Literatures of Language: a Literary History of Linguistics in Nineteenth-Century America

Literatures of Language: A Literary History of Linguistics in Nineteenth-Century America by Korey B. Jackson A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the degree requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in the University of Michigan 2010 Doctoral Committee: Professor June M. Howard, Co-Chair Associate Professor Anne L. Curzan, Co-Chair Emeritus Professor Richard W. Bailey Associate Professor Benjamin W. Fortson Associate Professor Joshua L. Miller To my grandmother, Marjory Brokaw Warne, who never stopped reading ii Acknowledgements First, I am deeply grateful for the continuous support of my committee. Special thanks go to Anne Curzan, who helped me to realize that linguistics need not be a foreign language in the English department; to June Howard, who asked hard questions when they needed asking and was never satisfied with prepackaged literary categories; to Richard Bailey for his unflagging enthusiasm and his encyclopedic knowledge of nineteenth-century language scholarship; to Joshua Miller for pushing me to challenge the critical assumptions of US language politics; and to Benjamin Fortson for his attention to detail and his uncompromising skills as a reader of linguistic history. I would also like to extend thanks to friends and colleagues who helped in reading early drafts of the dissertation: Stephanie Batkie, Alex Beringer, Gavin Hollis, Mike Tondre, Brian Matzke, and Nate Mills. Their insights and their ability to tell the right move from the wrong one have meant not only a better piece of writing, but better scholarship overall. I am indebted to Martin Bickman, Anna Brickhouse, Douglas Burger, Jeffrey Robinson, and Reginald Saner for showing me that literary history is more than an academic subject—it is truly a rewarding, lifelong pursuit. Finally, I would like thank my family: my parents, Tom and Lynne, for their love and for making the world of books an intimate part of my world; my brother, Matt, and my sister, Hillary, for taking their older brother’s strange affection for school as a matter of course; and my wife, Christa Vogelius, who never begrudged late nights, long hours, or last minutes, and who is, in her unceasing intellectual and emotional support, constancy without proviso. iii Table of Contents Dedication………………………………………………………………………………....ii Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………....iii Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………....v Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter 1: The Languages of Preservation: Native American Linguistics in the Early National US…........................................................................................................22 2: Beyond the Frame: “Phonetic Fever” and Early National Southwestern Humor…………………………………………………………………………....71 3: Beyond Language Anxiety: Local Color and Emergent Language Studies………………………………………………………………………..…119 4: Lafcadio Hearn’s “Linguistic Miscegenation” and Gilded Age Ethnolinguistics………………………………………………………………....177 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...234 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………….241 iv Abstract This dissertation traces the intertwined history of linguistics and imaginative literature in the nineteenth-century United States. Fiction and travel literature throughout the century gave rise to changing modes of thinking about and documenting language difference. At the same time, new discourses of language study transformed how literary authors represented and reflected on speech in writing. The history of this cross-disciplinary, mutually constitutive relationship has been an understudied topic in both historical linguistics and literary criticism. By reading major works from each field in context with one another—by performing, in other words, a literary history of language study—I seek to understand the profusion of multilingual and dialect literatures and to create a more complete historiography of the discipline of linguistics. My first chapter examines the work of early US language scholars Peter Duponceau and John Pickering. Alongside their research into various Amerindian languages, I discuss the fiction and travel writing of James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, and Margaret Fuller. Historicizing literary vernacular as part of an emerging, multidisciplinary interest in phonetic transcription, I turn in the second chapter to a number of authors of the Southwestern comic genre: Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, William Gilmore Simms, David Crockett, Thomas Bangs Thorpe, and George Washington Harris. The third chapter focuses on the ethnolinguistic literature of James Russell Lowell and Mark Twain. Alongside their work I examine postbellum linguists William Dwight Whitney and Max Müller, who were beginning to make the case for applying a strict scientific method to the study of language variation. The final chapter follows Lafcadio Hearn, an enigmatic, international travel writer who was responsible for some of the first ethnographic sketches of French and Spanish Creole quarters of New Orleans. These documents reveal a novel retheorization of contact languages and creoles in fin-de-siècle American literature and language study. Throughout this dissertation, it is my goal both to resurface further cross- disciplinary documents, and to reveal their shared methodological and conceptual approaches to language—approaches that were not simply echoes across a divide, but a collective practice that was part of the nascent disciplinary landscape of language study. v Introduction In his December 1887 “Editor’s Study” column William Dean Howells urged contemporary writers to abandon that “foolish old superstition that literature and art are anything but the expression of life, and are to be judged by any other test than that of their fidelity to it” (Harper’s 154). Borrowing from the “singularly modern” Edmund Burke, he argued that the duty of the author was to move beyond artifice and convention and begin the task of interpreting “human nature” in a more documentary mode. The key terms of Howells’s claim here—fidelity and expression—present a much more complicated demand on the critic than his breezy treatment would suggest. The author’s notion of a “test” of fidelity assumes an objective barometer: literature could be deemed artful based purely on how accurately the “expression of life” was rendered. But for such a test to work it needed an actual object of study, one that could correlate to some notion of the “real” outside of literary convention. For Howells and the realist credo he worked to establish, such expressions were intimately tied to the recording of actual linguistic expressions. In an 1895 “Life and Letters” column, for instance, he admired George Washington Cable for “contriv[ing] to spell the speech of his Creole characters so that you know just how they spoke” (532). The successful textualization of speech differences, then, was one sure way to mark a narrative as authentic, as a document of life as it was really lived, and not simply another imitative piece of romance, pulp, or pabulum for the undiscerning “general reader” (532). Good literature was tantamount to good linguistic documentation. 1 This dissertation takes as its jumping off point the critical and historical equation between the art of capturing speech in writing and the science of language study. Beginning with the early national writings of figures like Thomas Jefferson, Washington Irving, and Margaret Fuller and ending with the fin-de-siècle creolist and fictional work of Lafcadio Hearn, I explore a diverse set of texts whose central, sometimes self- professed, focus was the representation of the equally diverse array of spoken languages within the moving boundaries of the US. Through the textual depiction of dialect1 and multilingual speech, and the self-conscious observation and codification of voice, pronunciation, and idiomatic phraseology, these works fully participated in the richly ambiguous discourse shaping the study of language in the US. My dissertation represents a re-historicization of what Amy Strand has called the “cross-fertilization” between literature and nineteenth-century language study—the co-development of disciplinary methods that came to define modern linguistics and constituted the practices associated with literary language and perceptions about its varying degrees of authenticity. Though I am concerned throughout this thesis with illuminating the shared resources, objects of study, and approaches to speech documentation exhibited by these now separate fields of inquiry, I am not trying to reinvigorate a philological approach to literary texts. I believe wholly in what Michelle Warren has recently cited as philology’s 1 Howells himself championed the use of the term “dialect” to describe a more fully realized depiction of ethnic and regional varieties of English. But the word “dialect” has, as critic Dohra Ahmad notes, become synonymous with “the language spoken by caricatures” (Rotten English 17). In her recent anthology of variant English texts, Rotten English, she prefers to use what she considers the more politically neutral “vernacular.” In the end, however, there is no critical consensus in literary historical writing about how or which terms should be deployed. In my own writing, I have opted to use the term “vernacular” when referring to broad uses of slang and/or regional or ethnic varieties of English in literary texts and “dialect” when discussing spoken language types that correlate to particularized speech communities. The

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