On -ists and -isms

       

            I think I’ve always taken a rather defensive stance in response to literary criticism. My experience in the past  with literary criticism and theory has not been an intellectual environment in which I’ve felt comfortable. More often than not, it seems, the critics or theorists that I read have attempted to instruct me on what a story, or a character, or a setting means, represents, or communicates to the reader (me), but I often see something else entirely. I guess I’m tired of being told how I should read something by another reader who has formulated generalizations based on his or her own biased perspective. I’m not, usually, convinced by evidence carefully chosen (cherry-picked, to borrow a currently fashionable political cliché) to support a Marxist, feminist, or whatever-ist agenda.

            I’ve learned a number of things from my defensive position. Since my instruction in English Studies has occurred at a time which seems to have been dominated by voices categorizing themselves as one –ism or another (sometimes a combination), I have observed that critics and theorists sift carefully through the literature they study to find proofs of their theory within the text. From what I’ve read, these proofs are rarely iron-clad. From this I’ve learned that contradictory evidence may be conveniently ignored and, if one looks hard enough, any platform, any agenda, can be supported by virtually any text if one is clever enough with discovery.

            The idea that literature is a cipher that contains messages in secret code to be decoded by a clever –ist who knows how to correctly decode the messages has always seemed like bullshit to me, not to mention a bit like elitism. Am I to understand that authors hide clues within their works with the intention of handing that work over to the critics who then explain it to us readers?

I’ve never been comfortable with this chain of evidence.

I think meaning (whatever meaning means) is sometimes far less important within a text than an –ist may want to admit and sometimes these meanings or messages, if they exist, are so complicated, so convoluted, that they leave a lot up for grabs. And, the –ists rush in and grab what they’re looking for.

I am not trying to say that –ists are always completely off base, but I think that they are often overzealous in their pursuit of literary meanings, or truths, or proofs. They are too often too desirous of claiming an era, author, or text as the property of their –ism. I am wary of the generalizations within an –ist argument created (because they are more often created than found) in an effort to justify an –ist perspective.

        Therefore, I was pleasantly surprised to find that there is at least one theorist who empathizes with my stance. By the time I got to the end of Erin O’Connor’s essay “Preface for a Post-Postcolonial Criticism,” I wanted to stand and applaud. I would love to see more of a criticism that does not equate “knowing with containing, classifying, and controlling” but honors “the sheer complexity of literature, of history, and of the uncertain, shifting relationship between the two.” Like O’Connor, I think we, as readers and critics of literature, should follow the lead of the material and not a map provided by an –ism. That would “be genuine scholarship rather than clever partisanship, honest inquiry rather than advocacy masquerading as inquiry.”

Amen.

Dialect Literature

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.