Reaction to Dawson: Privileged discourse

My reflections on the "privileged cultural status afforded" by/to literary language:

1.
With the end of the cold war and the rise of multinational capitalism, the spread of American influence across the globe, English has assumed an increasingly important role in business around the world.

To chose to write in English (even if this is not experienced as a "choice") is to write in the language of global capital and to be in a dialogic relationship with the realities of late stage capitalism.

I'm not sure what more to say on this point. I've more to say on the domestic situation of American English.

2.
Countries that have a history of feudalism often have a rigidly stratified language, with dialects appropriate to each class. In such countries, clear choices are available to the author, each with equally clear political allegiances. In the U.S., where no such history of feudalism is present, there is not the same type of formal stratification. This is not to say that our language is not stratified, only that our stratification is not as rigidly formalized. It is just as real and functions equally to oppress and exclude, but it is not necessarily immediately apparent as a choice to the author, especially if the author is a white middle class male. To all other authors, the stratification of the language stand out more readily. (This, in part, is the nature of what is called "white privilege," the inability of whites to recognize privilege as such.)

The fact that academic discourse is essentially white middle- and upper-class discourse has been fairly well established. The difficulty of acquiring this discourse if one is not born into it has also been established. If we look at findings from the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), or similar data (SAT scores for example), we find that "proficiency" in literacy—that is dominant literacy, or white literacy—is disproportionately distributed along lines of race and class. Language is tied to power, and access to dominant discourse is denied to marginalized groups. The situation is really no different linguistically than the situation of post-feudal Russia, from whence Bakhtin arrives at his conclusion, only that the stratification of our discourse wears a face of meritocracy and egalitarianism.

Thus, the privileged author who writes in privileged English (as I am doing now) is often unaware that he/she has made a choice with clear political or ideological allegiances. I am writing and you are reading in the language of the white American patriarchy.

Further, the stats from NAAL show that in 2003 only 13% of the adult population qualified as "proficient" in prose literacy. In order to qualify as proficient in prose literacy, adults have to be able to demonstrate skills such as inferring the purpose of an event described in a magazine article and comparing and contrasting the meaning of two metaphors in a poem. Anyone making their living in the English department will identify these as rather basic skills of literary interpretation, necessary but not yet sufficient for understanding and appreciating works of literature. Further skills are required in order make sense of "high literary" or canonical works, which require the application of our many hermeneutical methods.

Think of the skills involved in making sense of a Pynchon novel. Gravity's Rainbow. Or a Shakespeare play. Or a poem by...well by pretty much anybody taken seriously by academics. These require a skill level well beyond "Prose proficiency," and this skill level is unevenly distributed along lines of race and wealth.

So what does it mean that we encourage our students to write "literary" poetry or drama or fiction? We push them to aspire to a discourse in which less than 13% of Americans will be able to participate. Why? Because this is "great" literature? Great for who? Literature for who?

To be fair, this argument fails to draw a distinction between language and power. Between the "beauty" of language and its "unfortunate" involvement in a politics of oppression. A rebuttal could be made that it is not the poet's fault that English is the language of global capitalism or that literacy in dominant English is unevenly distributed along lines of race and class. And this is true. It is not the poet's fault, but is the poet's circumstance, and poets ought not write in ignorance of the ideological and political realities attached to their medium.

Knowledge of these realities must precede any investigation of notions of audience. The question "Who are you writing for?" cannot be answered by an American author apart from an honest appraisal of the political situation of American English.