Romanticism and the Rise Of English - Rilegato

Elfenbein, Andrew

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 080476025X ISBN 13: 9780804760256

Casa editrice: Stanford Univ Pr, 2008

Riassunto

Named a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2009

Romanticism and the Rise of English addresses a peculiar development in contemporary literary criticism: the disappearance of the history of the English language as a relevant topic. Elfenbein argues for a return not to older modes of criticism, but to questions about the relation between literature and language that have vanished from contemporary investigation. His book is an example of a kind of work that has often been called for but rarely realized—a social philology that takes seriously the formal and institutional forces shaping the production of English. This results not only in a history of English, but also in a recovery of major events shaping English studies as a coherent discipline. This book points to new directions in literary criticism by arguing for the need to reconceptualize authorial agency in light of a broadened understanding of linguistic history.

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Informazioni sugli autori

Andrew Elfenbein is Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, GLBT Scholar in the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, and Affiliate Faculty in the Center for Cognitive Sciences.

Andrew Elfenbein is Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, GLBT Scholar in the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, and Affiliate Faculty in the Center for Cognitive Sciences.

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ROMANTICISM AND THE RISE OF ENGLISH

By Andrew Elfenbein

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2009 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6025-6

Contents

Acknowledgments.......................................................viiIntroduction: the dust of Philology...................................1 1 Purifying English.................................................18 2 Romantic syntax...................................................45 3 Bad Englishes.....................................................73 4 Sounding Meaning..................................................108 5 Sentencing Romanticism............................................144 6 Afterlives: Philology, Elocution, Composition.....................185Afterword.............................................................216Abbreviations.........................................................221Notes.................................................................223Works Cited...........................................................239Index.................................................................265

Chapter One

1 Purifying English

Histories of English all agree, as Murray Cohen notes, that "there is more of almost everything linguistic in the second half of the eighteenth century than in the first: more grammars and more kinds of grammar, more theories of language, more sorts of questions asked about language, more dictionaries, spelling books, proposals for reordering pedagogy, and more languages taught" (Sensible Words 78). Philologists, grammarians, lexicographers, and orthoepists (codifiers of correct pronunciation) developed rules about usage that changed how English was defined, taught, analyzed, judged, and printed. While guides to English had existed for centuries, they had previously helped foreigners wanting to learn English; if people (usually foreigners) spoke "good English," the phrase meant that they were comprehensible. The eighteenth century saw the rise of books of usage for natives, which aimed to teach readers not how to speak English, but how to do it correctly. Good English was now not just comprehensible: it followed rules for right usage.

Traditional philological histories have treated this prescriptivism as a very bad thing. Hatred of prescriptivism runs deep in linguistics. The first chapter of a standard linguistics textbook, for example, insists that "all grammars are equal" and commands that "any statement of the rules and conventions for speech and writing must reflect the way language is actually used, not someone's idealized vision of how it should be used" (O'Grady et al., Contemporary Linguistics 6, 7). Since linguistics long ago renounced prescriptivism in order to enter into the academy as a respectable scientific discipline, such textbooks make sure to teach the uninitiated that prescriptivism is deluded and harmful.

Historians of English follow the general trend of linguistics by carrying back to the eighteenth century the mistrust of prescriptivism: "One cannot escape the feeling that many of them [the prescriptivists] took delight in detecting supposed flaws in the grammar of 'our most esteemed writers"' (Baugh and Cable, History of the English Language 273); "Such writers fail to see that language has to remain variable in order to be able to respond to all kinds of changes as a result of developments in technology, culture and global communication generally. To think that language could be fixed in the same way as, say, the metre or shoe sizes or video systems is an illusion" (Nevalainen and van Ostade, "Standardisation" 285). Such comments turn later linguistic historians into unwitting prescriptivists, sternly separating good from bad linguists just as earlier writers separated good from bad usage. Yet the English experts have the last laugh, since the English of later historians obeys all their rules and helps to guarantee their continued power.

The changes in English in the eighteenth century are more profound than traditional philology has admitted. These changes meant less that English became rule-bound than that the nature of what it meant to be an English-using person changed. The English experts transformed English so as to recast personal identity, intra- and inter-group bonds, and collective agency. Their work drastically expanded the potential functions and results that could be expected of actions that took place in English. Most of all, they created a new urgency and excitement surrounding practices enabled by English.

At the center of this change was print. While Britons spoke many language varieties during this period, English ruled print: no utopian upheavals were needed to create print monolingualism. For many, print meant the diffusion of liberty and civilization themselves; as Samuel Johnson told Adam Fergusson, "The mass of every people must be barbarous where there is no printing" (Boswell, Life of Johnson 477). Print changed not only the amount of English available to readers but also the link between author and audience. As Michael McKeon notes, in discussing Defoe,

Publication is represented as an act of depersonalization that abstracts both author and reader from the concrete presence of face-to-face exchange; and yet the very impersonality of the exchange imposes upon the author an unprecedented burden of personal and ethical obligation. Publication is here felt to be an act of supreme mastery ... and yet by virtue of this mastery it is also felt to entail an alienation, a loss of control over what has been said, a disowning of what henceforth remains in the possession of others. (Secret History 54)

The abstraction and depersonalization described by McKeon had a side effect: English became the assumed source of commonality between author and reader. As other sources of common ground vanished, understanding printed English was left as the chief and possibly the only bond that an author had with an audience. Instead of writing for particular readers, authors faced an amorphous general public, of whom little could be known beyond the fact that it read English. As a result, print made the stakes in a common linguistic ground higher than ever before, and the standardizers of English worked hard to make it a reality.

The English experts' works glory in the dazzle of print. J. Paul Hunter has noted that by the beginning of the eighteenth century, novelists made up for the lack of a previous connection with their readers through devices aiming to mimic orality, such as introductions, direct addresses, and appeals to common interest (Before Novels 156-61). The English experts did the opposite. Rather than masking their print status, their books showcased the art of the page. At the level of layout, they feature elaborately varied formats, with beautifully aligned lists, columns, charts, and tables. At the level of typeface, they varied fonts and the size of type to distinguish between major topics, minor topics, exceptions, and examples. New symbols appeared for intonation, emphasis, syllabification, and special notes.' Although these books rarely mention print explicitly, their visuality proved that print had revolutionized communication. English would now be defined not through speech or handwriting, but through print. Even works about spoken English would be works in print, so that the meaning of pronunciation itself needed to be redefined.

Although later historians have called the work of the English experts "prescriptivism," they thought of it as purification. George Campbell defined "pure English" in his Philosophy of Rhetoric (1-776):

Pure English then, implies three things; first, that the words be English; secondly, that their construction, under which, in our tongue, arrangement also is comprehended, be in the English idiom; thirdly, that the words and phrases be employed to express the precise meaning which custom hath affixed to them. (1:408)

Campbell singles out three components of pure English: lexis, syntax, and semantics. Controversy swirled around each. Just which words counted as English had long been a problem in English because of its heteroglot history: was "chef" French or English? Which Scottish words were English, and which were not? In terms of syntax, the "English idiom" underwent rethinking in the period since it was not clear where it was located: in a region, in a city, in a rank, or in an institution. Finally, claiming that "custom ... affixed" a meaning to a word or phrase assumed an obviousness about "custom" that was easy to invoke in the abstract but harder to use when defining specific terms.

If the details of Campbell's definition were questionable, the myth of pure English was not. The adjective "pure" exalted English into a sacred vessel, an intact virgin needing defense from gross impurities. Those who used English well became knights of romance, defending her spotless purity; those who used bad English were vile ravishers, eager to turn the virgin into a whore. At the same time, the terms in which Campbell defined purity compromise its absoluteness by suggesting that the virgin is always already a whore, since her purity depended on the vagaries of custom, not on transcendent categories. In the eighteenth century, however, rather than wrecking the mythic purity of English, this seed of impurity only increased the ardor of those defending it, since custom ended up being whatever the individual believed it to be.

Before the eighteenth century, printed English, either as a group fantasy or as a body of actual linguistic and social practices, had not served as a common ground for England, Wales, Scotland, or Ireland. I use "common ground" in the sense of the psycholinguist Herbert H. Clark: "Common ground is a form of self-awareness. Two people, Susan and Bill, are aware of certain information they each have. To be common ground, their awareness must be reflexive-it must include that very awareness itself. Ordinarily, people can justify a piece of their common ground by pointing to a shared basis for it-a joint perceptual experience or a joint action" (Using Language 120). English experts dreamed that access to print would be the "shared basis" for making pure English common ground for all Britons. Before English's standardization, linguistic common ground for educated men meant Latin and Greek, along with the entire apparatus of learning that accompanied knowledge of those languages; for members of particular language communities, the spoken vernacular, in the form of local languages ranging from Scots to Manx, was part of common ground. What was missing was a language that could, at least at the level of social myth, be common ground for all Britons.

The discourse that should have had the greatest unifying power, Protestantism, came up against the fact that not everyone in Britain was Protestant, and not all Protestants were the same. By the end of the eighteenth century, printed English had done what religion had not. Protestantism had for centuries celebrated the vernacular, and by the end of the eighteenth century, the vernacular, as remade by print, took over for Protestantism: pure English has never lost the glow of sanctity that it earned as an unrecognized supplement to, or even replacement for, God. It had become an attainable ideal of commonality supposedly open to all Britons, unlike Protestantism. If they shared nothing else, Dissenters, Catholics, Anglicans, Jews, and atheists could all aspire to pure English. As such, it became what Benedict Anderson calls a national "print-language," allowing those "who might find it difficult or even impossible to understand one another in conversation" to become "capable of comprehending one another via print and paper" (Imagined Communities 47). Print alone did not create national consciousness: printed Latin and Greek, for example, had long fostered not national consciousness but a pan-European scholarly community. Yet eighteenth-century English experts worked hard to link pure English to Britishness.

This was not as easy a task as it might have seemed, largely because of the peculiar uncertainty around just what Britain was. Rather than being a secure site of identity, Britain was an unstable political image, made up of regions with independent and messy pasts. Its monarch led a German principality, and it was subject to some spectacular internal divisions, as in the American War of Independence and the 1798 Irish rebellion. The place of Britain in the larger world was unclear: it was both a nation unto itself, a nation tied to its European allies (as the Napoleonic wars proved), and a nation whose rising colonial power rendered old geographical limits obsolete.

As Linda Colley has noted, this uncertainty meant that "active commitment to Great Britain was not, could not be a given. It had to be learnt; and men and women needed to see some advantage in learning it" (Britons 295). Pure English as a national print language fostered an influential version of Great Britain: a unity of England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and numerous colonial possessions, in which England, especially London, was first among unequals. Using pure English would supposedly allow the peoples of England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and the colonies to participate in the mystic dominion of London, even if they lived and worked far from it, and even if other aspects of their identities had nothing to do with it.

In 1762, Thomas Sheridan dreamed of a Britain transformed by pronunciation:

An uniformity of pronunciation throughout Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, as well as through the several counties of England, would be a point much to be wished; as it might in a great measure contribute to destroy those odious distinctions between subjects of the same king, and members of the same community, which are ever attended with ill consequences, and which are chiefly kept alive by difference of pronunciation, and dialects. (Course of Lectures 206)

For Sheridan, "pronunciation, and dialects," more than any other factors, alienated people from each other, and he hoped that a standard would let the English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish learn that they were really "members of the same community." One might have imagined that religion or economic disparity, for example, would be far greater roadblocks to unity than linguistic differences, but Sheridan singled out pronunciation. There was an obvious reason for his focus: of all modes of creating national unity, print English seemed the most achievable. The infrastructure needed for such purification, including a functioning public sphere, a book trade that reached throughout Great Britain, a widespread, if uneven, system of education, and a commitment to the liberty of the press, made Sheridan's vision seem not like utopianism but a practical goal.

As Charles Jones notes, "by the 1780s and 1790s, it is difficult to find writers dealing with pronunciation characteristics who do not address them in a judgmental, prescribing or attitudinal fashion" (English Pronunciation 117). Blunt appeals to national unity accompanied this prescriptivism, and by the time of John Walker's Critical Pronouncing Dictionary (1791), the most influential work on English pronunciation ever written, the projection of bad English onto the Scottish, Irish, and working-class Londoners had become entrenched. Walker included in his prefatory material detailed "rules to be observed by the Natives of Ireland in order to obtain a just Pronunciation of English," "rules to be observed by the Natives of Scotland in order to obtain a just Pronunciation of English," and a list of the faults of "my Countrymen, the Cockneys." For Walker, London English ruled supreme: "Though the pronunciation of London is certainly erroneous in many words, yet ... it is undoubtedly the best" (CPD ix, xi, xii, xiii).

For the English experts, national linguistic unity predicted imperial greatness: "Do not the Arts and Sciences in every Kingdom participate to a great Degree the Fate of its Language? ... How dear then ought the Honour of the English Language to be to every Briton! And how regarded but with an Esteem equal to, and becoming the Glory of our Arms?" The author, James Buchanan, makes explicit the military analogy behind the purification of English: Britons should be as proud of pure English as of the finest artillery or battleships of the day. Inspired by his theme, Buchanan quotes from Nahum Tate's "Upon this Noble Design of an English Education":

Hark! Honour calls my Sons to new Alarms, To grow in Arts victorious, as in Arms, Our Language to advance, and prove our Words No less design'd for Conquest than our Swords! (British Grammar xxxiv)

For Buchanan and Tate, English "Words" rhyme with British "Swords." Britain's imperial might needed English, and, although the rhyme was imperfect, this claim was not empty rhetoric. British military power required prolific soldier-writers who penned reports, sent intelligence, and maintained a broad correspondence. At the most basic level of military operations, good soldiers needed good English.

While English's purification had been in progress long before the Romantic period, the Napoleonic wars gave it new urgency. More than ever before, pure English became not only a symbol for national pride but a critical aspect of a wartime communications. To use bad English was not simply to offend against rules: it was a kind of political treason, an offense against the nation. In Belinda (1801) by Maria Edgeworth (daughter of an Irish landowner), for example, Harriot Freke, dangerous supporter of French ideas, speaks markedly sloppy English: "And how d'ye go on here, poor child? ... I hope you're of my way o' thinking ... Now we talk o'looks" (204). The virtuous Belinda, in contrast, speaks in perfectly composed, almost exaggeratedly formal sentences: "Is it possible, sir ... that you should suspect me of such wretched hypocrisy, as to affect to admire what I am incapable of feeling?" (215). In Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813), a woman capable of saying "Kitty and me were to spend the day there" (244) is dangerous enough to be able, a few pages later, to threaten the unit cohesion of British military operations.

(Continues...)

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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Stanford Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2008
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 080476025X
• ISBN 13: 9780804760256
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 278
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile