the former, then clearly intention or consciousness is at issue. And if we mean the latter, we might instead need to distinguish between unintended, unforeseeable, and counter-intentional consequences. Anderson does not attend to this ambiguity of purpose. However, instead of seeing this non-attendance as (merely) a blind spot in Anderson’s essay, I think we should see it as an untapped potential.

Wai Chee Dimock. "Class, Gender, and a History of Metonymy." Rethinking Class: Literary Studies and Social Formations. Ed. Wai Chee Dimock and Michael T. Gilmore. New York: Columbia UP: 1994.

Dimock begins by historicizing Marx's "epistemology": deeming it tinged by an Enlightenment faith in metonymy, in the belief that if we can know a part, we can generalize to the whole. Thus, Marx's materialism draws on that posited by Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke, meaning it enjoys "epistemological certitude" because the material is perceptibly verifiable. What Marx really had was "corporealism," which explains why society or community was for him like a body whose members were like parts serving a specified purpose for the whole.

I hesitate at this point because it isn't clear to me that by calling the community a "body," Marx is being metonymical rather than metaphorical. Nor is it clear to me that my distinction matters, except that generalizability is not at issue in metaphor as Dimock demonstrates it to be in metonymy.

In any case, if the social is a generalized extrapolation from what could be known about the individual body (and if Dimock's right, she catches Marx(ism)'s flip side of liberal individualism's coin) and, thus, the social is a body with corresponding parts, classes are essentially identities because they are merely names for characteristics "in" the bodies of their members. Dimock sees, in this preposition, traces of metonymical thinking, and thus the historical contingency of Marx's theorization of classes.

Walter Benn Michaels, "Plots Against America: Neoliberalism and Antiracism." American Literary History. Summer 2006. 288-302.

Michaels continues his project, begun in The Shape of the Signifier, not of pointing out the incoherency of identity-based antiracism (that was Our America) but of observing the "political attractiveness" of "our commitment to the primacy of the subject position" (300), a commitment very much in the service of (neo)liberal capitalism. The texts which open up his critique are Philip Roth's Plot Against America and Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition, both of which are antiracist statements, but the difference between which is that the former (for Michaels) exaggerates American anti-Semitism at a time when antiracism is the (public) norm, whereas the latter "was, in its time, not only a brave gesture, but a critical and commercial failure" (295-96).

Mary Poovey, "The Social Constitution of 'Class': Toward a History of Classificatory Thinking." Rethinking Class: Literary Studies and Social Formations. Ed. Wai Chee Dimock and Michael T. Gilmore. New York: Columbia UP: 1994.

Mary Poovey's oft-cited article traces the history of the concept we now denote by the term "class," but it's more than a simple genealogy of the term; it's a historicization of the term by way of examining the available epistemologies that gave rise to "classificatory thinking." Her description of this "awkward phrase" is telling:

By "classificatory thinking" I mean to designate an epistemology that was gradually consolidated in the late seventeenth century and elaborated during the course of the next two centuries alongside, and in complex relationship to, the development of the material conditions we generally associate with "class." Classificatory thinking combined tow modes of understanding the natural and social worlds. The first, which dates back to Aristotle and finds its characteristic modern form in taxonomy, makes sense of the discrete particulars of the world by grouping them into categories (or classes) that foreground and isolate a single feature or group of features as definitive. The second, whose origin is probably equally ancient, conceptualizes "value" in terms of features that can be quantified, then commodified. When these two modes of understanding were brought together under the particular conditions of seventeenth-century England, they provided the terms for some of the characteristic concepts of modern Western societies—including the notions that quantity is more important than quality and that some kinds of activities are more "productive" (hence both more valuable and significant) than others. (16)

O'Hara, Daniel T. "Class," Critical Terms for Literary Study. Ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.

This morning, I finally got around to reading Daniel O'Hara's contribution to this useful collection. O'Hara wants to offer two (or one-and-one-half) interventions in the ongoing discussion about class as an object of literary-critical studies. First, he thoughtfully suggests we analyze our own class positions as academics—that is, the classes within our field, as well as our field's relation to other classes. O'Hara's gesture of turning a critical eye back on ourselves isn't unique (Phil Barrish finishes his first book, American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, 1880-1995, by applying the Bourdieuean mode of analysis, which he supplements throughout, to representative literary-critical discourse of the 20th century; hence, the "-1995"). But O'Hara's analysis does produce some interesting results, such as an explanation of why fads of critical models reproduce themselves—in bad faith since they operate to the detriment of the vast number of graduate students: