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Teaching Literature and Writing: An Interview with Gerald Graff, MLA President 2008
Cathy Birkenstein and Gerald Graff
Point of View: In Teaching Composition, ‘Formulaic’
Is Not a Four-Letter Word
J. Paul Hurh
Dirimens Copulatio and Metalinguistic Negation in Faulkner’s
Absalom,
Absalom!
Geordie Hamilton
Focalization as Education: The Race Relation Optimism
of the Narrator of Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901)
Katy Wright
The Role of Dialect Representation in Speaking from
the Margins: “The Lesson” of Toni Cade Bambara
Although many critics have noticed the prevalence of negation in Faulkner’s prose, not enough attention has been paid to the unique function and logic of pairing negated statements with positive ones. This essay posits that the rhetorical figure of dirimens copulatio (“not x, but y”) is raised to the organizing principle of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! This strategy of negating a prior statement to shape and clarify a positive one is not only locally employed at crucial moments in the novel, but it also characterizes the novel’s wider structure of presenting a sequence of competing and exclusive claims. This essay considers the logic and poetics of dirimens copulatio and discovers that it, in Faulkner’s use, employs metalinguistic negation (negating on the basis of assertibility, not descriptive truth). Tropological consideration of dirimens copulatio also reveals it as illustrative of the asymmetrical dynamism underlying interrelations among the novel’s central tropaic registers. By applying the conclusions about the metalinguistic logic and tropaic function of dirimens copulatio to the wider narrative’s narratological, political and authorial stakes, I show how dirimens copulatio enables an imbalanced fusion of the novel’s racial, legal, sexual, and political ontologies.
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Geordie Hamilton. “Focalization as Education:
The Race Relation Optimism of the Narrator of Charles Chesnutt’s The
Marrow of Tradition (1901)”
Scholars analyzing Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition frequently debate
the identity of the book’s hero. Most critics select the character of William
Miller as the hero, but a significant minority of scholars choose either
William’s wife, Janet, or a third character, Josh Green. Choosing a particular
character on which to center the novel is an important decision, since
each of these selections often roughly corresponds to a political interpretation
of the entire book: the choice of William commonly coexists with reading
the book as an optimistic allegory about future race relations between
blacks and whites. Selecting Janet as hero goes with a reading of Tradition
as black separatist and feminist, while choosing Josh frequently turns
the text into black militant protest.
In contrast with previous scholarship, this paper concentrates on the
study of Tradition’s narration, using concepts from narrative theory to
argue that the text’s audience is constructed or educated into specific
ways of thinking by the novel’s reliable narrator—ways of thinking that
necessitate a re-assessment of the prior interpretations just mentioned.
Drawing particularly on theories of narrative perspective or “focalization,”
and synthesizing this work with recent developments in rhetorical approaches
to narrative study, I argue that Tradition’s narrator identifies William
as the hero and moral center of the novel, and directs readers to entertain
mixed feelings for the Carterets, the family of white supremacists who
act as antagonists to the protagonist Millers. At the same time, however,
my analysis aims to complement rather than oppose the prior readings, seeking
to clarify rather than close scholarly discussion of Chesnutt’s novel.
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Katy Wright. “The Role of Dialect Representation
in Speaking from the Margins: “The Lesson” of Toni Cade Bambara”
Within literature, narrative voice often aims to speak in harmony with
the reality it describes. African American authors uniquely confront this
demand when weighing the value of speaking in the so-called “Standard”
American English dialect against speaking in African American English.
Toni Cade Bambara chose to embrace the language of her culture and community,
and in her hands that language became a powerful critical tool. Her use
of dialect representation in “The Lesson” beautifully illustrates the use
of alternative dialects in literature, functioning as an exploration of
how those who listen hear the voice of the marginalized. Through the reclamation
of the historically marginalized language of a long-marginalized people,
Bambara assists in the struggle to reclaim the cultural identity of African
Americans. In “The Lesson,” the reintegration of non-standard linguistic
aspects into the language functions as a profound reaction to this marginalization
and as proof of language’s power and plasticity in describing the diverse
realities of those living in all social spaces.
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