Monk Maps!

We’re reading The Monk by Matthew Lewis in the Gothic Seminar class I’m teaching. Space is an important element in much Gothic fiction, and it is very significant in The Monk. I asked my students to draw maps or cross-sections of the Monastery/Convent complex in the novel so we can help visualize the spaces in the novel and connect them to the larger thematic interests, concerns, and obsessions that Lewis presents.

They are all interesting and are thinking about the spaces in productive ways. Here they are, with permission and names obscured:

And because fair is fair: here is my terrible drawing on the board

I’m returning to this site after a long absence mostly as a place to post the reading list for my Senior Seminar course on The Gothic. I’ve had a few people on the Twitter machine request it, and I thought it’d be easier (and more useful) to direct them to a stable list rather than just tweeting it back at them. So here is what we’re doing:

Long Works

• Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto
• Matthew Gregory Lewis, The Monk
• Toni Morrison, Beloved
• Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
• Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House
• Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
• Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Mexican Gothic

Short Works

• Charles Perrault, “Bluebeard”
• Angela Carter, “The Bloody Chamber”
• Neil Gaiman, “The Hidden Chamber”
• Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher”
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wall-paper”
• William Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily”
• H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”
  • “The Rats in the Walls”

Critical Work

• David Punter, Introduction to The Edinburgh Companion to The Gothic and The Arts.
• Mary Shelley Introduction to Frankenstein
• Mark Edmundson, selection from Nightmare on Main Street
• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “The Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel”
• H.P. Lovecraft, Selection from Supernatural Horror in Literature
• Nnedi Okorafor, “Lovecraft’s racism & The World Fantasy Award statuette, with comments from China Miéville”
• Stephen King, selection from Danse Macabre

The Experience of Reading Poetry Part 2: “vex one like dronings of the shuttles at task”

In my last post I discussed Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Lady Lilith” and how the experience of reading the lines actually mirrors the poem’s content. Another excellent example of a poet using the form, in this case repetition and specific diction, to help create a feeling in the reader that mirrors the poem’s concerns is Augusta Webster’s “Circe.” A dramatic monologue (though even that is complicated) focused on the ancient Greek enchantress, the poem is stunning in its imagery. “Circe” was first published in 1870 in Webster’s Portraits, though the version I draw from is the slightly revised version from the 1893 third edition. I’ve had difficulty finding a copy of the 1893 text online, though it is available in print in Broadview’s Portraits and Other Poems,so I’ve created a page with the the 1893 poem as a whole here.  I’m focusing on the first few stanzas for this post.

Circe Invidiosa, John William Waterhouse, 1892

The poem begins with Circe gazing out over the expanse of sea from her island:

The sun drops luridly into the west ;
Darkness has raised her arms to draw him down
Before the time, not waiting as of wont
Till he has come to her behind the sea ;

This is an intriguing image, describing what initially seems to be a sunset, but then reveals itself to be a storm, as the mounting darkness reaches up and pulls the sun down before sunset has fully arrived. The gendering here is also significant, and it mirrors Circe’s standard role as seductress (though the poem complicates this dynamic in important ways that are outside of the scope of this blog post.) Webster then gives a tour de force of poetic imagery describing what will happen once the storm reaches her island:

Oh welcome, welcome, though it rend my bowers.
Scattering my blossomed roses like the dust.
Splitting the shrieking branches, tossing down
My riotous vines with their young half-tinged grapes
Like small round amethysts or beryls strung
Tumultuously in clusters ; though it sate
Its ravenous spite among my goodliest pines
Standing there round and still against the sky
That makes blue lakes between their sombre tufts,
Or harry from my silvery olive slopes                                                 20
Some hoary king whose gnarled fantastic limbs
Wear rugged armour of a thousand years ;
Though it will hurl high on my flowery shores
The hostile wave that rives at the poor sward
And drags it down the slants, that swirls its foam
Over my terraces, shakes their firm blocks
Of great bright marbles into tumbled heaps.
And makes my pleached and mossy labyrinths.
Where the small odorous blossoms grow like stars
Strewn in the milky way, a briny marsh.                                            30
What matter ? let it come and bring me change.
Breaking the sickly sweet monotony.

This stanza is a virtuoso performance that is delicious to read (if at times a little difficult.) It sounds wonderful aloud with its cascade of images and enjambment that just seems to keep going. The sexual imagery is there too, obvious (though not Goblin Market obvious) to an astute reader who will allow themselves to delve into the imagery (“pleached and mossy labyrinths” where “odorous blossoms grow” turned into a “briny marsh”).*

But then, immediately following this stunning language, there’s a stanza break and the poem shifts:

I am too weary of this long bright calm ;
Always the same blue sky, always the sea
The same blue perfect likeness of the sky.
One rose to match the other that has waned.
To-morrow’s dawn the twin of yesterday’s ;
And every night the ceaseless crickets chirp
The same long joy and the late strain of birds
Repeats their strain of all the even month ;                                        40
And changelessly the petty plashing surfs
Bubble their chiming burden round the stones ;
Dusk after dusk brings the same languid trance
Upon the shadowy hills, and in the fields
The waves of fireflies come and go the same.
Making the very flash of light and stir
Vex one like dronings of the shuttles at task.

When teaching this poem I usually read the previous stanza aloud, but this is the stanza I have the class read aloud. Often I’ll have all of us try and read it in unison and then I’ll ask students how they feel about reading it. Does it effect them in any way? Does it make them feel anything (in the immediate visceral sense)? What is it like to read those words aloud and hear them?

Normally students first remark on how delightful Circe’s island sounds (and it does, I’d vacation there in a second if it weren’t for all the sulky pigs running around.) It is interesting that Webster uses the idyllic “blue sea” and the “perfect” blue sky to express Circe’s discontent. But the other thing students notice is that this stanza, especially when compared to the previous stanza, is not pleasant to read. It is very boring and that boredom comes directly from Webster’s diction. Note the repetition: “Always the same, blue sky, always the sea / The same blue perfect likeness of the sky“. Just in these two lines we have “always” repeated twice. “same” repeated twice, “blue” repeated twice, and “sky” repeated twice. This pattern continues as the stanza goes on as the “late strain of birds / Repeats their strain.” In fact the word “same” occurs five times over the course of the stanza and it is certainly not the only repetition.

All of this repetition in close proximity mirrors Circe’s own experience of repetition and monotony. We as readers get a small taste of her daily life on the island. It is all finally tied together–the sounds we hear as we read aloud, the repetition hammering at us as the fifteen lines drag on, and the descriptions of how this monotony effects Circe–by the last several lines of the stanza. As the same experiences ceaselessly recur something as lovely as fireflies have become routine to the point that their “flash of light and stir / Vex one like dronings of the shuttles at task.” The language of shuttles reference weaving (which both connects directly to Circe in The Odyssey and also more largely to women (it is also utilized in Rossetti’s “Lady Lilith” as seen in the last post). This has important implications for the poem’s interest and critique of Victorian gender roles. It also though is focused on sound. The experiences of the island are analogous to the droning sound of the loom, just as on some level our repetitions as we read aloud are somehow analogous to Circe’s existence on her island. We for a brief moment are made to experience a small portion of the enchantress’s  ennui. Here again we have a skilled poet utilizing language to produce an experience in the reader that connects back to the content of the poem. These experiences are not just intellectual appreciations of the poem, or focused on what my students sometimes think are the “squishiness” of feelings, but rather they are reactions to speaking and hearing the poem and the power language has on a very basic level. Next up, as I unpack these kinds of experiences? Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Mariana.”

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*One thing that I sometimes find in my classrooms as that students are hesitant to suggest sexualized readings of poems because they either are too shy to talk about it, or think they must be wrong (and that everyone will think they have dirty minds for even thinking such a thing. This even happens with pretty obvious sexual references like the fruit in Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market or even the explicit sexual discussion in Donne’s “To His Mistress on Going to Bed.” But that is a subject for another post . . .

“soft sleep shall snare”: caught up in the language of poetry

One of my courses this semester is knee-deep in Victorian poetry. One way that I’ve been trying to dig in with my students as they try and tackle what is often very difficult work, is to focus the actual experience of reading poetry. I’ve always pushed students to read poetry aloud (“Do it! It’ll freak out your roommates!”) and this semester I’m really trying to hone in on the actual physical process of speaking and hearing the works as they are read aloud. What this has done has demonstrated the way in which the form of a poem, including diction, usages of assonance, consonance, meter, and numerous other formal elements actually physically effect the reading of the poem in a way that can mirror the poem’s content. I’m going to touch on a few poems that do this over the next few blog posts, but for today I’ll focus on Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Lady Lilith” also known as “Body’s Beauty.”

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lady Lilith (1868, 1872)

“Lady Lilith,” or “Body’s Beauty” by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Of Adam’s first wife, Lilith, it is told
(The witch he loved before the gift of Eve,)
That, ere the snake’s, her sweet tongue could deceive,
And her enchanted hair was the first gold.
And still she sits, young while the earth is old,
And, subtly of herself contemplative,
Draws men to watch the bright web she can weave,
Till heart and body and life are in its hold.

The rose and poppy are her flowers; for where
Is he not found, O Lilith, whom shed scent
And soft-shed kisses and soft sleep shall snare?
Lo! as that youth’s eyes burned at thine, so went
Thy spell through him, and left his straight neck bent
And round his heart one strangling golden hair.

This is a fascinating poem for a lot of reasons. It is one of the works (alongside Rossetti’s Eden Bower) responsible for bringing Lilith, a figure from Jewish mythology, to the attention of Anglo-Christian writers and artists. There’s a lot that can be said about it, especially its representation of gender, and for some excellent work on Rossetti and the Lilith mythology, I’d urge you to check out Amy Scerba’s excellent Master’s thesis Changing Literary Representations of Lilith and the Evolution of a Mythical Heroine. For the purpose of this blog post I’d like to focus for a moment on the sonnet’s sestet, specifically lines 9-11 “for where / Is he not found, O Lilith, whom shed scent / And soft-shed kisses and soft sleep shall snare?” When I teach this poem I always ask students to read it aloud. And then I ask several others to read the sestet aloud.It is always an awkward, somewhat amusing process as students stumble over the syntax and try and piece together the lines. And then I ask them what exactly it feels like to read those lines aloud: what was the experience like? What physically did it make you do? These are the answers I usually get:

“It’s hard!”

“It trips you up!”

And my students are right. It is difficult and it does trip you up. Then we turn to the question of why? Why does Rossetti construct these lines this way? Why does he choose to give us these tongue-twisters of lines? The reason the poem does this is not because Rossetti is a bad poet, of course, but rather because he wants the poem to trip us up here. This is a place where the language of the poem, the specific choices to rely on this difficult syntax and the repetition of sibilants, directly mirrors the content. What it does to the reader connects to what the poem is actually seeking to discuss. This sestet, describing the way in which Lilith beguiles and ensnares the men she seeks to conquer, actually beguiles and ensnares the reader. This is a forceful example of the actually experience of reading the poem connecting directly the poem’s actual content. In my next post on this topic, I’m going to take a look at Augusta Webster’s dramatic monologue “Circe.”

 

2016 Books

Every outlet in the world has been doing their best books of 2016, which I skim voraciously and make superficial notes of. I figured I’d add my voice to the mix with the stuff I’ve read this year that I really liked. To keep to theme I’m sticking to newly published work, though I might put together a non-2016 post at some point to chronicle some of the very good stuff I read which is not new and being pushed by publishers:

The Krampus and the Old, Dark Christmas: Roots and Rebirth of the Folkloric Devil by Al Ridenour

Ridenour’s book on the Alpine folklore and traditions surrounding the Krampus figure is wonderful. It features in depth examination of the legends associated with the figure and the importance of the darker winter traditions in their historical context and the modern age.

Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London by Matthew Beaumont

I first came across Beaumont’s work in an article on Wuthering Heights‘s slave-trade context. His work is one of the more convincing and nuanced takes on the novel’s relationship to slavery and it resists the dogmatism I’ve seen of late among some Bronte partisans. Nightwalking is a wonderful book, deep and engaging, and historically and literally rich. Its sharp too, with politics that will cut you if you’re not correct or careful.

Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places by Colin Dickey

Dickey’s book is both theoretically rich and readable (things which don’t always go hand in hand together.) It takes the stories we tell seriously and seeks to understand the various social functions of ghost stories. If nothing else this book helps illuminate the fact that these stories, urban legends, and pieces of folklore are important tools to think with when we contemplate American identity.

The Witches: Suspicion, Betrayal, and Hysteria in 1692 Salem by Stacy Schiff

One of my favorite films of the year was Robert Eggers’ meticulously crafted The Witch.  The film put the viewers directly in the head-space of 17th-century Puritan colonists and their fears of the new continent in which they found themselves. Schiff does similar work in her well-research tome that more than anything else highlights the actual psychological spaces that the villagers of Salem were inhabiting in 1692.

Hard Light by Elizabeth Hand

The third of Elizabeth Hand’s Cass Neary crime novels is as sharp as ever. It finds Neary in London and the West Country of England as she seeks to navigate another mystery surrounded by outsider artists and the remains of ancient pre-history. Hands work is always lyrical and subversive and impossible to put down.

Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff

Ruff crafts a Lovecraftian America centered on the enduring legacy of America’s racial crimes and in the context of the Jim Crow south and the Sundown Town north. It digs deep into pulp fiction in order to connect the horrors of writers like Lovecraft to the genuine horrors of racism. It doesn’t always succeed, but the interconnected stories are worth examining even when they miss the mark somewhat.

“in your sphere”

By Chapman & Hall – Heritage Auction Galleries, Public Domain, Link

Had Trotty dreamed?  Or, are his joys and sorrows, and the actors in them, but a dream; himself a dream; the teller of this tale a dreamer, waking but now?  If it be so, O listener, dear to him in all his visions, try to bear in mind the stern realities from which these shadows come; and in your sphere—none is too wide, and none too limited for such an end—endeavour to correct, improve, and soften them.  So may the New Year be a happy one to you, happy to many more whose happiness depends on you!  So may each year be happier than the last, and not the meanest of our brethren or sisterhood debarred their rightful share, in what our Great Creator formed them to enjoy.

-Charles Dickens The Chimes: a Goblin Story

You had me at “the empowerment of human beings as language-using creatures”

I’ve just started reading Danielle Allen’s Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality. I saw Allen speak at Loyola University Maryland’s “Democracy and the Humanities Symposium” last September. Her presentation “On Participatory Readiness: Why the Humanities are Necessary for Democracy” was one of the highlights of the program for me. It was clear, precise, and accessible. In it Allen presented the Declaration of Independence as an Arendtian world-making document and proceeded to point to the role that humanities education should play in fostering civic engagement (concluding with Jefferson’s library at Monticello as a kind of conceptual model of this kind of education). That is a very simply summary of a wonderful presentation, and it is what drove me to pick up Our Declaration. And yeah, she had me at the prologue, the third paragraph even where she lays out the importance of language in the Declaration and the importance of cultivating the usage of that language:

When we think about how to achieve political equality, we have to attend to things like voting rights and right to hold office. We have to foster economic opportunity and understand when excessive material inequality undermines broad democratic political participation. But we also have to cultivate the capacity of citizens to use language effectively enough to influence the choices we make together. The achievement of political equality requires. among other things, the empowerment of human beings as language-using creatures. (21)

As an English and literature teacher, I love this. It doesn’t deny the very important role of material conditions on political equality, but it also points to the importance of language and the world we build with language as essential to democracy.

Oscar Wilde made the much misunderstood statement that “Life imitates art for more than art imitates life.” I often have seen this statement used in the wake of school-shootings and youth oriented violence as a way of blaming violent media for violent behavior. However Wilde’s point is far subtler and more profound. He is actually making a point about how art helps create and shape our cognitive categories and as such actually creates the world. Language helps create the reality we exist in, socially and in our minds. Wilde’s fiction literalizes this at various points (The Picture of Dorian Gray, and The Importance of Being Earnest both do this in particular ways). This is one of the great values of literature and why it is important, language and the art we make with it has consequences as Rebecca Solnit has recently pointed out. A large part of Allen’s thesis seems to be that the Declaration of Independence  is one of the great resources available to us not just for discussing and understanding liberty but also equality, and we should be more effectively employing that language and using it to construct our worlds. I look forward to seeing and mulling over the details of her case.

Folkways in Thomas Hardy (a cursory review)

A big chunk of my current research project is centered on Thomas Hardy’s novels and folklore. Hardy famously utilized various folk-customs and beliefs throughout his work. They function in a variety of different ways, as literary devices such as foreshadowing and symbolism, as well as adding to the texture of Hardy’s Wessex (the name he gives his fictional English county) for which he deservedly celebrated.

Hardy’s use of the folklore, and the complexities of his gathering practices and employment has received a great deal of critical attention. Betty Rich Lombadi noted in“Thomas Hardy’s Collecting Techniques and Sources for the Folklore in His Wessex Novels”

that the novelist’s collection methods were enthusiastic, but not comprehensive: The lore which Hardy uses in his Wessex novels was collected in a rather haphazard way. He recorded snatches of songs in his notebooks, beliefs and remedies on the back of old envelopes, paying no attention whatsoever to his informant . . . This is no unusual revelation about Thomas Hardy, for he was so at home in the Wessex region that his imagination was free to work upon material thoroughly familiar to him for a lifetime. (20)

Still any reader of Hardy’s work is hard pressed not to marvel at the seeming encyclopedic quality of his charting of folklore alongside the ways it is seemingly organically infused into his characters thoughts and beliefs.

I’m currently making my way through Ruth A. Fiori’s 1931 book Folkways in Thomas Hardy. It is a fascinating text for a number of reasons that I want to go into here. First, it was published in 1931 just three years after Hardy’s death. Thus this is one of the earliest pieces of scholarship that grapples, at least in some form, with Hardy’s work as a whole including both the novels (the last of which was Jude the Obscure published in 1895 and the poetry (Hardy is said to have dictated his final poem “He Resolves to Say No More” from his death-bed.)

But beyond the closeness in date, and the reminder that while Hardy’s world is not our own, the world he lived in did exist and was contemporaneous with critics, scholars, and other writers (which is useful to remember as we too often relegate the writers we study to some heterocosm that does not actually interact with the real world or lived history) the book provides us with some very interesting window into the scholarship of its moment.

Fiori’s text is encyclopedic. It is organized into thematic sections that treat multiple works, including short fiction, the novels, and individual poems as examples in a larger web of folkloric usage. The scope of this endeavor is staggering as she seeks out the references and allusions across this great range of works and in multiple categories. Her first thematic section, for instance is focused on “Omens, Premonitions, and Fatality” and engages with at least seven novels (I stopped counting after she brought in The Mayor of Casterbridge) and just as many poems. This is a massive undertaking and it is meticulously footnoted, drawing from what was a vast array of contemporary scholarship.

The work is purely descriptive, seeking to point to the numerous places where Hardy is utilizing folklore and seeks to clarify the various nuances of that folklore as it is found in diverse places. Fiori makes no arguments about the significance of these references in Hardy or how and why they are used. As such, the book functions primarily as a reference text, something to bring out when seeking the roots of a particular element in one of Hardy’s works. This is an amazing thing, this pure reference. The amount of work that goes into such an account is truly impressive.

Here’s a lovely moment from her discussion of bees as an omen (taking off from the bees that swarm the day of Dick Dewey and Fancy Day’s wedding in Under the Greenwood Tree (I have reproduced this without the 10 footnotes the work provides for its sources)

The belief is widespread that a stolen or stray swarm, that is, any swarm not formally purchased, is lucky. Things found, begged, or stolen, are lucky; in finding things, the favor of fortune comes into play; to things begged the labor, and to things stolen the risk of acquisition, lends additional value. A contradictory opinion is that a stray swarm alighting on a house, hedge or tree means bad luck– fire, perhaps, a death in the family within the year, or some undefined disaster. Pliny describes the panic in Drusus’ camp at this omen. Bees have an elaborate folklore. This is not the place for a study of bees as messengers of the gods and part of the cult of the sacred oak Folklore, however, notes the uncanny supernatural knowledge of the future which bees possess, and their deep affection for their masters–a fact revealed in the custom of “telling the bees” of the death of the bee-master. Bee culture is shrouded in superstition: some say that bees will not thrive for those who lead an unchaste life, and that they fare best with man and wife; others that partners in bee-keeping should not be married; all agree that one person alone has no success. (2-3)

The book is packed with these succinct tracings of various beliefs and superstitions.

This passage also points to something else that makes this work so interesting. It provides a particular window into the way in which early twentieth century folklorists thought about folklore. We can view the text as not just a reference work useful to scholars of the time (and to contemporary ones as well) but also as a relic of a particular vision of both anthropology and folklore. One of the weaknesses of the text from a modern point of view is the way in which its treatment of folklore ultimately becomes culturally reductive. The passage quoted above is, like much early anthropology and folklore research, syncretizing: it takes a vast range of folk beliefs from different times and cultures and thrusts them into unlikely relationships.

A quick example of this may be found in Fiori’s discussion of hair where she states: “From the Savages of Polynesia to the Scottish Highlands we find the use of hair to work black magic upon the possessor” (10). Fiori’s use of the loaded pejorative savage here of course places her work within its era, but so too does the reductionism this points to. Cultural distinctions and differences disappear and the Polynesians relevance (or lack thereof) to Hardy’s context goes uncommented upon. We are still here in The Golden Bough mode of scholarship ( a work which Fiori references quite a bit.)

There is something fitting about this as a cultural relic we can read and think of Hardy’s work through. Hardy himself was of a similar opinion regarding the way folklore functions nearly universally. We find for instance in 1890, Hardy endorsing the lectures of Edward Clodd, who following many early anthropological figures argued that folkways revealed “survivals” of our primitive human origins, survivals that had their genesis in a kind of universal human pre-history. Hardy wrote in his journal after attending one of Clodd’s lectures, “Mr.E.Clodd this morning gives an excellently neat answer to my question why the superstitions of a remote Asiatic and a Dorset labourer are the same.” That answer for Hardy, as it was for Sir James Frazer, and as it seems to be Fiori is the human races progress through a culturally evolutionary trajectory that appears universal despite the cultural distinctions we notice.

The return of the return of the blog

I’m knee deep in teaching and research, which clearly means I need to distract myself from those noble goals to talk to the void of the internet. The reading I’ve been doing for a current project has really struck me and so I may actually have some things to say over the next little while and I think I’ll try to keep up with this blog on a semi-regular basis. Of course I say that every time I start posting here again . . .

Slang, rhetorical situations, and a ridiculous school policy

The inimitable Cory Doctorow over at Boing Boing has linked to a BBC news story about a school in Croydon (South London) that has banned students from using slang. Here is the original article and here is Cory’s post. Students who use slang will be asked to “reflect” on their usage of language and how it is apparently improper. This irks Doctorow as a writer and it irks me as an English teacher. Language is a vibrant constantly changing thing. It evolves, sometimes in ways that I don’t personally like (I’m still hoping that text-speak dies in a fire before becoming fully enshrined in our lexicons) but it is always shifting. That is what is to be celebrated about language, both its precision and its elasticity.

Harris Academy’s ostensive reasoning is that (as the BBC article states) “In addition to giving students the teaching they need to thrive academically, we want them to develop the soft skills they will need to compete for jobs and university places.” So, the school claims, this ban is not about reducing student expression that is tied directly into things like their heritage, their culture, and the places and classes they grew up in, but is all about teaching students how to function in job interviews where more formal language is required. Doctorow’s response to this is right on the money:

The argument is that privileged British people look down on people who talk “poor” — using words like “woz” and “ain’t” — and that the inability to code-switch into rich-person’s English makes it harder to get a job. There is some validity to this (that is, rich people are indeed bigoted against poor people), but my experience in my own neighbourhood is that people are perfectly capable of code-switching to formal registers if they want to.

There are a couple of things that should be noted here. When we talk about the context in which discourse takes place we often use the term “rhetorical situation.” The rhetorical situation is made up of the audience, the venue, and the various other factors that create the “space” in which we speak. The rhetorical situation I confront each day in the classroom is far different from the one I confront in a bar on the weekend. The language I use in the classroom is not the same language I use in a bar. Each space is made up of different audiences with different expectations, needs, purposes, and relationships. Harris Academy’s ban on slang suggests that there is only one important rhetorical situation—the space of middle class working discourse—and that student use of slang gets in the way of engaging in that rhetorical situation. But Doctorow is correct when he observers that many people from numerous walks of life, including the economically disadvantaged, understand quite well the differences in rhetorical situations and adapt the way they respond based upon that. This is especially true about people whose discourse is not the dominant or controlling social discourse. I am reminded of Dave Chappelle’s contention that African Americans speak two languages “business” and “street.” The disenfranchised and underrepresented are often forced to engage in multiple distinct rhetorical situations because the one they have inherited is not the one which controls mainstream culture.

It is our job as English educators to help students recognize those different rhetorical situations, and hone their responses to them. It is not, however, to cut off entire avenues of expression from them by telling them there is no situation where the language they speak at home and with their friends is truly appropriate. This delegitimizes their own creativity—not mention their culture, heritage, and home life—and ultimately further others people that are often already othered due to race or socioeconomic status. English instruction should be about building students’ abilities to move between discourses. It is about helping them discover their power. It is not about dismantling the place where they come from and telling them their own personal rhetorical situations do not matter.