Open post on wikis

The purpose of this post is to provide a place for your questions, comments, and tips to your classmates on how to put your wiki pages together. I'll quickly take the opportunity to point you to this page on world English dialects.

Have a good break, everyone!
Prof. B

Structuralism and its discontents

Hi, everyone. I'm going to post my lecture notes from Thursday's rather (a-HEM) sparsely attended class. The I'll post a wiki discussion entry. I'll give a link that I've run across for dialects, and you all can comment and give each other tips as you figure things out.

Lecture:

I. Principles and history of structuralism

• Founded by Ferdinand de Saussure in 1913-1915, but not translated into English until the 50s
• Structuralism looks at the larger principles of human patterning and thought.
• Structural linguistics examines the meanings of words in relation to each other, not historically over time. It only cares about what features make up the “deep structure” of the language rather than the historical accidents of its words.
• Language is a major structuring tool for human beings, which means that it influences the way they see the world. Words are not just transparent references to real thing, but are tied to our perception of these things. Since we only know by perception, and languages influence that, we only “know” things through language. Our knowledge is often shaped by separating concepts into “binaries” which are seen as antithetical to each other (day/night, evil/good, right/left).

II. Benjamin Whorf and the Eskimos

• One example that has been classically given for this is the Eskimo Snow Vocabulary. Basically, the claim goes, “Eskimos” have hundreds of words for snow in order to let them structure their notion of the environment. The example was made famous in the writings of Benjamin Whorf, and is called the “Sapir-Whorf” hypothesis.

• However, this one has been busted. The Inuit (now the preferred term for the indigenous people of Greenland and other northern territories) don’t really have many more words (ie, individual roots) for snow than English!
• Does this bust the S-W hypothesis? This is actually not a valid question. First off, it isn’t really a “hypothesis” in the sense that scientists and most people use that term. It’s more an ideology, a set of underlying philosophical notions that Whorf was trying to clarify in his writing. As such, (as one commentator memorably noted) it can no more be proven or disproven than Buddism or Polish drinking customs.
• And Inuit words do hint at a different structure of thought from English: for instance, they differentiate snow in the air and snow on the ground more sharply than we seem to.
• Despite the whole furor over Inuit vocabulary, which served as a pretty big distraction, most modern theorists of language do assume that vocabulary has some shaping effect on perception. It accustoms us to thinking in certain ways

III. Feminists and language

• For instance, language can reinforce notions about empowered and disenfranchised groups, if it posits one as “normal” and the other (binary) opposite as “other”
• If “men” is normal (and the use of the word to encompass human experience suggests that it is), then anyone who does not fit the category of “men” is not-normal and inferior.
• One linguistic example that I’ve noticed the (fortunately dated) use of co-ed to mean female students. If co-educational means men and women, then why are co-eds only female? The use of the word suggests that “students,” the “normal” category, is male and female students are “co-ed”—different.
• The sort of sloppy thinking that such terminology invites has lead to sloppy thinking in research, such as:

1. Heart attack symptoms. The “classic” symptoms that (until recently) everyone was taught to identify are typically male. No one bothered to research heart attacks in women to notice that they have a much lower instance of chest pain. If men are “normal,” then only the normal people need to be studied for a representative sample. Heart disease remains the number-one cause of death in women, at least in part because it is often not identified in time.

2. Car air bags. All the crash-test dummies in the first few generations were “average” humans—ie, adult males. No one tested shorter dummies, because no one thought about women drivers. Turned out the airbags could decapitate shorter drivers. This hadn’t been tested.

IV. Post-structuralism

• Structuralism posited that words (signs) don’t refer to actual objects in the world, but to our mental construction of the objects, which is influenced by the words themselves
• Deconstruction goes further—words only refer to other words. We only understand a word by relating it to other words to which it is related or opposed to.
• So there is no actual “meaning” for a word. Meaning is “deferred” by the endless chain of signifiers that it relates to, and what passes for meaning is only the “difference” between it and other words. Derrida called this “différance", combining the French words for differ and defer.
• So we have no understanding of the “real world,” only of language—and we have no real understanding of any words, either.
• Because all our understandings of words is bound to what they aren’t, all of the binaries that Saussure noticed we use to shape our perception—they’re all false. Deconstruction is all about examining the ideologies and meanings we think things have (texts, and also our very notions of our identities) and seeing where there are tensions, ambiguities, or downright contradictions.

V. Post-structural identities .

• Post-structural criticisms (feminist, racial, disablity) often try to deny the categories that make discrimination possible (race, gender, ability, etc).

• One radical feminist, Mary Daly, has attempted to re-define the dictionary in feminist deconstructivist terms (handout). You’ll notice a lot of puns, breaking words, capitalization in order to defamiliarize the “meaning” of the word and uncover the layers of différance inherent in it.

Wiki Dialect Pages

Sorry, folks--I got a little behind on the course blog. The lecture notes from Tuesday are posted below. I thought I might post the dialect assignment on the blog, so you can all look at it on-line as well as in the paper copy I handed out in class.

Our course wiki is here. I have not posted our password; it's on the paper assignment sheet. It is the name of the cafe on the main level of the Student Center, if you don't have your sheet and don't remember.

Group Project ENGL 360: Wiki Dialect pages

For your final project, I’d like you to get into groups of 3-4 and write a report on a dialect of English. Include the following areas:
· The geographic location(s) of the dialect
· Features of pronunciation
· Lexical and/or grammatical features that distinguish this dialect
· The social function of the dialect in the surrounding groups
· Any works of literature that are written in this dialect or include written representations of the dialect
· Bibliography.

You will be asked to present a brief version of your findings to the class on Thurs., Nov. 30. The final version of your report should be presented as a page on the ENGL 360 wiki (www.engl360.pbwiki.com) and must be in place by Tues., Dec. 5.

The EETS, the OED, and the late 19th century

Some of the information from today's lecture is delightfully presented in a couple of non-fiction books by Simon Winchester:
The Professor and the Madman discusses the contributor who was working while incarcerated in an asylum. I've read this and recommend it.
The Meaning of Everything marked Winchester's return to the OED, this time discussing its creators more generally. I haven't read this, but intend to.

Today's lecture notes:

I. In Late Victorian period, again notions of progress surged in the wake of industrialism.
* Universal education became public (but only in English) in 1870
* English education was used as a way of preventing non-speaking groups from having access to power or from developing a sense of community other than that of their conquerors (British or American)
* Children were taken from parents and forced to attend English-only schools, where they were beaten if they spoke their native language

II. EETS
* Founded mid-century by scholars so that texts would be available to middle-class readers, and to women (who would emotionally connect to the history but were not expected to study it professionally)
* “We are banded together to trace out the springs, and note the course, of the language that shall one day be the ruling tongue of the world, which is now the speech of most of its free men” (EETS report 1869; qtd. in Biddick 93). The EETS tied its activities to an imperialist agenda and the learning of English language history to the projection of the English language future.
* Medieval material, now widely available, was used as a claim that English culture (and the English language) was superior to native cultures in America and India, and therefore served as a justification for the conquest and subjugation of the natives. The editing of medieval English and of Sanskrit laws took place with some of the same people involved as organizers.

III. The OED (I am deeply indebted to Charlotte Brewer's terrific study of the OED for this portion of the lecture)
*The Philological Society began explorations of new discoveries in linguistics in the 1850s, and rapidly realized that they needed a new dictionary that would reflect the new theories.
*They began assembling words and citations, and in 1879, J.H. Murray had taken over as editor in chief.
*The OED meant to include all words, and provide etymologies and examples that would show how the word had changed through time.
*Its view was shaped by theories of science, which had fine-tuned the experimental method of starting with data then forming assumptions. As one of the period’s best-known literary characters states, “It is a cardinal mistake to theorize ahead of the facts.” The editors tried to adopt this approach to lexicography.
*The "scientific" associations of the philological method somewhat obscured the project's ideological underpinnings. The OED was founded on assumptions that English could demonstrate the superiority of England. The notions proceeded that there was an inherent superiority of European and/or Germanic.

Close Reading

I found some good web sites on how to go about closely reading and analyzing a text:

This site is general and some of the steps only apply if you're reading fiction, but it should still be useful.

Don't feel bad if this is new to you--even the folks at Harvard aren't born knowing how to do this! One of the options for the essay is a poem; if you think you might discuss it, look at this site on close reading poetry (it also has some good general advice).

A google search on "close reading" turns up tons of sites, so feel free to keep looking on your own.

I think I'll spend Thursday's class working with you on the difference between summary and analysis (which can be tricky) and I'll show you a type of pre-writing that can be really helpful when you're writing about a text that is difficult to understand (those of you in ENGL 311 or 411 next semester--you'll see this again!).

Late Early Modern England and the Augustans

Please note a change to the syllabus: Tuesday we will have an in-class peer reading day for Essay 3. Essay 3 will now be due on Thursday, Nov. 9 . Next class, we will spend some time practicing close reading. Keep up with the reading schedule on the course syllabus, however.

Here is the web site that has the mnemonic poem about English monarchs from the Conquest to Elizabeth II.

Some later early-modern English history:
*After Queen Elizabeth I died without children, the crown passed to King James of Scotland (He was James VI of Scotland, and James I of England, so is sometimes called James the Sixth and First)
*He believed in an autocratic monarchy, free of restraints from Parliament. He was also fairly shrewd—he listened to the complaints of the Puritans that the maintaining of the episcopacy in the Church of England was a doctrinally problematic remnant of Roman Catholicism, but did not removed bishops. His response was, “No bishop, no king.” Turns out he might have been right about that. . . .
*He was succeeded by his son, Charles I in 1625. Charles was the second son (his older brother died early) and had been sickly as a boy. His father persisted in calling him “Baby Charles” until the end of James’s life (royal families have a famous knack for messing up their kids!). Charles came to the throne determined that he would show everyone what a strong king he was. He exaggerated his father’s autocratic tendencies. He thought Parliament should pass whatever taxes he asked of them, and wasn’t willing to listen to their grievances or consider any governmental or religious reforms. He used his private courts to circumvent some of the traditions of English legal practice (like the use of juries).
*Finally, in 1641, a civil war started. The King’s party fought against a party consisting of an alliance between Puritans and Parliamentarians. There was a brief cease-fire, but war started up again and in 1649, Charles I was tried for treason and executed.
*The country was ruled by Oliver Cromwell, who took the title “Lord High Protector.” When he died, however, the Parliamentary party, who had gotten tired of Cromwell’s Puritanism and disregard for procedure, invited Charles II back to be king. He returned, and the following period is called “the Restoration.” Drama began to be written again—racy stuff, with lots of illegitimate kids and whatnot.
*The crown passed to Charles’s brother James II, who was Catholic. The Parliament didn’t like that, so they removed him from office, and offered the throne to William and Mary. They came to the throne in 1689. Their daughter Anne ruled in the early 18th century, then we get a line of kings from the House of Hanover—Germans (the early ones could barely speak English). The first 4 of them were named George.

The Augustans
The Augustans were a group of writers who wanted the English of their day (the 18th century) to represent the height of linguistic and literary achievement, like Latin had supposedly done under Caesar Augustus. To heighten this parallel, they laid down several "rules" of English that were based more on the usage of Latin than the way anyone really spoke or wrote English:
* Don't use double negatives
* Don't split infinitives
* Don't end sentences with prepositions
These are all prescribed, artificial "rules" that did not evolve out of spoken English at all!