I believe, as others do, that one of the most important functions of literature is the expansion of the reader’s life experience. I believe literature has the power to help readers transcend their own existence by allowing them to live the realities of people outside their own immediate culture. Additionally, literature is a means of cultural definition. It offers readers an opportunity to learn about and affirm their own identities – their own specific place in a wider cultural identity.
Literature offers the teacher opportunities to recognize that which is too often marginalized or excluded altogether. Students can (and should) be introduced to texts that reflect not only their own lives, cultural environments, and realities, but also those of others in the diverse culture of the world. Students can do little but benefit from active participation in analyses of literature – engaging with, reflecting, questioning, and criticizing texts using their own backgrounds and experiences as a position for comparison.
The language of American literature has changed over time. Humorists of the 1830s and 1840s expressed a more “American” alternative to the dominant British style of writing. Dialect use in literature began to appear in parts of Georgia, the Carolinas, Mississippi, and Arkansas as “Old Southwestern” humor. After the Civil War, use of the vernacular became very popular in American literature. All dialects, however, were not met with acceptance. Mass immigration and increasing urbanization in America at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries brought together diverse populations and a lot of linguistic variation in confined spaces. Language was increasingly regarded as the foundation of national identity and a barometer of cultural health. People began to claim that language policies should be implemented to protect the English (the American) language from linguistic contamination. Evidently, modern scholars, much like the alarmists of the turn of the century, express a tendency to ignore literary representations of what are called “ethnic dialects.” Put off by the possibility that such literature creates prejudice and supports stereotypes, critics often avoid close readings of these works, particularly if the works are written by writers perceived as “outside” of the dialect group (Mark Twain’s use of dialect in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been much maligned). Critics assume, unfairly, I think, that use of dialect as a literary device implies derogatory if not racist intentions.
Use of dialect – stylized versions of ethnic speech – in literature does carry with it a stigma of inferiority, coarseness, even vulgarity since it has been used in the past and present with humorous (not necessarily good-natured) intentions. Humor, particularly anything considered ethnic humor, is often seen as an act of aggression, so dialect humor is often seen as a reflection of the author’s disdain for what he sees as crude, inferior speakers of a crude, inferior dialect. And, since it is common outside of literary criticism to consider deviant forms of English to be inferior, the users of those forms are considered inferior. But, as Charles Abbott said over one hundred years ago, “crudity of diction is not always indicative of crudity of thought.” Linguists have insisted for a long time that speech varieties are not better or worse than each other, just different.
