Grammar and Twentieth-Century American Literature
- Provides the first in-depth study of the role of grammar in American literary history
- Charts the various, and often contradictory, institutional definitions of grammar in a range of academic disciplines and in popular culture and national life
- Explores how grammar has been used and marginalized within twentieth-century literary criticism, from the New Criticism to the Digital Humanities, and considers new ways of thinking about grammar and literary studies
- Includes original readings of Gertrude Stein, Zora Neale Hurston, Lydia Davis, and David Foster Wallace that situates their work in a long history of U.S. language politics and intellectual history
Taking Gertrude Stein, Zora Neale Hurston, Lydia Davis and David Foster Wallace as key case studies, Lola Boorman makes a series of compelling links between how American authors and intellectuals learned grammar – through various, diverse institutional settings – and how they use it in their work to directly address structures of power, authority, democracy, gender, race and class. Drawing on the shifting discourses and definitions of grammar in academic disciplines, literary and intellectual movements and para-literary networks – including linguistics, anthropology, language philosophy, self-help grammar books and school pedagogy – the book charts the invisible yet ubiquitous role that grammar has played in literature and literary criticism, and its embeddedness in systems of social and political power and conceptions of national identity.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Make Grammar Do
1. Authorised Forms: Gertrude Stein and Harvard Style
2. Zora Neale Hurston’s Tone-Deaf Dialects
3. A Position at the University: Lydia Davis, Theory and the Everyday
4. Politics and the English Language: David Foster Wallace’s Standards
Conclusion: Tense Present
Notes
Bibliography
Index
As literary critics, we are in the grip of at-least two major crises: ‘Democracy’ and ‘Close Reading’. But how can supporting one help redeem the other? Bringing them together through a radical reading of the concept of American ‘grammar’, Boorman takes on the imperative task of imagining futures for both.
