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A STUDY OF SOCIOLINGUISTIC TEXTS AND SUBTEXTS
AS FOUND IN FIVE
HIGH SCHOOL AMERICAN LITERATURE ANTHOLOGIES

By

Mary Rose Harmon

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
In partial fulﬁllment of the requirements for
the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1993

ABSTRACT
A STUDY OF SOCIOLINGUISTIC TEXTS AND SUBTEXTS
AS FOUND IN FIVE
HIGH SCHOOL AMERICAN LITERATURE ANTHOLOGIES

By

Mary Rose Hannon

The literature anthology serves as the single, most frequently used source of literary
selections by United States’ high school English teachers. That anthologies, as collections of
texts, possess power and authority has been argued by a diverse group of theorists and critics.
Linguists, literary theorists, and pedagogical researchers have consistently linked language
with power, called for increased sociolinguistic study, and found literature to be an ideal ﬁeld
upon which to foreground language study.

In the light of the above and of the claims of the publishers of literature anthologies as
to an integrated approach to language and literature study and to the inclusion of
multiculturally diverse literary selections, I analyzed the most recent editions of ﬁve widely
used American literature anthologies. Using discourse analysis as my mode, I sought to
determine: the degree to which anthologies’ selections represented a broad range of the
dialects and cultures found in the United States; the degree to which these anthologies
promote thought and discussion about the social aspects of language use; and whether these
anthologies’ non-selection materials contain subtexts of social class, gender, and/or ethnic
discrimination.

My ﬁndings indicate the need for greater representation of women and minorities in
selections and non-selection materials. Three of the ﬁve anthologies contain few selections
with passages written in dialect. Anthologies give only limited attention to sociolinguistic
concerns. At times, through their own language use, they send mixed and/or discriminatory

messages about language variants, women, uneducated persons, and various ethnic groups.

I conclude by theorizing as to why such imbalance, linguistic bias, and mixed messages
occur and detail the implications of my study’s results for English language arts teachers and

English Education professionals.

Copyright by
MARY ROSE HARMON

1993

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank Dr. Marilyn Wilson, my dissertation chair, for her guidance, assistance,
and consistent support.

I wish to thank Dr. Geneva Smitherman for inspiring me and introducing me to the ﬁeld
of sociolinguistics.

I wish to thank Dr. James McClintock for his alerting me to postmodern critiques of

language.

I wish to thank Dr. Kathleen Geissler for helping me temper my polemic tendencies.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter One: Background and Methodology of The Study ..................... 1
An Introduction ............................................. 1
Cautions .................................................. 3
Background of The Study ....................................... 3
Demographics .............................................. 5
The Preliminary Study ......................................... 7
Scaffolding For The Study ...................................... 9
Questions Underlying The Study ................................. 10
The Sample ............................................... 11
Related Previous Studies ...................................... 12
Methodology .............................................. 14

Chapter Two: Theoretical Underpinnings ............................... 17
Language and Power: Language Theory and Linguistic Research ............. 17
Pedagogical Concerns: Calls for Study About Language .................. 26
Literature and Language Study: A Merging of Texts .................... 33

Chapter Three: Covers and Tables of Contents ........................... 40
The American Experience. Prentice Hall, 1991. ........................ 42
Cover .................................................. 42
Table of Contents ........................................... 42
Introductions/Biographies ...................................... 47

vi

Language Varieties .......................................... 48

Adventures in American Literature. Pegasus Edition. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,

1989. .................................................. 51
Cover .................................................. 51
Table of Contents ........................................... 52
Introductions/Biographies ...................................... 55
Language Varieties .......................................... 56
We United States in Literature. Classic Edition. Scott, Foresman, I991. ....... 59
Cover .................................................. 59
Table of Contents ........................................... 6O
Introductions/Biographies ...................................... 61
Table 3 ................................................. 62
Language Varieties .......................................... 64

Elements of Literature: Literature of the United States. Holt, Rinehart and

Winston, 1993. ............................................ 68
Cover .................................................. 68
Table of Contents ........................................... 69
Introductions/Biographies ...................................... 73
Language Varieties .......................................... 73
Literature and Language. McDougal, Littell, 1992. ..................... 77
Cover .................................................. 77
Table of Contents ........................................... 78
Introductions/Biographies ...................................... 80
Table 5 ................................................. 81
Language Varieties .......................................... 84

vii

Summary Tables and Commentary ................................ 86

Chapter Four: Language History, Dialects, Levels of Usage ................... 95
The History and Changing Nature of American English .................. 100
Commentary ............................................. 103
Dialect ................................................. 104
Prentice Hall ............................................. 104
McDougal, Littell .......................................... 105
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich .................................... 108
Scott, Foresman ........................................... 110
Holt, Rinehart and Winston .................................... 111
Commentary ............................................. 1 15
Levels of Usage ........................................... 118
Prentice Hall ............................................. 119
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich .................................... 121
Scott, Foresman ........................................... 123
Holt, Rinehart and Winston .................................... 124
McDougal, Littell .......................................... 127
Commentary ............................................. 129

Chapter Five: Gender, Ethnicity, Names and Labels ....................... 134
Gender ................................................ 135
Timelines and Historical Chapters ............................... 141
Introductions ............................................. 144
Features Speciﬁc to Individual Anthologies .......................... 146
Ethnicity and Language ...................................... 151
Names and labels ......................................... 156

viii

Commentary ............................................. 159

Chapter Six: Conclusions ....................................... 164
Strengths ............................................... 168
Considerations ............................................ 170
Questions Raised .......................................... 171
Implications for Teachers and Teacher Educators ...................... 177
Implications for Further Research ................................ 180

Appendix .................................................. 183

Bibliography ................................................ 187

ix

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1A 1946 to Present ....................................... 44
Table 1 The American Experience. Prentice Hall, 1991 ..................... 45
Table 1B Introduction Lengths ..................................... 47

Table 2 Adventures in American Literature. Pegasus Edition. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,

1989 ...................................................... 54
Table 3 The United States in Literature. Classic Edition. Scott, Foresman, 1991 ..... 63
Table 3A Pages Breakdown ....................................... 64

Table 4 Elements of Literature: The Literature of the United States. Holt, Rinehart and

Winston, 1993 ................................................ 72
Table 5 Literature and Language. McDougal, Littell, 1992 ................... 83
Table 6 Summary Table ......................................... 87
Table 7 Summary Table ......................................... 89
Table 8 Columns of Language Commentary and Questions ................... 99
Table 9A Timeline Events ....................................... 143
Table 9B Timeline Pictures ...................................... 143
Table 10 Modes of Introduction ................................... 145

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1 Cultural Dominance and Language ............................. 20

xi

Chapter One

Background and Methodology of The Study

An Introduction

High School literature anthologies, especially those which present a national literature
between their covers, are backed by the weight of tradition as they proclaim themselves
spokespersons for ”The United States in Literature" or "The American Experience" or even
more bluntly "American Literature." Added weight to their claims is given by such readily
visible edition labels as "Classics Edition" or ”Pegasus Edition" calling on the Western
classical tradition in literature to valorize their contents. That texts, and by extension the
literature anthologies that select and contain them, possess both power and authority has been
asserted by a large and diverse group of critics and researchers, among them Robert Scholes
(1985), Michael Apple (1991), Henry Louis Gates Jr., (1984, 1990), and Linda Hutcheon
(1989). Texts both employ and emphasize language: they are made of words and articulated
by means of words. As speech acts, literary texts all emphasize and demonstrate as Robert
Scholes asserts, "the reductive and representational power of the language, the power to give
accounts, to tell stories, to turn the world into ﬁction and history, to narrate" (1985, 20).
They embody "the power to select (and therefore suppress), the power to shape and present
certain aspects of human experience" (Scholes 20). Literature textbooks, collections of texts
and commentary bound for student and teacher use, say Apple and Christian-Smith, "signify-

through their content and form-particular constructions of reality, particular ways of selecting

2
and organizing that vast universe of possible knowledge" (Apple and Christian-Smith 1991,
3).

Apple and Christian-Smith suggest that all textbooks are messages to and about the
future, participating in "the organized knowledge system of society" and assisting in "the
creation of what a society has recognized as legitimate knowledge" (4-5; Apple 1991, 24).
All texts are social, as Said (1979), Foucault (1977, 1979), and Bakhtin (1981) have insisted
and as Kenneth Burke insisted as early as 1931 (Clifford 1992, 219): all texts speak to the
readers who make up their audiences, presenting them with selected versions of knowledge.
After the work of these four theorists, as John Clifford notes, it has become a commonplace
in our thinking about discourse that:

however disinterested and apolitical the form and substance of our language appear
on the surface, it is nevertheless...imbued with assumptions, biases, constraints, and
variable judgments of a speciﬁc intellectual community composed of people with
their own political and social allegiances (219).
The title of the 1989 English Coalition Conference Report, Democracy Through Language, as
well as the theme of the upcoming 1993 National Council of Teachers of English Convention,
Democracy Through Language, lends credence to Clifford’s assertion.

Literature anthologies, collections of selected texts, carry the authority of the school, the
teacher, the classroom, and, sometimes, the state as in the case of Texas and California where
state selection committees choose textbooks to be used in public school classes. And, they
carry all sorts of messages to their audience of students and teachers. An investigation of
these highly social and, to use Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s term, "speakerly" textbooks seems
appropriate to determine the nature of the sociolinguistic messages offered their readers and to

determine, to some degree, whose and which versions of knowledge and language their

contents present.

Cautions

Throughout such a study, Apple’s and Christian-Smith’s cautions seem critical to
remember:

1. Our readings of what knowledge is in texts cannot be done by the application of
simple formulas or reductive theories.

2. Texts have multiple readings.

3. The way the teacher reads a text may not be the way students read it.

4. What is "in” the text may not be what a teacher teaches.

5. What is taught may not be what is learned.

6. All readings, including my own, of the sociolinguistic messages offered and
conveyed by high school American literature anthologies, are subject to and constrained by a

whole complex of social and cultural traces (12-15).

Background of the Study

The roots of this investigation go back into my last years of public school high school
teaching, 1988-89, and to my work in the late 1970’s and 1980’s to diversify the literature
selections read by my students in their junior and senior English classes. Because I did not
use anthologies in two of my classes and because I felt free to reorder and supplement those
used in my American literature classes, I’d not taken a close look at the then curremly
available anthologies for students and their teachers in several years. In 1988, the English
Department at Portage Public Schools was given permission to order a new American
literature anthology; we were then using a 1974 Scott, Foresman textbook. Prior to the Scott,

Foresman anthology, a 1962 Harcourt Brace had been the reigning text. The 1974 Scott,

4
Foresman had not been the ﬁrst choice of the English Department’s selection committee.
Rather it had been chosen by the Curriculum Director, who opted for it because its English
literature counterpart contained Macbeth and purchasing the series would save buying copies
of the play in paperback. As a member of the 1989 selection committee, I, like my
colleagues, agreed to serve only if our choice would be honored. Assured it would be, we set
about the task of perusing anthologies and the extensive teaching apparatus which accompany
them.

I was amazed and disheartened, as I searched, by two factors: 1. the anthologies
contained few selections by women and even fewer by members of non-white minorities; 2.
the anthologies’ non-selection teaching apparatus seemed to limit thinking on the part of both
students and teachers by providing in teachers’ annotated editions summaries and
interpretations of works included in the student textbook as well as the answers to all the
questions asked students. In the student version of each anthology, questions, explanatory
materials, guides, and introductory entries seemed to lead (or prod) students toward a single
reading or a rather narrow range of acceptable readings.

I was later to ﬁnd my observations conﬁrmed by the research of Arthur N. Applebee
who, after analyzing both high school literature textbooks and the teaching of literature in the
secondary schools, concluded:

American literature courses remain quite narrow in their representation of both
women and non-white authors. . . .Works by women and non-white minorities are
least likely to appear in chronologically arranged courses that emphasize older
works....They are less likely to be placed into a social, historical, or literary context
than are selections drawn from mainstream traditions (1991, 53).
Moreover, "works by women make up only 16 % of the reading students are asked to do for
English courses in grades 7-12, and works by non-white authors less than 7% " (1992, 32).
Additionally, Applebee found the instructional apparatus surrounding anthology selections

to be "overwhelmingly text and content centered, with little attention paid to the development

5
of students’ abilities to think on their own” (1991, 53). New Critical in approach, this

apparatus emphasizes text-based comprehension. An "overwhelming proportion of the study
activities involve recitation, where there is a presumed single right answer; only about one
third of the activities leave room for students to develop and defend their own point of view "
(53).

Although I objected to our adopting such anthologies, the selection committee voted
seven to one to choose Prentice Hall’s 1989 The American Experience. About this anthology
only one year later, Romero and Zancanella were to note that "only twelve of the 1399 pages
in the text are devoted to works by writers with Hispanic surnames...and not a single page is
devoted to literature about the Hispanic experience in the United States" (1990, 24). The
anthology, said Romero and Zancanella, exempliﬁes "tokenism" (24), that is, the sort of
representation Gonzalez refers to as "token" as it fails to encourage the "overt exploration and
validation of the identities of minority students" (Gonzalez 1990, 18-19). Romero and
Zancanella assert that such limited representation is critical to students’ perceptions of
themselves in relation to America’s cultural heritage since ”the authors whose works are in
the textbooks are viewed as the signiﬁcant voices of our American heritage and those left out

of the textbooks are viewed as peripheral ﬁgures” (24).

Danographies

Gonzalez cites demographic studies which predict that by the year 2000 A.D., ”one out
of every three Americans will hail from a non-English speaking or other-culture home, and
the minority school-age population will increase to 42% " (1990, 16). Indeed, in large urban
centers ”linguistically and culturally different children...will comprise 80-90% of the school-

age population” (16). Farrell (1990) ﬁnds that "as the number of Black and Hispanic students

6

enrolled in American public education continues to rise, the percentage of available Black and
Hispanic teachers continues to decline" (39) so that by the year 2000 A.D., projections posit
that "less than 5% of America’s teachers will be a member of a minority group” (40). This
decline in minority teachers affects all students adversely; according to the Carnegie Forum
on Education and the Economy:
the race and background of their teachers tells them (all students) about authority
and power in America. These messages inﬂuence children’s attitudes toward school,
their academic accomplishments, and their own and others’ intrinsic worth (1986,
cited in Farrell, 45).

Thus, on a number of fronts, it appears that the voices of minority persons are
infrequently read or heard in authoritative school positions. If the stories, voices, languages,
concerns, and cultures of minority persons are nearly excluded from classrooms; if schools
fail to acknowledge and afﬁrm such voices and experiences as valid objects of discussion and
study, the results, says Gonzalez, will "foreshadow trouble for the nation as our society
incrementally loses the productive capabilities of an entire generation" (16) as signiﬁcant
numbers of minority students act out what John Ogbu refers to as an "oppositional identity
and an oppositional cultural frame of reference" (1987, 166) and opt out of academic tasks
and academic achievement, behaviors they deﬁne as "white" (166-168). According to Ogbu,
"Black Americans tend to attribute the low school performance of Black males to the schools’
inability to relate to Black males in ways that will help them learn” (169). Besides citing a
nmnber of his own and others’ research studies to support his view, he recalls an episode
involving an angry 17-year-old African American who touched off a group demonstration as
he strode in front of his high school brandishing his history text, The Land of the Free. He
angrily asked his teachers if they’d ever considered that the book’s title might have very
different meanings for Blacks, Indians, and Mexican Americans than it does for them, all

whites (170). Ogbu also recounts the testimony of a Black mother asking, ”Do every

classroom have Black books?. . .You can never read where the Black man conquered nothing.

7

You know that’s a lie. " About her son, she asks, "Is it better for him to learn when he goes
to college or learn before ever he ﬂips off the ground? Why don’t they reverse it? Why does
he have to go to college to learn about his own culture?" (171).

Statistics support Ogbu’s and Gonzales’ contentions and concerns. In 1987, the drop-out
rate for African American youth in Chicago was 65 %; in Detroit, it was 66% (Smitherman-
Donaldson 1987 , 29). Forty percent of all Hispanic youth do not go beyond the eight grade,
and only 53.3% of all Mexican American youth, as compared with 85.7% of Anglo
Americans, graduate from high school (Gonzalez 17).

Neither Gonzalez nor Ogbu blame the schools entirely for the above statistics. Both cite
other inﬂuencing factors, including economics, family situations, societal barriers, and social
prejudices. Yet both are, as are a host of other researchers and educators, deeply concerned
about the exclusions of or the mere token mentioning of non-white minorities and their
cultures and heritages which they ﬁnd occurring in American educational programs and

teaching/learning materials (Ogbu 1987, Gonzales 1990).

The Preliminary Study

Prompted by my observations while a member of the textbook committee and by the
commentary and research of Farrell, Smitherman, Gonzales, and Romero and Zancanella, I
began a preliminary study of high school American literature anthologies wherein I counted
the selections and long works included that were written by women and minority authors. My
feminist outlook also played a role in my curiosity. It had been heightened and focused by
Fatemeh Khosroshahi’s research on the so—called generic ”he" (1988), Lewis and Simons’s ”A
Discourse Not Intended for Her, " which relates the silencing felt by women graduate students

(1986), Jennifer Coates’ 1986 Women, Men, and Language, Patricia Lake’s succinct appeal

8

for the inclusion of more women writers in Advanced Placement English curricula (1988),
and the work of Dale Spender (1989, 1990) examining and detailing women’s relative silence
as conversants, students, and published and taught authors and critics. My preliminary study
operated on the premise that the tables of contents of literature anthologies constitute highly
inﬂuential, though informal, language policies by authorizing and potentially excluding or
privileging some stories, voices, dialects, and languages in many classrooms. While just how
many classrooms has not been fully determined, Applebee found that 66 % of public school
high school teachers report "regular use of an anthology,” 63% use the anthology as ”their
main source of selections," 92% rate anthologies as ”at least adequate as a source of
selections," and 88% similarly rate them as an "at least adequate" source of teaching
suggestions (1990, 53). In the course of my preliminary study, Dr. Geneva Smitherman
suggested to me that merely counting texts, selections, and pages written by women and
minority persons, while it would acquaint me with the degree of multicultural representation
in then-current anthologies (I worked with those edited 1989-1990), would yield only limited
information as to the linguistic diversity of these anthologies and to the sociolinguistic aspects
of language use within them (Smitherman, personal conversation, 1990). Thus, I somewhat
redirected my focus and interest.

Besides focusing my attention toward language and the social aspects of language use,
my preliminary study proved useful in that while counting selections, I could not help but
notice the huge amounts of non-selection materials, the instructional apparatus, which
surround selections. These materials consist of interpretive commentaries on selections, often
New Critical in nature; indices; introductory, historical chapters; introductory comments to
writers and selections; questions and project suggestions following selections; pictures; time-
lines; tables of contents; maps; photographs; deﬁnitions of literary and rhetorical terms as

well as illustrations of their use; glossaries; grammar and composition guides; "Voices"

9

sections which present short quotations from people seen as representative voices of a
particular era; and commentaries on language, particularly on changes in "American English. "
Any sort of query into the sociolinguistic messages to be found in American literature
anthologies would have to take this non-selection material into account, as it cannot help but
impact upon teacher and student readings of the selections contained within these books. To
ignore this material which constitutes between 48-59% of the total pages of the anthologies I
examined would render any study of the sociolinguistic texts and subtexts which reside in high
school American literature anthologies incomplete. An investigation of this non-selection
material would include an analysis of the direct and indirect information and messages this
material conveys about the literary texts it surrounds, about the language use within those
texts, and about the social aspects of language use by peoples of varied social classes, ethnic

origins and genders.

Scaffolding for The Study

Publishers of current high school American literature anthologies nearly all proclaim an
integrated approach to literature study as well as a broad representation of selections across
the gendered, cultural, and ethnic spectra. Indeed, they promise students ”the power of ﬁne
literature and the mastery of the language arts" (Prentice Hall, 1991, insert) as well as ”the
knowledge and appreciation of language" (T-3) through "the perfect blend of literature,
language, and life" as found in a ”wide range of literary voices" (McDougal Littell, 1992,
insert, T-2) which "recognize and embrace the rich diversity of cultures in America" (Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1993, advertising supplement, 2) and ”chronicle various inﬂuences on
the English of Americans" (Scott, Foresman, 1991, T-9). To assess the validity of such

claims, I have examined the selections and the print non-selection materials found in the most

10

recent editions of ﬁve well-known and widely used American literature anthologies. The
three points below function as the theoretical scaffolding for my investigation. Each will be
detailed in the chapter which follows.

1. Current language theory and research which consistently link language use with
power and the attempts to standardize language and canonize its texts, even if inadvertent, to
domination and subordination. Besides affording communication and facilitating the full
participation of peoples in a culture, language can also serve as a means of erecting barriers
to bar one ethnic group or another, one gender or another, one social class or another from
educational, economic, or societal advantages.

2. Calls from English language arts professionals over the past 25 years for the
inclusion of study about language, that is, the sociolinguistic aspects of language use and
misuse, as an important part of English language arts curricula.

3. The contention that literature is an ideal ﬁeld on which to foreground language study
as it serves as reservoir, repository, and record of language use; literary texts foreground the

push-pull of competing dialects, of languages in contact.

Questions Underlying The Study

In the light of the above, as I examined anthologies and analyzed the discourse therein, I
sought to determine:

1. Their demonstrated responses, if any, to recent, theorists’ research and resolutions
as these anthologies discuss or query language history, language use, dialects, and the

language related issues of class, gender, and ethnicity.

11

2. Whether these anthologies actively promote student thought and discussion about the
role of language in reﬂecting and possibly perpetuating social, economic, and political
stratiﬁcation.

3. The texts and subtexts of such demonstrated responses (or silences) as they occur in
the non-selection material found in these anthologies.

4. Whether these anthologies’ selections represent a broad spectrum of languages,
dialects, and cultures as promised.

Although aware of and sensitive to the issue of gender orientation and the possible messages
literature anthologies transmit in regard to this issue, I did not consider it in my study for the
following reasons. I would have been examining silences. The topics of homosexual
preferences and relationships never surface even through inference in either the literary
selections or the non-selection materials included in the American literature anthologies under
examination. The messages sent by this overwhelming silence as well as that enforced by
State Boards of Education such as Michigan’s which will not permit the phrase ”sexual
orientation" to be included in materials detailing K-12 literature outcomes and objectives

constitute a whole ﬁeld of needed educational research in itself.

The Sample

The ﬁve anthologies I have examined are:

Adventures in American Literature. Pegasus Edition. Annotated Teacher’s Edition. Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich. 1989.

America Reads Series. The United States in Literature. Classic Edition. Teacher’s
Annotated Edition. Scott, Foresman and Company. 1991.

Elements of Literature. Fifth Course. Literature of the United States. Annotated Teacher’s
Edition. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 1993.

12

Literature and Language. Yellow Level. American Literature. Teacher’s Annotated Edition.
McDougal, Littell and Company. 1992.

Prentice Hall Literature. The American Experience. Second Edition. Annotated Teacher’s
Edition. Prentice Hall. 1991.

These works include the most recent editions of the so-designated "Big Four" American
literature anthologies reviewed by Appleby, Johnson, and Taylor in The English Journal
(1989-1991) and are among the seven examined by Applebee in A Study of High School
Literature Anthologies (1991). Barbara G. Pace considers these four among the most
”commonly used United States literature anthologies” (1992, 33) along with McDougal
Littell’s American Literature as she attempts to establish the United States literature "textbook
canon." In place of her 1987 McDougal Littell edition, I have selected the 1992 Literature
and Language American Literature (McDougal Littell), an anthology whose senior consultants
include Arthur N. Applebee and Judith A. Langer, two prominent pedagogical researchers
who have recently published their ﬁndings and views on the teaching of literature in United
States classrooms (Applebee 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992; Langer 1992). In the light of their
recent research and recommendations, I was especially interested in taking a close look at this
textbook which in its frontispiece declares itself to be "a stroke of genius in literature-based
instruction. " In all cases, save the Harcourt Brace anthology, my work has engaged
textbooks published as much as 5-6 years more recently than those used by Pace in her study

and 3-4 years more recently than those examined by Applebee.

Related Previous Studies

My work differs from that of Appleby, Johnson, and Taylor (1989, 1990, 1991) in that

theirs consists of brief and informal reviews of anthologies’ contents and teaching apparatus;

it addresses no sociolinguistic concerns. Pace (1992) is interested in establishing which

l3

selections appear in three of the ﬁve United States literature textbooks she documents. She
neither considers those selections not common to at least three of the ﬁve, nor does she
examine the non-selection material therein. Sleeter and Grant (1991) report on race, class,
and gender bias as found in the content and pictures in 10 reading textbooks used in grades K-
8 with copyright dates between 1980 and 1988. They base their conclusions on analyses of
pictures, story-lines, content, and language. Though useful, Sleeter and Grant’s study treats
only textbooks used prior to senior high school. It does not, with the exception of a brief
comment on sexist language, investigate the sociolinguistic aspects of language use in the
textbooks it covers (90).

Applebee’s studies (1989, 1990, 1991, 1992) provide a wealth of statistics and insights as
he examines the teaching of literature in American secondary schools and the anthologies
from which most teachers, grades 9-12, draw selections. However, he does not provide
information on an anthology by anthology basis, nor does he divide the categories into which
selections fall in as much detail as I do. He notes only the gender and general ethnic
background of authors represented within the seven anthology series he researches. He lists,
as well, the most frequently anthologized selections and authors and those which are most
frequently taught. While he does examine the non-selection materials that accompany
selections in detail, he is primarily interested in the teaching techniques these materials call
for and the critical and theoretical bases the teaching apparatus demonstrate not in
sociolinguistic concerns. In a recent interview, Applebee told me that the sociolinguistic was
a dimension he had not yet considered as he examined anthologies (personal conversation,
October 13, 1992).

My investigation, then, updates and expands Pace’s and Appleby, Johnson, and Taylor’s.
It updates, and adds both speciﬁcity and a new dimension, the sociolinguistic, to Applebec’s

analyses of high school literature anthologies as it focuses on American literature. It extends

14

the work of Sleeter and Grant into the senior high school and focuses on aspects of textbooks
they treated only brieﬂy.

My study considers the teacher’s annotated edition of the ﬁve textbooks it researches as
well as the student anthology. Because I was interested in the materials directly available to
students and those in teachers’ hands on a daily basis, I did not include the expensive and
optional teaching kits and supplementary materials which these ﬁve publishers sell to
accompany their anthologies in this study. Nor did I analyze those anthologies published
primarily for college classrooms but advertised as suitable for Advanced Placement English

classes.

Methodology

To determine whether the ﬁve anthologies under study contain, as they promise, a broad
spectrum of languages, dialects, and cultures or whether they privilege some languages,
dialects, and cultures over others, I examined the selections included in each anthology. I
recorded and charted:

l. The number of male and female authors represented.

2. The number of African American, Native American, Asian American, Latino
American authors represented.

3. The number of selections in each anthology written by persons in each of the above
groups.

4. The number of pages devoted to selections written by persons in the above groups.

5. The number of long works contained in each anthology written by persons from the
above groups. I deﬁned "long works" as novels and plays. I did not include excerpts from

novels and plays as "long works. "

15

6. The number of pages of non-selection material.

7. The number of selections in each anthology which feature dialects other than
standard English and its prestige variants.

To counter claims that the chronological format of most American literature anthologies
makes imbalances inevitable and accounts for those which I found to exist, I also charted the
above for the time period 1900 (or 1915 depending on the time-frame of each anthology) -the
present, an era which as increased awareness, reclamation, and reassessment have taught
provides a wide diversity of literature in a wide range of dialects.

To determine the quantity and kinds of commentary and queries about language these
anthologies contain, I have analyzed the non-selection portions of each which treat language
use and have recorded the quantity and kinds of language discourse according to the following
categories on a number of full columns basis, one column being equal to about 50 lines.

1. The History and/or Changing Nature of American English

2. Dialects

- The definition of dialect
— dialects of American English
- authors’ use of dialect
- the status or stigma attached to various dialects
3. Levels of Language Use
— the deﬁnition of standard English
— standard English contrasted with non-standard English
- the nature of language standards, the setting of them
- varied levels of language use
- author’s use of varied levels of language use

- the status or stigma attached to varied levels of language use

16

4. Language and Gender
— the generic "men" and "he"
- authors’ use of the generic "man" and "he"
- other sexist language use
- the implications of sexist language use
5. Ethnicity and Language
— racist language use
- the implications of racist language use and derogatory ethnic language
6. Names and Labels
Because I am interested in more than the surface features of language use—the
countables-I have analyzed the language that surrounds selections to determine its texts and
subtexts, i .e. , the messages it conveys to teachers and students in regard to the social aspects
of language use, particularly language use as it relates to issues of race, social class, and
gender. Using discourse analysis as my mode, I have highlighted, recorded, and analyzed
passages in each anthology which treat language use directly by way of deﬁnition, description,
or explanation and which question or comment on the language use or mode of speaking of
characters in literary texts or of the authors’ of those texts. Additionally I have similarly noted
and analyzed passages which themselves may exhibit ethnic, gendered, or classist subtexts
and/or mixed messages. While I have not engaged in a full discourse analysis of the
anthologies’ literary selections, I have provided such discussion of selections as is needed to
inform my analysis of the non-selection materials. Following a discussion of the theoretical
underpinnings of my investigation in Chapter Two, the results of my study will be detailed as
will their implications for students, their teachers, and English education professionals in the

chapters that follow.

Chapter Two

Theoretical Underpinnings

Language and Power: Language Theory and Linguistic Research

That language can be used as a means of domination and subordination is widely
recognized by an array of linguists and language theorists. Consequently, many of these
theorists and educators readily link language with authority and language issues with issues of
gender, social class, and ethnicity. Standardization and canonization have often been
perceived as means to control and contain the spoken and written language, rendering some
dialects and written and spoken productions prestige and privilege while rendering others
inferior and silencing others. As early as 1946, George Orwell pointed out the political uses
of language to subvert and manipulate in his "Politics and the English Language. " Even
earlier, Louis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass alerted its readers not only to the arbitrary
nature of words but also to the power of the person who supplies and enforces their
deﬁnitions when Humpty Dumpty declares that he can ”deﬁne a word ‘to mean just what I
want it to mean’" since he is "‘Master’" (in Bosmajian 1974, 6).

Raymond Williams in both Keywords (1983) and Marxism and Literature (1977) asserts
that the power inherent in language use, in language standardization, in literature, and in
literary language Operates, in part, through the designation of "authentic and longstanding
(language) variations...as culturally subordinate;“ dialects become deviations within the

”process of cultural domination" where "what is projected is not only a selected authoritative

17

18

version" against which all other versions can be found inferior and incorrect, but also a
reiﬁed notion of language as separate from its speakers and variants: ”a singular English and
then dialects of English" (1983, 105-106). Language standards work to maintain cultural
authority in the face of the inevitable oppositional and alternative practices in social language
that emerge and newly deﬁne a changing practical consciousness (1977).

Jennifer Coates (1986), well aware of the connections between language and power,
speaks of the "vicious circle" which results when "social distinctions are reﬂected in linguistic
distinctions which, in turn reinforce social distinctions" and suggests that language, at least
"in a secondary way is a factor in perpetuating disadvantage" (160). The thought of both
Williams and Coates as well as that of the many language theorists who follow below informs
the following diagram where I depict the cyclical and reciprocal nature of cultural dominance
and language use. A reciprocity exists between dominant culture institutions which have the
power and authority to set and/or legitimatize language norms, to name, to deﬁne. Language
reveals the political and social attitudes of the dominant culture. Language use which voices
those attitudes that are discriminatory toward women, some races, some gender orientations,
some social classes helps perpetuate the power of the dominant culture. Conversational styles
and modes as well as various media often serve as the transmitters of dominant cultural
attitudes, and, in doing so, reinforce those attitudes, thus receiving both power and sanction
from the dominant culture.

To see my diagram as a closed circle, however, is to rigidify and over simplify. Because
language is, in Williams’ terms, both "constitutive and constituting”(l977, 43), language can
not be graphed as a reiﬁed construct separate from its users as those who adhere to the notion
of a reiﬁed standard are wont to do. Rather, language functions as an active "social
language,...living evidence of a continuing social process, into which individuals are born and

within which they are shaped, but to which they also actively contribute, in a continuing

l9

process" (37). Language is "the articulation of this active and changing experience, a social
presence in the world. " (37-38).

Williams’ account of language allows for change and some ﬂexibility, hence, the gaps in
my diagram. It acknowledges a reciprocity between social change and language change or
tends to merge the two. Can persons make changes in the society at large by changing their
language? Clearly, language manipulators and censors of all sorts, whether such
manipulations work toward humanitarian or dastardly ends would answer in chorus "Yes!"
along with Sapir and Whorf (1956). But again, one must guard against over-sirnpliﬁcation.
As Julia Penelope points out, Sapir "suggested that language is a prepared road or groove into
which our thoughts slip. Language guides and limits the options available for describing our
perceptions" (1990, 203). "Guides" as opposed to "dictates" or "controls” seems an
important distinction, as it allows for the sort of change Williams ﬁnds essential to seeing
language as social and constituting. Paths can diverge from roads. Paths trodden long
enough become roads.

Bosmajian (1974) Smitherman (1977, 1984), and Gates Jr. (1984), among others, speak
to the power of words: of "Nommo, the magic power of the word” which can "actualize life
and give man mastery over things” (Smitherman, 1977, 78). The views of all three will
prove important to the forthcoming analysis of literature anthologies. Gates describes the
power of language to critique and subvert a dominating culture through signifyin(g), which
produces what he sees as the double-voiced ”trickster" nature of all Black oral and written
literary texts (3, 5, 184-231). Bosmajian details the power of language to name and deﬁne:
"Our identities are greatly affected by the names we are called and the words with which we
are labelled....Through deﬁnition, we restrict, we set boundaries,” we limit (5). ”While
words, names, and language are used to inspire us, to motivate us to humane acts, to liberate

us, they can also be used to dehumanize human beings and to justify their suppression" (6).

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21
Kramarae, Schultz, and O’Barr’s useful collection of essays, Language and Power

(1984), delineates the links between oral and written languages usage and the power
relationships inherent in such usage. William O’Barr summarizes a variety of
language/power mergings. Among them are included: pronoun choices, titles and labels,
language policies of any sort, language attitudes toward dialects and speech patterns, and
language rights (such as The Students ’ Right to Their Own Language Resolution to be
discussed below) all of which will be discussed in Chapters Four and Five (260-285). He
concludes that ”language is both a mirror of society and a major factor inﬂuencing, affecting,
and even transforming social relationships" (265). Among those most aware of the power of
language to maintain or transform social relationships are feminist writers. Although not
always in complete agreement on speciﬁcs, Julia Penelope (also Stanley 1977, 1985, 1990),
Aileen Nilsen (1977, 1981, 1991), and Robin Lakoff (1974, 1975, 1990, 1991) all discuss the
reality of a ”women’s language," detail the negative effects of the sex-marked and deﬁning
labels women are given, and bring to light the deep seated nature of sexism in spoken and
written English and in language practices such as classroom discourse and personal
conversations.

Baron (1989), alluding to a much earlier essay "The English Language is My Enemy" by
Ossie Davis (1969), brieﬂy outlines ways in which the use of language can discriminate
against peoples on the basis of color, religion, national origin, and gender. While this
discrimination may be deliberate, much results from persons who are not language aware and
self-conscious language users being "the unwitting perpetrators of a bias that has become built
into the language"(173). It is to those "unwitting perpetrators" that the work of the many
linguists and theorists discussed above should have special impact. Paulo Freire, who as a
pedagogue of the oppressed strives to bring both his students and readers to awareness, alerts

his audience to words’ power and the necessity of demanding a voice in the cultural dialogue

22

as he declares, "To speak a true word," that is, one comprised of both reﬂection and action,
"is to transform the world" (1990, 75).

To silence, to ignore, to declare a people’s dialect unintelligible is to subordinate
peoples, whether done deliberately or inadvertently. To rigidly standardize language serves to
maintain cultural dominance, whether or not that result is deliberately sought. Graham Pechy
(1989), while reviewing the language theories of Mikhail Bakhtin, argues that standardization
and canonical approaches to literature and discourse "are not as much analogues of the
absolutist state as accomplices in that state’s belief in the absoluteness of its rule" (68). As
Tony Crowley (1989) mediates Bakhtin’s afﬁrmation of heteroglossia (many voices, many
languages) within cultural discourse, he, like Bakhtin, ﬁnds standardization to be an attempt
to create a monoglossia (single voice or language) within a culture for purposes of frustrating
those dialogic tensions which decentralize the power of the dominant culture. Forms and
representations of the language of emerging social classes and ethnic groups which appear to
threaten the dominant culture’s hegemony must either be enslaved or supplanted through a
"solidiﬁcation of grammatical or cultural forms," that is, through a standard language and
standard cultural forms of that language. A monoglossic standard literary language taught in
early education ensures a dominant culture’s hegemony by disciplining its citizens to take only
certain positions or roles within the social order. This monoglossia of language and literature
silences non-standard speakers by rendering them "noisy, " "inarticulate, " ”stammering, "
"emotional,” and produces a sense of shame and insufﬁciency in them. The discourse of
power is denied to them as is access to publication (75-82).

In his Lives on the Boundary (1989), Mike Rose makes similar assertions. According to
Rose, a literary canon has tended to push much discourse to the margins, from American
Indian songs and chants to immigrant ﬁction and poetry and the works of African Americans

in favor of a literature that often seems to be foreign and overwhelming to many children and

23

which features the supposed cultural superiority and language of middle class whites. This
canonical approach tends to silence cultural dialogue and transaction. Voiced with greatest
force during times of social and economic challenge and uncertainty, it promotes "quality
control" and the mythic image of a stable past as it stiﬂes thinking and diffuses the essential
dialogic tension between the old and the new while demeaning much of the "rich mix of
speech and ritual and story that is America" (238). Like Rose, James Moffett gives testimony
to the links between power and language and the desire to control power by controlling
language when he theorizes that latent ruling class fears may create hidden impediments to the
implementation of successful language programs in the schools. "Both laity and educators,"
he contends, fear

the liberation in thought and behavior that students would achieve if talking, reading,

and writing were taught effectively; that is, if these powerful tools were freely given

to youngsters for their personal investigation (1985,92-93).

The educational research investigating language prescription and standardization of James
Milroy and Lesley Milroy (1985), though written in less strident political tones, is in
agreement with much of the thought above. They trace the history of ”the complaint
tradition" in regard to non-standard usage from Jonathan Swift to John Simon. Typical
complainers assume that "there is only one correct way of speaking and/or writing the English
language" and that deviations from this norm are "illiterate barbarisms,...irregular and
perversely deviant. " Their use is a sign of "stupidity, ignorance, perversity, moral
degeneracy, etc. ; " thus, it is ”quite right to discriminate against non-standard users" (40).
Although standard English remains an ideal in the mind never wholly attainable and
standardization an ideology, "language guardians always consider non-standard usages to arise
from the perversity of speakers or from cognitive deﬁciency” (25). Clearly attitudes toward

language readily become attitudes toward language users.

24
John Willinsky’s research, ﬁrst published in 1984 and again in 1988, focuses on the

politics of standard English in the high school. In the forward to his study, Edgar
Friedenberg suggests that schools operate as the ofﬁcial custodians of language use. Though
tactful and moderate, says Friedenberg, Willinsky’s work will reveal the schools’ power "to
make young people who use language differently doubt whether they have anything to say at
all" (ix-xi).

Willinsky openly admits that he sees in language use "a political struggle....Words
become weapons and targets for people securing their position in the linguistic community"
(xvii). Citing the 1979 research of Kehane and Kehane and the 1978 work of Kroch,
Willinsky argues that "the place and value of standard in the occupational hierarchy is
maintained as one group holds its most favored status by virtue of its ability to work this
prestige form" (5). While examining students’ and teachers’ attitudes toward standard and
non-standard usage and speakers, he found and documented evidences of race, class, and
gender bias directed against Blacks, girls, and low-status "west-enders.” (126-127). He also
found that literature studies as well as grammar and composition studies serve to perpetuate
the primacy, even the quasi-morality of standard English, "proper English," as it is so often
called; that both students and teachers regard dialect as deviation (141), and that the schools
tend to perpetuate rather than demythologize the reiﬁcation of standard English as well as "the
investment of intellectual and moral qualities in its form" (140; see also 6-12).

Willinsky urges the demystiﬁcation of standard English as well as open and direct
classroom discussion of language and its sociolinguistic aspects: of standard’s establishment
of male as generic, dialect as deviation, and its use as propriety and morality. Its artiﬁce, ”a
political wonder," should be deconstructed and exposed, its false air of intellectuality and
superiority undermined. Standard English should be seen for what it has become, a tool

surrounded by social texts which can function as a sort of ”cultural capital” (141). Such an

25
honest and realistic look at language should prompt a "re-exploration of language" while
protecting students against the schools’ full appropriation of "clarity and respectability" of
"power and knowledge" (142).

Willinsky’s recommendations that language serve as the means to undermine the notion
of a reiﬁed standard is voiced in terms much like Michel Foucault’s: "Discourse transmits
and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and
makes it possible to thwart" (1979, 101). Indeed, Willinsky’s investigation of students’ and
English teachers’ attitudes toward standard English bears out Foucault’s earlier and well-
known contention:

Education may well be, as of right, the instrument whereby every individual, in

a society like our own, can gain access to any kind of discourse. But we well know
that in its distribution, in what it permits and what it prevents, it follows the well-
trodden battle lines of social conﬂict. Every education system is a political means of
maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse with the knowledge and
power it carries with it. ...What is an educational system, after all, if not the
ritualization of the word; if not the constitution of a diffuse doctrinal group; if not
the distribution and an appropriation of discourse, with all its learning and powers?"
(1972, 227)

Like those persons described by Crowley as he mediates Bakhtin, the non-standard speakers

interviewed by Willinsky assessed themselves as "speechless, babbling" (131).

Linda Christiansen (1990) recounts a similar situation where she was reduced to tears in
front of her ninth grade classmates due to her teacher’s ridicule of her working class dialect.
Because she did not speak standard English, or what Jesse Jackson refers to as the "cash
dialect," she was humiliated. Rather than serving to prompt her to learn standard
pronunciations, public embarrassment served to silence her in class and to inhibit her from
linguistic risk-taking, to play "language cop" in regard to her own discourse and to suppress
words that were difﬁcult for her to pronounce "properly" as well as usage conventions from

her working class background, making careful substitutions for those words and conventions.

"Lawyer" became "attorney;" lie or lay? was resolved by "recline." Now, after 15 years of

26

English teaching, she consistently ﬁnds the same silencing fear of risk-taking and
embarrassment on the part of her non-standard speakers and writers and works to counter it
(1990, 36-40).

Do high school American literature anthologies in some way serve to silence and
embarrass nonstandard speakers? The forthcoming analysis of both the kinds of selections
contained in these anthologies and of the sociolinguistic messages these selections as well as
the non-selection material that surrounds them may carry to students and their teachers will

consider that question among the others it addresses.

Pedagogical Concerns: Calls for Study About Language

The teacher’s ideal (is) not so much the diffusion of knowledge among the many, as
the evocation of power among the few; and the teacher’s function not so much the

democratizing of education, as the aristocratizing of it. (Broadus 1915)

English language arts professionals and educators have long been aware of the connections
between power and language, the use of language to manipulate and silence, and the
sometimes conscious, but often non-thinking and inadvertent use of language and language
arts education to enhance the prestige of some persons and groups while embarrassing and
silencing others. Such a blatant wording of elitist educational theory as Edmund K. Broadus’
1915 English Journal statement would not see print in today’s College English or English
Journal. Rather than ﬁnding any inherent superiority in those texts and dialects a culture
privileges, increasingly, leading English language arts professionals, like the researchers and
theorists above, posit causal relationships between the economic and social interests of a

dominant culture and its attempts to standardize language, canonize its texts, and maintain

27

what Ben Nelms has called "fussy elitist" attitudes toward language use and users.
Increasingly, they work to undermine such attitudes. Accordingly, English education
professionals have called for increased attention to study about the sociolinguistic features of
language in all educational settings, contending that such study must move well beyond
traditional concerns with grammar, vocabulary, and syntax to the serious consideration of the
social, political, and economic aspects of language use.

8.1. Hayakawa contributed signiﬁcantly to attempts to heighten language awareness.
Despite his more recent efforts in conjunction with John Tanton to pass a restrictive English-
Only amendment to the United States Constitution, these efforts seen as posing a threat to
America’s multilingual heritage and the civil rights and well-being of persons who belong to
"language minorities" (Daniels 1990, Smitherman 1990, Villanueva 1990, Sledd 1990, Stalker
1990), his 1941 Language in Action must be acknowledged. It focused attention on semantics
and on the political uses of language to "start marches in the streets" and to "stir others to
stone marchers" (Preface to the 1989 edition, Language in Thought and Action). As a
textbook it "informed and inﬂuenced the 40’s generation of high school and college students,
and has continued that inﬂuence through the 50’s, the 60’s, the 70’s, the 80’s and now in the
90’s," states Peter Hasselriis in the February 1991 issue of The English Journal (28), an issue
which features six articles attesting to the signiﬁcance of Hayakawa’s book and suggesting
classroom applications of it.

The Dartmouth Conference, as recorded in Growth Through English (Dixon 1967),
convened under the joint sponsorship of the Modern language Association (MLA), the
National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and the National Association for the
Teaching of English (NATE). As spokesperson for the international group of English
educators, John Dixon called for English teaching environments in which students are

"steeped in language in operation" so as to "conceptualize earlier awarenesses of language"

28

and, thereby, "gain insight into themselves and others" (13). Schools should provide students
with opportunities to read, write, speak, dramatize in an atmosphere of language awareness
where teachers and students recognize that "one of the most intimate possessions of a person
is his dialect" (31) and where students and teachers explore how "language relates to
experience and society" (114).

Eighteen years later, as chair and spokesperson of the Committee on Language, Politics,
and Public Affairs, during the 1984 conference of the International Federation for the
Teaching of English (IFTE), Dixon stated that language has too often become a tool by which
the politically elite lie or create linguistic smokescreens to promulgate altered views of reality.
Dixon praises NCTE for alerting the public to the dangers and reality of doublespeak (See
also Lutz 1989, 1990 and Pei 1973) in language use and moves to issues of racist and classist
language as he contends that in political, economic, and cultural empires, the way people
speak is organized in especially obnoxious and bigoted ways to maintain and enhance the
position of those in power (1985, 135-136). To counter disadvantage and prejudice, his
committee insists that English teachers must recognize that their students represent a broad
range of racial, ethnic, religious, and social differences, all of which must be valued. They
must afﬁrm:

1. That they accept their students’ right to the varieties of language they bring to
school,...appreciate that all varieties of language fulﬁll common human purposes in their
home speech communities, . . .embrace and celebrate the richness of this variation.

2. That one-but only one-of the English teacher’s jobs is to help students add to their
repertoire a variant of their dialect of English that is usable as a lingua franca .

3. That English teachers should teach about how language is used in real social

contexts, including why prestige dialects exist and why they are perpetuated (139).

29

It was at this same conference that James Moffett spoke of the hidden impediments to the
realization of universal literacy mentioned above.

Ten years earlier (1974), the Conference on College Composition and Communication
(CCCC), after two years of intense discussion and debate, adopted the Students ’ Right to
Their Own Language Resolution, which afﬁrmed all students’ rights to their own patterns and
varieties of language—"the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they ﬁnd
their own identity and style" (in Allen 1985, 144). Since scholars long ago denied the
validity of the myth of a standard American dialect, "the claim that any one dialect is
unacceptable amounts to an attempt of one social group to exert its dominance over another"
(144). The Resolution urged that teachers be provided with the necessary "experiences and
training that will enable them to respect diversity and uphold the right of students to their own
language" (144). The 1979 King decision in Ann Arbor, Michigan, not only brought to
national attention the adverse effects upon student learning caused by negative teacher
attitudes toward and teacher stigmatization of students’ Black English Vernacular, but also
acknowledged the barriers created by these attitudes which deprive Black speakers of
educational equity. The case afﬁrmed Black English as a legitimate language. The Ann
Arbor School Board was ordered "to takes steps to help its teachers recognize the home
language of students and to use that knowledge in their attempts to teach reading skills in
Standard English" (Scott and Smitherman 1985, 312; see also Smitherman 1990, 1981, 1984;
Scott 1985).

By 1986, language diversity and cultural diversity were commonly seen as connected
educational issues. The NCTE Task Force on Racism and Bias in its Expanding
Opportunities: Academic Success for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students (1986), a
revision of its earlier Non-White Minorities in English and Language Arts Materials (1978),

found critical to the success of linguistically and culturally diverse students the incorporation

30

into regular classroom use of "the rich backgrounds of linguistically and culturally diverse
students" and the frequent introduction and use of "classroom reading materials that celebrate
students’ cultural richness" in ways that do not strike students as mere tokenism. In 1987, in
answer to national and state campaigns for a National Language Amendment and for
restrictive English-Only laws, the NCTE became a charter member in English Plus in
afﬁrmation of "America’s multilingual heritage" (Daniels 1990) and passed unanimous
resolution at the 1987 NCTE Convention condemning attempts to "purify" the language by
mandate and/or legislation (vii). 1988 saw the CCCC institute and pass its National Language
Policy which asserts the value and validity of multilingualism as well as the necessity of
students achieving oral and literate competence in the "language of wider communication
(English) to prepare all American youth for full participation in our multicultural nation and
linguistically diverse world" (Smitherman 1990, 115). The policy insists that legal services,
education, civil rights, and social services must not be denied to people because of "linguistic
differences" (Smitherman 1990, 115-116). As of the passage of the resolution, the policy of
the CCC has been:

to provide resources to enable native and non-native speakers to achieve oral and

literate competence in English, the language of wider communication;

to support programs that assert legitimacy of native languages and dialects and

ensure that proﬁciency in the mother tongue will not be lost; and,

to foster the teaching of languages other that English so that native speakers of

English can rediscover the language of their heritage or learn a second language. (in

Smitherman 1990, 116)

The 1989 English Coalition Conference Report, Democracy Through Language, (Lloyd-

J ones and Lunsford) foregrounds language study, especially "the value-laden nature of
language use" (27) and the use of language to "manipulate, coerce, or control" (40). Ben
Nelms, editor of The English Journal, in recent issues of that periodical has called for
language studies that go beyond "the history and structure of the language to its emotive and

semantic dimensions." English instruction should assist students as they "examine the

31

language of public discourse and the media to recognize and defend themselves from
propaganda and manipulation" (January 1990, 103). In February 1991, Nelms reiterated his
position that English professionals must aid students to:

1. discern intention and resist manipulation

2. analyze mediated texts (ﬁlm, television, advertising, political oratory, PR

campaigns) along with written texts

3. understand the semantic properties of language in thought and action (99).
Students, and some of their teachers, need language study to help overcome "the adult
community’s linguistic naivete, prejudice, and fussy elitism" (99).

The use of language as a potential means of control and creator of barriers has been of
interest not only to those theorists and educators interested in multiculturalism and
multilingualism; these issues have aroused keen interest among feminists. Among those aware
of and offering commentary on language and its role in subordination early on were Robin
Lakoff (1974, 1975), Julia Stanley (1977), Haig Bosmajian (1974), Kate Millett (1970),
Aileen Pace Nilsen (1981/1972, 1977), Casey Miller and Kate Swift (1991/1972, 1991/1976),
and Gloria Steinem, who in 1984, collected essays she had written 1971-1983.

In the light of such commentary, the 1974 NCTE Convention adopted a resolution calling
for the preparation of guidelines for non-sexist language use, which were adopted and
published in 1975. These gave teachers the responsibility for "promoting language that opens
rather than closes possibilities to women and men," crucial as "language plays a central role
in socialization" (Guidelines, in Nilsen et al., 1977, 182). 1977 brought the publication by
NCTE of Sexism and Language (Nilsen et al.) endorsed by both the NCTE Committee on the
Role and Image of Women in the Council and the Profession and the NCTE Committee on
Doublespeak to "bring to English teachers’ attention an analysis of the image of females in the
language we speak, write, and teach" (vii).

Dale Spender’s research in schools and university classrooms (1980, 1990/82, 1989)

reveals the relative silencing that occurs as women converse with men, learn in classrooms

32

along side men, try to publish their writing, and seek for general classroom study in the
mixed classroom more works written by women. Patricia Lake, in a 1988 English Journal
piece, succinctly states the case for the inclusion of more texts written by women in high
school literature classes. Failure to do so:

1. distorts cultural heritage;

2. promotes the myth that men are the only real producers of culture; and

3. promotes stereotypes which keep women from achieving all of which they - are
capable (35-38).

Like Spender and like Penelope in her Speaking Freely, Unleaming the Lies of the Fathers ’
Tongues (1990), and like many of the researchers and educators cited above, Lake would like
to advocate the time when both in and out of the classroom discourse proves itself to be
intended for "her" as well as for "him."

Clearly, recent history reveals English language arts professionals promoting language
studies that go well beyond grammar and syntax to alert students to the power of language as
it relates to authority, cultural dominance, and issues of ettmicity, social class, and gender.
Literature is a particularly appropriate ﬁeld in which to advance the sort of language study
called for by educators, theorists, and researchers. Literature is language in action; literature
foregrounds the push-pull of varied languages and dialects. While the argument can be made
that at least indirectly all literature offers a commentary on language use, much past and
current literature directly features language as both subject and mode. Literature, then, serves
as a ground upon which the heteroglossia thrives and where the carnival, which is language,
is enacted. Whether the current literature anthologies under study acknowledge their role as
language collections as well as text collections and have translated pedagogical concern about
and calls for increased study about sociolinguistic issues, into direct commentary and

questions about language use will be a focus of the chapters which follow.

33
Literature and Language Study: A Merging of Texts

Consistently linked with spoken language, with authority, and with power, literature
serves as an ideal ﬁeld on which to foreground language study. As reservoir and record, as a
shaper and controller of language, as composed of language, literary texts themselves as well
as the collections of those selected to appear in authoritative literature anthologies can teach a
great deal about the social aspects of language use and the push-pull of competing dialects.
Likewise the texts which surround the selected pieces, the non-selection materials, through
direct statement, through silences, through contradictory and/or mixed messages, through
naming and deﬁning can serve as grounds for language study and for an analysis of the
attitudes towards language use-either that within the literary selections or that of people in
general—these textbooks convey.

The links between oral and written texts as well as the authority and power granted to
text producers and the texts themselves have been frequent topics of Edward Said, Michel
Foucault, and M.M. Bakhtin. Said (1979) rejects the opposition between spoken and written
texts as he discusses an author’s ideolect and voice. Texts are "worldly" and social. In many
ways they are analogous to speech situations (165). A written text, like an oral one, is an
"utterance, which is the verbal realization of a signifying intention. . .that is, a verbal
intention" affected by the world-by time, place, circumstance, and audience (169). In written
texts, speech is valorized as the "discursive, circumstantially dense interchange of speaker
facing bearer is made to stand—sometimes misleadingly—for a democratic equality and co-
presence in actuality between speaker and bearer" (178). Foucault addresses this "misleading
equality" as he discusses the power of oral and written texts:

In appearance, speech may well be of little account, but the prohibitions surrounding
it soon reveal its links with desire and power...speech is no mere verbalization of

conﬂicts and systems of domination, but the very object of man’s conﬂicts (1972,
216).

34

As Foucault recognizes, power accompanies the producer of texts; power accompanies
authorship. An author soon becomes an ideological abstraction, and comes to represent more
than a mere person (Shakespeare for example). The author then represents a whole mode of
discourse, and, as such, the object of the struggle for power. The author, thus, is a
"functional principal" by which "in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses" (1979,
158). "The author" put forward as an inspirational model and source of knowledge, serves to
control and censure the "excesses" of the heteroglossic and the polysemic discourse of ﬁction.
To reduce literary studies to "great author" studies, exerts control over literature’s carnival-
like tendencies as the discourse of those authors works to set standards for literary discourse
and discourse in general. Additionally, their discourse affects the discourse, both oral and
written, through which these authors are discussed (158).

Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) points out the social nature of all verbal discourse in "its entire
range and each and every of its factors, from the sound image to the furthest reaches of
abstract meaning" (259). For Bakhtin, "the novel can be deﬁned as a diversity of social
speech types and a diversity of individual voices, artistically arranged" (262). The
heteroglossia which makes up ﬁction includes:

social dialects, characteristic group behavior, professional jargons, generic
languages, languages of generations and age groups, tendentious languages,
languages of the authorities of various circles, and of passing fashions, languages
that serve the speciﬁc sociopolitical purposes of the day (263).
The social diversity of speech types and the multiplicity of social voices serve as both the
medium through which ﬁction’s themes move and the means through which they are
articulated (263). Stratiﬁcation and heteroglossia of language use keep language alive and
developing in contrast to attempts, always ﬁnally doomed, to create or strictly maintain a
standardized, monoglossic language by uniting and centralizing verbal-ideological thought.

Bakhtin ﬁnds such attempts to control language directly linked to "processes of socio and

cultural centralization" (271). These attempts will ultimately fail, for while "in higher ofﬁcial

35

socio-ideological levels" they seem successful, "on lower levels," the heteroglossia, its
speakers and writers perhaps evincing Ogbu’s "oppositional cultural resistance," prevails
sharply and consciously opposed to the literary language. As examples of the survival of
language life amidst language oppression, Bakhtin cites the literature of parody, the fabliaux,
the Schwanke of street songs, folk sayings, anecdotes wherein was found language play with
the "ofﬁcial language of monks and scholars" so that no language "could claim to be an
authentic, incontestible face" and all "languages were masks" (273). Today we would add
song lyrics, rap, street language, and talking trash (obviously only a partial list) to his list of
oppositional discourse forms which ensure language vitality.

A large number of other writers and critics link literature and speech. Many directly
discuss language use in their creative productions. To treat all those who do so is beyond the
scope of this study, and probably impossible if, as Jameson suggests, "it is the possession of
language that ‘writes’ us even as we imagine ourselves to be writing" (1972, 140). All texts,
says Jameson, via metalanguages, tell stories about their own writing; they are language
speaking about language. Even in texts which do not openly discuss language, "one can show
how auto-referentiality dominates in some conscious fashion, even in those contemporary texts
which lay claim to older and more traditional types of content" (204). Rather than any sort of
complete listing, what follows, then, is a brief sampling of some of those critics, writers, and
written texts which directly feature language use and its social and political dimensions.

In his Black Literature and Literary Theory (1984), Henry Louis Gates Jr. parallels
Bakhtin’s double-voiced discourse which offers parodic narration and hidden or internal
polemic with the African American practice of signifyin(g) (294-295) and contends that all
Black literature signiﬁes, names by indirection, so that the apparent signiﬁcance of the
message differs from its real message (291). "Talking texts" (297) and "speakerly texts,"

says Gates, "privilege the representation of the Black speaking voice. " Black texts become

36
"oral books" or "talking books" (296). Elsewhere Gates analyzes "the trope of the talking

book" as found in African American narratives and ﬁction (1988). The Color Purple,
according to Gates, signiﬁes on this trope as Celie not only produces "a "talking book" but
also gains her own voice (784).

Kimberly W. Benston’s "I Yam What I am: The Topos of (Un)naming" (1984)
investigates the critical importance of language use as found in names and labels as she traces
the topoi of naming and unnaming apparent in a variety of writers’ stories and poems
including Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Walker, Baraka (whose own name illustrates the
topos of (un)naming as does Hawthome’s), Ellison, Jay Wright, and Michael Harper. Names
as furnished by Masters are enslaving ﬁctions which must be (un)named, that is,
deconstructed and rendered powerless whereby a person gains the right to name herself.
Naming rituals play a role in a great deal of African American literature as this process is
explored and illustrated (151-170). Keith Gilyard (1990) presents yet another language-related
concern of many works of African American literature, the topos of ﬁnding one’s voice, both
oral and written, as he traces the prevalence of African language traditions in African
American literature. The dozens, signifying, testifying, and naming rituals ensure ethnic
language survival against what he calls "genopsycholinguisticide" (778).

Barbara Christian’s comments on Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God argue that
Hurston exposes "the multitextual interior of Black culture. . .to reveal its language rich in
metaphor and inherent poetics" (in Pettis, 1990, 789). "The oral nature of the culture
expressed through story telling, sermons, jokes, and songs becomes a vital part of the
spirituality that informs the book," adds Pettis (1990, 789).

In two interviews, one recorded by Mari Evans (1980) the other by Larry McCaffery
and Tom LeClair (1983), Toni Morrison identiﬁes those unorthodox novelistic techniques she

inscribes into the traditional novel form to make it Black, thus transforming a genre created

37

by and for middle class whites to one that includes and highlights the classic mythic heritage
of African Americans. Not surprisingly, many she lists relate directly to language use and
conventions. They include: the use of a chorus, the use of oral language to depict the lingua
ﬁanca of Black people, the construction of dialogue as it is heard, eliminating whenever
possible dialogue tags as she weaves together idiom, dialect, rituals, folkways, legends, and
myths. Recently, Joyce Irene Middleton has once again commented on the "orality," that is,
the abundance of "participatory oral forms" and the "oral memory" (1993, 65) which pervade
Morrison’s novels.

Critics and authors from non-white minority traditions acknowledge the power of words,
the critical importance of ﬁnding one’s voice, and the necessity of the survival of one’s ethnic
and/or home language. All these are critical to one’s sense of identity. Many of those
writers often referred to as postmodern, especially those who are not members of non-white
minorities, also feature language concerns in their works. However, they are more often
convinced of the fragmentation of language, of its lack of communicative power, of its abuse
into nearly meaningless babble. Even so, language constitutes one of their most frequently
written about topics.

Patricia Waugh (1984), Larry McCaffery (1982), and Tony Tanner (1971) all discuss
self-reﬂexive, postmodern writers who create "cities of words;" who recognize that reality is
a language construct, and who foreground language use in their works. Language has become
an entropic system, no longer useful for the communication of signiﬁcant meaning; it appears
to be breaking down into banalities, cliches, doublespeak, "drek" as Barthleme calls it in
Snow White. These writers present the "odd linguistic trip", examine the artiﬁce of language
constructs, investigate the "trash phenomenon" of language, and engage in very serious

language-play as they present the carnival we name "language. "

38

Clearly the above provides a wide variety of critical and literary texts for the study of the
social aspects of language use. William W. Cook, while urging the study of language use in
literature states, "if language is more than mere word, gesture, tonal variation, and so on,
literature is more than the sum of words and events it includes." Literature, made of words
as one of its components offers readers an image of a world and of a culture (1985, 224).
Literature offers a means "to admit the home language to the classroom and grant that
language a dignity equal to other language" (245). Often literature makes that language-and
other language-its topic as well as its mode.

A brief list of a few works that directly treat language use would include "Words," by
Vern Rutsala, a poem in which the persona states his preference for non-standard language
use; Pygmalion (also My Fair Lady), a study of classist language attitudes; "Mommy What
Does ’Nigger’ Mean?" by Gloria Naylor; "The Story Hearer," a doublespeak story by Grace
Paley; the ﬁlm Educating Rita; and "Borders," a poem by Pat Mora meditating on the
difﬁculties of male/female communication. Donald Barthleme’s Snow White has already been
mentioned as featuring language as a "trash" phenomena; Margaret Atwood’s "Loulon: or the
Domestic Life of the Language" mocks academics’ language pretensions; Israel Horowitz’s
drama, This Indian Wants the Bronx chronicles a deadly hatred of foreigners and foreign
tongues. Although less violent in outcome, W. McDaniels’ "Who Said We All Have To Talk
Alike?" depicts the language intolerance levelled at an Ozark Mountain woman’s dialect when
she accepts a job as a nanny in California. Rita Dove’s "Parsley" tells of language
pronunciation as the basis for ethnic extermination. And it is Alice Walker’s Celie who
eloquently asserts her right to her own language:

Darlene tryin to teach me how to talk. . . .Everytime I say something the way I say it,
she correct me until I say it some other way. Pretty soon it make me feel like I

can’t think....Look to me only a fool would want you to talk in a way that feel
peculiar to your mind (222-223).

39

These are just a few of the many texts available which use language to talk about
language. If texts such as these are included among those in high school literature
anthologies, a ﬁeld on which to foreground discussion of the sociolinguistic aspects of
language use will be readily available. As this study examines the versions of United States’
literature ﬁve current high school anthologies present, a focus will be on the extent to which
these books foreground the study of the social aspects of language in both their "speakerly"
literary selections and their non-selection materials. Are the home languages of a wide
variety of persons presented? Do we "hear" the hetroglossia? Or, through the selection and
exclusion of literary texts as well as through the commentaries about the literary pieces
included, do we ﬁnd that these anthologies privilege some elements of the heteroglossia over

others? These are questions Chapters Three, Four, and Five will address.

Chapter Three

Covers and Tables of Contents

As the previous chapter demonstrates, language theory and its sociolinguistic applications
have been primary considerations not only to linguists but to literary theorists, cultural critics,
educators, and pedagogical researchers as well. Once the province of university classrooms
and scholarly journals, language topics have become a part of the current milieu and are
featured in a sizeable body of literary works, publications accessible to the non-academic
audiences such as Deborah Tannen’s You Just Don ’t Understand: Women and Men in
Conversation (1990), magazines and news articles. In addition to my shelves of more
scholarly works, in the past two years I have collected over 150 news clippings, cartoons, and
magazine articles which treat language issues. In the light of all the available scholarship on
language, of current interest in language, and of educators’ and educational researchers’ calls
for serious study of the sociolinguistic aspects of language use, one might expect current
American literature anthologies to contain selections which display the variety of dialects
which make up the current mixture called American English to open readers to this diversity.
One might also expect current American literature anthologies to provide in depth
commentary and questions about the sociolinguistic aspects of language use as well as about
the language use of selections’ authors and characters in those selections.

Similarly, one might expect recent American literature anthologies to feature a wide
diversity of authors and selections in the light of the growing interest in multiculturalism as

teachers, scholars, and readers call with Patrick Colm Hogan for "Mo’ Better Canons"

40

41
(February 1992, 182), particularly when reviews of recent research reveal that inter-cultural
and gender egalitarian literature classes "allow for freeing oneself from narcissistic constraints
and experiencing what one is not--but still on the basis of what one is" (189). Literary study
involving the extensive incorporation of diverse literary traditions-women’s literature and
minority literature-not only allows for a freer play of the heteroglossia as diverse stories,
voices, and dialects are read and validated, it also proves by all current measures, concludes
Hogan, to be "intellectually, aesthetically, and ethnically very desirable" (191).
In their adaptation of Shanhan and Knight’s guidelines for evaluating and selecting

classroom textbooks, Maxwell and Meiser (1993) argue:

Textbooks should represent our pluralistic society. . . .A literature textbook should

contain a balanced selection of representative pieces (not tokens)....A language text

should address language differences, treating all dialects of equal communicative

value, with the goal of enhancing understanding and interpersonal communications.

The relationship between language and cultures should be made clear (278).
What are literature texts if not language texts? If not language in action? In its 1986
Expanding Opportunities: Academic Success for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse
Students, NCTE recommends the incorporation of "the rich backgrounds of linguistically and
culturally diverse students by introducing classroom reading materials .that celebrate the
students’ cultural richness." Their dialects are a critical part of that cultural richness.
Teachers should choose reading and writing materials that "have more than token
representation of works by nonwhite minorities (I would add women) and that reﬂect a
diversity of subject matter, style, and social and cultural views." Language use in these
materials should be "realistic, consistent and appropriate to setting and characters."

What follows in this chapter are analyses of the tables of contents of the ﬁve anthologies

under scrutiny in regard to the gender and ethnicity of the included authors and in regard to

these authors’ use of variants of English. Whose voices and stories do we read in these

42

anthologies? Which of the diverse dialects of American English can be heard in these

"speakerly" texts?

The American Experience. Prentice Hall, 1991.

Cover

Because this anthology contains no literature from Canada, South America, or Central
America, the essentialist title, The American Experience, embossed in large gold letters, may
give messages to its readers that the United States is the only real America, that experience in
the United States has been universal ("experience" is singular), and that this experience is
deﬁnable (use of the deﬁnite article "the"). The large portrait under the title of the face of
Captain Joseph Reddeford Walker, a white male nineteenth century adventurer, which
dominates both the cover and the frontispiece could imply to readers that the contents within
come primarily from a white male perspective. The table of contents as well as an

examination of who the selections’ authors are bears out such a reading.

Table of Contents

The contents are arranged chronologically and begin with "Native American Voices," six
short pieces ranging in length from ﬁve lines to one and one half pages. Rather than
including early Spanish explorers or any Native American reaction to exploration and
colonization, the table of contents moves from colonial times to 1946. After 1946, works are
arranged by genre. While most of the table of contents is printed in black, blue is used as an

accent color to highlight special sections which appear throughout the anthology: "Reading

43

Critically: Model," "You The Writer," "You The Critic," "Crosscurrents" (special topics
and persons of interest), "Great Works." These are fully capitalized in enlarged print and
highlighted in blue. As the eye is caught by the large blue type and blue bar accents, one can
not help but notice that all of the six "great works" detailed are by white male authors, all
persons named in "crosscurrents" titles are white males, and seven of the eight models read
critically are by white males. One of the "crosscurrents" sectionsnone that was topically
titled rather than named for a person—"The Music of Harlem," was granted more space, six
columns, than the space given for the selections by all ﬁve of the Harlem Renaissance poets.

The male dominance visible in the table of contents corresponds with that found in the
Teacher’s section which precedes the student text in the Teacher’s Annotated Edition. Here
teachers ﬁnd supplementary teaching materials for a variety of courses listed and advertised.
All of the study guides depicted are supplementary to works written by white males. Of the
18 novels which make up the "Library of Great Works" that can be ordered from Prentice
Hall, only two are by women; only one, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, was written by a person
of color.

Further analysis of the authors and selections found in this anthology’s table of contents
can be found in Table 1 which follows on page 45. There Af.A. stands for African
Americans, As.A. for Asian Americans, N.A. for Native Americans, and LA. for Iatino(a)
Americans. Looking over Table l’s ﬁgures, it seems obvious that selections and pages by
white male authors dominate the textbook. What I found surprising was the degree of
domination in a 1991 publication. Hoping that an analysis of the selections and their authors
which make up the post-1946 portion of the book would prove that section more diverse and
balanced, I charted these below. Because the time and genre arrangements of units prohibited
a similar charting for my other anthologies, I did not analyze them. I found major gaps and

imbalances for the period 1946-present as well as for the textbook as a whole.

authors
selections
pages
percent

Men
27
30
145

(79.2)

44

Table 1A
1946 to the Present
Women Af.A. As.A.
l4 5 2
16 5 2
38 7 2
(20.9) (3.8) (1)

NA.

(1.6)

(5)

45

Table 1

The American Experience. Prentice Hall, 1991.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

m mm Ama w ALA. M La. .1“
To 1915 39 8 5 0 7 0
Post 1915 g _1 IQ 2 2 2
Total 128* 91 29 15 2 9 2
Percent (71.1) (22.7) (9) (1.6) (7.8) (1.6)
lr___Sele°ti0n8.; Mes Em . ALL 2 ALA. w EA. ~ __
To 1915 71 26 5 0 7 0
Post 1915 E 25 19 2 2 2
Total 204* 146 50 15 2 9 2
Percent (71.6) (24.5) (7.4) (1) (4.4) (1)
Pages e- Men ﬂames , Ate. ;As._A. . he... L_.A_.
To 1915 234 38 9 0 10 0 ﬂ
Post 1915 E 66 8 2 3 2 1
Total 618* 502 104 17 2 13 9
Percent (81.2) (16.8) (2.8) H(.3) (2) (1.4) I

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Long Works — 1 (white male)
Selection Pages — 618
Non-selection Pages — 718
Works in Dialect — 14 or 6.9%

Af.A. — African American

As.A. — Asian American

N.A. — Native American

L.A. — Latino(a) American *includes anonymous

46

As the above clearly reveals, even in that period 1946 to the present, an era from which
widely diversiﬁed selections are readily available, the representation in this anthology for
persons of color amounts to little more than token. Of the 145 selection pages containing
men’s writing, 17 contain writing by men of color. Of the 38 pages containing women’s
writing, 4 are devoted to writing by women of color. Prentice Hall’s version of the American
experience consists primarily of the experiences and voices of white males. Perhaps the short
excerpts at the back of the anthology which illustrate literary terms and techniques are
intended to modify or soften the message of white male dominance this anthology transmits.
These 2-5 line pieces illustrate "the parts of a literary work" (1270) as those parts are deﬁned
and explained. A breakdown of the authors of the short excerpts reveals that 20 are men, 23
are women, 13 are African Americans, 3 are Asian Americans, 3 are Native Americans, and
0 are Latino(a) Americans. However these excerpts, hidden in the back of the book are too
short, the numbers of their authors too many (43, 26 of whom appear nowhere else in this
book) in too few pages (69)for students to fully acknowledge and incorporate into their
knowledge of United States literature. They are barely mentioned.

Numbers without commentary tell an important, but only partial, story. Looking more
closely at the table of contents, 1 ﬁnd no work of ﬁction or drama in The American
Experience written by a person of color. African Americans and Native Americans appear in
the collection on largely a one poem per person basis or they appear in the nonﬁction section
of the book, a section that in too many literature classes holds the "least assigned genre”
(Swibold 1984). In the post 1915 section of the anthology, persons of color are represented
by only 22 of 334 pages or 6.6%. When one recalls the demographic projections recorded by
Gonzalez and Farrell quoted earlier in this study, 6.6% seems like serious under-
representation. When one remembers that women comprise slightly more than 50% of the

persons in our classrooms, Prentice Hall’s 16.8%, much of that in the nonﬁction and poetry

47

sections of the book, also seems less than generous. It is worthy of question that writers of
the stature of Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Adrienne Rich receive only a page
apiece of selection space, while Poe’s selections receive 20 pages and Franklin’s 17. No long
works by women or persons of color appear; the text’s one long work is Arthur Miller’s The

Crucible.

Introductions/Biographies

Prentice Hall’s authors are introduced prior to their works. A few writers make
appearances in two sections of the book and are given two full pages of introduction:
Faulkner, Sandburg, Crane, and Whitman. Most writers prior to the modern sections of the
anthology receive a full page of introduction which sketches the author’s life, style, literary
accomplishments, and views on writing. Thus students are "set up" before reading an
author’s selections to regard that author’s work through a lens colored by editorial comment.
Not all authors receive a full page of biographical introduction. An examination of who does

and who does not reveals the following:

Table 1B
Introduction Lengtin
Intro. Men Women Af.A. As.A. N.A. L.A.
Full pg. 70 20 5 0 l 1
1/2; Va pg. 21 9 8 2 2 1

A disproportionate number of writers of color receive less than a full page of introduction.
62% of the men who receive a full page are white; 95 % of the women who do are white.

Phillis Wheatley is the only woman of color given a full page of introduction. 90% of all full

48

page introductions are given to white authors. Not only can student readings be inﬂuenced by
the texts of the introductions which precede pieces, but by the relatively small space in words

nonwhite minority writers receive in introduction to their works.

Language Varieties

Not only are the primary voices found in The American Experience those of white males,
those voices as recorded in writing, speak primarily in standard English. Students receive
only limited exposure to the "Englishes" (Baron 1992; NCTE 1992) which are and have been
spoken throughout the United States. Only 14 of the 204 selections contain usage which
would be classiﬁed as either non standard or dialect. Too often those passages in dialect seem
nearly drowned out by the ﬂood-tide of standard English which surrounds them. For
example, in Stephen Crane’s "The Open Boat” the nonstandard speakers, the cook and the
oiler, engage in little dialogue, their spoken passages claiming only about one tenth of the
lines in this 30 column story told by an educated narrator who speaks in standard. Bernard
Malamud’s shoemaker and his assistant in "The First Seven Years" retain Yiddish syntactical
traces—"So, how did you enjoy?"-although their speech is surrounded by standard English
narration.

No selection is contained that has major passages written in Black English Vernacular as
deﬁned by Geneva Smitherman (1977). Nor do any appear in which can be found portions
written in what might generally be called Spanish inﬂuenced English (Ramet 1992) or more
speciﬁcally Chicano English (Ramet 1992; Finegan and Besnier 1989). The central character
in Eudora Welty’s "A Worn Path,” Phoenix Jackson, a BEV speaker, speaks in only 30 lines
of a 500 line story. In Faulkner’s ”The Bear," only Sam Fathers’ speech shows dialectal

inﬂuences of the rural South and of his Native American and Black heritage. All other

49

characters and the narrator are standard speakers. Sam serves as the boy-protagonist’s mentor
in the woods; he receives 41 lines of an 850 line story. No poems written in dialect are
included in this collection. Even the two spirituals listed in the table of contents have been
standardized so that "Coming for to carry me home" from "Swing Low Sweet Chariot"
remains the only vestige of Black dialectal usage. While no evidences of Chicano dialect can
be found as stated above, John Steinbeck does introduce a few untranslated Spanish words
into his ”Flight" as does Truman Capote in his "A Ride Through Spain.” Steinbeck also
retains an archaic translation of the familiar "thee” and "thou" as Mama addresses Pepe.

Other English variants to which students are brieﬂy exposed include rural Maine and
frontier, Western dialects. They read Cooper’s version of frontier dialect as spoken by Natty
Bumpo in an excerpt from The Prairie, well submerged in fathoms of standard narration.
Harte’s outcasts occasionally demonstrate frontier dialect (their dialogue makes up only about
1/ 13 of the story) in "The Outcasts of Poker Flat," but the story clearly belongs to the
standard English speaking narrator. In Larry McMurty’s excerpt from Lonesome Dove,
characters converse in an 1870’s frontier variant of English. Mrs. Tilley, a likeable but
minor character in Jewett’s ."The White Heron," chats in her rural Maine dialect, but is the
only nonstandard speaker in the story; her daughter, the omithologist, and the narrator all use
standard. Readers do "hear" a bit of dialect as Mrs. Tilley praises her Grandaughter:
"There ain’t a foot 0’ ground she don’t know her way over....Last winter she got the bluejays
to bangeing here, and I believe she’d ‘a’ scanted herself of her own meals to have plenty
about amongst ‘em" (PH, 543).

My point in reviewing the selections that include short passages in dialect is not to
critique authors’ styles. Rather I wish to demonstrate how few works PH contains where
students are exposed to lengthy passages in dialect. Flannery O’Connor, Mark Twain, and

Arthur Miller provide exceptions to the above pattern of nonstandard speech well insulated by

50
standard English. Sustained, major portions of their works are written in dialect. O’Connor
and Twain still rely on the educated narrator, but s/he does not dominate their works.
O’Connor’s narrator moves the storyline, provides descriptive detail, and summarizes
characters’ thoughts. Nonetheless, Mr. Shiftlet’s and Mrs. Crater’s voices, rich in southern
rural dialect, emerge as critical to the story. Students hear variants such as:
”Saturday," the old woman said. ”You and her and me can drive into town and
get married."
"I can’t get married right now," he said. "Everything you want to do takes
money and I ain’t got any."
”What you need with money?"
"It takes money," he said. "Some people’ll do anything anyhow these days, but
the way I think, I wouldn’t marry no woman...unless I could take her to a hotel and
giver something good to eat" (PH, 961).

Twain’s narrator frames both "Tom Quartz" and ”The Celebrated Jumping Frog... "
while the inner stories are told in western frontier dialect by Dick Baxter and Simon Wheeler,
respectively, giving the illusion that the dialectal speakers are the tellers of their tales. More
on this illusionary nature of Twain’s dialectal characters as their own story tellers will be
discussed in Chapter Four. The longest work in which characters converse in dialect is
Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, where readers ﬁnd John Proctor and many of the other
villagers and farmers speaking in what Prentice Hall identiﬁes as "a New England dialect of
the 1600’s” (1219). The judges, examiners and ministers in the play all speak in standard
English, thus serving as an opening for a discussion of the social class nature of standard
English which never occurs in either the questions or commentary that surround the play.

Although students are exposed to informal varieties of standard English in the works of
writers such as EB. White, John Updike, James Thurber, and Katherine Ann Porter as she
depicts Granny Weatherall’s death-bed stream of consciousness, although archaic word uses
are pointed out to them in Bradstreet and Bradford’s works, and although they see the

language experimentation of e.e. cmmnings, they receive extended exposure to the dialects of

American English in only three pieces. Of these three, only one, O’Connor’s "The Life You

51

Save May Be Your Own, " is written in a dialect that could be called current. Both Twain
and Miller replicate dialects from previous eras. And when one considers that only a small
fraction of this anthology’s selections have been discussed here (6.9%), it becomes apparent
that the voices speaking in this textbook represent a very limited range of those who have

participated in the experiences that make up the American experience(s).
Adventures in American Literature. Pegasus Edition. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989.
Cover

The title of HBJ’s current American literature anthology allows for a somewhat broader
reading than that of the previously discussed PH textbook. While the literature of the United
States is still equated with American literature, thereby seeming to discount other Americas,
Americans, and their creative works and revealing a subtext of ethnocentrism, ”Adventures"
is a more pluralistic and broadly encompassing term than the singular "experience" and
deﬁnitive ”the" in the PH title, The American Experience. The colorful cover picture,
Autumn landscape, a stained glass window by Tiffany, excludes neither gender. The
frontispiece, a photograph of a silver Greek coin featuring Pegasus in ﬂight may remind
readers of the adventuresome nature of reading as one takes ﬂights of the imagination, all of
which allow for plurality and the openness of the unknown. However, this photographed coin
with its direct reference to Classical Greek traditions could also silently signify the Classical
Tradition’s giving the works that follow its seal of approval, thus stamping the textbook with
the authority of the Western classical tradition, a tradition that excludes both women for the

most part and minority groups among its authors and artists.

52

Table of Contents

The table of contents features a chronological approach until 1914 with time period
names, the years, and a title for the period announced in brightly colored bands. Unlike PH,
HBJ includes short excerpts from the writings of the early Spanish explorers before covering
English explorers and colonizers. Chronology is interrupted by the occasional inclusion of
articles on the development of American English, critical reading and writing, suggested
additional readings, and short, informative pieces on topics of rhetorical interest such as ”The
Plain and The Ornate Style. " The most jarring, and somewhat inexplicable, interruption to
chronology results from the placement of "Voices of Native Americans” just after Lincoln’s
"Gettysburg Address” and a letter from General Lee to his son. Included in the section are
two pages of background material on the oral tradition, three brief oral tradition pieces which
pre-date the arrival of the Spanish and the English explorers, Black Hawk’s surrender speech
(1832), Chief Joseph’s surrender speech (1871), and an excerpt from his An Indian ’s Views of
Indian Aﬁairs (1877). The placement next to documents from the Civil War contains a
certain irony since two of the selections are surrender speeches and since the defeat and
mistreatment of Native Americans by United States military and governmental personnel is
well-known. And as will be discussed in Chapter Five, the placement of Native American’s
selections so late in the anthology does not allow them a chance to speak for themselves early
in the book despite the fact that they have been labeled ”savages” by colonial writers.

The last half of the anthology contains post-1914 works arranged chronologically within
genres by the authors’ birth dates. Modern ﬁction, poetry, nonﬁction, and drama are the
subheadings for this portion of the book. A ﬁnal section, ”Reading and Writing About
Literature,” illustrates the close reading of a play, poem, and a short story. The works

chosen as samples are all written by white authors, the play excerpt and short story by men,

53

the poem by a woman. "Writing About Literature" follows; here actual works from the main
body of the anthology serve as examples or as texts to query. Twenty-seven works are
mentioned in this section. Of these, only three are by women; only one is by a minority
person, Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s "Douglass."

Table 2 contains the charted analysis of authors and selections found in Adventures in
American Literature. As in PH, a review of Table 2 overwhelmingly proves that to HBJ, "the
ﬁnest works from important authors" (P—2) in this "innovative, authoritative” (P-l) anthology
are primarily those written by while males. Out of a total of 575 pages of selections, the
remaining 517 pages consisting of non-selection materials, 85.7% are written by males. Of
those 493 pages, only 34 were written by men of color, leaving 79.8% of the selection pages
featuring works by white men. 11% of the pages contain works by white women, leaving
only 2.6% of the pages as those written by women of color. Clearly women, as well as
persons from all minority groups- Asian Americans are not represented at alluare seriously
under-represented in HBJ. Native Americans at 2%, Latino(a) Americans at 3%, and African
Americans at 5 % of pages have received, at best, token inclusion. The "adventures” in
literature contained here are predominately those told from male perspectives and in male

voices.

54

Table 2

Adventures in American Literature. Pegasus Edition.
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

l-l' , ,. = . ,

To 1914 43 5 5 o 5 3
Post 1914 6_2 1_9 Q Q 2 6
Total 134* 105 24 16 o 7 9
Percent (78.4) (18) (12) (0) (5.2) . (6.7)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To 1914 100 24 5 0 5 3
Post 1914 82 26 g Q 2 1
Total 233* 182 46 18 0 7 10
EIlkrcent (78.1) (19.7) (7.7) i(0) (3) (4.3) II
To 1914 264 25 5 0 6 3
Post 1914 m 2 _24 Q 6 13
Total * 493 78 29 0 12 17
$522 (85.7) (13.6) (5) (0) . (2.0) (3) J

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Long Works — 2 (white male)
Selection Pages — 575
Non-selection Pages — 517
Works in Dialect — 16 or 6.9%

Af.A. — African American

As.A. — Asian American

N.A. — Native American

L.A. — Latino(a) American *includes anonymous

55

While the ratios shift a bit in the period 1914 to the present, the dominance of this
textbook by white males is still assured. Of the 229 pages written by men, 204 were written
by white men. Of the 53 pages written by women, 39 were written by white women.
Converting to percentages, I ﬁnd that in this section of the anthology, 72.6% of pages by
white men, 8.9% by men of color; 13.9% of pages by white women, 5% by women of color.

The above does not reveal that no long works or works of drama written by minority
persons are included. The two long works, James’ Daisy Miller and Wilder’s Our Town, are,
obviously, the writings of white men. Of the 24 women writers in the book, 14 appear on a
poem per person basis. Most of the short stories here are men’s; only Alice Walker among
persons of color has a short story included. Other minority writers have a poem apiece or a
selection in the nonﬁction portion, that least assigned portion. Again, I can not help but
notice that Gwendolyn Brooks, Adrienne Rich, and Langston Hughes have been given room
for only one poem while Robert Frost has 6 and Whitman has 8. The Poe section of the book
spreads over 39 pages, more pages than the texts of all the African American writers found in
this collection, more pages than those given to Native American and Latino(a) writers

combined.

Introductions/Biographies

Similar to PH, HBJ places introductions to authors’ lives, styles, and accomplishments
prior to their selections. These introductions range in length from one half page to four
pages. The space granted each author’s introduction tells an interesting story on the
subtextual level. Only white males receive more than a full page of introduction, except for
Emily Dickinson at 1 1/2 pages. The ten men who receive more that a full page are: Twain

(4), James (3), Melville, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Faulkner, Hemingway, Crane, Poe

56
(2), and Fitzgerald (1 1/2). 95% of white male writers receive at least a full page

introduction. 71% of African American writers do-all of the 5 women and 5 of the nine
men. Of the 24 women authors in the anthology, 62% have full page introductions, all of the
ﬁve African American women included and 10 of the 19 (53 %) white women. One of the
ﬁve Native American writers and none of the Latino(a) American writers receives a full page.
Poets and nonﬁction writers are less likely to receive full page introductions than dramatists
and ﬁction writers; white women are far less likely than white men. The text is silent in
regard to Asian American writers. As in PH, one must acknowledge that students and their
teachers’ readings not only of author’s texts but also of the very nature of American literature
can not help but be colored by the space afforded authors’ introductions as well as the content

of those introductions.

Language Varieties

Just as tokenism prevails in regard to the selections included in HBJ , tokenism prevails in
the varieties of dialects and variants in which selections’ characters express themselves. Most
of this book’s "Adventures " are narrated in standard English; most of the characters who
dialogue do so in standard English. Of the 233 selections, only 16 (6.9%), incorporate
variant voices. As was seen previously, many of these voices seldom speak. Selections

previously discussed which contain nonstandard speakers whose lines make up less than 1/5 of

the story’s length are:

"A Worn Path" Eudora Welty
"The Bear" William Faulkner
”The First Seven Years " Bernard Malamud

The Outcasts of Poker Flat" Bret Harte

S7
"The Open Boat " Stephen Crane

As in PH, "Swing Low Sweet Chariot” retains only remnants of its original Black dialect, and
the other spirituals have been wholly standardized. Other works in HBJ not found in PH
whose nonstandard speakers say relatively few words include Stephen Vincent Benet’s "The
Devil and Daniel Webster, " which according to HBJ features the occasional use of New
England dialect (650), Jesse Stuart’s "Another April," where Pap retains vestiges of his rural
Kentucky dialect, Cooper’s Natty Bumpo, this time speaking in The Deerslayer, and Willa
Cather’s "The Sculptor’s Funeral. " The townspeople, the sculptor’s parents, and others
among the sculptor’s mourners speak in the dialect of small-town western Kansas at the turn
of the twentieth century; the main character, Jim Laird, uses standard English to berate the
cruel provincialism of his fellow Kansas dwellers.

Three plays capture language variants. Triﬂes by Susan Glaspell presents midwestem,
rural speakers. Thornton Wilder’s Our Town scripts the speech of a cross section of persons
living in a New Hampshire village from the dialectal, nonstandard speech of Howie Newsome
to the standard English, with occasional "lapses," of the Webbs and the Gibbs and the
pedantic standard of Professor Willard. An early play of Eugene O’Neill, Where The Cross
Is Made, contains Captain Bartlett, whose "speech suggests an earlier time" (958) than the
1900 California setting and who uses sea jargon. While all these plays voice language
variants, they all only expose students to dialects of white persons living around the year
1900.

Again Twain and O’Connor present sustained passages in dialect. They are joined by
James Russell Lowell who writes "The Courtin’" in the Yankee dialect of rural New England
in the 1840’s (315, 317). O’Connor’s "The Life You Save..." has already been discussed as
has Twain’s "Celebrated Jumping Frog..." wherein he unites the tradition of the

southwestern yarnspinner with the dialect of the western frontier miner (396) to contrast with

58

the genteel speech of the sophisticated Eastemer who frames the story in standard English
(391-2). In "Baker’s Bluejay Yarn," the educated narrator only introduces the tale told by
Jim Baker in "the language of the backwoodsman" (396). In the one page excerpt from The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck needs no educated person to introduce him; he gives
the illusion of speaking for himself in his backwoods, rural southern dialect. The "Brag"
taken from Life on The Mississippi is introduced as a sample of Keelboatman’s dialect by the
educated narrator of the novel. The narrator tells his readers that he has been working on a
novel, Huckleberry Finn. He then takes his readers inside this novel where Huck narrates. It
is Huck who overhears and records the "Brag." HBJ tells readers none of this. The book
simply includes the "Brag" by itself as a sample of tall talk ﬁlled with the Americanisms
which had come to pervade the language of the frontier (431) in a ”Development of American
English" article.

As in PH, students read works written in variants of standard English, many of which
appeared in PH. An exception is Alice Walker’s "Everyday Use, " whose narrator, while she
may retain elements of BEV, speaks primarily in informal standard. Works in HBJ already
discussed as samples of informal standard usage include E.B. White’s "Walden," Thurber
pieces, and Porter’s "The J ilting of Granny Weatherall. " Archaic word usages are pointed
out to students in Bradstreet’s and Bradford’s works as well as in the passage from Sarah
Kemble Knight’s Journal (TN only), whose syntax and spelling have been standardized for
inclusion in this collection. The plain and the ornate style are described for students and are
juxtaposed in the works of Bradford and Mather respectively.

As before, selections present readers no examples of Spanish inﬂuenced English or of
Chicano(a) dialect. Three writers sprinkle their works with a few Spanish words as they
narrate in standard English: Steinbeck, Ernesto Galarza, and Rolondo R. Hinojosa-Smith.

And as before, no characters, except for Phoenix Jackson, speak in BEV. Thus the range of

59

exposure to the dialectal variants of contemporary English is almost nil (O’Connor and Welty
are the exceptions). Only 6.9% of the anthology’s selections present English variants, and

most of these are variants spoken at least 90 years ago.

The United States In Literature. Classic Edition. Scott, Foresman, 1991.

Cover

SF eliminates the potential charge of ethnocentricity that could be levelled at the
previously discussed anthologies with its title The United States in Literature. However
unlike the gender neutral cover chosen by HBJ , SF has placed a copy of Sailboats Racing on
The Delaware on its front cover. Admittedly, the ﬁgures in the sailboats are small, hardly
full face male portraits as on the cover of PH. Yet the ﬁgures out adventuring in the river
are surely male. Perhaps these are ”generic" males, and a woman can assume the reading
adventures this anthology holds are intended for her. The Scott, Foresman Classic Edition
seal decorates the cover’s top and the frontispiece. A shield shaped gold emblem on which is
etched the ﬁgure of a sailing ship from the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, it bears
the words "CLASSIC EDITION” and the letters "S" and"F." In size, it compares with the
Pegasus coin found in HBJ . All of this ship imagery may signify the exploration and
adventure that open to one as s/he reads literature as well as the excitement of venturing into
the unknown in the case of the older vessel. Yet, the Sunday sailing scene looks more like
recreation than adventure, and fairly well deﬁned and rule-bound recreation at that. As is the
case in HBJ, the stamped coin character of the emblem with its logo "classic edition” make it
possible to read it as a seal of approval stamped on the book’s contents conferred by the

authority associated with the Classical Tradition in literature.

Table of Contents

The table of contents arranges the book chronologically for the ﬁrst seven chapters where
it offers a ”survey of major American writers over the past four centuries” (xvii). Chapters
ﬁve through seven, which cover the period 1915 to the present, are arranged by genre. In
chapter eight SF offers readers something unique: they can choose to purchase either the
regular edition which contains Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage or they can purchase the
”Alternative Edition" which contains three short stories: "Four Meetings" by Henry James,
”Afterward" by Edith Wharton, and "Tom Outland’s Story" by Willa Cather.

One chapter title that appears in the table of contents may puzzle readers. Chapter three
is entitled "American Classic.” I wonder if its selections are somehow more classic than
those which precede and follow the chapter and what it means to be more classic. Are these
the selections that set the standards against which all other American literature is to be
judged? In a "Classic Edition" are some selections or authors more classic than others? And
who decides? Are Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau "better" writers than Twain,
Dickinson, Whitman (the former set appears in this section)? Are Josh Billings, Louisa May
Alcott, and Chief Seattle, also in this section, more "classic" than Mary Wilkins Freeman,
Bret Harte, and Chief Joseph who appear in the next chapter entitled "Variation and
Departures”? Raymond Williams recalls that as the word "classic" came into English in the
early seventeenth century, it had ”social implications before it took on its general meaning of
a standard authority and then its general meaning of belonging to or associated with Greek
and Roman antiquity” (1985,60). Are the authors, then, in this chapter standard setters? Do
these standards have social implications?

Throughout the table of contents, ”Thinking Critically About Literature" articles are

announced. In these sections readers ﬁnd critical commentary on selected literary pieces as

61

well as composition aids and suggestions and concept reviews. All 11 of the authors about
whom "Thinking Critically" articles appear are white, 6 women and 5 men. In "Readers
Notes," readers ﬁnd discussions of 17 works. Of these, only Robert Hayden’s is by a person
of color; two are by women, Dickinson and Lowell. "Comments" contains short articles on
32 varied topics. Of those which treat authors and their works, 14 deal with white male

authors, 3 with female authors, and 3 with male authors of color.

Introductions/Biographies

Selections or groups of selections are preceded by a biography of their authors. Again a
subtext of gender and racial dominance can be read in the story of space allotments for these
introductory comments and biographies. Only 25 authors (27 in the Alternative Edition)
receive full page biographies. Of those, 20% are women. No African American, Latino(a)
American, Native American, or Asian American author can claim a full page introduction.
William Least Heat Moon’s 2/3 page introduction is as close as a minority writer comes to
full page representation. While variant stories might be read regarding the placement and
space allotment afforded the Harlem Renaissance writers, it seems odd that their six
biographies are crowded onto two pages and the poems from all six writers only receive ﬁve
pages. Just before their "section," appears Robert Frost’s full page introduction and six pages
of poems; just after their section appears T.S. Eliot’s full page biography and his six pages of
poetry. I try to resist the "sandwiched" or "tucked away" metaphors, but they come to mind

as I read this textbook.

62
Table 3

Table 3 contains the breakdown of authors, selections, and pages found in The United
States in Literature. Table 3 again reveals the gender and racial dominance seen in the
previous anthologies. If readers use the Alternative Edition (Alt. Ed.) gender ratios improve,
but racial ratios do not. African American writers (8.6%), Asian American writers (.4%),
Native American writers (3%) and Latino(a) American writers (2%) again receive token

representation.

63

Table 3

The United States in Literature. Classic Edition. Scott, Foresman, 1991.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ABM DEL! ‘ warned ALA; AS-A NA LA ﬂ
To 1914 47 12 9 0 10 3
Post 1914 Q _3_0 14 2 5 3
Total 164* 107 42 23 2 15 6
Percent (65.2) (25.6) (14) (1.2) (9) L (3.6)
.r‘Selections Men _W_t_>’l_r_le_n_ _Af._A_. As.A. N_._A_. LA; ﬁll
To 1914 75 29 9 0 10 3
Post 1914 6_7 _26 _1_4 2 5 3
Total 221* 142 70 23 2 15 6
Percent (64.3) (31.6) (10.4) (.9) (6.8) (2.7)
3233—15 .. mm = MA " _A_s_A_._ —— —
To 1914 168 41 21 0 7 5
Post 1914 2Q 24 _2_5 2 2 _6_ I
Total 533* 403 115 46 2 16 11 I
Percent (75.6) (21.6) (8.6) (.4) (3) (2)
Alt. Ed. 359 169

L (67.4) (31.7) (8.6) (.4) (3) 1— (2)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Long Works — 2 (white male); Alt. Ed. 1 (white male)

Selection Pages — 533

Non-selection Pages — 460

Works in Dialect — 20 or 9%

Af.A. —— African American
As.A. — Asian American
N.A. — Native American
L.A. — Latino(a) American

*includes anonymous

 

64
Both of the long works in SF were written by white males: The Glass Menagerie (Williams)

and The Red Badge of Courage (Crane). Further analysis of the book’s pages reveals the

following percentages. ”W" means white; "NW” means nonwhite.

Table 3A
Pages Breakdown
pages Men Women W Men W Women NW Men NW Women
R B Ed 75.6 21.6 68 17.6 7.6 4
Alt. Ed. 67.4 31.7 60 28.2 7.4 3.5

All women are under represented, but women of color are most seriously so. Men of
color, while they claim again as many pages as women of color, share their serious under
representation. Remembering that demographers predict that by the year 2000, the minority
school age population will increase to 42% , and that in large urban areas linguistically and
culturally different children will comprise 80-90% of the school-age population (Gonzalez
1990, 16), these ﬁgures seem especially disturbing. SF presents a predominately white
version of American literature and a predominately white nation as it presents predominately
white males’ views and voices. It, like the two previously discussed anthologies, presents a

nation that no longer exists, if it ever did.

Language Varieties

Like PH and HBJ, SF offers a very limited selection of works (20/220 or 9%) written in
nonstandard variants of English for the teacher eager to expose students to the wealth of
variety that exists in American English. Works contained in this anthology already discussed

above are listed below:

65

From The Deerslayer James Fenirnore Cooper

"The Celebrated Jumping Frog..." Mark Twain

"The Outcasts of Poker Flat" Bret Harte

"The First Seven Years" Bernard Malamud
"A Worn Path" Eudora Welty
"The Bear" William Faulkner

"The J ilting of Granny Weatherall" Katherine Ann Porter

Several works and authors have not been previously mentioned. Those which
incorporate a limited use of dialect amidst standard English narration and/or standard English
speakers include Mary Wilkins Freeman’s "A New England Nun," where Joe Dagget and Lily
converse in a rural New England dialect while Louisa, the main character, and the narrator
use standard. A couple of lines identiﬁed as Cockney dialect are a part of Melville’s "What
Redbum Saw in Lancelot’s Hey." A short excerpt From Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle
Tom ’s Cabin contains the standard English dialect of the narrator and Eliza as well as the
rural, Black dialect of Uncle Tom and Aunt Chloe and the southern, rural speech of the inn
hostess and Solomon. Three spirituals are the only poems in dialect. Both "Follow the
Drinking Gourd" and "Deep River" are nearly void of dialect and their original orality.
"Swing Low Sweet Chariot" reads as far less standardized than the version found in HBJ.
The short Josh Billings piece, "Uncle Josh’s Zoo" contains only the nonstandard "ain’t". It
seems odd that Mike Fink’s "Brag" has been fully standardized and that such standardization
receives no comment in either the teacher’s or the student’s notes and commentary.

Several pieces yet to be detailed in this study expose students to more sustained passages
of variant "Englishes. " In The Red Badge of Courage edition, Stephen Crane employs the
rural dialect of Henry Flemming and his fellow soldiers as well as that of Henry’s mother.

Despite sustained passages in dialect, especially in Chapter 10, the standard English narration

66
makes up at least 75% of the piece. Davy Crockett, in the dialect of the Southwestern
yarnspinner, tells a Crockett tall tale. Eugenia Collier’s "Marigolds" presents the BEV of a
small-town African American family and their neighbor, Miss Lottie. Richard Wright’s "The
Man Who Saw The Flood" features long dialogue interchanges in BEV and juxtaposes Tom
and May’s dialect with the more standardized speech of Mr. Burgess, the owner of the farm
on which Tom and May work as sharecroppers. This example comes from the ﬁnal page of
the story. Burgess is the ﬁrst speaker:
"How things look?"
"They don look so good, Mistuh."
"What seems to be the trouble? "
"Wall, Ah ain got no hoss, no grub, nothin. The only thing Ah got is tha ol
cow there."
"You owe eight hundred dollars down at the store, Tom. "
"Yessuh, Ah know. But Mistah Burgess, can’t yuh knock somethin off tha,
seein as how Ahm down a out now?" (SF, 486).

William Least Heat Moon’s excerpt from Blue Highways records the dialects of eight
different Southern speakers including a shop owner in Shelbyville, Kentucky, a farmer/factory
worker he meets on the Shepardsville Road near Nameless, Tennessee, a waitress in
Gainsboro, Tennessee, and the rural Watts family, the proprietors of the store that makes up
all there is of Nameless. One of the most colorful speakers he records is Thurmon Watts who
incorporates idiom, folk wisdom, and rural Tennessee dialect into his speech. Three passages
will serve to demonstrate:

"Always take a baby upstairs before you take him downstairs, otherwise you’ll incline
him downward" (SF, 762) advises Watts as he and Least Heat Moon head downstairs to the
fruit cellar. About calming a person’s nerves he recalls that the Doctor "put Miss Ginny on
one teaspoon of spirits of ammonia in well water for her nerves. Ain’t nothin’ works

better....None of them anteebeeotics that hit you worsen your ailment" (SF, 761). As Least

Heat Moon is about to leave, Watts asks his his destination. When Least Heat Moon says he

67

doesn’t know, Watts replies, "Cain’t get lost, then." He grumbles about the weather,
"Weather to give a man the weary dismals" (SF, 762).

I was delighted to ﬁnd Sojourner Truth’s dramatic "Ain’t I A Woman?" in this
anthology, but surprised to ﬁnd that compared to the version printed in Paul Lauter’s
scholarly anthology, The Heath Anthology of American Literature (1990), this version had
been so standardized that nearly all evidences of BEV had been eradicated. Truth is not the
only author to be standardized. The grapholect of Sarah Kemble Knight, according to
commentary in the student edition, has been "partially modernized," although "some of the
archaic spellings have been retained to give the ﬂavor of the original "(44). Indeed, when I
compare this version with the one found in Lauter, it reads much closer to the original (in
Lauter) than the version previously discussed in HBJ .

While the percentage of dialect pieces may not be a great deal higher than those found in
PH and HBJ (9% as compared with 6.9%) and while teachers still do not have a wide variety
of contemporary dialects included to expose students to--no Spanish words or Spanish
inﬂuenced English or Chicano(a) dialects appear in this book; nor are working class New
York, contemporary New England, Southwestern or Western dialects, and Asian American
dialects to be found—SF is to be applauded for including Wright’s, Least Heat Moon’s,
Collier’s, Knight’s, and Truth’s works, though persons eager to explore language variants
might wish the last two had been less standardized. SF’s excerpt from Uncle T om ’s Cabin,
Collier’s story and Truth’s speech allow readers to "hear" Black dialectal voices for sustained
periods of time as does Wright’s. All allow for discussion of social class marked language
and social class attitudes toward dialect as well as demonstrations of the communicative
competence of Black English. And Least Heat Moon’s highly entertaining nonﬁction
narrative records several contemporary language variants spoken currently in Kentucky and

Tennessee.

68
Hements of Literature: Literature of The United States. Holt, Rinehart and Winston,

1993.

Cover

The cover of HRW’s 1993 anthology features a reproduction of Joseph Stella’s The
Brooklyn Bridge: Variations On an Old Theme. Both the book’s title and the cover
illustration refrain from overt ethnocentricity and gender dominance. No human ﬁgures
appear on the impressionistic cover illustration whose vertical lines carry the eye upward and
then to a downward plunge. The cover might suggest the notion of literature as a bridge,
literature as a complex and multifaceted construct, or literature as ascent and descent.
Without the picture’s title in small print on page vi, the image could be open to any number
of interpretations; its modernistic planes and curves only suggest a bridge. The frontispiece
picture, Threshing, shows a steam powered tractor pulling a threshing machine. The farm
equipment, set against a huge expanse of grain and sky is driven by two men. The two
pictures pull together an industrial present with a rural past. Even though the image on the
ﬁrst is not overtly gender or race speciﬁc, both the mechanism of the bridge and the farm
equipment are white male—designed, made, and driven. Expanses of harvest-ready grain may
lead readers into mental metaphors of literature as harvest and literature’s expansiveness.
Alternatively both this and the bridge image could remind readers of commodity production as

well as the mechanization and dominance of nature by humans.

69
Table of Contents

The table of contents announces itself to be a chronological survey, although as in HBJ,
Native American pieces appear after the early English/American writers and no Spanish
explorers precede them. Again, stereotypes of Native Americans as "savage" and cruel,
especially with the inclusion of Mary Rawlandson’s captivity tract, are reinforced long before
Native American voices are given a chance to speak for themselves. After 1914, units are
arranged by genre. Units are given both titles and interpretive subtitles, which tend to color a
student’s reading of a section prior to that student even opening to the selections. For
example, the "The Colonial Age" is subtitled "The Age of Faith." "The Revolutionary
Period" is dubbed "The Age of Reason" and is devoid of women or minority writers. Some
unit titles evaluate the writers therein: "The American Renaissance—Five Major Writers, " all
white males, and "A New American Poetry—Whitman and Dickinson." In "The Modems--
The American Voice in Fiction," readers "hear" the monologic voice of white America and a
predominately male voice by a 8:5 ratio. In "Poetry-Voices of American Character, " the
voices speak in standard English (except for one poem), and are male voices almost
exclusively. Twenty-two male authors contribute 39 poems to this section; 2 women
contribute 3. Unit 13, "Poetry in a Time of Diversity-1945 to the Present," contains only
three poems by nonwhite writers among its 19 poems. A "Handbook" section follows the
literary selections wherein is found a handbook of standard English grammar, study guides for
two novels not included in the anthology, The Great Gatsby and The Scarlet Letter, literary
terms deﬁned, and aids for writing about literature. As in the case of other anthologies
discussed, this "aids" section relates its comments to literary works—5 men and 3 women; 5

white and 3 nonwhite minority writers. These excerpts come too late in the book, are too

 

70

short, and too many crowded into a few pages for most readers to incorporate into their over-
all view of American literature.

An alternative table of contents organizes works by theme and mixes genre and, to some
extent times in which selections were written. This table of contents does not offer
judgements as to who is "major" or "new;" all authors and selections are printed in the same
size and color in list form under the theme. However the ethnic and gender dominance of
this anthology ensures that thematic units will exhibit only limited diversity. "Oh, Brave New
World" lists 19 male-written pieces and 1 female-written; 17 white authors and 3 authors
from nonwhite minorities. "Loss and Renewal," 3 bit more gender balanced-9 men, 5
women—contains no authors of color. "The Triumph of Love" offers readers 14 white writers
and 1 Black writer. Only one unit displays what might be called a genuine diversity.
"Freedom From Bondage" contains the voices of 5 women, 11 men, 5 persons of color.

Even here, Edgar Allan Poe’s selections receive more pages, 27, than anyone else’s; all
persons of color receive only a combined total of 15 pages.

Table 4 charts analyses of authors and selections. Once again, even in a 1993 edition,
Native Americans, Latino(a) Americans and Asian Americans are granted only token space.
Heartening is the fact that African American writers appear on 17.7% of the selection pages
and the inclusion of a long work by an African American writer, A Raisin In The Sun by
Lorraine Hansberry, although most of the other works by African American writers appear on
a one poem per person basis or in the nonﬁction section of the anthology. Emily Dickinson’s
poems (13) outnumber all of the poems written by persons of color (11) included in this book.
Yet one would hate to see a simple reduction of Dickinson’s section of the text, as white
women claim only 9.9% of the anthology’s pages. Poe, Hawthorne, Twain, and Melville
receive abundant pages (26-36). Together, these four white male writers receive twice as

many pages (119) than the combined total of all of the pages of white women (58). Of the

71

74.2% of pages granted to males, men of color receive 7.6% of the selection pages; women

of color receive 15%.

72

Table 4

Eements of Literature: The Literature of the United States. Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1993.

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

To 1914 26 6 5 0

Post 1914 g; Q 1_5 2

Total 112* 77 29 20 2 7 2

Percent (68.8) (25.9) (17.9) (1.8) (5 5) (1 8)

To 1914 61 18 5 0

Post 1914 E Q _1_8_ 2

Total 188* 135 47 23 2 7 3
‘ﬂm (71.8) (25) (12.2) (1.1) (3.7) (1.6)
I?- g ”T . 7 ,

To 1914 214 22 9 0 3 0

Post 1914 2_27_ a 26 _1_1 lg _1_Q

Total 594* 441 148 105 11 13 10

Percent (74.2) (24.9) (17.7) (1.9) (2.2) (1 7)

 

Long Works — 1 (white male); 1 (Af. Am. female)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Selection Pages — 584

Non-selection Pages - 653

Works in Dialect — 18 or 9.6%

Af.A. — African American
As.A. — Asian American
N.A. — Native American
L.A. — Latino(a) American

 

 

 

*includes anonymous

73
Introductions/Biographies

Nearly all authors are afforded at least a full page of biographical and critical
commentary. These precede their selections. Again the length of introductory space tells a
story with possible gender and ethnically biased subtexts. And again, since these materials
precede selections, they can not help but inﬂuence students’ and their teachers’ readings of the
texts that follow. Of the 18 writers who have more than a full page introduction, 15 are
white men, 4 of whom, Melville, Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau, receive 3-4 pages apiece.
Three women, all white, were given 1 1/2-2 page introductions. One writer, Olaudah
Equiano, a former slave, was not introduced at all in the student version of this book and was
given only a few lines in the Teacher’s Annotated Edition. Closer examination of the
introductions reveals in this anthology as it did in PH a discrepancy other than space in the
manner in which men and women are introduced to students. This discrepancy, one of

introduction mode, will be detailed in Chapter Five.

Language Varieties

HRW exposes its readers to a wider variety of "Englishes" than any of the anthologies
under discussion in this study. For the ﬁrst time, readers ﬁnd Asian-inﬂuenced English and
Spanish-inﬂuenced English. A Raisin in The Sun, a study in heteroglossia, offers an entire
long work’s passages in BEV juxtaposed to other English variants.

Authors and works discussed previously are listed below. In addition I have added new
works by previously discussed authors if the language patterns they display are not
signiﬁcantly different than those discussed before.

"The J ilting of Granny Weatherall" Katherine Ann Porter

74

"The Outcasts of Poker Flat" Bret Harte

language experiments e.e.cummings

"A Worn Path" Eudora Welty

"The Life You Save..." Flannery O’Connor
"The Open Boat" Stephen Crane

"The Mystery of Heroism" Stephen Crane
Journal excerpts Sarah Kemble Knight

Spirituals From Blue Highways William Least Heat Moon
"The Magic Barrel" Bernard Malamud

Although Twain has been covered earlier, the extended passages from The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn and Life On The Mississippi merit further analysis. The latter is framed by
an educated narrator who takes readers inside the novel he claims to have been working on,
Huckleberry Finn. Within this novel, as detailed earlier in this study, Huck narrates his
exploits aboard a keelboat and records the speech and a "Brag" of the keelboatrnen, after
which readers are returned to the educated narrator’s commentary. Thus three dialects, all of
which demonstrate communicative competence, all of which appear for extended passages, are
juxtaposed. Although there can be little doubt that the piece’s story belongs to the educated
narrator, Huck’s inner story gives the appearance of being his own. Standard English, rural
Southern dialect, and the specialized dialect and rhetoric of the keelboatrnen and their "Brag"
are juxtaposed and play off each other to produce a Bahktinian heteroglossia. In almost
postmodern fashion, the reader is then introduced to a lengthy passage from the actual novel,
Huckleberry Finn where s/he ﬁnds the backwoods dialect of Pap, the rural Southern dialect of
Huck, and the Black dialect of Jim, all seemingly recorded by Huck as he narrates the tale.
Again heteroglossia rules, and again the communicative competence and range of dialects

other than standard English are displayed in extended passages.

75

Authors who use English variants and who have not appeared in any of the anthologies
so far detailed are Amy Tan, Julia Alverez, Langston Hughes, James Alan McPherson, Nora
Zeale Hurston, and Lorraine Hansberry, about whose work more must be said than was said
above. In Amy Tan’s "The Rules of the Game," Waverly Jong’s mother speaks Chinese-
inﬂuenced English, making Tan’s the only piece in any of the surveyed anthologies that
employs Chinese-inﬂuenced English in extended passages. To illustrate, readers "hear" Mrs.
Jong inform Waverly, "this American rules. Everytime people come out from foreign
country, must know rules. You not know, judge say. Too bad, go back. They not telling
you why so you can use their way go forwar " (HRW, 913). In Julia Alvarez’s semi-
autobiographical ﬁction, "Daughter of Invention, " the parents, important characters in the
story, and immigrants from the Dominican Republic, speak in Spanish-inﬂuenced English,
especially the father as his "What ees wrrong with her eh-speech?" (907) demonstrates. The
story is the only work in any of the examined anthologies that illustrates a dialect of English
which has been inﬂuenced by Spanish, a major gap when one considers the large number of
persons living in the United States whose dialects show Spanish traces.

In McPherson, Hurston and Hughes’ works, Black dialect is found. The framed portion
of Hughes’ poem, the only poem in dialect in this anthology except for standardized
spirituals, "The Weary Blues, " presents the song of the blues singer in dialect while the
poem’s outer frame is written in standard. Except for Lowell’s "The Courtin’" in SF and
aforementioned spirituals, this is the only poem in all of the examined anthologies written
even partially in dialect, ironic in a country that enjoys a lengthy oral tradition of songs and
ballads, tales and legends and a wealth of dialectal speakers and story-tellers. Perhaps these
pieces, usually produced by workers, country people, minority persons, and writers who have
not or who have not yet made the list of "great" writers, or "major" writers or "classic"

writers are not "literary" enough to be included in any substantial numbers in literature

76

anthologies, particularly if what is literature continues to be measured by the residual
traditional standards imposed by units entitled "Five Major Authors" or "A New American
Poetry-Whitman and Dickinson." Nora Zeale Hurston, whose ﬁction appears only in HRW,
is one of these, until recently, unheralded story-tellers who writes in BEV. Her "How The
Lion Met The King of The World" from Mules and Men recounts an African American folk
tale and provides another extended passage of dialect for study. McPherson’s "Why I Like
Country Music, " presents the idiom-laced speech of a rural Black elementary schoolteacher
and the BEV of her students.

A Raisin in the Sun is the longest piece in HRW in dialect and by far the longest when
compared to any found in any of the textbooks discussed above. A widely acclaimed and
major work, it not only merits serious literary study but also can serve as a forum for
language study. Hansberry employs the BEV of Mama, Ruth, and Walter, the more
standardized English of Beneatha, George Murchison, and Mr. Linders, and the British
standard of Joseph Asagai. The BEV speakers in this piece are not just token characters with
secondary roles, they are the play—their speech, their conﬂicts, their wide range of emotions,
their triumphs. Two of the standard English speakers, Mr. Linder and George Murchinson,
while in better ﬁnancial condition than the Younger family, are less than desirable people,
George due to what Beneatha labels his snobbishness and his superﬁciality, Mr. Linder as the
spokesperson for a white citizens group who try to bribe the Younger family not to move into
their neighborhood. Beneath’s assumption of standard English serves as a source of comment
by both the playwright and Walter.

Other language variants available to students are the informal and colloquial standard of
Kurt Vonnegut and Sandra Cisneros and the experimental "Game" by Donald Barthleme,
wherein characters’ repetitive and choppy syntax parallels their disturbed mental states. And

as has been the case consistently, archaic words and syntax are pointed out to readers in the

77

works of several of the colonial writers. Although written in standard English, Jamaica
Kincaid’s excerpt from A Small Place deserves comment here as does Russell Baker’s "Little
Red Riding Hood Revisited. " Kincaid takes the commercial, standard English of the tourist
brochure and through double-voiced irony folds it back on itself to reveal the difficult lives of
the former Black British slaves who inhabit the island and the corruption and ugliness that the
typical tourist to Antigua may likely never see or choose to ignore while vacationing on this
tropical "paradise." Baker retells the story of Red Riding Hood as he satirizes those standard
English speakers who construct their discourse from euphemisms, jargon, and over-inﬂated
diction.

Even when remembering that the selections which employ dialect are small in number
(9.6% of all selections) and even when acknowledging that 52.4% of this textbook (653
pages) is taken up by non-selection materials, all of which are written in standard and whose
very numbers could tend to undermine the effects of dialectal passages by dialectal speakers, I
feel cautious optimism as I see the range and variety of language found in HRW. Perhaps
these oppositional and alternative approaches to "literary" language will increasingly become
the norm as such effective and moving works undermine the idea that standard English is the

only ﬁt language for literature.

Literature And Language. McDougal, Littell, 1992.

Cover

McDougal, Littell (ML) places "American Literature" on the frontispiece, not the cover,

defusing an initial ethnocentric response to the contents within. The cover features a lone

horseman riding into an almost overwhelming expanse of rock, hills, river, and sky, an

78

orange, green, and blue western or southwestern scene. Man and horse follow a river which
winds into the world beyond the picture. Again metaphors come to mind as I read this almost
stereotypic image of a man surrounded by the immensity of nature, unspoiled and somewhat
forbidding, yet lovely, and I am tempted to interpret the scene as signifying a student’s ride
into the unknown as s/he (more accurately "he" in this picture) travels by way of literature
and language. The frontispiece displays a reproduction of Katherine Westphal-Rossbach’s
1964 The Unveiling of The Statue of Liberty which focuses reader attention on the statue as
having torn through its draping, a sort of impressionistic patchwork quilt. Thus, the book is
introduced by two traditional symbols of United States culture, the lone horseman and the
Statue of Liberty. The Westphal-Rossbach reproduction is the only art work by a woman
used to introduce any of the anthologies under study; its quilt, the only artifact whose

production is more commonly associated with women than with men.

Table of Contents

As soon as readers view the table of contents, they can see that this anthology differs
from those they may have encountered before. The contents are divided into units which in
the ﬁrst third of the book are ﬁrst chronological, then thematic, and move readers from pre-
colonial times to 1900. After 1900, the arrangement is entirely thematic as the twentieth
century selections are categorized under four major themes, which are further divided into
subthemes. ML’s themes do not read in exclusionary fashion. Titles such as "Triumphs of
the Spirit," "Secret Understandings," "The Double Edge of Deception," and "Unexpected
Gifts" do not exclude women and minorities as do more traditional themes such as "The Age
of Reason, " "The Settlement of the Frontier," and "New England Renaissance" found in the

other anthologies that offer thematic arrangement. Under themes and subthemes. throughout

79

the book, selections represent a variety of genres, and in the twentieth century portion, a
mixture of times. For example, "Taking a Stand," a subtheme under "What We Believe,"
contains three works of nonﬁction, two short stories, and two poems, the years of the pieces’
production ranging from 1905 to 1978. An alternate table of contents, "Organization by
Genre," reveals this collection contains 29 short stories, 34 poems, 41 nonﬁction pieces, and
four dramas, including the book’s one long work, Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. Because
genres and times are mixed throughout the text and because selections play off each other as
arranged under themes and subthemes, contemporary works, especially poems and nonﬁction
pieces, are not relegated to the back of the book as has been the case in the previously
discussed anthologies.

Perhaps to remind readers of links through time or between times, within the two major
time divisions pre-1900 and post 1900, chronology is undermined. In the early portion of the
textbook 12 "Contemporary Perspectives" pieces from contemporary times which play off
"historical pieces," interrupt the ﬂow of time. In the post 1900 section, "Historical
Perspectives, " pieces from the pre-1900 era, accompany each subtheme. Thus readers ﬁnd a
diversity of times, genres, and perspectives within each unit and sub-unit. For example Nina
Otera’s contemporary "The Bells of Santa Cruz" accompanies the exploration tracts of the
Spanish explorers to the new world, and Anne Bradstreet’s "To My Dear and Loving
Husband" plays off the contemporary works of Tillie Olsen and Moss Hart.

Other features of the book apparent from its table of contents are the "Language From
Literature" workshops which appear with each subtheme and which are divided into three: a
writer’s workshop, a language workshop which most often focuses on elements of standard
usage, and a skills workshop which treats such topics as study skills, thinking skills,
vocabulary, as well as speaking and listening tips and exercises. As the next chapter will

show, despite the book’s claim to being "the perfect blend of literature, language, and life,"

 

80

ML contains very little discussion of the sociolinguistic aspects of language use, concentrating
instead on the skills of standard usage, reinforced by a "Language Handbook" which covers
the basics of standard usage. A "Reader’s Handbook’ " which provides a glossary,
deﬁnitions of literary terms, and the biographies of about 1/3 of the book’s authors, and a
"Writer’s Handbook," which details and illustrates the writing process as well as the formats

and conventions of various writing genres complete the table of contents.

Introductions/Biographies

Unlike previous anthologies, ML contains only short author biographies, all of which
appear after both the selections and the discussion commentary and questions on each piece.
Such arrangement focuses student attention on the work rather than the author and counters
the inevitable construct of the AUTHOR as an ideological abstraction and all of the authority
conveyed by such an abstraction. Instead of reading HAWTHORNE, students are more likely
to read "Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment" less constrained by editorial commentaries and
assessments.

Yet, even in this alternative anthology, stories with underlying texts of the sort of gender
and ethnic discrimination read in previously discussed anthologies can be interpreted upon
closer examination of these biographies. Only 42 of 89 writers receive biographies that
directly follow their sections of the book and are a part of the book "proper. " Forty-one
receive very short biographical entries in the "Reader’s Handbook, " which follows the
anthology’s literary selections. Six receive no biography at all, even in the teacher’s notes in
the annotated edition. Of these two women and four men, four appeared in "perspectives" or
in "insights," short inserts which play a short work against another, usually longer one; two,

however, were the authors of complete or longer featured works: Martin Gansberg, author

81
of the news article "37 Who Saw Murder and Didn’t Call the Police," and Jesus Colon,

author of" Little Things Are Big, " a nonﬁction work featuring the double—edged nature of
ethnic discrimination.

Of the 42 writers who receive 1/2 page biographies included as a part of the regular
textbook and placed as a part of the section of the book that contains their work, 71% are
male; 63.5% are white males. No Native Americans or Asian Americans are among them.
Women receive only 29% of these biographies; women of color, 17%. Once again, it seems
that the introductions which are a part of the literary selections portion of the anthology tell a
story of the male dominance of American literature and of the under- representation of some
groups of persons, especially in this anthology, Native Americans, Asian Americans, white
women, and men of color. The story in this anthology is not nearly so blatant, however, as it
has been in some of the previously discussed anthologies, such as HRW, where some white
males received as many as four pages of introduction and some Black males’ introductions
were spaced three to a page. Here no author is granted more than 1/2 page of space for
biographical information, and such information appears well after selections, rather than as a

prelude to them.

Table 5

With its integrated, oppositional, and alternative format, readers might anticipate ﬁnding
diverse and non-traditional selections in Language and Literature. Table 5 charts the authors
and selections as found. The Table reveals some, limited, differences from those for the
other anthologies considered. Although the number of male authors and selections still
dominates the book, 69% and 70.3 % respectively, and although male-written pieces still ﬁll

65 .4 % of the pages, these numbers show some movement toward greater gender balance than

82

those found previously. African American representation has increased to 24% of the
selection pages. However, the representation of other nonwhite minorities can still only be
called token. No Native American pieces written after 1900 are part of this book; in fact,
Native Americans are represented by only anonymous pieces and surrender speeches. One
wonders what sort of negative or stereotyped message that sends dominant culture readers and
Native American readers as well. Also under-represented by ML are men of color, whose
selection pages only total 5.3% and white women who claim only 11% of the selection pages.
Women of color receive 22.1%.

Similar to HRW, this anthology contains a long work by an African American woman, A
Raisin in The Sun. New in this collection are three Latino(a) short story writers: Nina
Otero, Manuela Williams Crosno and Jose Armas. A wealth of other writers not found in
previously discussed anthologies includes Dorothy West, Martin Gansberg, Nora Ephron, Tim
O’Brien, William Saroyan, Bill Cosby, Nikki Giovanni, and Joyce Carol Oates. While those
authors who appear to constitute "the American tradition" in other anthologies as evidenced
by unit and chapter titles as well as by the large blocks of space in pages afforded them
appear also in this collection-Hawthome, Emerson, Thoreau, Twain, Dickinson, Whitman,
Melville, Poe, etc—they do not dominate the collection as they have previously. Few
authors, except for the dramatists, claim over ll pages of selection space here. The mixing of
past and present times as well as the thematic approach and the mixing of genres also works
against what I might term the "great men and a few good women" approach to too many
American literature survey classes. And, it helps undermine, as Foucault would say, the

authority and power of the AUTHOR, i.e. "great" author domination.

83

Table 5

Literature and Language. McDougal, Littell, 1992.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  
 
 
  
  

 

 

 

 

 
  

Am * Mat! ’ Elm ALA: . ML. . M
To 1900 30 6 5 1 4
Post 1900 _3_4_ 1_ g 2 4
Total 93 64 25 18 3 5
Percent (68.8) (26.9) (19.4) (3.3) (5.4)
_setatna. ‘ ' " w w , w e . ___ L_'.A..
To 1900 36 9 5 1 4 2
Post 1900 Q 1_ Q 2 .1. .4.
Total 108* 76 28 18 3 5 6

‘ =icﬂrcent (72.2) (25.9) (16.7) (2.8) (4.6) (5.6)
To 1900 162 12
Post 1900 M _144
Total 471* 308 156

ercent (65 .4) (33. l)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

 

Long Works — l (Af. Am. female)
Selection Pages — 471

Non-selection Pages — 595
Works in Dialect - 16 or 14.8%

Af.A. — African American

As.A. — Asian American

N.A. — Native American

L.A. — Latino(a) American *includes anonymous

Language Varieties

Sixteen, or 14.8% of the 108 selections, employ dialects and/or variants of English other
than the prestige variants of standard English. This percentage is signiﬁcantly higher than all
previously discussed anthologies, including HRW’s 9.9%. However if the percentage of
pages on which are found pieces which contain extended passages in dialects other than
standard are compared the gap between HRW and ML narrows: 17.1% for HRW and 19.7%
for ML. Because ML has no examples of contemporary dialects other than Black English,
although a case could be made for the 1930’s rural, Oklahoman dialect found in the excerpt
from Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, its range of illustrated dialects, while broader than
PH, HBJ, and SF, is narrower than that in HRW.

The following lists works in English variants already discussed in this study.

"A Christmas Memory, " which, according to ML
displays "southern colloquial expressions" (829) Truman Capote

"Everyday Use," with "colloquialisms and

"informal grammar and syntax" (687) Alice Walker

One spiritual Triﬂes Susan Glaspell

A Raisin in The Sun Lorraine Hansberry
"The Devil and Daniel Webster" Stephen Vincent Benet
poems e.e. cummings

"What Redburn Saw in Lancelot’s Hey" Herman Melville

"Ain’t I a Woman," standardized somewhat,
and despite its BEV characteristics, described

simplyas nonstandard English (317) Sojourner Truth

85

Characteristic of previously discussed anthologies, selections occur which display only
limited passages in dialect. Williams Forrest’s "Plainswoman" contains the hired hand,
Pleny, who speaks in an informal, nonstandard style sprinkled with frontier colloquialisms.
William Saroyan retains the syntactic patterns of the mother’s "broken English"(12), the
inﬂuence of her "old country" tongue, in the short story "Parsley." Although their stories
show no evidence of Chicano(a) English, Manuela Williams Crosno and Jose Arrnas retain a
few Spanish words and phrases in "Martinez’ Treasure" and "A Delicate Balance."

More extended passages in dialectal speech appear in Dorothy West’s "Jack in the Pot,"
where all of the main characters speak in BEV in contrast to the welfare worker’s standard
English and in A Raisin in the Sun, already discussed above. Triﬂes and James Agee’s
dramatic adaptation of Stephen Crane’s "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" both employ rural
dialects of an earlier time. The Agee play features the western frontier dialect of all of its
characters from authority ﬁgures, the sheriff, to the outcountry person, Scratchy Wilson.
This piece is one of the few in any of the textbooks examined where authority ﬁgures also
speak in dialect. More often, as in the case of the West story or the Wright story in SF,
characters with limited power speak in dialect; those with more power or social stature speak
in standard. The inclusion of more pieces like Agee’s could help dispel the myth of standard
as the ﬁt language for authority. In fact, the only standard speaker, the Eastern drummer, is
a humorous character, his language clearly marking him as an outsider, a reversal of the
situation in works like those of Twain, where often the dialectal character and his dialect are
used for humorous intent. In Steinbeck’s excerpt, a situation similar to that in the Agee play
occurs where all characters, from the J oads to the store owners who sell them bread and
candy sticks at a cut rate, speak in rural dialects.

Thus, ML gives readers ample evidence of the communicative effectiveness of various

dialects and the dignity of their speakers. While I might wish their coverage of contemporary

 

86

English variants were more broad, the omission of any extended passages of Spanish
inﬂuenced English or Asian inﬂuenced English creating real gaps, I recognize that their
19.9% of selection pages containing works which feature extended passages in the non
prestige dialects of English is a signiﬁcant increase over the other anthologies covered by this

study, the exception provided by HRW.

Summary Tables and Commentary

As students and their teachers look at these ﬁve anthologies, they see that three of their
covers depict men of action. The exceptions, HBJ and HRW depict artifacts produced and
reproduced by men, a Tiffany stained glass window and the Brooklyn Bridge. Frontispieces
display either traditional symbols which may serve to link the contents ahead with long-
standing traditions—the Statue of Liberty, a shield-like coat of arms, and a Greek coin
featuring Pegasus—or, again, men of action. In fact, the PH teacher’s notes explain that
Captain Walker, whose portrait graces not only the book’s cover, but its frontispiece as well,
also serves as a symbol of whats is to come in the anthology as he represents the values of
nineteenth century Americans (v). One, of course, is tempted to ask of whose values and of
which Americans is this white male trapper, trader representative. PH, with its unitary
approach to The American Experience, does not seem to take those questions into
consideration. Women play no direct role in the images one receives from these anthologies’
covers and frontispieces, unless one wants to make a case for the gender of the Statue of
Liberty. Nor do any minority Americans.

That two of the anthologies are bound in tradition may be inferred from their edition
titles "Classic Edition" and "Pegasus Edition." Three of the ﬁve ethnocentrically equate

American literature with the literature of the United States. As the summary tables below

87

reiterate, this male dominated and ethnically limited approach is replicated in much that

appears in the tables of contents of these anthologies.

88
Table 6

Summary Table

 

ggggggtsg=kgvd~;<>t42g;4;=lﬂzaueug=14-54Léa;xi“r,eeaaa.":;?tlvna=a;a.-_.., ,

 

PH — 128
(Percent)

19
(71.1)

29
(22.7)

15
(9)

 

HBJ — 134
(Percent)

105
(78.4)

24
(18)

16
(12)

 

SF — 164
(Percent)

107
(65 .2)

42
(25.6)

23
(14.0)

 

HRW — 112
(Percent)

77
(68.8)

29
(25.9)

20
(17.9)

 

ML — 93
(Percent)

 

(68.8)

 

25
(26.9)

 

18
(19.4)

 

 

 

 

 

kneel. , ~

    

'.<£?:}ghdeng;7

 

PH— 204

(Percent)

146
(71.6)

: women] j; , 1

50
(24.5)

 

HBJ -— 233
(Percent)

182
(78.1)

46
(19.9)

 

SF — 221
(Percent)

141
(64.3)

70
(31.6)

($9)

 

HRW — 188
(Percent

135
(71.8)

47
(25)

(1.1)

 

 

ML — 108
(Percent)

76
(72.2)

28
(25.9)

(2.8)

 

 

 

Peg ‘3‘Sifififfi:i'?i;ii?9ii!“iii Men

 

PH — 618

(Percent)

502
(8 1 .2)

Women

104
(16.8)

 

 

HBJ — 575
(Percent)

493
(85.7)

78
(13.6)

 

SF — 533
(Percent)

403
(75 . 6)

115
(21.6)

(8.6)

 

(3)

 

HRW -— 594
(Percent)

441
(74.4)

188
(24.9)

105
(1722)

(2.2)

 

ML — 471
(Percent)

308
(65 .4)

156
(33.1)

113
(24)

11
(2.3)

 

 

SF — 533
Alt. Ed.

 

359
(67.4)

 

169
(31.7)

 

(8.6)

 

 

16
(3)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

mm

SF—Alt. Ed.

Works in Dialect

PH
HBJ
SF
HRW
ML

14/204 —
16/233 —
20/220 —
18/188 —
16/108 —

89

 

Table 7
Summary Table
Emma ALA. AS-A. EA
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
1 1(w) 0 0

p—s

1(w)

6.9%
6.9%
9%
9.6%
14.8%

Selection Pages/Non-selection

PH

Table Heading Codes

Af.A.
As.A.
N.A.
LA.

618/718 — 44/56%
575/517 — 52.6/47.4%
533/460 — 64/46%
594/653 — 47.6/52.4%
471/595 — 41/59%
African American

Asian American
Native American
Latino(a) American

r
.3’

90

Tables 6 and 7 as well as earlier tables and discussions reveal that despite these
textbooks’ claims to multicultural approaches which demonstrate the diversity of United States
language and life, i.e., the perfect blend of literature, language and life, all ﬁve contain gaps
between their claims and reality. In all ﬁve, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and
Latino(a) Americans receive, at best, token representation as do African Americans in PH
(2.8% of pages) and HBJ (5%). Women, too, are vastly under represented with their portion
of pages ranging from 13.6 and 16.8% (HBJ, PH) to 24.9% (HRW), 31.7% (SF-Alt)-—SF has
only 21.6%-—and 33.1% (ML). Other major gaps occur. ML contains no Native American
works written after 1900; HBJ no Asian American writers. With the exception of A Raisin in
The Sun, no long works in any anthology are written by a minority person or by a woman.
The same play, again an exception as are a limited number of short stories, most works by
nonwhite writers fall into the one poem per person category or appear in the non ﬁction
sections of anthologies. A student reading about the Harlem Renaissance could easily get the
impression from four of these anthologies that it consisted of 3-4 Black male poets who wrote
4-5 poems in total. In the ﬁrst three anthologies discussed (PH, HBJ, SF) both women and
men of color, along with all women were greatly under represented. In the two most recent
anthologies, I ﬁnd women to be still under represented, although their percentage of selection
pages has increased to 24.9% (HRW) and 33.1% (ML). Pleased to see this increase, I am
disturbed to see that white women claim only 9.9% (HRW) and 11% (ML). And I am
equally disturbed to see that men of color receive only 7.6% of pages in HRW and the token
5.3 % in ML.

All ﬁve anthologies surveyed demonstrate what Raymond Williams has called the
selective tradition. By their very nature, they retain residual elements of the past that verify
some view of the present and incorporate the actively residual "by reinterpretation, dilution,

projection, discriminating inclusion and exclusion" (1977, 123) into the selective tradition of

91
the dominant culture, i.e. white male. Literature traditions and canons, and as Apple and
Christian-Smith (1991) contend, by extension, the textbooks that contain them, promote "a
selective version of the character of literature" (Williams 123). Such selection works to
incorporate the residual into the dominant culture to preserve it from the pressures of
oppositional and alternative versions (123). Or such selection may appropriate elements of
alternative or oppositional traditions by "mentioning" them, thereby "integrating selective
elements into the dominant culture by bringing them into close association with the values of
powerful groups" (Apple and Christian-Smith 10), thus defusing their oppositional elements.
Are such defusion and "mentioning" deliberate attempts to silence by appropriation? While
writers such as Rudolfo Anaya see deliberate conspiracies against the works of their peoples,
others avoid simple conspiracy theories. A discussion of this issue will be taken up in
Chapter Six.

The ﬁgures above amply demonstrate Apple and Christian-Smith’s concept of
"mentioning; " rather than produce a United States literature textbook which offers alternatives
to or undermines the "many great men and a few good women" approach to American
literature survey texts, publishers tend to grant a few pages to minority writers and a few
more to women; that is, they mention them. They seldom reduce the number of pages held
by the "traditional greats; " instead, they add pages, producing heavier and heavier
anthologies. The PH student edition weighs almost 15 pounds! The teacher’s annotated
edition is even heavier! As Apple and Christian Smith observe:

As disenfranchised groups have fought to have their knowledge take center stage in
the controversy over legitimacy, one trend has dominated textbook production. In
essence, very little tends to be dropped from textbooks. Major ideologized
frameworks do not get markedly changed. Textbook publishers are under
considerable pressure to include more in their books. Progressive items are perhaps

mentioned, then, but not developed in depth. Dominance is partly maintained here
through the process of "mentioning" (101).

92

Not only are the alternative literatures of women and minority persons, too often, only
"mentioned," variant forms of English other than prestige variants of standard English appear
seldom and in short spans of pages. Notable exceptions are A Raisin in The Sun, and the
Twain selections in HRW. Even these selections are interspersed with and surrounded by
standard English commentary and questions. When one remembers that the non-selection
portions of these anthologies constitute from 46-59% of their pages, the space provided even
these long passages of dialectal variants, appears to be rather small. The limited number of
dialect selections, the even smaller number in contemporary dialects, the standardization of
some selections (Mike Fink, Sojourner Truth, Sarah Kemble Knight), standard English
handbooks at the back of anthologies (HRW, ML), and all of this non-selection commentary,
while sometimes helpful to students, work to undermine the linguistic effects of the dialect
pieces and tend to reinforce the idea that standard English is the best language for literary
production and the only language for literary discussion. Literature, as John Willinsky notes,
becomes the province of "the well-tempered tongue" wherein "standard is represented for all
students as the highest, and most perfect form of expression in English. " "What tends to be
lost, " he adds, "is the fact that language in its entire range is something that can be worked to
great effect rather than just properly, by the ‘rules’" (133). As appears to be the case too
often in the ﬁve anthologies under discussion, literature becomes a "celebrity endorsement for
the standard form" (133) and propriety merges with prestige.

Thus, for the most part, exceptions to be discussed below, an examination of the ﬁve
anthologies under study reveals the narrow range of voices, stories, and language variants
these textbooks contain. Huge gaps and silences occur due to limited inclusion of women’s
voices, working class voices, and minority persons’ voices. Kurt Spellmeyer, sounding like
the some of the theorists reviewed early in this study-Bakhtin, Pechy, Foucault, Rose-argues

that to discredit a person’s voice, to silence a person works toward the colonization of that

93
person’s mind and aids in the politics of dominance (1993). Ogbu would contend that to do

so may create an oppositional resistance to all things white and standard on the part of
minority persons, thus ensuring their distrust of and disinterest in "white" education (1987,
1992) and educational institutions. Ogbu would agree with Spellmeyer that:
To silence any person or prohibit his speech or discredit his manner of speaking is
to silence much more than the person, not only everyone from whom the speaker
learned his words but also everything these words have made real (271).
Apple and Christian-Smith note, however, that all textbooks do not, of necessity, work to
impose the values and traditions of the dominant culture upon their readers. Some offer
oppositional discourse and alternatives, or, at least, contain elements of the genuinely
oppositional which may tend to undermine dominant traditions (11). To a very limited extent
in HRW, despite its very traditional format and ratios of selection pages, and to a much
greater degree in ML, I ﬁnd what Apple and Christian-Smith might term "progressive echoes"
(1 1).

HRW offers at least "echoes" of the oppositional or alternative through its inclusion of its
heteroglottic Twain selections. In these, not only does the heteroglossia triumph, their
placement raises the question of the degree to which Huck is the narrator of his own story and
the degree to which he operates as Twain’s tool (and, perhaps, sometimes, fool). The
Hansberry play allows readers to hear a variety of Black voices speaking varied "Englishes, "
all of which serve them well and constitute, in part, their characters. Such a play counters
the notion of the superiority of standard English for literary purposes. The Kincaid piece
folds the standard English of the tour guide back on itself to reveal social inequities standard
English speaking tourists might otherwise choose to ignore. Tan and Alvarez introduce
readers to dialects they may not have frequently seen before in literature and legitimatize

those dialects as effective literary languages.

94

In ML, chronology, which is often used to explain away the white male dominance of
those anthologies which contain a national literature, has been somewhat rearranged by this
work’s mixing of times via "Perspectives" and "Insights" sections. The thematic arrangement
in both the pre-1900 and post-1900 sections of the book promotes a mixing of genres; no
longer are contemporary poetry and nonﬁction, the genres in which are found the greatest
representation of women and minority writers, relegated to the back of the book. The
increased inclusion of works which contain extended passages of English variants allows
readers to "hear" more voices and validates them as literary voices and legitimate ways of
speaking.

The placement of authors’ biographies after their work as well as the limitation of
individual introductions to 1/2 page and the limitation of nearly all individual author’s
selection portions of the book, except for the dramatists, to 11 pages all help to undermine the
"Great men and a few good women" approach to American literature. No longer do Poe,
Hawthorne, Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson, Faulkner, etc. , "own" 25 or more pages apiece
while Hughes, Rich, Sexton, Brooks "own" two. Placing authors’ biographies after works
promotes readers’ placing initial emphasis on the work itself without interference from lengthy
(or short, depending on the author) assessments of style, lists of accomplishments, and literary
evaluations. Additionally the reader will not be swayed by the relative lengths of such
information as it appears before authors’ works. All of this can serve to demythologize

"literary giants" and counter the authority of the ideology of the author.

Chapter Four

Language History, Dialects, Levels of Usage

Chapter three reveals that the ﬁve American literature anthologies under study do not
contain a broad range of the authors, selections, language varieties, voices, and stories that
make up United States literature. Rather:

1. Writers who are women or persons of color are seriously under-represented,
particularly in the light of the demographic projections of students in United States public
schools by the year 2000 A.D..

2. Those writers who are women and/or persons of color whose selections are included
often appear on a one poem apiece basis or in the nonﬁction portions of the textbook.

3. Introductions/biographies/critical assessments of authors and their works most often
appear before authors’ works where they may inﬂuence readers’ responses to both the works
and their authors.

4. Women and persons of color are most likely to have shorter introductions/biographies
than white male authors. Introductions vary in length from 1/4 page to 4 pages. Those
writers with multipage introductions are most often white representatives of the traditional
canon in United States literature: Twain, Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Emerson, Faulkner,
Whitman, Crane.

5. Wide variance occurs in the number of pages granted authors. Except for Emily
Dickinson, Lorraine Hansberry (two textbooks), and Susan Glaspell (two textbooks), seldom

is a woman given 10 or more selection pages. The recipients of more than 10 pages of

95

96

selection space are primarily white male authors. No Native Americans, Asian Americans, or
Latino(a) Americans receive 10 or more pages.

6. In three of the ﬁve anthologies no long works by women appear. In three of the ﬁve
anthologies no long works by persons of color appear. Four of the ﬁve anthologies contain
long works by white males.

7. The covers and frontispieces feature pictures that, when they depict human beings,
depict white males. If they contain artifacts, most often the artifacts they depict are those
produced by males. Women appear only indirectly as the Statue of Liberty or as the probable
producers of a quilt. Persons of color do not appear at all.

8. Three of the anthology titles or subtitles imply subtexts of ethnocentricity.

9. Some unit titles legitimatize and/or valorize some works more than others:

"American Classic," "Five Major Writers."

10. The range of variants of English other than the prestige variants of standard English
is narrow, with limited emphasis on contemporary dialects and infrequent exposure to
extended passages in dialect. A Raisin in the Sun provides the exception in two anthologies
(ML and HRW). Between 93.1% (HBJ, PH) and 85.2% (ML) of the selections are written in
prestige variants of standard English. All selections are surrounded by extended non-selection
passages in standard English. Non-selection materials make up from 46% (SF) to 59% (ML)
of the anthologies.

11. Some oppositional and alternative elements can be found in limited degree in HRW,
though gender imbalance, format, and page allocation tend to undercut them. In a greater
degree, oppositional and alternative elements can be found in ML.

12. Even so, "mentioning" and appropriation serve as the primary modes through which

non-traditional "literatures" and "languages" are placed in all anthologies except for ML. All

97

too often these are included in only token fashion. All too often such selections are relegated
to the back of the book.

Having reviewed the above, this chapter will present the results of my analysis of the
non-selection materials which surround literary works and units of those works. As detailed
in Chapter One, the results below will determine:

1. These anthologies’ demonstrated responses to recent theorists’ research and
pedagogical calls for the inclusion of the sociolinguistic aspects of language use in English
language arts classes. Do these anthologies directly discuss or question language history,
language use, dialects, and the language related issues of class, gender, and ethnicity? If they
do, to what degree?

2. Whether these anthologies actively promote student thought and discussion about the
role of language in reﬂecting and possibly perpetuating social, economic, and political
stratiﬁcation.

3. The nature of the texts and subtexts of such demonstrated responses (or silences) as
they occur in the non-selection material found in these anthologies. As has been argued in
chapters 1-3, this non-selection material makes up a considerable portion of all of the
examined anthologies and carries a signiﬁcant weight of classroom and social authority.

To determine the quantity and kinds of questions and commentary about language found
in the ﬁve anthologies, I categorized and tallied those portions of each textbook that directly
treat six aspects of language use. My results appear below in Table 8. The numbers in Table
8 refer to the number of columns of printed material about each of the six topics found in
each anthology. A column equates to 50 lines. The reader of Table 8 can not simply add up
the columns recorded to find the total number of columns devoted to language discussion in
each anthology because over-lapping material has been cross listed. For example, material on

dialects that appears in a history of the language article in an anthology is entered under both

98
"The History/Changing Nature of American English " and under "Dialects" in Table 8.

However, within sections of Table 8, columns can be totalled to ﬁnd the amount of space
given a particular heading. For example, under "Dialect" the entries under SF can be totalled
to reveal that SF devotes 1.56 columns to discussions or questions about dialect. As has been
my previous practice, anthologies are abbreviated as PH (Prentice Hall), HBJ (Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich), SF (Scott, Foresman), HRW (Holt, Rinehart and Winston), and ML (McDougal,
Littell). I did not include in HRW’s and ML’s ﬁgures the many-paged grammar handbooks
that are contained at the end of each anthology following all of the literature selections.
However, since these may act to reinforce the primacy of standard English as the only
acceptable literary dialect and because often these label sentences as "Correct" or "Incorrect,"
"Clear" or "Unclear," and "Standard" or "Nonstandard," I do consider them as I discuss
anthologies’ presentations of the varied levels of English usage. Following Table 8, Chapter
Four will provide discussion of the results and the implications of those results for the ﬁrst
three categories: "The History/Changing Nature of American English," "Dialects," and
"Levels of Language Use. " Chapter Five will provide discussion of "Language and Gender,"

"Ethnicity and Language," and "Names and Labels."

99

Table 8

Columns of Language Commentary and Questions

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

«PH;- _ HBJSP HRW ,- ;.
1. The History/Changing Nature of American 4 13 16 39 1. 5
English
2. Dialects
— The deﬁnition of dialect '3 '3 '4 1'1 '5
— Dialects in American English 0 0 .6 3.8 2.9
— Author’s use of dialect 1.4 6.4 .5 4.0 1.8
-— Dialect as status/stigma 0 0 .06 .6 0
3. Levels of Langﬂge Use
— The deﬁnition of standard English 0 0 0 0 '16
— Contrasts between standard and
nonstandard English; Standard English 20.5 .6 .2 (22") 252587)
grammar '
— Language standards, language control,
setting standards .34 .4 .5 6.5 0
— Varied levels of language 2 4.3 2.2 15 2.4
— Author s use of varied levels of 2 .5 2 6 12
language use
— The status/stigma attached to varied .16 1.3 .2 2 .8
levels of language use
4. Langgge and Gender
— The generic "he" and "man" 0 0 0 0 0
— Author s use of the generic "he and 0 0 0 0 0
man
— Other sexist language use .16 .1 0 .06 .32
— Implications of sexist language use 0 .1 0 .06 .22
5. MW .3 .2 0 .4 .7
— Rac1st language use
— The implications of rac1st language .5 0 0 .7 .96
use
6. Names an Labels 3 .5 1 .44 1.04

 

 

 

100
The History and Changing Nature of American English

All ﬁve anthologies present students with information on the sources of American
English as well as on some of the changes it has undergone. PH and ML contain the least of
this sort of information and spread it throughout their anthologies in short, 10-15 line
sections. Both seem primarily interested in vocabulary enrichment and dictionary work as
they ask students repeatedly to research etymologies. PH contains 13 of these short sections
titled variously "Finding Word Histories" or "Understanding Word Origins. " PH privileges
Latinate words; seven of its 13 sections treat words with Latin origins. One article apiece
covers words from Native American languages and words from Spanish, Greek, French, and
Old English. Following 8-12 lines of comment, students are sent to the dictionary to ﬁnd
roots and contemporary meanings of listed words. The answers appear for teachers in the
teacher’s notes.

ML has three short sections on language sources and change. The ﬁrst, a 15 line entry
on language change, appears as a part of a "Study Skills Workshop" (57). The article
mentions two ways languages change—through borrowing and through the coining of new
words. It becomes obvious that the emphasis here is not on language but on reading skills.
Students are told to scan, skim, and read the article and then to write its main idea in one
sentence and to list the examples in the article which support its main point. ML’s second
language commentary, titled "Latin Roots," is in reality a "Vocabulary Workshop" (257).
Following 13 lines of instruction and 9 of examples, students are directed to the dictionary to
ﬁnd the roots of 17 words. Again, the teacher’s notes supply answers for teachers. ML’s
ﬁnal entry on language origin and change treats archaic language in six lines and suggests that
as students read Anne Bradstreet’s "To My Dear and Loving Husband" they replace the

archaic words with current ones (777).

101

HBJ, SF, and HRW present students with more discussion of language change and
history than ML and PH. HBJ offers two 13-15 line "Finding the Origins of Words" pieces
wherein the "diverse and composite" nature of American English is stressed (673) as is the
importance of Native American words to the American English vocabulary (22). As in PH
and ML, students are given lists of words to look up in the dictionary to determine their
origin. In addition, HBJ contains three longer articles on "The Development of American
English." A six-column piece by Frederic G. Cassidy (60—62), details and exempliﬁes three
causes of language change: borrowed words, coined words, adapted words. Spanish,
French, Dutch, Native American, and German borrowings and naturalizations serve as
illustrations. The questions which follow the article, rather than extending or applying
Cassidy’s comments, ask students to recall speciﬁcs from the piece. The second article, a
"brag" excerpted from Twain’s Life on The Mississippi, as discussed previously in Chapter
Three, is said to demonstrate the tall talk, colloquialisms, and exaggerations of frontier
vernacular (432). Rather than connecting this "brag" with those that appear in Greek, Anglo-
Saxon, and African American traditions or than asking about the social and political purposes
of such boasts, HBJ directs students to ﬁnd examples of metaphors, exaggerations, and
phonetic spellings in the "brag" and to compare it to Davy Crockett’s which is found later in
the anthology. Thomas Pyles’ and John Algeo’s article (561-562) covers Noah Webster’s
work in standardizing American English pronunciation and spelling as it points out differences
between current British and American spelling and pronunciation. Why Webster or anyone
might want to standardize a language and distinguish it from its "kindred" is not considered;
nor is the connection between language standards and social class distinctions. Instead,
students are told to ﬁnd more examples of differing British/American spellings and to read

Shaw’s Pygmalion and "report on Shaw’s spelling innovations" (562).

102

Table 8 reveals that SF’s primary emphasis falls on language sources and change as the
book offers language use commentary. Its "Story of American English" articles accompany
each of its eight units. Each of these two-column pieces traces a different source of the
contemporary American English vocabulary. The positive tone that pervades all of the pieces
culminates in the statement "Change is not to be lamented; it is a sign of vitality and life"
(658). Among the language sources highlighted by SF, sometimes in a nearly list-like
fashion, are French, Spanish, Black pidgin English, and Native American languages; war;
industrialization and technology; the frontier; and immigration. In the Alternative Edition,
SF’s ﬁnal article, rather than treat language change, focuses on formal versus informal
language use. Additionally, and almost in passing, the topics of Black double-voicing,
Bryant’s disdain for Americanisms, and Webster’s standardization work are addressed. The
articles are not extended through comments and/or questions by SF, although each piece’s
lively tone makes for interesting introductory reading about language. The topics covered
could lead to more in-depth thought and discussion about language on the part of students.

HRW contains, by far, the greatest amount of direct comment on the changing nature of
American English. Its seven articles which run 5—6 full-page columns apiece cover a wide
variety of topics under the umbrella title "The American Language." Among those given at
least 1 1/2 columns of coverage are: British versus American English, language control and
linguistic authority, social status and language, slang, euphemisms, language unity (Cooper’s
view) versus language diversity (Jefferson’s and Twain’s view), the dialects of American
English, and the sources of language expansion. Not only are topics afforded more space and
covered in more depth than in the other anthologies under examination, they are also followed
by questions, which, while they often send students to the dictionary, occasionally ask them to
do a bit more theorizing, extending, and applying. For example, the "High Tech” section

tells students to list computer terms found commonly in standard (non-computer) usage and

103

deﬁne how each is used in current speech and writing. Additionally they are directed to list
ﬁve more terms they think might enter standard usage in the future and to tell what each
means now and may mean then (1082). They are to invent "upgraded" words or phrases for
"student," "babysitter," "automobile," and "apartment house" in the "Euphemisms" section
(981). In the "Dialects" section, students must "propose reasons for any spelling
inconsistencies they ﬁnd in sample dialect passages" (702). HRW directs students to "compile
a brief dictionary of the special vocabulary of people in a business you are familiar

with....Explain the meaning of each word or phrase, and, if you can, cite its origin" (490).

Commentary

It is encouraging to ﬁnd that three of the ﬁve anthologies (HRW, HBJ, SF) provide
extended discussions of language history and change which move students well beyond the
etymological concerns which prevail in ML and PH. Two of those do so in a particularly
lively and engaging fashion. Both SF and HRW embrace change as essential to the vitality of
a language. HRW’s articles provide the most in-depth discussion of language change and
frequently address topics the other four anthologies do not consider or consider very brieﬂy
such as the debate between language liberals and language conservatives over language
controls which occurred in the United States in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries and the social and political forces underlying language change. Both of these will
be discussed in more detail in later portions of this chapter. In addition to the extended
articles, what would be of value to both students and their teachers would be for these three
anthologies to provide more in-depth and thought provoking questions following the articles to
encourage student thought and discussion about current changes in and debates about

American English and their attitudes toward those changes.

104
Dialect

Prentice Hall

Students encounter PH’s ﬁrst discussion of dialect in conjunction with the book’s
presentation of Mark Twain and his works. The link between dialect and humor is stressed,
and dialect is consistently discussed as a source of humor. Students are told that:

regional dialects-«he colloquial languages of people living in certain areas—were an

important element of Western humor. The use of regional dialects helped capture

local color and made the characters more interesting and amusing (506).
"Simon Wheeler’s use of regional dialect" as well as "his frequent use of unexpected words"
makes him "a very entertaining character" and "adds to the humor of ‘The Notorious Jumping
Frog of Calaveras County’" (506). After the selection, dialect and humor are connected four
times in the questions and comments that follow the story (511). Even the teacher’s notes
afﬁrm that without Twain’s use of dialect, Wheeler would be "less unusual," "less well-
deﬁned," and "less amusing" (511-TN). "Dialectal speakers amuse;" "dialect calls for
laughter" are the messages students and their teachers are sent and may well receive. Yet the
anthology never asks, "amusing to whom?" or "why amusing?". Following this presentation
of dialect, students are asked "to write a story in which the characters speak in a regional
dialect" (511). Brief comments precede Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s poems where students are
told that Dunbar was disillusioned and disappointed that critics esteemed his dialect poems but
ignored his more formal works. Except for these, dialect receives few additional comments
other than students’ being told to ﬁnd examples of dialectal usage in Twain’s and Harte’s
works until late in the anthology in conjunction with Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.

There dialect is deﬁned as "the distinctive manner of speech of people living in a

particular region" (1219). Authors use dialect to "capture the ﬂavor of a particular region"

105
(1219). After being told its features, students are directed to ﬁnd examples of dialect in the

play. One wonders if they notice that farmers and common villagers speak using dialectal
features, but preachers and judges do not. No questions concerning dialect as a marker of
social class distinctions occur in the anthology. Students are asked how the play would be
different if dialect was omitted. The "correct" answer having been supplied for them only a
few lines above the question, students should answer, according to the teacher’s notes, that
the play would be less "realistic" without the use of dialect (1219-TN). In the "Handbook of
Literary Terms," the deﬁnition of dialect reads very neutrally: "the form of a language
spoken by people in a particular region or group. Every dialect differs from every other
dialect in the details of vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation." Authors use dialect to
advance realism and to create local color (1336). Although humor plays no role in this
neutral deﬁnition, the reader is referred back to Twain’s "Jumping Frog" story, where, as has

been shown above, texts linking dialect and humor surround the piece.

McDougal, Littell

Unlike PH, ML avoids making the consistent link between dialect and humor. Most of
ML’s limited coverage of dialect is conﬁned to the teacher’s notes in short passages intended
to point out difﬁculties Limited English Proﬁciency (LEP) students may have reading
sentences which contain dialect or colloquial idioms. Examples of two of these short passages
which accompany A Raisin in The Sun read:

LEP: Dialect. Some students may have difﬁculty with this speech of Marna’s as it
contains words and phrases of dialect, including one long sentence containing several
thoughts. Help students see that Mama ﬁrst contrasts Walter and Bennie with her
husband and herself. Then she accuses her son; then she lists the things that she and

her husband provided for their children; and finally she states how different two
generations of the same blood seem (871-TN).

106
LEP: Dialect. Some students may have difﬁculty with this speech in which Walter
lets down his guard and speaks more gently with his wife. Be sure they are clear as
to his tone, as well as about the meanings of phrases such as "much understood"
(things agreed upon) and "folks" (other people). In standard English, the end of
Walter’s speech might read, "How did we get to the place where we are, scared to
speak about our tenderness for each other? Ruth, what is it that gets into pe0ple
who ought to be close?" (880-TN).
This sort of commentary can only prove beneﬁcial to both teachers and students, providing
teachers raise the issues in class that the teacher’s notes present. Of the 22 references I found
to dialect, six appear in the student text.

Of those six references to dialect, all but one deﬁne it. That one brieﬂy comments on
the spoken-language characteristics of Native American literature (589). The others deﬁne,
illustrate and, sometimes question. Three times these deﬁnitions focus on dialect as regional
speech: "Dialect is the particular variety of language spoken in one place by a distinct group
of people. Dialects exhibit the pronunciations, vocabulary, expressions, and grammar of a
region" (243). And, again, "Language that is characteristic of a speciﬁc geographical area is
called a dialect. Dialects vary in vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar" (356). Later, the
ethnic and social dimensions of dialect are added to the deﬁnition as students are told that "a
dialect is the distinct form of language spoken in a particular region or by a certain social or
ethnic group" (401). That defmition is repeated and ML adds, "writers use dialect to honestly
portray the characters in a story" (872). The "ofﬁcial" deﬁnition as found in the literary
terms section of the book reads: "Dialect is the particular variety of a language spoken in one
geographical area by a distinct group. Dialect includes the pronunciations, vocabulary,
expressions, and grammatical constructions used by the people of a region." Writers use
dialect to establish setting and to characterize (939). Two points must be made about this

"ofﬁcial" definition. First it avoids any reference to dialect as a source of humor as is

consistent of ML’s treatment of dialect and speakers of dialect throughout the anthology.

107

Second, it excludes consideration of ethnic and social class dialects and, thus, does not
consider a large range of dialects and dialectal speakers.

The longest entry on dialect is found in a "Speaking and Listening Workshop" (401).
After introductory comments on regional vocabulary differences (hero, sub, grinder, hoagie)
and the acknowledgement that many regional dialects exist in the United States, dialect is
deﬁned as above. Even while deﬁning dialect, ML asserts the desirability and primacy of
standard English as it states, "There is no right or wrong when it comes to dialect. There
are, however, certain situations where it is important to speak standard English with none of
the nonstandard grammatical elements that are sometimes a part of dialect" (401). Previously
in this book, students have read that "standard English is language that is acceptable at all
times and in all places" (317). They are offered the same information in the Literary Terms
section, that "standard English is language that is acceptable at all times and in all places"
(946). The statements’ inaccuracy aside for a moment, one wonders if conﬂicting messages
are being sent to students as "unacceptable" is not so very different from "wrong."

On page 401 , ML asks students to "translate. . .into standard English" ten statements made
in a frontier Western dialect and taken from James Agee’s adaptation of Stephen Crane’s "The
Bride Comes to Yellow Sky." Teachers are advised to accept all reasonable answers and to
point out that "although dialect sounds normal to the speaker, it is not standard English" (401-
TN). The teacher’s notes further advise teachers to "accept all dialects without judgment, "
but to also "discuss which occasions demand the use of standard English" (401-TN).
Occasions in which dialectal English may be more desirable and appropriate than standard are

not queried. Standard English is "acceptable at all times and in all places."

108
Harcourt Brace J ovanovich

HBJ defines dialect only once in its 1092-page textbook, although dialect and the
vernacular speaker are the topics of extended passages in the portion of the book that presents
Mark Twain and his works. "Dialect," according to HBJ, "is the characteristic speech of a
particular region or social group. Dialects differ from standard English in sentence structure,
vocabulary, and pronunciation. Writers often use dialect to establish local color. Here is a
humorous example of dialect ..." (1048). Again dialect is linked with humor; again dialect is
presented in contrast to standard English. Standard English is seen as a reality, a deﬁnable
entity, just as it was in ML.

In HBJ, as happened in PH, dialect is most often discussed in conjunction with humor.
Two short comments on dialect are exceptions: those following the selections by Washington
Irving and James Russell Lowell. Here students must list examples of dialectal use they ﬁnd
in the two pieces (317, 650). By far the majority of the discussion about dialect accompanies
commentary on the work and skill of Mark Twain. In introductory comments to the unit in
which Twain appears, dialect and humor are linked three times (347-348). Twain, readers are
informed, fused local color writing with vernacular humor to create "the embodiment of the
vernacular perspective" in Huck Finn, thereby giving a dialectal character the voice in which
to tell his own story as he "cuts through the hypocrisies of society" (348).

Inside the actual unit, six statements connect the vernacular style with humor, four of
them occurring on one page (396) as Simon Wheeler’s narration of the jumping frog’s
exploits is reviewed. The teacher’s notes rather bluntly tie this humor to readers’ feelings of
class superiority:

The basic method of this humor is to establish our superiority to the voice of the

narrative: not only are we his [Wheeler’s] superiors in matters of grammar and
usage, we are aware, as he is not, of how ridiculous his story is (391-TN).

109

Readers, then, feel superior to Wheeler due to both his language and his sense of story. This
"superiority," one of social class and education, is not challenged as classist by HBJ. Rather,
it appears accepted as it is described as, "the distance between ourselves and Simon Wheeler
as readers" (391). HBJ states that Twain has given Wheeler his own voice: "It is Wheeler’s
voice that tells the story" (396). I question equating Twain’s creating a character at whom
readers-the "superior" we-will laugh due, in part, to his manner of speaking, with giving a
character "voice."

In HBJ’s discussion of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the teacher’s notes take up
the issue of the increasingly widespread claims that the novel is racist. They state: "It [the
novel] has been banned from the libraries of many schools by those who have failed to read it
or have grossly misinterpreted it as being racist; the book is, in fact, a strong statement
against slavery" (402-TN). The logic of the defense is suspect for it implies that being
against slavery automatically renders one free of racism. Additionally the defense does not
address the language issue many critics of the novel have raised, the frequent and repeated use
of the word "nigger." Nor does it address Huck’s and Tom’s demeaning "sport" with Jim
near the novel’s end as they seek to "free" him.

As to HBJ’s contention that Huck is given his own personal voice as he engages in "his
way of conveying his experiences" (403), Myra Jehlen suggests that rather than Twain’s
granting Huck "the ultimate critical power when he gives him control of the novel’s
language," he allows Huck sight but not judgement. Huck is not the author of his own story
as HBJ would have readers believe. The sincere and naive admiration for Colonel
Grangerford and the splendors of his parlor expressed in the uneducated dialect of "lower-
class Huck, " which tends to heighten the reader’s sense of Huck’s sincerity and naivete, is not
shared by either Twain or, Twain hopes, the reader. The reader reads against Huck’s account

rather than with him as Twain presents the Colonel as "an absurd mannequin of a grandee, a

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humbug" (1990, 12), thereby disempowering Huck and rendering his "voice" the tool of
Twain’s satire. Here, as in the Jumping Frog story, Twain’s humor and satire depend, in
part, on the reader’s "superiority" to Huck.

HBJ’s questions and exercises regarding language use in the Twain pieces asks students
to point out examples of both dialect and exaggeration, to write an advertisement for The
Adventures of Huckleberry Firm in Huck’s "voice," to contrast the narrative styles and
language use of Simon Wheeler and Jim Baker ("Baker’s Bluejay Yarn"), and to note the

language style of the standard English narrator in an excerpt from Life on the Mississippi.

Scott, Foresman

SF deﬁnes dialect in terms of deviation: "Dialects deviate from the norms of standard
language in vocabulary, pronunciation, and usage, " and "Twain chooses a narrator who tells
this story in frontier dialect, using peculiar sentence patterns, mispronunciations, and
grammatical deviations" (334). Again, dialect and humor are equated (333-TN, 282, 339)
and students are asked to consider Twain’s use of dialect as they analyze his humor.
Teachers are told that the use of dialectal speakers conveys "a lighthearted, humorous tone "
(333-TN). Frontier humor displays, among other characteristics, "a disregard for standard
English," as both Twain and Josh Billings utilize "colloquial misexpressions" (282).

SF notes that dialect is used by authors (and readers and listeners) as a class marker, but
does not tease out any of the implications of that fact. With Richard Wright’s ”The Man
Who Saw the Flood, " students compare the language of the Black family (tenant farmers) with
that of Burgess (landowner) and consider how Wright’s use of dialogue reveals "social
relationships" (486). The teacher’s notes supply the answer for teachers: "through dialect

Wright situates his characters in the rural South. Burgess’ speech is more standard; this

111

difference reveals the social gulf between them" (486-TN). The Twain section also picks up
on the social distance between Twain’s educated and uneducated narrators as revealed through
their language (330, 338). Elsewhere dialect is addressed and queried as evidence of local
color (873, 859 Alt. Ed., 494-TN, 354) and students are asked to point out "peculiarities of
speech." William Least Heat Moon is praised for his ability to capture "the rhythms and
peculiarities of various dialects of American English," (763) and students must look for them.
The teacher’s notes list only nonstandard speakers as displaying language "peculiarities" (762-
TN). The only reference to Black English dialects in SF occurs as SF names "Black pidgin
English" as one of the sources of contemporary American English. That description of Black
speech is never updated nor is Black English Vernacular described.

By the time the student reaches the "ofﬁcial" deﬁnition of dialect in "The Handbook of
Literary Terms, " which reads, "a form of speech characteristic to a particular region or class,
differing from the standard language in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammatical form"
(954), the student may have notions of dialect as humor, dialect as peculiar, and dialect as

mispronunciation and deviation rather ﬁrmly in mind.

Holt, Rinehart and Winston

HRW devotes the greatest amount of space to the discussion of and questions about
dialect of the ﬁve anthologies. Its defuiition from the "Handbook of Literary Terms" reads:

A way of speaking that is characteristic of a certain social group or the inhabitants
of a certain geographical area. Dialects may differ from one another in vocabulary,
pronunciation, and grammar. As in most countries, one dialect has become
dominant in America, and it is known as Standard English. This is the dialect used
most often on national radio and television news broadcasts. Many writers try to
capture dialects to give their stories local color, humor, or an air of authenticity

(1 172).

112

This deﬁnition differs from those which have been noted before in that it places "social
group" before " geographical area," it refers to standard English as a dialect, it bluntly asserts
the dominance of standard English, and it attempts a deﬁnition of standard English in terms of
its users. However, the deﬁnition and its explanation leave out what is meant by
"dominance" (the most speakers? social prestige? academically enforced? cultural
hegemony?), the how’s and why’s of such dominance, and what this dominance means to
nonstandard speakers. HRW explores some, but not all of these issues in its language
discussions which occur throughout the anthology.

Similar to all previously reviewed anthologies, HRW positions a great deal of its dialect
commentary near the works of Mark Twain. In the short article "Dialect and Frontier
Humor," the use of dialect to arouse laughter is brieﬂy discussed, and students are sent back
to Twain’s text, the excerpt from Life on The Mississippi examined in Chapter Three where
Twain juxtaposes the dialects of Huck, Jim, the keelboatman’s brag, keelboatmen’s
conversation, and the educated narrator, to ﬁnd examples of dialectal speech as well as other
devices of humor such as exaggeration (413). Students are encouraged to read the selection
out loud to hear the variants of English this selection displays. Unlike HBJ, HRW links the
keelboatman’s "brag" with a "brag" of Odysseus. Students are directed to write a boast and
to rewrite a section of the text’s boast in standard English. "What has been lost in the
standard English translation?" they are asked (413). The teacher’s notes that accompany the
excerpt from Huckleberry Finn suggest three times that students translate dialectal passages
into standard English (418, 420, 426-TN) as both Pap’s dialect and Jim’s are "thicker than
that spoken by Huck" (426-TN).

HRW contains a second lengthy passage where it directly treats dialect, its "American
Dialects" article (698-702). In this useful and engaging article, dialect is deﬁned and

distinguished from "dominant" standard English in much the same manner as in the

1 l3
" Handbook of Literary Terms." The HRW article treats dialect in much greater depth than

any of the other anthologies as it details the ways dialects originate, maps out three major
dialect regions of the United States, and exempliﬁes the "language peculiarities" of each
region. All of this is introduced by a passage from The Grapes of Wrath in which Pa Joad
and Ivy Wilson comment on the many ways people pronounce words. They deem these
variant pronunciations "queer." HRW continues, "The ‘queer’ talk that makes these
Americans so different in speech is, of course, dialect" (699). Later in the anthology, dialect
as an author’s tool for characterization is demonstrated by means of excerpts from the work
of Bobbie Ann Mason and Flannery O’Connor. Dialect’s use for humor is also covered, and
HRW asserts that the dialectal pieces of regionalist authors "were usually comic; much of the
humor derived from funny pronunciations and peculiar local words" (699). "Funny to
whom?" and "Why funny?" are questions one might wish the text would ask.

To reinforce the above, HRW gives students a list of words which vary from region to
region (pail/bucket; soda/pop). Next, the textbook directs students to note and list the
variations from standard spellings, nonstandard or slang words, eye dialect, and spelling
inconsistencies which occur in four dialectal passages which are identiﬁed as Missouri, 1840;
Midwest, 1920’s; African American, New York City, 1980’s; and Interstate Truckers,
1980’s. HRW wants students to theorize as to why the spelling inconsistencies they ﬁnd
occur. Finally HRW asks students to identify the passage that demonstrates the dialect of a
social group as opposed to a region, an odd phrasing of the question since the BEV passage
qualiﬁes, but is not deemed correct in the teacher’s notes. The teacher’s notes find the
Interstate Truckers’ passage to be the one written in the dialect of a social group, an
occupational group falling under the umbrella term "social. "

HRW offers additional commentary on dialect in conjunction with Hansberry’s A Raisin

in The Sun and Alvarez’ "Daughter of Invention. " Hansberiy’s drama contains a wide

114

variety of dialects; only two questions, both of those found in the teacher’s notes, address
these dialects. Asagai’s British English is queried and referred to as "stilted" (828-TN). The
second question asks why Walter assumes the "dialectal patterns of a slave" as he prepares to
sell out to Linder (860-TN). Both these are certainly worth asking, but HRW’s lack of
further comment on the language use found in this play is worth noting. This play not only
amply demonstrates the communicative effectiveness of dialect, it also juxtaposes ﬁve dialectal
variants of English spoken by the Younger family and their acquaintances and lends itself well
to a discussion of language change and language assimilation. Hansberry’s stage notes clearly
distinguish Mama’s speech from Ruth and Walter’s and Beneatha’s from the rest of the family
(818, 821). Why these differences occur and their sociolinguistic implications would make
for interesting thought and discussion. In Alvarez’ "Daughter of Invention, " the mother, a
native Spanish speaker, speaks English as a second language. The mother’s mix-ups as she
uses English idioms are referred to as "corruptions" (909-TN) and as "mangled" speech (910)
as ML queries the story.

HRW leaves hanging Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s and James Weldon Johnson’s negativity
toward writing in dialect. Whether Black authors should "write white" to gain wider
exposure with a white reading audience is asked in the teacher’s notes (644-TN), but no
mention is made of current writers who write in dialect and are highly successful at reaching
all sorts of audiences such as Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Ishmeal Reed, and Alice
Walker. Instead students are left with Johnson’s "doubts about the further possibilities of
stereotyped dialect" and his paraphrased comments that standard English is capable of
conveying greater variety and power than dialectal English (646, 680). Teachers and students
have only to read William W. Cook’s "The African American Griot" (1985) to debate these
negative attitudes toward dialect’s ability to communicate powerfully. Having done so, they

might begin to question what part the linguistic hegemony of standard English and the

115

economic and cultural domination of standard English speakers may have played in Johnson’s

negativity toward dialect.

Commentary

As I review the above in regard to the anthologies’ discussions of dialect, I ﬁnd patterns
emerging. One readily apparent is the limited space given to discussions of dialects in all ﬁve
anthologies, although HRW (9.5 columns), HBJ (6.7 columns), and ML (5.2 columns) grant
considerably more space than PH (1.7 columns) and SF (1.56) columms.

With the exception of ML’s, much of the discussion of dialect centers around the work of
Mark Twain. There the connections between dialect and the speech of dialectal speakers for
humor emerges as a predominant theme. None of the anthologies explore or ask students to
explore "humorous to whom?" and the possible classist overtones of educated speakers
laughing at the speech of less educated speakers. HRW is the only one of the four to also
provide extended discussion on dialect elsewhere in the book. Its discussion in its "Dialects"
article, while it again covers the link between dialect and humor, also stresses dialect’s social
aspects and provides information on how dialects develop and the major kinds of dialects
found in the contemporary United States. HRW, as it asks students to translate ten sentences
of frontier dialect into standard English, is the only anthology to ask "What is lost?" as the
dialect passages are changed.

Anthologies’ deﬁnitions and discussions of dialect also tend to emphasize the geographic
or regional aspects of dialect. Although only PH completely excludes the social aspects of
dialect from its deﬁnition and presents it as a strictly a phenomenon which correlates with
geographic regions, the others place greatest emphasis on dialect’s regional aspects as they

deﬁne it and/or as they illustrate it through the selections they contain. HRW, again, proves

116

to provide a partial exception to my statement in that in its "American Dialects" article it
queries the dialects of social groups. And both HRW and ML carry Hansberry’s play which
contains a wide range of dialects more readily associated with social and/or ethnic groups than
with geographic regions.

It may be this emphasis on the regional aspects of dialect that accounts for the lack of
questions and discussions in the anthologies on the sociolinguistic aspects of dialect use as
well as the lack of questions which might prompt students to think about their attitudes toward
their own dialects and those of others. Or it may be, in part, anthologies’ reluctance to
explore a topic that is both sensitive and controversial as persons even within the English
teaching profession are very divided in their attitudes toward language diversity and language
pluralism as the divided and emotional response to Dennis Baron’s recent article in the
Chronicle of Higher Education (to be discussed later in this study) reveals. In the article,
Baron asks why academics continue to insist on ‘proper English’ when such English is a
"mythic construct” (1992). The general patterns for questions on dialect in all ﬁve of the
anthologies are either find and transcribe or simply ﬁnd and list examples of dialectal usage.
Each anthology asks students once to write a passage in dialect.

Passages which deﬁne, describe, question, or illustrate dialect often to have a somewhat
negative tone. Dialects and dialectal speech are labelled "peculiar," "queer,"
"mispronunciations," "funny," "corruptions," "deviations," and "mangled." Students are
asked to suggest situations which demand (my emphasis) the use of standard English without
being asked to suggest when dialectal speech may be more appropriate than standard by ML
and are told that "Standard English is acceptable in all times and at all places." HRW tells
students that standard English is the "dominant" dialect without exploring the nature of that
dominance and what that dominance means to dialectal speakers. Standard is the norm

against which other languages appear to be judged as "peculiar." HBJ is the only anthology

1 17
to directly and bluntly link education, a higher social class, and the speaking of standard

English to personal "superiority, " but I would argue that the other four anthologies
inadvertently send similar messages to student readers an increasingly large number of whom
are dialectal speakers.

Many linguists and researchers have asserted the ideological/mythic nature of standard
English and the difﬁculties entailed in trying to deﬁne its properties (Milroy and Milroy 1985;
Baron 1990, 1992; Willinsky 1988; Williams 1983, Bakhtin 1981). As the ideology is
reiﬁed, it becomes the standard against which other dialects are judged and deﬁned. Words
like "peculiar," "deviations," and "norms" tend to reinforce its authority and ride on the
underlying assumption that there is only one way to speak and write the English language.
Such authority-laden reiﬁcation of standard English projects, in the words of Raymond
Williams, "a selected authoritative version [of language] from which all other varieties can be
judged as inferior or actually incorrect" and participates in "the process of cultural
domination" (1983, 106). Crowley, as he mediates Bakhtin, argues that the reiﬁcation of
standard English as the only "correct" way to speak and write works toward a solidiﬁcation
of grammatical and cultural forms which serve to insure the cultural hegemony of standard
language speakers (77-81). In such a climate, students who are dialectal speakers may
"wonder if they have anything to say at all" (Friendenberg in Willinsky, xi). Or as John
Ogbu argues, dialectal speakers may choose to enact oppositional resistance to all things they
regard as "white, " maintaining their self-esteem at the cost of disenfranchising themselves
within the dominant culture (1987, 1992).

I wonder what it is like to be the speaker of a nonstandard dialect in classrooms that use
anthologies that repeatedly link dialect with humor and describe it as "peculiar" or "queer" or
"deviations. As a source of humor or as the speaker of a dialect not "acceptable at all times

and in all places," the dialectal speaker may be made to feel as Smitherman suggests, that

118

"the value assigned to nonstandard speech is tantamount to the difference between going to the
front door and going to the back door" (1988, 157). These students who sit in the 63%
(Applebee 1990) of classrooms where anthologies serve as the predominant source of literary
selections read may be made to feel the "insufﬁciency and shame" described by Crowley and
noted earlier in this study, the public embarrassment felt by Christiansen, or the diminished
self-respect reported by Willinsky which caused dialectal speakers to refer to themselves as

"speechless, babbling."

Levels of Usage

My examination of the ﬁve anthologies’ presentations of varied levels of usage within
English speech and writing, i. e. , formal/informal, standard/nonstandard, plain/ornate, slang,
and colloquialisms, overlaps, to some extent, the previous segment of my examination and
yields some of the same conclusions. Yet, because the phrase "levels of usage" is more
inclusive than the term "dialect" and incorporates the concept of social registers within
dialects, I will discuss this topic as a separate category. What follows will consider those
varieties of usage other than dialects. As Table 8 details, I surveyed each textbook’s
commentary on language standards, varied levels of language use, and the status or stigma

attached to those varied levels.

119
Prentice Hall

PH offers no deﬁnition of standard English; however, PH uses the phrase as the norm
into which dialectal and archaic passages are to be transcribed. Ironically the four sentences
PH wishes students to "rewrite in standard English" (52-TN) already are in standard English.
They contain a few archaic words and phrases typical of William Bradford’s time.
Throughout the anthology, 56 grammar exercises entitled "Grammar in Action" appear. They
present standard English usage and conventions and seek to correct such nonstandard usages
as the double negative, a legitimately grammatical construction in Black English Vernacular
and Chicano(a) dialects, and who/whom mix-ups. Because all of the grammar exercises
assume standard English to be the norm and the usage they seek to "correct" to be
" nonstandard, " I have entered these exercises under the category "Contrasts Between Standard
and Nonstandard English" on Table 8, even though the contrasts are most often implied rather
than directly stated. None of these exercises appear in the student edition of the textbook; all
are confined to the teacher’s notes. Whether or not students are exposed to them will be a
matter of teacher choice, though, since they are listed in the objectives for each section where
they occur, PH assumes they will be used.

PH’s teacher’s notes offer a brief discussion of language standards as they mention
Webster’s standardization efforts. They link the emergence of dictionaries and grammars in
England with the rise of a middle class "keen to ape their betters" and "anxious to deﬁne and
circurnscribe" lexical boundaries (89-TN). This detached, almost satiric tone seems ironic in
the light of the deﬁnitions and circumscriptions which occur in the grammar lessons PH
includes in its Teacher’s Annotated Edition. The tone of the lessons indicates they are to be

taken seriously.

120

PH comments on formal and informal language and the plain and the ornate styles. After
deﬁning the plain and ornate styles, PH points out William Bradford and Ernest Hemingway
as plain-style writers and Cotton Mather as an ornate stylist and concludes that the plain
style’s less complicated syntax and diction make it easier to understand (22, 1344, 1345). PH
presents contrasts between formal and informal usage in conjunction with the Lincoln’s formal
"Gettysburg Address" and the informal works of Robert Benchley, Carl Sandburg, and
Katherine Ann Porter.

PH distinguishes formal usage as more complex, more in line with "traditional standards
for correctness," and more serious than informal usage which it ﬁnds more suitable for
conversational situations, dialogue, humor, and entertainment (445). When used by powerful
and respected ﬁgures such as Lincoln in his more relaxed moments, informal quips and
coined words both humanize speakers and entertain listeners. Even so, the dignity and
elegance of formal usage is stressed; formal language "persuades, instructs, informs,
explains," while informal amuses and entertains (445, 769, 775). Informal pieces are "less
serious in purpose," "more loosely organized," and informal writers and speakers are more
likely to "stray from the topic" (769, 775). PH’s diction seems to privilege the more formal
style, a style, which by deﬁnition dialectal speakers can not attain as it adheres to "traditional
standards for correctness (445). " Readers may infer that PH denies the discourse of power to
nonstandard speakers who, according to PH’s deﬁnitions, can not hope to persuade, instruct,
inform, or explain.

PH, alone of the examined anthologies, states that sometimes stilted, formal English can
serve as a device for humor and points to the Eastern narrator of Twain’s "Jumping Frog"
story as its example. The point made in this three-line entry in the teacher’s notes (507-TN)
tends to be easily lost amidst the six entries which link nonstandard speech with humor, four

of which appear in the student edition of the anthology (506-511).

12 l
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

HBJ deﬁnes neither standard versus nonstandard English nor informal versus formal
usage. Nonetheless, HBJ English standardizes the grapholect of Sarah Kemble Knight and the
spirituals it includes, contrasts dialect with standard English as it forges the link between
dialect and humor as discussed above, and consistently assigns students the translation or
transcription of nonstandard or archaic language into contemporary standard English.

The book provides a two-page discussion of the plain versus the ornate style (32-33) and
reinforces its discussion with shortened deﬁnitions in its literary terms section (1055, 1056).
Cotton Mather, as in PH, exempliﬁes the ornate style; Hemingway, Bradford, Twain,
Anderson, and Dickinson use a plainer style, which is said to more direct and simple. Such
statements may mislead students. Although usually written in simple diction, the poems of
Emily Dickinson can hardly be called "direct and simple." PH links the prevalence of the
plain style in American literature with American democracy, an odd connection when one
remembers that the plain style originated with the English Puritans, a group hardly noted for
its democratic governmental policies where non-Puritans were concerned either in England or
in the American colonies.

The article on Webster’s standardization efforts by Thomas Pyles and John Algeo has
been covered above in the previous section of this study. More pertinent to this discussion
are the four short sections in HBJ which link language use with social class status. All four
Open discussion on social status as revealed through language. Already commented on is the
passage that assures readers of their social distance from the uneducated narrators of Twain’s
pieces. In Bernard Malamud’s "The First Seven Years," Feld’s retort, "I pay you wages in
cash," is said to reveal his regarding his assistant as a mere hireling unworthy to marry his

daughter (708, 708-TN). In conjunction with Pound’s "The River-Merchant’s Wife: a

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Letter," the teacher’s notes point out the obvious use of "My Lord," to reveal the lower social
standing of the merchant’s wife (767, 767-TN). ’

HBJ’s inclusion that most directly links language with economic and social status is
Rolando R. Hinjosa-Smith’s "This Writer’s Sense of Place" which reveals the role language
plays in a person’s acquiring a sense of identity and a sense of place. HBJ is the only
anthology under study to address this topic. According to Hinjosa-Smith, language serves to
create a social network for persons who live and speak together in a geographic region.
Hinjosa—Smith’s people speak "the language of the Border." Borderers, Texas-Mexicans who
live near both sides of the border between Texas and Mexico, have preserved their derivative
Spanish language, despite the derision of "gringos. " Their language ties them to each other
and to their geographic region. Hinjosa-Smith states that the price Borderers have paid to
maintain their linguistic unity has been exorbitantly high. In its commentary on the piece,
HBJ asserts in the teacher’s notes that "the inability to speak English remains an economic
handicap" for the Borderers in response to the question in the student text, which queries what
Hinjosa-Smith means by an "exorbitantly high price" (890, 890—TN). This answer alters the
whole tone of Hinjosa-Smith’s remarks, and reduces the high price paid to a matter of
economics. The desire to preserve one’s identity and sense of place through linguistic unity is
reduced to an "inability to speak English" by HBJ. Even so, HBJ’s inclusion of the piece
may serve to prompt students’ discussion and thought about the role of language in their own
acquisition of an identity and a sense of place and the economic and social consequences of
preserving linguistic unity in the face of what Peter Farb would call "linguistic chauvinism"
(1990, 201) and James Sledd names "the linguistics of white supremacy" (1973, 388). HBJ is

to be applauded for its inclusion.

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Scott, Forman

Table 8 reveals that, except for issues relating to dialect, SF provides little commentary
on levels of language use. In the Alternative Edition a discussion of informal and formal
language usage occurs. The work of seven male authors and one female author illustrates
SF’s distinctions: Cather, Twain, Anderson, and Hemingway fall into the formal camp;
Mather, James, Melville, Faulkner, and Wolfe into the informal. Additionally, SF touches on
language control and standard setting with its half-column on the work of Noah Webster (97).

An extended presentation of standard and nonstandard language use appears in a poem,
"Words," by Vern Rutsala. In the poem the speaker makes it clear that he and his associates
chose to speak nonstandard English because it ﬁt the lives they lead as children much better
than standard English. Standard named too many "ghosts," "things you only saw in movies,"
not at home. He came to hate these names, the language that named, and the sense of
vacancy these names stirred in him. Thus, even though he knew better, he used "ain’t" and
"he don’t" and "came to love/ the double negative" (723). The poem provides a wonderful
opportunity for the examination of class attitudes toward language and students’ attitudes
toward their own and the language variants they hear around them. SF conﬁnes its questions
entirely to the poem and suggests in the teacher’s notes that the "we" of the poem, even
though they know better, use nonstandard forms because those forms are more in keeping
with the 'shabbiness" (my emphasis) of their lives and the "vacancy" in their lives (725-TN).
"Sub-standard" language forms (723-TN) are equated with "lack, absence, and emptiness"

(725-TN).

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Holt, Rinehart and Winston

HRW gives more space to language levels than the other four anthologies. Like the
other anthologies, HRW asks students to translate archaic or dialectal usages into standard.
Although to a lesser degree than SF, HRW standardizes Sarah Kemble Knight’s journal. The
anthology reinforces standard English in another, very deﬁnitive way, by placing two
grammar handbooks at the end of the book. The ﬁrst, "Literature and Language" (1153-
1168) reviews ﬁve troublesome usage problems (fragment and run-ons, pronouns and
antecedents, short, choppy sentences, diction, and commas) and the persuasive, expository,
descriptive, and narrative modes of writing. Short literary passages accompany each of the
"modes" lessons to illustrate the particular mode under discussion. The second, the
"Grammar, Usage, and Mechanics Reference Guide," walks students through a review of
English grammar conventions, complete with the "rules governing standard English usage"
(1183-TN) and examples of "correct" standard usage (1183-1228).

HRW’s presentation of the plain style and the ornate style reads much the same as those
discussed above in conjunction with other anthologies. The book’s consistent assignment to
students as it discusses and defines inﬂated words, archaic words, or unusual syntax
(Knight’s, Hawthome’s) is "ﬁnd and translate." The textbook points out archaic words for
students ﬁve different times with ﬁve different authors. The "ﬁnd and translate" or "ﬁnd and
list" mode of questioning continues as students are brieﬂy introduced to jargon (490),
euphemisms (1001), and colloquialisms (562). Russell Baker’s "Little Red Riding Hood
Revisited" satirizes jargon, euphemisms, inﬂated diction, cliches, and redundancy. The
questions which follow direct students to ﬁnd examples of each of the "abuses" listed and to

transcribe three paragraphs of the piece, eliminating all "abuses." Though the students are

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told that the inﬂated and evasive languages of these ﬁelds are being mocked (1001, 1001-TN),

they are not asked to consider the popularity of such rhetoric or its manipulative potential.

Two lengthy pieces on language varieties found in HRW remain to be discussed, "Slang"
(621-624) and "Euphemisms" (977-981). Because the "Euphemisms" article includes a great
deal of information which could open discussion about the classist nature of much language
use and because it addresses such topics as many persons’ preference for "prestigious"
Latinate words over Anglo-Saxon words, I have placed its six columns on Table 8 under
"Levels of Language Use. " HRW addresses the tendency of many language users to inﬂate
language in the hopes of seeming to upgrade and grant more prestige to the referents of that
language and to themselves. Users of "the language of anticipation" might refer to the
University of Michigan as "the Harvard of the West." Americans, says HRW, tend to use
euphemistic job titles. For years I have been a reader or a table leader for Educational
Testing Service for the Advanced Placement Reading. This year, according to a recent letter,
I am no longer table leader. Although I have exactly the same job as in the past, I now am a
"professional consultant." This is the sort of euphemistic upgrading HRW alerts students to
as "teachers" become "educators" and a "job" becomes a "profession" (979). The article
states that some users of euphemistic language hope that language will promote "civilized
attitudes. " Perhaps, the article asserts, that motive coupled with democratic impulses is the
reason for "gentleman" being applied liberally to men in the United States. Euphemisms
which deliberately obscure meaning (ﬁnal solution) for political reasons and those which treat
topics difﬁcult to face (passed away) make brief appearances in HRW’s article.

The article reads in lively fashion; it offers many examples of euphemisms, theorizes as
to why they are used, notes the classist overtones of those persons who seek to inﬂate
themselves and their referents via euphemisms, and points out the possible political uses of

euphemisms. The exercises which follow the article direct students to the telephone book to

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ﬁnd euphemisms in the yellow pages, to categorize a list of words as "plain" or "fancy," to
create their own euphemisms, and to translate several "bureaucratic" euphemisms.

HRW provides the most thorough treatment of slang of any of the reviewed anthologies.
The "Slang" article deﬁnes slang as "any informal nonstandard, specialized language" (621).
Besides providing a deﬁnition and asserting "most peoples’s" negative attitudes to slang,
HRW reveals the "social kinship" slang use lends its speciﬁc groups of users. Slang serves
the "social function of marking members of a group and asserts the group’s relatedness"
(621). HRW details ﬁve ways slang words and phrases originate and discusses the role of
print and non-print media in spreading slang. Although, the article certainly does not openly
disparage slang; it refers to the transition that some words make as they move into standard
usage as a " jump " (624). Words which never make this "jump" are described as "so informal
as to resist standard English" and "commonplace" (624). As students complete the article,
they are sent to dictionaries, are told to make lists, and asked to identify ﬁgures of speech
found in a list of slang terms. Once again, as in the euphemism article, HRW provides
interesting and stimulating commentary that could open discussion and thought on the social
aspects of language use. Then, instead of following up on these sociolinguistic issues, HRW
relies on seek and list exercises.

Two sections in HRW raise the issues of standard setting and language control. In "The
American Language" (109-112), HRW reviews the disagreement between language
conservatives such as John Adams and Noah Webster, who as purists wished to establish an
ofﬁcial Federal English, and the language liberals such as Thomas Jefferson who opposed the
formation of a national language academy and a prescribed Federal English. "Noah’s Ark"
(172-176) notes the growing need for linguistic authority felt by persons in the United States.
What prompted, it asks, this need for authority? It replies, the ﬂuid class system in both the

United States and in England. A baker who rises into the middle class will not want his

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children to learn his speech patterns, which clearly mark his lower class origins. Hence the
rise of English grammars and "the schoolmastering of English" as persons sought to learn the
speech habits (and writing habits) "of the class they wanted to imitate" (172). Webster’s
dictionary and speller served dual roles: Like "arks", they kept the newly language—conscious
rising middle class from drowning in "lower class dialects," and they distinguished American
English from British English, thereby satisfying growing United States nationalism. Many
households placed their copy of Webster’s Dictionary "next to the Bible" (176), a telling
comment as it reveals the authority granted Webster’s prescriptive book. This commentary is,
by far, the most searching of any encountered in the ﬁve anthologies’ presentations of
Webster’s work and the class origins of language prescriptivism. Following the article HRW

asks students to make various sorts of lists of words and to ﬁnd spelling inconsistencies.

McDougal, Littell

The deﬁnitions ML gives to standard and nonstandard English read as follows:
Standard English. English is divided into two main levels, standard and
nonstandard. Standard English is language that is acceptable at all times and in all
places. It conforms to accepted standards of grammar usage and mechanics (946,
401, 317).
Nonstandard English. Nonstandard English does not conform to accepted standards
of grammar, usage, or mechanics. For example, expressions such as "he don’t" and
"I ain’t" are nonstandard. Nonstandard English is chieﬂy a form of spoken English;
it is not used in writing except in dialogue (943, 317).
Following these deﬁnitions on page 317, students are alerted to the two speakers who follow,
Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, and are told that Douglass’ speech is in standard
English and that Truth’s is in nonstandard. They are asked which speech is more persuasive
and impressive. Having just read the valorization of standard English as "acceptable at all

times and in all places" one wonders if students are not being set up to prefer Douglass’. The

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questions that appear in the teacher’s notes ask students to think of times when nonstandard
English is not acceptable (317-TN). In fairness, it must be added that unlike the situation on
page 401 when this same question is raised in connection with dialectal speakers, the text does
also query situations in which standard English might be ineffective, but, for many students,
the answer may already have been given by the textbook. To argue otherwise would place
the student in the position of going against the weight of authority of the text as well as the
standard English lessons and grammar handbook it contains. Students are asked in the
teacher’s notes to translate portions of Truth’s speech into standard English (317-TN).

Truth’s "Ain’t I a Woman? " is accompanied by a "Teaching Tip": "The fact that she
used nonstandard English did not take away from her effectiveness as a speaker; in fact, it
probably enhanced it" (322-TN). The answer ML gives to its question "Do you think Truth’s
speech is effective?" (Effective for what and to whom—the whole question is
decontextualized.), allows that Truth speaks in a brief, clear, powerful, and logical manner,
but adds that, for some students, "her use of nonstandard English may have made her less
credible" (324-TN). With the weight of the classroom’s and the textbook’s authority on
standard English, that prediction is very likely accurate. The textbook never queries, why
standard English may seem more credible to some students.

ML might have continued its story and told students (and their teachers) in its
background material or teacher’s notes that following the speech, roars of applause erupted.
Truth’s speech was instrumental in salvaging the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention in Akron,
Ohio, which had neared dissolution due to the jeers and mockery of heckling men in
attendance. Truth silenced the mockery, and the convention proceeded. According to
Frances Gage, Chair of the convention, Truth "turned the sneers and jeers of an excited

crowd into notes of respect and admiration" (Gage in Lauter 1990, 1913).

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Other language varieties succinctly discussed by ML include slang, formal versus
informal English, and colloquialisms. After each of the language varieties are deﬁned,
authors’ uses of them are pointed out in the teacher’s notes. When students are asked
speciﬁcs about slang, colloquial, or informal usage, they are most often asked to identify and
explain those they ﬁnd in passages they have just read. Informal and formal English are
deﬁned according to use, that is, purpose, audience, and venue. ML deﬁnes informal
language as "everyday language," and often "the language of newspaper and magazine
journalists" (55, 609). Slang, says ML, is very informal English which consists of colorful
words and expressions. Often created by a group of people, it is often quickly out of date.
"Bug" serves as ML’s example. Colloquialisms are "informal words and phrases used in
everyday conversation" and in "informal conversational English" (648, 829). Fourteen
"Language Workshops" reinforce standard grammar throughout the textbook, and a 7 8-page
"Language Handbook" near the end of ML adds further weight of authority. A "Language
Workshop" correcting student use of the double negative follows a subunit where is placed
Dorothy West’s "Jack in The Pot," a story featuring Black English Vernacular a dialect in

which multiple negation is correct and grammatical.

Commentary

Again, if the sections which treat English grammar are deleted from consideration for a
moment, Table 8 reveals rather limited discussion of language varieties in all of the
anthologies except for HRW. Reviewing the discussions that occur, I ﬁnd two patterns
emerging which require further commentary. The ﬁrst relates to the questions which follow
selections which directly treat language use. SF offers no follow-up questions to its " Story of

American English" articles. The questions which follow Rutsala’s "Words" directly query the

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poem’s content but do not extend that content out beyond itself. PH and HBJ ask students to
ﬁnd examples of dialect or of archaic language and translate them into standard usage.

HRW, although it does ask students to do some theorizing as to spelling inconsistencies,
euphemisms, jargon, and technical terms which may become a part of the common language
pool, most often assigns exercises of the "list and transcribe nature" or the "ﬁnd and list"
nature. ML often asks students to translate passages into standard English and to ﬁnd
examples of various language varieties (slang, colloquialisms) in pieces they have just read.
All anthologies as noted above ask students to write a passage in nonstandard language such
as a story, a dialogue, or an advertisement for Huck Firm in Huck’s dialect. The tasks, asked
of students, while surely of value, the writing tasks asking students to brieﬂy code-switch and
hear dialect in their mind’s ear, do not query students’ experiences with language varieties,
students’ attitudes toward their own language and the various languages they hear around
them, the motivations which underlie the use of slang and euphemisms, and their own usage
of and attitudes toward varying social registers as they move from less formal to more formal
language and change social situations.

A second pattern emerges as anthologies treat nonstandard and standard English. All the
textbooks ask students to translate and transcribe language variants into standard English. SF
associates the "vacancy" and "shabbiness" of persons’ lives with their "nonstandard" and
"sub-standard" language. Two texts contain lengthy standard English grammar handbooks
(HRW and ML), and two texts intersperse standard English grammar exercises throughout the
anthologies’ selections, one placing them in the teacher’s notes (PH), the other directly in the
student edition of the anthology (ML). Four anthologies standardize selections. ML asserts
three times in the student edition that standard English is acceptable at all times and in all
places. HRW declares standard English to be the "dominant" dialect in the United States

without any discussion of that dominance. In short, even though all anthologies contain

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selections written in nonstandard variants of English, the anthologies, at the same time, assert
the primacy of standard English and reinforce that primacy, thereby, demeaning nonstandard
speakers’ language and perhaps appearing to those speakers, by extension, to demean them.

Julia Penelope (1988), Dennis Barron (1992), and Robin Lakoff (1990), among others,
have written about language control and "language police. " Language police, language
conservatives, and members of what Milroy and Milroy call the "complaint tradition" (1985)
attempt to enforce what Sledd refers to as "Anglo Conformity" (1990) as they seek to contain
and constrain language change, place a high social premium on standard usage, and
sometimes seek to legally enforce such exclusionary policies as an English-Only amendment
to the United states Constitution and English-Only laws at the state level (Daniels 1990).
Lakoff ﬁnds the following to be the motivating factors behind language policing:

1. Admiration for another language (Latin, for example) or culture as more learned or
"civilized. "

2. The notion that conservativism is good in itself. Change is equated with corruption;
language evolution must be stopped, or at least contained.

3. The desire to maintain power. By controlling language, "those already in power
(political, intellectual, social) both justify their possession of power and keep others from
getting a piece of the pie." Those in power, well-educated and well-bom, have always been
in positions of inﬂuence and have been in the position to determine "what forms of language
count as articulate and persuasive" 289-296).

Larry Andrews, in his Language Exploration and Awareness, reviews the myths about
standard English compiled by Gere and Smith. These "Ignotions About language " include:

1. Standard English is a clearly deﬁnable set of correct pronunciations. It is
"standard" because it represents the widest usage and because it has been reﬁned to
be the most versatile and acceptable form of English.

2. Standard English is the kind of English people should use for all occasions.
3. Standard English is necessary for success and therefore employment.

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4. Standard English is the best version of English for the expression of logical and
abstract thought. Because all of the great English and American writers use this
form,...it must be the form best suited to the expression of precise and sophisticated
21101183531}: people, such as Blacks and hillbillies, speak a version of English that is
degenerate (1993, 128).

The patterns just discussed which emerge from the analysis of these anthologies’
discussions of language varieties in combination with those discussed above in the dialect
section suggest that in their commentary on and questions about dialect, nonstandard English,
and standard English all ﬁve anthologies tend to reinforce these "Ignotions About Language,"
and in doing so, act to an extent as language "police." This reinforcement and "policing"
carry with them messages of both ethnic and social class discrimination as dialectal and
nonstandard speech is described as "peculiar," "queer," or "sub-standard."

However it would be both unfair and misleading not to acknowledge and credit those
inclusions of language-issue related passages and articles which open sociolinguistic discussion
on language and introduce students to the social aspects of language use. Most notable among
them are:

l. HRW’s seven "The American Language" articles.

2. SF’s eight "The Story of American English " articles.

3. SF’ inclusion of Rutsala’s "Words" and HBJ’s of Hinjosa-Smith’s "This Writer’s

Sense of Place."

4. HRW’s inclusion of Russell Baker’s "Little Red Riding Hood Revisited" and, as

discussed in Chapter Three, Jamaica Kincaid’s excerpt from A Small Place.

5. Both ML’s and HRW’s inclusion of extended selections written in nonstandard

variants of English.

6. HRW’s and ML’s emphasis on dialect as something other than a tool for arousing

laughter.

133

7. The many short passages in ML’s teacher’s notes which deﬁne and point out language

variants.

These seven items, of course, do not eliminate or lessen the seriousness of the
suggestions above that subtexts found in the ﬁve anthologies under study reinforce
discriminatory cultural attitudes toward nonstandard speakers of English. What they do
provide is evidence that interested and creative teachers can ﬁnd some basis for introducing

and extending discussion of the sociolinguistic aspects of language use in their classrooms

through these anthologies.

Chapter Five

Gender, Ethnicity, Names and Labels

Chapter Four reviewed Table 8’s results and the implications of those results in regard to
the surveyed anthologies’s discussions of language history and change, dialect, and levels of
language use. In this chapter I will continue my analysis of Table 8’s findings as I consider
passages in each anthology which directly treat gendered or racist language use by way of
deﬁnition, description, or explanation or which comment on or query the gendered or racist
use of language by either characters in or narrators of literary works within these anthologies.
As has been the case in the previous chapter, I have not focused on the selections themselves
but on the comments and questions which surround the selections. Any discussion of the
selections in this chapter appears only to inform my analysis of non-selection materials.
Through such analysis, I will consider the extent to which these anthologies actively promote
thought about the role of language in reﬂecting and possibly perpetuating racial and gender
subordination. Additionally, I will consider whether some of the passages themselves
potentially send readers messages of such subordination. A ﬁnal section of this chapter will
address the commentary provided by these anthologies about the practice of naming and

labelling. I will treat only those names and labels not already covered above.

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135
Gender

Any discussion of language use and issues of gender directly questioned or commented
upon by the ﬁve anthologies under study would, of necessity, be brief as almost no such
direct questions or comments are contained. Thus, much of what follows will focus on the
silences which occur and the implications of those silences, i.e., the subtexts of these silences.
In addition, I will point out any non-selection materials that seem to contain sexist messages.

Linguists and theorists who have considered the implications of the use of the generic
"he" and "man" include Steinem, Spender, Penelope, Nilsen, Baron, and Kosroshahi. All
note the exclusionary nature of these terms; all link this exclusion from discourse with an
exclusion from power. Penelope (1977, 1990) and Koroshahi (1988) consider the terms
directly. Kosroshahi’s research reveals the strong tendency of college students to assume that
"he" or "man" refers to males even when used in sex-neutral sentences. Nielsen is interested
in the sexism that pervades language practice and the English lexicon as she examines the
dictionary and the language usage around her in 1972 and updates her findings in 1990.
Penelope offers convincing evidence that both the deep and surface structures of the English
language are vehicles which carry texts of male domination as she examines the metaphors in
sentences like "Washington likes to get rid of sick savings and loans by marrying them off to
strong mates. But some cases are so hopeless no suitors can be found" (41), and contends the
passive voice obscures agency in sentences like "The suffragettes were brutalized and
defeminized" (158). In sentences such as "But man reproduces himself" (191; see also 109-
117) women are excluded from the discourse. As readers they can not ﬁnd themselves in
such texts. She refers to the generic "he" and "man" as the "pseudo" generic (116). Baron
states the problem as follows:

The conunon use of the generic masculine renders women linguistically invisible, a
situation that subtly controls everyone’s perceptions of what women can do. . . .the

136
exclusion of any speciﬁc reference to women (Everyone loves his mother) has the
psychological effect of limiting the reference of such language-and standard English
in general—more or less exclusively to men (190).

With the exception of HBJ, all anthologies avoid sexist wording as they comment and
question. "Man" becomes "person" and "men" become "people." "Person" is referred to as
"he or she. " "Spokesperson" replaces what once would have been "spokesman." HBJ asks,
"Does ‘self-interest’ mean ‘selﬁshness’?" and replies, "No, man will work because reward
follows effort" (107-TN). As HBJ probes students’ reading of Thoreau, it asks students about
the man who hears a different drummer (245). Although HBJ notes that non-Europeans are
excluded in de Crevecoeur’s discussions of Americans, the book does not acknowledge de
Crevecoeur’s omission of women.

Four out of the ﬁve anthologies avoid the use of masculine generics. Yet none of them
query its use in author’s selections. Products of their times, Jefferson, Emerson, Thoreau,
Longfellow, Paine, de Crevecoeur, and Henry all use the generic "he" and "man." Close
analysis of the imagery and metaphors used in these writers’ pieces makes it clear that when
these writers spoke of "men," often they only meant "males." Irene C. Goldman, in her
"motion, and The Universal: A Case Study on Walden" (1990), gives

ff ._ __..-._ --.
ample evidence and convincing argument that Thoreau does not include women in his use of

 

"he," "man," "mankind," and "we." Thoreau follows his "Talk of divinity in a man" with
references to tearnsters cowering before squires. He "admonishes his readers to be ‘the
Lewis and Clark and Frobisher of your own streams and oceans’" (127). While Thoreau does
consistently view Nature as feminine, as do most of the male romantics, his writings are not
inclusive of "real women and their real lives" (129). In spite of statements like "The lives of
great men all remind us" (Longfellow), "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist"
(Emerson), "I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this," and "If a man does not

keep pace with his companions, . . . " (Thoreau), the anthologies do not address this issue.

137

None of the above is meant to imply that these texts should not be included in
anthologies intended for high school students. I readily recognize the esteem in which these
texts are held. What I am suggesting is that the four anthologies whose questioning patterns
change "mankind" to people and "man" to "person" directly ask students to consider the
exclusionary and diminishing effects of the pseudo-generic on women, thus to some degree,
perhaps, defusing its effects. Obviously, I would also suggest that HBJ eliminate its use of"
the sexist "man" as it poses questions.

Another issue of sexist vocabulary not directly addressed by these ﬁve anthologies is that
of gendered labels given to women. Among theorists to publish early on the derogatory
effects of sexist labels were Nilsen (1981/72), Miller and Swift (1991/72), and Lakoff (1975,
1991/74). Haig Bosmajian, another early commentator on "the language of oppression"
(1974), succinctly sums up the argument: "As long as adult women are "chicks," "girls,"
"dolls," "babes," and "ladies," their status in society will remain inferior; they will go on
being treated as subjects in the subject-master relationship" (9). To Bosmajian’s list I would
add some of the negative labels applied to women in the examined anthologies: "bags,"
"nags," "shrews," "termagants," and "scolds," all of which reductively dehumanize women
and two of which depict them as animals. In addition to the list just before, references to
adult women as "ﬂirts," "girls," and "pretty girls," are found in selections by many writers
including Washington Irving, Henry James, Anne Tyler, Tim O’Brien, F. Scott Fitzgerald,
Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, and Sherwood Anderson. The use of
such sexist and reductive labels is not queried by any of the anthologies. Several of the
anthologies use the above labels, themselves, as they ask questions or make comments on
literary pieces. For example in HRW, Dame Van Winkle "nags" (116); she is a "termagant
and a shrew" (137-TN), an "ill-tempered shrew" to whom Rip is "enslaved" (136). Nothing

is said, however, of the role Rip’s irresponsibility toward his family may have played in her

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anger at her husband. Rather, Rip is described earlier in HRW as a "triumph of American
innocence (121). In 1978, Judith Fetterly, in her The Resisting Reader suggested the
difﬁculties stories such as "Rip Van Winkle" pose for women readers who certainly can not
identify with Rip and who are loath to identify with Dame Van Winkle as described by
Irving. Where is a woman reader to stand in relationship to the text? She must either read
against herself and accept Irving’s view of women as presented in this story [or in "The Devil
and Tom Walker"] or be accused of misreading the text by the literary establishment, as
represented in this study by the comments and teacher’s notes which surround texts. She
must "immasculate" herself and identify with a male point of view and "accept as normal and
legitimate a male system of values, one of whose central principles is misogny" (xx). HRW’s
comments and narne-calling in its non-selection materials only compound the problems for the
female student of this text. Patrocinio P. Schweikart makes an equally strong statement as
Fetterly’s in regard to women’s reading androcentric texts. The reading of such texts, she
contends, can "have a profoundly damaging effect on women readers. . . .For a woman, then,
books do not spell salvation. In fact, a literary education may well cause her grave psychic
damage" (1986, 41). In conjunction with Irving’s "The Devil and Tom Walker," SF refers to
Tom’s wife as "shrewish" (118-TN) and a "termagant" (110-TN). Again women readers are
placed in the position of literary schizophrenia and must read against themselves.

Other names applied to women include HRW’s reference to Emily Dickinson as a
"spinster" as it offers discussion of a painting accompanying Sylvia Plath’s "The Spinster. "
The painting, Emily Dickinson and The Raven, is placed without comment in one flill column
of the questions which follow Plath’s poem. In the teacher’s notes, teachers are advised to
ask students what connection this dark painting has with Plath’s poem. The anthology’s
suggested answer asserts that the picture is appropriate to the poem "because Dickinson was a

spinster and a recluse who found personal relationships difﬁcult" (1121-TN). The raven’s

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presence in the picture is explained by the fact that the narrator in Poe’s poem of the same
name was alone grieving at the time of the raven’s entrance into the poem. Such labelling of
women in regard to their marital state occurs elsewhere in HRW in regard to Emily
Dickinson and Anne Bradstreet. About Dickinson, students are told that her youth seemed
"normal. " "No one doubted that she would grow gracefully into womanhood, make a good
marriage..." (352). HRW’s view of normal may send readers rather conventional messages
as to the normal state for adult women. When Dickinson chose, however, a much more
unusual way of life, HRW describes her in terms of her dress and her marital state: she
dressed "in white-like the bride she would never become" (352) and died at the age of 56,
"the perpetual bride who never crossed her own doorstep" (353). About Bradstreet, HRW
exclaims, "Who would guess that the poet who would begin our literature would be an
immigrant, teen-aged bride" (42). One wonders which is most surprising to HRW— teen-
aged? Immigrant? Bride? In fact, Bradstreet was 38 and long-married when her ﬁrst work
was published. HRW is not the only anthology to name-call in its non-selection materials.
ML labels "bags" the old, poverty-stricken beggars Melville refers to as "hags" when
querying "What Redburn Saw in Lancelot’s Hey" (485-TN). Two of the anthologies refer to
women as " girls" as they question selections. HBJ deems the twenty-year-old Daisy Miller "a
young girl" when it asks about Mrs. Costello’s refusal to be introduced to her (536). A
"Commentary" section on the James piece describes Daisy as "a fresh and beautiful young
girl, and an American girl (559). SF’s references to the younger Lucynell Crater, a woman
of nearly thirty according to O’Connor’s story, as a "deaf mute girl" (680-TN) and a "girl"
Mrs. Crater feels protective of (680) may be explained by the younger woman’s mental
retardation which makes her appear to be younger than she is. However, that is not the

situation when, in conjunction with a Dorothy Parker piece, SF’s teacher’s notes explain an

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adult Swedish woman’s asking "Please?" as "the Swedish girl does not understand the
statement" made to her in conversation (5‘61-TN).

Julia (Stanley) Penelope (1977, 1990) and Casey Miller and Kate Swift (1991/72) ﬁnd
labelling women past adolescence "girls" to be trivializing and reductive. Lakoff calls the
practice "patronizing" (1975, 1991) and asserts that it contributes to the imbalance of social
and economic power between men and women as do the generic "he" and "man" among other
linguistic practices (1990, 211-214). "Girl" suggests a person "too immature and too far from
real life to be entrusted with...decisions of any serious nature" (1991/74, 296), Lakoff adds.
Miller and Swift exemplify their objections to the term and point out its trivializing effects by
recounting the ordination of the Reverand Barbara Anderson to the American Lutheran
Church. Beneath her picture in the newspaper read the caption "Happy Girl " (1991/72, 254).
Despite this early work and the continuing efforts of feminists to bring the sexist and
diminishing effects of such language use to public attention, referring to adult women as
"girls" is not commented on by any of the ﬁve anthologies although any number of works in
them contain this usage and, occasionally, two of the anthologies seem to authorize this usage
in their non-selection materials.

Again, I wish to point out that I am not trying to censor the language of literary texts.
Wondering about their effects on both young male and female readers, I am suggesting that
classroom discussion may be enriched by a consideration of those elements of language that
researchers and theorists have shown to exclude and/or diminish women or render them

inferior. Additionally, I am suggesting that students’ literature anthologies which contain //
/

selections that include these elements might open that discussion. At the very least /
/
anthologies might refrain from using sexist labels as they query and comment on selections /

and, thus, avoid authorizing the use of such terms.

141

HRW, ML, and HBJ do address women’s exclusion from discourse some degree. In its
teacher’s notes, ML states that de Crevecoeur excludes women from his deﬁnition of an
American, and it quotes Abagail Adams’ remark to her husband that despite the
revolutionaries’ desire to emancipate nations, they maintain absolutue power over their wives
(70-TN). Later, ML asks students to consider Bill Crosby’s piece on dating exploits from the
perspective of one of the women the male narrator has dated (582). HRW attempts to give
Dame Van Winkle a voice when it assigns students to write an epilogue to Rip’s story
detailing her response to Rip’s dissappearance. Students are asked to consider whether they
will write in Dame Van Winkle’s voice or Diedric Knickerbocker’s (137). The two
anthologies which contain Gaspell’s Triﬂes (HBJ, ML) both point out the condescending
attitude toward women the county attorney reveals through his language (HBJ 948-949; ML

642-TN, 645-TN, 645).

Timelines and Historical Chapters

All of the anthologies introduce units with 4-to 20-page sections that brieﬂy narrate the
historical and literary background of the period forthcoming. Each of these historical pieces
features a 2-to 4-page tirneline which places the historical and literary events highlighted in
the introductions with the year in which they happened, thus helping students visualize the
chronology of events. In four of the anthologies, these events are accompanied by pictures.
While there is not an absolute correlation between the events narrated in the chapter and those
on the timeline, the two closely correspond. An analysis of the events and pictures placed on
the timeline, then, will yield a close approximation of that which could be made of the events
discussed in the chapter. In analyzing these events I labelled those produced by individual or

groups of males as "male events." "First ﬂight at Kitty Hawk" would be classiﬁed as a "male

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event; World War One declared would also be a "male event," since a woman or groups
which consist primarily of women do not have the power to declare war in the United States.
"Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms" would obviously also be a "male event." "Wornan’s
Rights Convention in Seneca Falls" and "Pearl Buck wins the Nobel Prize" would be female
events. I was also interested in the number of events on timelines that might be designated as
speciﬁcally Native American, Latino(a) American, Asian American, and African American.
When Spanish explorers’ accomplishments were noted, I counted them as Latino(a) American
events. In short, I counted all events which relate in some speciﬁc way to the ethnic groups
under consideration and categorized them under the appropriate group. Some events such as
weather, population, or plague events I counted as neutral. 1 categorized the pictures which
accompany events in much the same way, except that I counted all artifacts, landscapes, and
mixed gender pictures as neutral. Through these tallyings and categorizing, I hoped to show
the view of history that seems to predominate in the textbooks’ introductions. The results
appear in Table 9A-Events and 9B-Pictures.

As Table 9A overwhelmingly demonstrates, men’s events, accomplishments, and
publications clearly dominate the textbook’s histories by high margins. From 85 % to 92% of
events placed on timelines are male. When one realizes that 1/3-1/2 of the events that fall
under the categories "Africa’n’gnericanlanleativeAmerican" relateto either slaveryﬂor to

__ _ ”aw—-

battles and defeats and that most of the events that comprise the listings under Asian

 

 

American relate either to World War Two or to the United States’ forced opening of trade
with the Far East, the nature of white male domination of the versions of history presented by
these anthologies becomes even more clear. Except in SF, the pictures which accompany
timelines depict primarily white male faces. Native Americans, if present at all, are usually
dressed in feathers; persons with Spanish origins are most often explorers or soldiers in either

the Mexican War or the Spanish American War.

Table 9A

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Timeline Events
—- nan ..a__aw me _LA 3.. I tia- : -
PH 431 33 10 3 3 3 10
Percent (91) (7) (2) (.6) (.6) (.6) 2
HBJ 213 18 11 1 5 1 0
Percent (92) (8) (5) (.4) (2) (.4) 0 "
SF 281 33 25 6 5 2 4
Percent (88) (10) (8) (1.8) (1.5) (.6) (1 .2)
HRW 235 30 20 6 4 2 12
Percent (85) (l 1) (7) (2) (1 .4) (.7) 4.3
ML 135 11 16 4 1 2 7
Percent (88) (7) ( 10.4) (2.6) (.65) 1.3 4.6

Table 9B

Timeline Pictures
1-“ M22 Kama: ; M M M M llama—1.“
PH 103 13 5 3 1 3 4
Percent (86) (1 1) (4) (2.5) (.8) (2.5) (3.3)
HBJ 32 5 2 2 1 0 5
Percent (68) (10.6) (4) (4) (2) (0) (10.6)
SF 12 10 1 5 0 2 21
Percent (28) (23) (2 . 3) (1 1.6) (0) (4.6) (49)
HRW
Percent
ML 19 3 5 l 0 0 13
Percent (54) (8.6) (14.3) (3) (0) (0) (37)

 

144
Women have virtually no or very little space in history as related by the ﬁve anthologies.

Does that matter? As early as 1979, Florence Howe argued, "The images we pick up,
consciously or unconsciously from literature and history signiﬁcantly control our sense of
identity and our identityuour sense of ourselves as powerful or powerless for example-
controls our behavior" (62). According to Katherine Gill, professor of history at Yale
Divinity School, as she reviews Gerda Lemer’s The Creation of The Feminist Consciousness
for The New York Times Review Of Books:

The exclusion of women from history has not been one among many exclusions, it

has been women’s most debilitating cultural deprivation....Men’s power to deﬁne

what is political and what is not, what is historical and what is not, what is

meaningful and what is not, has left women adrift in an eternal present (1993, 12).
This is obviously a difﬁcult position to be in as women strive to have their authority
acknowledged and their voices regarded as equal and important. One wonders how students
perceive the limited representation of women in the historical introductions. From such
representation they will likely be taught subtexts of female insigniﬁcance and subordination.
One also wonders if the limited number of African Americans, Native Americans, Latino(a)

Americans, and Asian Americans found on timelines teaches both white and non-white readers

subtexts of white domination and superiority.

Introductions

The introductions/biographies which accompany writers in each anthology have
previously been discussed in regard to the racist and gendered subtexts which can be read
from their placement and their lengths. As I examined these introductions more closely, I
found a pattern emerging in the ways two anthologies, PH and HRW, lead in to the body of
their introductions. It appeared that these two anthologies introduce male writers more often

in terms of their accomplishments than is the case for women writers. Curious, I examined

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the ﬁrst two sentences of each introduction, realizing that these would give readers their ﬁrst

impression of each author. I found that authors were initially introduced in one of four ways:
by their accomplishments, by the place where they were born or lived for a signiﬁcant portion
of their lives, in terms of other people they were related to or inﬂuenced by or by interpretive

comments on their outlooks or writing style. I charted the results below by percent.

Table 10
Modes of Introduction
Accomplishments Place Other people Style
HRW — Men 49% 22% 13% 14%
Women 7% 52% 28% 19%
PH — Men 81.3 % 7.7% 4.4% 6.6%
Women 39.7% 20.7% 20.7% 20.7%

The results show that men are much more likely to be introduced by their accomplishments
than women. In both HRW and PH women are far more likely to be introduced in terms of
other people, usually friends, family, or literary mentors or in terms of where they were born
or lived. The other two anthologies that utilize introductions did not show any pronounced
patterns or tendencies. The messages read by students in the sorts of introductions found in
PH and HRW may be that men accomplish and their accomplishments rank high in
importance. Fewer women accomplish great literary feats. They are interesting only in
regard to whom they have known or been inﬂuenced by, where they have lived, or their

outlooks or writing styles.

146
Features Speciﬁc to Individual Anthologies

Features speciﬁc to individual anthologies also send messages of gender domination to
student readers and their teachers. PH ends each of its historical unit introductions with a
page of "American Voices." Here readers ﬁnd "quotations by prominent persons of the
period" or so reads each "Voices" subtitle. Totaling all these American voices under the
same gender and ethnic categories that have been used consistently throughout this study
yields the voices of 20 women and 93 men. Four Native Americans and ﬁve African
Americans are among this 113 person chorus. No Asian Americans or Latino(a) Americans
add their voices. The chorus, while not wholly monoethnic nearly is. Only 16.7 % of those
voices are women’s. PH also introduces each of its units with quotations. Of the eight
introductory quotations, seven are male; one is female, but that female, Joan Didion, has no
selection in PH. All the quotations are the words of white persons. ML also uses quotations
to lead into units. Of ML’s eight, students ﬁnd one by a male African American, one
Chinese proverb, two by white women, and four by white men. HBJ, rather than using
introductory quotations or a "Voices" section, contains a "Critical Reading and Writing" page
at each unit’s end. Here students are given writing assignments which incorporate the texts
read in the unit each follows. Often literary critics are quoted, and, as a part of these
assigmnents, students are asked to agree or disagree with the professionals’ assessments. Of
the 16 critics quoted, all are white males.

As HBJ addresses "Pluralism in Literature, " the textbook places a heavy burden on
Gwendolyn Brooks who is said to combine both the African American’s and the woman’s
point of view (580). In HBJ, male critics and writers express a wide variety of points of
view. Yet women’s and African Americans’ perspectives are treated as synonymous and

unitary, thereby diminishing them in dignity and importance. With such a heavy burden, it is

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surprising that HBJ gives Brooks no more than two pages of its 1092-page book. A literature
from many perspectives is promised by HBJ to students who read the ﬁnal portion of the
anthology. What students ﬁnd are 282 selection pages on which appear the works of 82 men
and 22 women. The pages break down as follows: Men, 229; women, 53; African
Americans, 29; Native Americans, 6; Latino(a) Americans, 14, and Asian Americans, 0.
Other perspectives may be mentioned, but white male perspectives dominate.

A similar burden is placed on Maxine Hong Kingston by HRW. HRW states that
Kingston "speaks for some of the long-stiﬂed voices" of "women, Native Americans, Blacks
and other ethnic groups, blue-collar workers, and the poor, who did not in anthologies of the
past often have the chance to tell their stories directly" (1025). Kingston’s own ethnic group
is not listed among those for whom she is said to speak. If Kingston speaks for them, how
can all of the listed groups possibly be telling "their stories directly?" As I am sure that
Kingston herself would agree, she can not possibly speak for all of those diverse voices. For
HRW to imply that she can, diminishes all of the women and all of the varied ethnic and
social groups she is said to speak for by merging them into a mass of indistinguishible faces.
Again, students may well be given false impressions that women and ethnic groups speak with
one voice, a unitary voice, while white men speak with many. That one woman’s voice will
seem rather insigniﬁcant amidst the varied male perspectives which surround it.

HBJ’s introduction to the "American Novel" includes pictures: six men and four women.
No pictures of non-white novelists are among them. The discussion of the novel’s
development covers 33 novelists: six women and 27 men. Only two minority writers
receive brief acknowledgement, Ellison and Walker. The introduction to the "American
Drama" unit describes the contributions of 18 male playwrights and three females. Ironically,
Susan Glaspell’s name never occurs; her play Triﬂes is the ﬁrst of three plays HBJ contains.

Neither HBJ or HRW as they narrate drama’s growth in the United States give recognition to

148
the Black Theater Movement of the late 1950’s and 1960’s; nor do they acknowledge Lorraine

Hansberry, an odd omission in any case, but particularly odd in HRW as A Raisin in The Sun
is one of HRW’s featured long works. One hopes that students and their teachers do not read
these omissions to mean that Glaspell’s and Hansberry’s works have little importance to the
development of American Drama.

The gender and racial imbalances which are readily apparent in SF ’8 "Thinking
Critically," "Reader’s Notes," and "Comments" sections have already been addressed in
Chapter Three. SF periodically gives its readers a full-page article on "Themes in American
Literature." A review of these themes as well as the authors SF associates with them reveals
them to be largely those which have engaged the efforts and stories of white men. For
example under the "Initiation" article, students read of the initiations of Huck Finn, Henry
Flemming, Tom Outland, Holden Cauﬁeld, and Ishmael. Other initiations are brieﬂy
mentioned as well. In all, 12 men and one woman are considered initiates. The woman, "a
young girl who learns compassion" (843) in Eugenia Collier’s "Marigolds," is given no name
and only three out of 100 lines. The "Journey" theme features the works of 10 male and
three female authors. The journeys of the women travellers include those of the younger
Lucynell Crater, who is abandoned by Mr. Shiftlet, Phoenix Jackson, who travels to town to
buy medicine for her grandson, and Teresa Palomas Acosta, who reminisces about her
grandmother. These receive ﬁve out of 100 lines in the article. The "American Dream"
theme discusses 11 male author’s works and those of one female author, Harriet Beeecher
Stowe. In SF, it seems that women’s experiences constitute a very minor part of the over-all
picture as literature is divided into themes. The picture is colored by and features male
experiences and perspectives. SF ’3 limited inclusion of women’s voices and perspectives
parallels that in regard to the inclusion of nonwhite perspectives. Harriet Tubman and

Frederick Douglass make brief appearances in three of the articles, and William Least Heat

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Moon appears in one. Acosta receives 2-3 lines in two articles. Other than these persons,
those who are featured in the ten "Themes" commentaries are not only primarily male; they
are also primarily white. SF places a good deal of emphasis in its second theme piece on
finding "a voice" in American literature, a "uniquely American voice," a "national voice"
(127). Perhaps it is this artiﬁcial emphasis on a unitary voice that deafens SF to the chorus of
voices that make up the United States’ cultures and experiences as well as its literature. This
"Voice" article with its 15 voices of Anglo writers—14 male—suggests that the voice SF
projects speaks to readers primarily in white and male tones. Gregory S. Jay’s comments in
his "The End of ‘American’ Literature: Toward a Multicultural Practice," question the
organization of literature around traditional themes such as "Individuality and Nonconformity"
and "Initiations. " Jay contends that thematic approaches are largely androcentric and

can be especially discriminatory since themes are by deﬁnition elements of a totality

or metanarrative centered on an historically limited point of view; though thematic

criticism regularly universalizes that perspective... .it presents a partial experience in

the form of an eternal verity (1991, 211).
SF’s "universal" and "eternal verities," as has been shown by the above, exclude whole
worlds of experience.

To SF’s credit, it includes the text of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s address to the ﬁrst
Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. So does HBJ. Yet SF
also includes two sections of commentary elsewhere that appear to be anti-woman. While
discussing humor in its "Types of Colonial Literature" piece, SF quotes Nathaniel Ward’s
negative comments on women. SF notes that today Ward may seem more "misogynist than
humorist" (43). Yet SF may have legitimatized his attitudes by printing his lines:

The world is full of care, much like unto a bubble
Women and care, care and women, and
Women and care and trouble (43).

No "humorous" lines critiquing men’s behavior are quoted anywhere in SF ’s non-selection

materials or in any of the other four anthologies’. A more lengthy passage of anti-woman

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sentiment occurs in "Woman Novelists of The Nineteenth Century" (265). SF recalls
Hawthorne’s distress at the popularity of nineteenth century women novelists’ works and his
judgment of them as a "mob of scribbling women." The text of the article never queries why
"the women novelists of this period have been forgotten. " In fact, it seems to agree with
Hawthorne’s judgment as it "elevates" only one author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, "above
Hawthorne’s ranks of ‘scribbling women’" (265). Who determines such judgments never
becomes an issue; nor does the role respected male writers and critics like Hawthorne may
have played in ensuring the present silence of these "forgotten" women writers. One is
reminded of Dale Spender’s contention that "Men have been in charge of according value to
literature, and they have found the contributions of their own sex immeasurably superior"
(1989, 1). Paul Lauter, who backs his calls for a restructuring of American literature with 67
syllabi for diverse and inclusive courses, supports Spender’s views. "Surely," he states, "the
political system system we call ‘patriarchy’ is at some level involved in choosing works that
focus on male experience and perspectives" (1983, xvii) as those which form the basis for
study in many American literature courses.

Because it does not examine the sociolinguitic aspects of the language use involved and
because it may send unexamined sexist messages, potentially abusive messages, to readers,
one work in SF must be detailed brieﬂy. Harry Mark Petrakis’ "The Wooing of Ariadne"
(649) features a male protagonist who has fallen "in love" with Ariadne who emphatically and
consistently tells him "no." He launches a loud campaign to defeat her opposition to him and
harasses her at a dance, follows her, visits her father’s grocery store, repeatedly knocks on
her door, shouts to her from the sidewalk, visits her priest after following her to church
where he shouts and creates a scene. She, the fulﬁllment of male fantasy, ﬁnally decides that
he may call her, much to his triumph and joy. In the days of stalking laws and women’s

insistence that "no" means "no," it seems irresponsible for SF to include this story which may

151

teach that male harassment will prevail and that women do not know their own minds. Rather
than query the sociolinguistics of dating and courtship, SF refers to the protagonist’s ﬁnal

speech as "eloquent" (657).

Ethnicity and Language

Because direct commentary is rare, this analysis of anthologies’ texts and subtexts in
regard to ethnicity and language use must also consider silences and absences. In the analysis
that follows, I do not wish to imply that I favor the censorship of literary texts as I comment
on derogatory ethnic labelling as found in the selections I examined. My primary focus
centers on the non-selection materials and the degree to which they consider and open
discussion on the issues of ethnicity and language use. As has been my stance above, rather
than argue that all literary texts be excluded which contain derogatory names or labels, I
would propose that textbooks directly open discussion on those included in the works they
contain. I would also propose that textbooks consider that when they use derogatory labels
themselves as they discuss and query literary works, they may seem to students to authorize
and condone their use.

Table 8’s ﬁgures show that four of the ﬁve anthologies directly point out racist language
use. Sometimes they almost do. For example, HBJ describes John Smith’s language as
"biased," but fails to identify the racist labels, "savages" and "barbarians" which make it so
(18—TN). Elsewhere, HBJ comes close to questioning the internalized racism evident when
Phillis Wheatley describes the goddess of liberty as " golden haired" but stops short when it
only asks students how Columbia is described by Wheatley (l 10-TN). Wheatley, a slave, has
been doubly victimized in that, as Alice Walker notes, she deﬁnes liberty as a white goddess;

liberty is not a blond goddess for Black people (1992). PH and SF follow this same pattern

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of questioning the Wheatley poem. None of these books query the irony Walker ﬁnds here.
HBJ’s final comments on racism are the defense it presents of the supposedly non-racist
nature of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn pointed out in Chapter Four and the book’s directing
students’ attention to de Crevecoeur’s omission of all races except for Europeans in his
deﬁnition of an American (107).

PH also queries Smith’s "bias" and ties it to his use of words like "savage" and
"barbarian" to describe Native Americans in the teacher’s notes (44-TN). The possible racist
implications of such "bias" are not addressed, and the discussion all occurs in the teacher’s
notes rather than in a location which would open discussion directly for students. Prior to
"The Devil and Tom Walker," PH more directly introduces the topic of language and racial
bias when it quotes Washington Irving’s contentions that "the appellation of ‘savage’ and
‘pagan’ were deemed sufﬁcient to sanction the hostilities " of the colonists and of early
American writers. Native Americans, says Irving, were "persecuted and defamed" (183).
While the statements of Irving PH quotes mitigate to some extent the effects, Irving
perpetuates such defamation in his "The Devil and Tom Walker, " included in PH, which
associates "Indians" with the devil and stereotypes them as savage killers. This mixed
message is not addressed by PH.

HRW directly addresses the problem and reality of racist language when it includes
Countee Cullen’s "Incident." It asks what might lead an eight year old child to insult another
child with a "racial slur" (697). The teacher’s notes make it clear that discussion of the
origins of the child’s prejudices is to occur (697-TN). Yet, HRW reproduces Edward
Winslow Kemble’s 1884 illustration of Jim on his knees with his hands raised in supplication
to Huck who stands before him, gun in hand, with its Huckleberry Finn excerpt (426). No

amount of teacher’s notes commentary (426-TN) can undo the potential of such a picture to

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reinforce racial stereotypes and prejudices. N o commentary of any sort about the illustration
appears in the student edition of the textbook.

Three of the ﬁve anthologies begin their surveys of American literature with several
Native American texts, giving voice to the United States’ original inhabitants well before
students read about them from the perspectives of the colonists. HRW and HBJ, as was noted
in Chapter Three, place the all the pre-twentieth century Native American texts they include
after the colonists’ selections have labelled Native Americans repeatedly as barbarians,
savages, and wild men. HRW also precedes the Native American texts with an excerpt from
Mary Rowlandson’s A Narrative of Her Captivity, which, as HRW acknowledges,
"contributed to the further deterioration of relations between Native Americans and colonists"
(23). Well before Native American voices have the chance to speak for themselves in these
two textbooks, they are repeatedly shown as enacting stereotypes all too many white
Americans internalized as young children and may still hold as high school students
(Stensland, 1979; see also Charles, 1987). In HBJ, Native Americans appear on the timeline
ready to slay John Smith (7); in ML in feathers (20). As noted earlier, ML contains no
Native American literature produced after 1900; that which it contains prior to 1900 consists
of oral tradition pieces and "defeat" speeches.

None of the texts give in-depth consideration to the dehumanization that occurs as racial
slurs are used by "in-groups" to deﬁne others and maintain power. The implications of
derogatory ethnic labels (DEL) have been researched by Greenburg, Kirkland, and
Pyszczynski (1988), who review research prior to theirs, describe the psychological properties
of DELs, discuss the motivations for using DELs, and delineate the effects of DELs on their
users and targets. While the research of Greenburg et a1. may not have been available to the
publishers of the 1989 HBJ , an abundance of commentary on this issue existed well before the

1974 publication of Bosmajian’s The language of Oppression. In it, he states succinctly, "the

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segregation and suppression of Blacks in the United States was justiﬁed once they were
considered ‘chattels’ and ‘inferiors. ’ The subjugation of the American Indian was defensible
since they were deﬁned as ‘barbarians’ and ‘savages’" (9). Later, he adds, "calling the Black
American ‘nigger’...has given Whitey a linguistic power over victimized Blacks, a power
many whites are unwilling or afraid to give up" (60).

HRW does query the double-voiced and euphemism-laden speech of Mr. Linder, the
representative of the Clyboume Park Improvement Association who tries to convince the
Younger family (A Raisin in The Sun) that it is in their best interests to not move to an all
white neighborhood. HRW identiﬁes his speech as "insulting," as "hypocrisy," and as
"racism" (848-TN, 851-TN). All of this appears in the teacher’s notes; the questions in the
student edition do not address this "hidden" racism. In Act III, Walter’s assumption of the
"dialectal patterns of a slave" is noted as a means of students’ judging that Walter will not
"feel ﬁne" if he sells out to Linder, to whom he refers to as "Captain, Mistuh, Bossman" and
"The Man" 860-TN). Again, this commentary is found in the teacher’s notes. Student
questions at the end of Act III maintain silence about the language of racism.

The space ML provides for the discussion of racist language is greater than that in the
other anthologies. ML suggests that "some students may insist that his [Linder’s] statements
are the statements of a racist, whereas others may state that his ideas may be unpleasant, but
true in some communities" (891-TN). ML identiﬁes racist labels various races use for each
other and describes them as derogatory. "Cracker," "Ofay," "gringo," and "nigger" are
deﬁned; however, the tendency of these labels to dehumanize and generalize their targets even
while they may give their users feelings of power or solidarity are not discussed by ML.
Mike Royko’s possible racism is exposed as his language use is questioned in "Shorthand
Grad is Shortchanged. " ML states that his article received accusations of racism and asks

students if they find evidence of racism in the piece. The teacher’s notes suggest that some

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students may ﬁnd such evidence in Royko’s naming the race of the poorly prepared secretarial
candidate when race has nothing to do with his argument (606-TN). ML also reprints
Royko’s response column in which he asserts that "Anybody who says that column was racist
is an idiot" (607). ML’s teacher’s notes suggest that some students amy ﬁnd Royko’s
response "strident and unpleasant" (609-TN). Additionally, ML questions possible racist
attitudes as evident from language choices in Nina Otero’s "The Bells of Santa Cruz" (44,48),
William Bradford’s work (63-TN), Irving’s "The Devil and Tom Walker" 233-TN; 236-TN),
and in the white speaker’s graduation address in Maya Angelou’s excerpt from I Know Why
The Caged Bird Sings in addition to giving considerable information on school desegregation
(806-TN; 811-TN; 814-TN).

In ML, as is the case in the other anthologies under study which treat the issue, readers
ﬁnd the majority of commentary and questions regarding racist language and the social
phenomena which accompany its use in the teacher’s notes in the Teacher’s Annotated Edition
rather than in the student edition of the anthology. Because the issues surrounding racist
language use often arouse vigorous and heated discussion as well as potential community
reaction, some teachers, without authorization and the reinforcement of its importance in the
student edition, may hesitate to open such discussion. Their students will ﬁnd these
admittedly sensitive but certainly timely and critical sociolinguistic issues never raised in their
classrooms. By maintaining silence, these classrooms may seem to sanction racist language
use. Even in those classrooms where the issue of racist language use is raised by teachers in
accordance with the Teacher’s Edition’s commentary, students ﬁnding such discussion not
validated and authorized by their own editions may regard this issue and its discussion as

peripheral, trivial, or purely a matter of their teacher’s opinion.

-:=I

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Names and Labels

Besides the sexist and ethnic names and labels discussed above, all ﬁve anthologies at
least brieﬂy consider the importance of other names and of the ability to name and deﬁne.
Sometimes they, themselves, use derogatory names and labels. HRW’s application of
"spinster" and to Emily Dickinson has already been noted. Elsewhere HRW’s teacher’s notes
consider whether Salzman in Malamud’s "The Magic Barrel" is a "schlemiel" and decide he
probably is a "schlemiel," a dolt or a bungler (889-TN). Salzman, a marriage broker whose
sense of etiquette appears lacking, is hardly a schlemiel as he in Columbo-like fashion
cleverly "bungles" his way to whetting Leo Finkle’s interest in meeting and arranging a
marriage with his daughter. Following O’Connor’s "The Life You Save...," HRW offers
students an article on connotations and notes that words with strong connotations reveal
speakers’ attitudes (610). As the sister of two mentally retarded brothers, I wonder what
attitudes HRW and HBJ convey and what sorts of linguistic authorizations they give students
when they refer to the younger Lucynell Crater as an "idiot"(607-TN and 717, respectively)
as they discuss the story. Earlier HRW’s non-selection commentary seems to have
dehumanized other O’Connor characters by calling them "freaks and clowns" (603).

While it is true that the younger Lucynell Crater is severely mentally retarded and that
O’Connor’s works often feature persons on the margins of the societies her works depict, my
argument is concerned not with whether the name-calling which occurs can be "justiﬁed. "
O’Connor, herself, refrains from such labelling in her works. Rather my argument centers on
the fact of the name-calling itself. Instead of focusing student attention on the sociolinguistic
issues surrounding the use of names and labels, HRW appears to authorize the use of labels
which are reductive and dehumanizing and which may make persons who inhabit social

margins the targets of ridicule. As more and more students who once peopled special

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education classrooms-the educational marginsuare mainstrearned into the "regular"
classroom, my contentions gain in pertinency. Farb (1981), Bosmajian (1974), Baron (1989),
Andrews (1993), and Penelope (1977, 1990) are only a few of the linguists and rhetoicians
who have described the harmful effects of labelling. Names set boundaries and limit persons.
Bosmajian has already been cited in Chapter Two as asserting that names and labels "can be
used to dehumanize human beings and ‘justify’ their suppression and even elimination" (6).
Farb, in much the same vein, adds that name-calling can have a major impact on a person’s
"feelings about his identity, and it can sometimes be devastating to his psychological
development" (139). Smitherman (1987) and Penelope remind their readers that words can
hurt as much as sticks and stones. And words can set dismissive or reductive boundaries for
a person as insurmountable as those set in stone.

Most often, ML appears sensitive to the importance of names and labels, despite its
having labelled the old beggars in Melville’s story "hags." "Boy" when applied to adult
males as in "Boy, bring me a drink" or "So you’re her Southern boy" insults the manhood of
those to whom it is addressed (576-TN); "Native American" is a more appropriate name than
"Indian" (18-TN); and "Mister" rather than "Excellency" as an address for the President was
a critical switch (156-TN).

Two works especially point out the importance of one’s name to one’s sense of self as
well as the value in coming to terms with one’s name or in renaming, (un)naming as
Kimberly Benston would say (1984), oneself. These two works could serve to call student
attention to and open student discussion of the power associated with naming and deﬁning as
well as prompt student awareness of the personal and social conﬂicts one’s name or one’s
(un)naming can arouse. Both ML and HBJ carry Alice Walker’s "Everyday Use. " Both
comment in their teacher’s notes that the name "Dee" to the mother in the story incorporates

and reminds her of personal, family heritage. To Dee, herself, the name may seem like a

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redupiation of her African heritage and a link to former oppressors, as slaves were not given
African names by slave owners. To Dee, who has (un)named herself by chosing "Wangero"
as her name, her new name serves as a link to her ancient heritage. To Dee’s mother,
"Wangero" may indicate that Dee has redupiated her personal, family past and the people for
whom she has been named (HBJ, 730-TN; ML, 693-TN).

PH and SF contain the second piece, an excerpt from Ralph Ellison’s Shadow and Act.
Here Ellison recalls the difﬁculties and puzzlement his own name caused him as he grew up.
Finally, he renamed himself, that is, he suppressed his middle name, Waldo. The questions
in PH’s student edition and their answers in the teacher’s annotated edition raise the following
issues: the power of names, African Americans’ names sometimes having associations with
slavery, one’s name placing an obligation on one, the link between persons’ identities and
their names, persons’ renaming themselves and why they might chose to do so (1048-1049;
1048-TN-1049-TN). SF raises similar issues and adds that people can establish a unity
between themselves and their names as they make them the associative center of their personal
world and as they see their names representing the values for which they stand (778; 776-TN-
778-TN).

Although both sets of questions alert students to the importance of names, neither directly
queries the power involved in conferring names or in renaming oneself or, as Humpty
Dmnpty recognized long ago, the power inherent in deﬁning what labels mean and what
persons mean based on the labels "masters" give them. In the introduction to the piece, PH
does bring up these topics. It asserts that to an extent:

naming is controlling....For, example, a young woman may be called a dumb
blonde. She will have no control over the way she has been quantiﬁed, or named,
but it will affect her life greatly. People may pigeonhole her....The greatest danger

for the young woman, of course, is that she will accept the name applied to her.
When that happens, language...has become a club for control (1043).

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This brief passage is one of the most sophisticated and insightful comments on language I
have found in any of the anthologies I examined. I am grateful for it, though I wish the
questions at the end of Ellison’s article, in addition to the issues they raise, had followed
through on this introductory comment by asking students to examine the names they and
others apply to people, to trace the sources of those names and labels, and to consider the
effects of such naming. If all ﬁve anthologies considered the sociolinguistic aspects of names
and labels, students would not need to read of people being referred to as "hags," "shrews,"
"idiots," "girls," "termagants," "spinsters," "freaks," and "clowns" in the non-selection
materials of their high school American literature anthologies, textbooks which carry the

weight of the classroom’s and the school’s authority and which may seem to condone and

reinforce the use of such labels.

Commentary

A review of Table 8 reveals that all ﬁve anthologies grant very little space to direct
discussion of language issues related to race and gender. Nor is very much granted to the
issues which center around names and labels. No direct discussion in any anthology occurs
about the generic "he" and "man, " although four out of ﬁve avoid its use in their non-
selection materials. ML’s .32 column or sixteen lines given to "other sexist language"
doubles that granted by PH and triples that granted by HBJ . SF does not bring up the topic.
All of the anthologies (except for SF) grant more space to the issues surrounding racist
language. Again ML’s 83 lines (1.66 columns) of discussion signiﬁcantly exceed that given
by the anthology in second place, HBJ, with 1.1 columns or 55 lines and double the third
anthology’s amount, PH’s at .8 column or 40 lines. However, when one remembers that

these are the total number of lines devoted to these discussions in anthologies whose length

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varies from 993 pages or 9,930 lines to 1336 pages or 13,360 lines, these numbers seem very
small. All of the anthologies, except HRW, devote a good deal more space to the issues
involved in conferring names and labels. That HRW devotes relatively little space to this
topic may account for its tendency to name-call in its non-selection materials as has been
discussed above.

Two of these anthologies contain lengthy grammar handbooks (ML, HRW), and two
intersperse grammar exercises throughout the anthology (ML, PH). Three of these
anthologies describe themselves as an integrated approach to language arts study (HRW, ML,
PH). Thus, I ﬁnd it worthy of comment that so little space has been assigned to
sociolinguistic concerns which, if addressed, would enrich student discussions about the
literary works included, could heighten their language awareness and alert students to the texts
and subtexts of racism, sexism, and classism that underly not only some of their literary texts
but also the varied and diverse texts which surround them daily, and would ask students to
probe their own language use and language attitudes. Why so little space has been assigned
will be a topic explored in the chapter which follows.

Reviewing and summarizing the Table 8 numbers, while of value, is not enough on
which to base conclusions or attempt a response to the above considerations. As I review the
preceding analyses of the kinds of questions and commentary that are found which account for
the numbers on Table 8, leitmotifs emerge. The more readily discernible are as follows.

None of the ﬁve anthologies use ethnic or racial labels in their non-selection materials.
Four out of the ﬁve anthologies use gendered names or labels such as "girl" for adult women,
"shrew," "hag," "termagant" in their non-selection portions as they comment on or query
selections. PH avoids all sexist labelling. Interestingly enough it is PH that includes the
particularly insightful commentary on the power of names to quantify persons and affect

persons’ views of themselves. HRW contains the least commentary on labelling and is the

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anthology that most often labels people in its non-selection portions. Because the numbers
involved here are very small in comparison to all of the space available in these anthologies, I
am reluctant to draw hard and fast correlations. However, I would argue the numbers suggest
that anthologies which include more discussion of the sociolinguistic aspects of language use
in regard to names and labelling are less likely to use gendered or sexist language themselves.
Women and persons of color appear infrequently, if at all, on timelines, in historical
chapters and critical commentaries, in articles delineating literary history or the development
of particular genres, in "Voices" and "Themes" sections, or as the authors of pre-unit
quotations. While I can hardly expect anthologies to wholly rewrite history, I can suggest
they revise theirs to more inclusive versions. I recognize as does Linda Hutcheon (1989) that
histories are "ﬁctions," that is, "versions" as opposed to "what really happened." All contain
gaps. The versions of history and literary development presented by these anthologies contain
huge gaps and appear to be white and male dominated. Despite the fact that during the half
century after 1870 "most of the major ﬁction writers were women" as attested to by both
Lauter (xiii) and Schweickart (44), very few women’s names appear on time-lines or in
sections of the anthologies which present literary history. Except in ML, no women critics
are quoted, at least by name. These sorts of exclusions cause one to wonder just where do
women readers, African American readers, Latino(a) American readers, Native American
readers, and Asian American readers ﬁnd versions of themselves in these histories and other
non-selection commentaries. When they are explicitly given voice through comments in non-
selection materials by HBJ and HRW, they are seen as representative voices and as unitary
voices for large and varied groups of peoples. The roles assigned Kingston and Brooks as
"the voice" of many peoples has been discussed above. Men’s voices speak for themselves as
individuals, and a great many men’s voices, names, and faces are heard and seen in these

anthologies’ selections and non-selection materials. Far fewer women’s and minority persons’

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voices are heard, and, in some cases, they seem to be expected to represent the ethnic point
of view as though there were only one and/or the women’s point of view as though it were
unitary. This condensation of many divergent views into one seems much like essentialism
which can easily lead to tokenism. Two anthologies (HRW, HBJ) do not allow Native
American voices to speak for themselves until after the early English colonial writers have
repeated named them "savage" or "barbarian." Only one anthology, PH, addresses directly
the hostility toward Native Americans on the part of the early colonists those names seemed to
sanction.

The above raises several questions. Despite the work of theorists such as Terry Eagleton
(1983), Linda J. Nicholsen (1990), Dale Spender (1982, 1989), Paul Lauter (1983), and
Annette Kolodny, Nina Baym, Carol Ohmann, and Elaine Showalter (see Schweickart 1986,
39-45) in historicizing male domination in the establishment and maintainance of traditional
literary canons, delineating the essentialist nature of the thought scaffolding such canons,
exposing the "androcentric critical strategies that pushed women’s [and minorities’] writing to
the margins of the literary canon" (Schweickart, 44), and detailing the harmful effects of
women’s near exclusion from canonical literary discourse, women and persons of color
continue to receive limited historical, critical, and literary attention in high school American
literature anthologies. This limited attention can not be explained by the unavailability of high
quality and challenging literary works written by women and persons of color, especially in
the last 120 years. How, then, can it be explained? What are the effects on students and
their teachers as they encounter this limited representation in combination with a limited direct
treatment of racist and gendered language and as they ﬁnd their literature anthology itself
using sexist language (ML only once) as it comments on selections as well as using names

like "idiot" and "freak" (HRW) to refer to characters in stories?

163

These questions defy simple answers. Parts of their answers relate to the realities of the
publishing business which I will address in the next chapter. Parts of the answers would
require further research. While an increasing number of studies exist on the way readers read
and respond to individual literary texts, nothing has yet been done to determine how
anthologies’ non-selection materials inﬂuence their student and teacher readers.

I readily acknowledge that these anthologies seem to represent steps forward in regard to
their inclusion of women and persons of color both as readers and authors as has been
asserted and documented by Applebee (1992) among others (although my research in Chapter
Three reveals large steps forward have not been taken by white women in ML and HRW).
Yet, in the light of the above commentary as well as that which occurs in Chapters Three and
Four, I would contend that these anthologies, all the most recent editions available from their
publishing houses, reﬂect and reinforce dominant culture subtexts of racial and gender
subordination and act, most likely inadvertently and unconsciously, as perpetuators of this

subordination.

_g‘.‘ L_- 2..“ I a

Chapter Six

Conclusions

After brieﬂy reviewing four anthology series and basing their evaluations on criteria
taken from an English Journal symposium on "The Textbook Gap" (Guth, Boynton, Squires,
1989), Appleby, Johnson, and Taylor conclude: "What do we recommend when buying a
literature series? Just say ‘No."' (1991). Instead they state that teachers should pick and
choose individual anthologies from various series or that teachers should use paperbacks
rather than anthologies. The ﬁrst suggestion, while excellent, is of little help to teachers
seeking a speciﬁc anthology, as the three reviewers do not make speciﬁc recommendations.
Nor is Gregory Jay’s "‘American’ literature-R.I.P." (1991) practicable advice for the
majority of high school English teachers and high school curricula. Appleby et al.’s second
suggestion, while in accordance with my past public school teaching practices, may not be
possible to enact in cash-strapped districts concerned about the cost of constantly replacing
consumable paperbacks. Most paperback editions do not stand up for long to the wear and
tear of many 16 year old students. Even relatively wealthy schools may prefer buying sturdy
anthologies at the cost of $35.00-$55.00 per book and using these for 8-10 years rather than
spending $15.00-$20.00 per student for paperbacks which will only last a short time and for
which over-all cost will be increased if one adds in the time spent ordering and reordering
them.

In a more ideal world, individual literary texts and non-selection materials for those texts

might be made available for classes from an immense computer bank. Individual authors

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165

would store published works in these banks, or, in the case of non-living authors, works
would be stored. A school district or preferably an individual teacher, for a small service fee
and royalty fees, would access the computer bank and create consumable anthologies for each
class. Obviously such a system would raise many questions which would need to be resolved,
among them, who controls what is placed in the bank and administers the system, who has the
authority to decide which selections are "acceptable" for use in classrooms at various levels,
who composes the non-selection materials and to what extent will a variety of them to choose
from be available. Perhaps current publishing houses would create competing banks, which
might lessen fears of state control. The technology for this alternative system is available.
Mc Graw-Hill’s Prirnus system features a large data base wherein are collected literary pieces,
letters, and documents of cultural interest. Currently, Mc Graw-Hill is adding texts to its
collection and producing a catalogue which will be available to teachers. They will select and
arrange pieces from the catalogue; Mc Graw-Hill will produce lower cost anthologies made
up of the teacher-selected texts. Soon university instructors will have access to the system.
As of yet, the system has not been extended to the production of high school anthologies
(Judy Nichols, personal conversation, July 2, 1993). A system such as this for individual
teacher use in the high school would require major changes in the outlooks of current
publishing houses who, according to Michael Apple, are far more interested in what will sell
than in what students should know (1991, 31). A Primus-like system would free teachers in
Massachusetts to use materials and approaches that teachers in California might hesitate to use
or that powerful state boards in Texas might inﬂuence publishing houses to exclude from
current anthologies.

Such a system would require teachers who are knowledgeable and conﬁdent of their own
judgments and interpretive abilities. They would not only need to decide which texts to use,

but how to contexualize them and play them off each another. College English departments

166
and English Education professionals would need to work closely together to ensure that their
pre-service teachers are exposed to a wide variety of texts written from diverse and
multicultural perspectives in a broad range of language variants. Additionally all those
involved in teacher preparation would need to provide their students with access to learning
and practicing a variety of critical strategies so that they become conﬁdent readers and
interpreters as they construct meaning. The opening of texts to variant readings would need
to be embraced as essential to transacting with and interpreting literary texts as well as all of
the texts that surround students everyday.
Until such a system or a far better one is in actual practice in high schools, school
districts or state boards of education will be faced with choosing anthologies, and the
anthology will likely remain a signiﬁcant part of public school teaching, especially when,
according to Applebee as quoted in Chapter One, 92% of teachers report anthologies to be "at
least adequate" as a source of literature selections and 88% report anthologies to be an "at
least adequate" source of teaching suggestions.
As noted in Chapter Three, NCTE provides teachers with a list of criteria to consider as
they select textbooks for use in English language arts classrooms. A brief review of this list
is provided for the convenience of the reader. The criteria include:
1. Students should gain skill through using language. Activities should encourage
students to think about their own language use.
2. Textbooks should emphasize the social uses of language.
3. The language arts should be integrated.
4. Textbooks should reﬂect our pluralistic society. . .and should contain a balanced
selection of representative pieces (not tokens). They should address language
differences, treating all dialects as variants of equal communicative value (in Meiser
and Maxwell, 1993).

As do I, Meiser and Maxwell ﬁnd sociolinguistic considerations to be of critical importance as

teachers choose literature anthologies and other teaching materials. The results compiled and

discussed in Chapters Three, Four, and Five of this study reveal that the ﬁve American

167

literature anthologies examined, although each has some strong points to be reviewed below,
appear to meet the above criteria, at best, minimally.

All ﬁve have major gaps in their representations of the diverse groups that contribute to
United States’ literature. Women and various peoples of color are under represented in all
ﬁve in their selections and in the historical chapters, timelines, and critical commentaries
included. Textbook covers and frontispieces most often feature males. No long work by a
white woman is included in any of the ﬁve anthologies nor is one by a male author of color.
Four of the ﬁve contain long works by white male authors. Two contain a long work by a
woman of color, the same work, A Raisin in The Sun. Women’s and minority authors’ works
are most likely to appear near the back of the textbook on a one poem apiece basis or in the
non-ﬁction portion of the book. White males are far more likely to be afforded more
selection pages per author and longer introductions. They are more likely to be introduced in
terms of their accomplishments, rather than in terms of their region of the country or the
people with whom they have associated.

Two of the ﬁve anthologies give signiﬁcant portions of their selection pages to works in
which are found extended works in dialect (HRW, ML); the others devote relatively few
pages to dialectal pieces. In their discussions of dialect and nonstandard usage, all ﬁve
anthologies in the many ways reviewed in Chapter Four reinforce the primacy of standard
English and appear to demean nonstandard variants of English as humorous, "peculiar," and
"deviations" as they valorize standard incorrectly as acceptable in all times and at all places.
Standard is the "norm" against which they define and judge other dialects. Three of these
anthologies provide standard English grammar exercises and/or handbooks which add an
additional weight of authority to standard English usage.

These heavy anthologies function as reservoirs and repositories of language. Their

"speakerly" selections could serve as an ideal ﬁeld on which to sometimes foreground the

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study of sociolinguistic language issues as well as content-related rhetorical, social, and
aesthetic issues. As Chapter Two demonstrated, pedagogical researchers and theorists have
been calling for such study for well over 25 years. Linguists and theorists have repeatedly
pointed out the importance of such study on the personal, social, educational, and political
levels. Yet these anthologies seldom directly address the social aspects of language use in
their non-selection materials. Even when they contain selections and articles which might
prompt such discussion, they tend to send students to dictionaries, ask them to list and
transcribe, and request that they point out examples or make word lists. While all of value,
these activities do little to promote student thought on their own and the language use of
others or to examine their attitudes toward both of these as well as the attitudes they ﬁnd in
the culture around them. Much of the discussion about sociolinguistic issues occurs in these
anthologies only in the teacher’s notes where students have no direct access to this
information.

As has been detailed in Chapter Five, some of these anthologies appear to condone or
authorize gendered name-calling as they, themselves, use gendered labels as they comment on
or query selections or in "Commentary" sections. While none use ethnic or racist labels in
their non-selection materials, with the exception of PH and HRW, they provide no
examination or discussion of the derogatory effects of the racist labelling which occurs in the
selections they include. None provide commentary or questions on the derogatory effects of

gendered labelling, although PH comes close as it discusses the power naming entails.

Strengths

Yet all the examined anthologies do have a number of strengths. ML’s alternative format

mixes chronology allowing a diversity of works to appear in the "early" section of the

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anthology and allowing works from the past and present to speak to one another. Its
shortened "introductions " have become biographies and are placed after works where they are
less likely to inﬂuence students’ initial reading of pieces. While ML’s historical introductions
are male-dominated, they have been shortened to 4-5 pages, rather than the 14-20 pages other
anthologies include. While white male selections still are the majority found in ML, no
longer do a few white male authors receive 20-30 pages while other authors receive only 1-2.
Seldom is an author’s selection section longer than 11 pages in ML. ML points out racial
labels and avoids the linkage of dialect to humor. Its brief deﬁnitions of slang and
colloquialisms are succinct and non-judgmental. Like all of the anthologies, except for HBJ,
ML avoids the use of the generic "he" and "man" as it offers commentary and questions.

HRW’s "American Language" articles have already been listed as an asset for HRW as
have its inclusion of the Baker and Kincaid pieces and its arrangement of its Twain pieces.
Its head-on discussion of racial slurs in conjunction with Cullen’s poem is the only one of its
kind in any of these anthologies. HRW more thoroughly than the other anthologies discusses
language variants and traces their origins. It offers commentary on language control and the
classist nature of some language use. It contains the widest range of dialectal pieces and
offers the second highest percentage of works (second to ML) with extended passages in
dialect. While it discusses dialect in conjunction with humor, the discussion does not stop
there. Rather, HRW links authors’ use of dialect with characterization and the establishment
of setting in some depth. Both its and ML’s inclusion of Hansberry’s play illustrates the
communicative effectiveness of dialect.

SF ’8 use of pictures of many artifacts on its timeline prevents white male domination of it
visually. The book’s inclusion of its "Story of American English" articles has already been
discussed as has its inclusion of Ellison’s and Rutsala’s works, all of which can open

discussion of sociolinguistic aspects of language use. PH’s insightful comments about names

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and labels in conjunction with its Ellison excerpt, its quotation of Irving’s comments on the
names the colonists gave Native Americans and the effects of those labels, and HBJ’s

inclusion of Hinjosa-Smith’s "This Writer’s Sense of Place" all raise sociolinguistic issues.

Considerations

In addition to capitalizing on the above strengths, all of the anthologies under study
should consider:

1. The inclusion of shorter and fewer selections by white males coupled with the
inclusion of more pieces by women and persons of color. Native Americans, Latino(a)
Americans, and Asian Americans make token appearances in all of these anthologies. Space
for a more balanced table of contents, in addition to the above, might be provided by
shortening or eliminating historical chapters, eliminating "themes" sections and most
"commentary" sections both of which provide readings for students rather than asking them to
construct their own readings and most of which are, at present, dominated by male
commentary and perspectives.

2. In three of the anthologies, the inclusion of more pieces in dialect and the inclusion of
a wider range of dialects. Students will be less likely to respect each other’s language if they
do not see variants of English authorized by their literature textbooks and experience the
communicative effectiveness of those variants. Nor will a signiﬁcant number of them get a
"feel" for and an "ear" for the pronuciations, diction, rhythms, and ﬂow of dialectal variants
other than their own if they do not ﬁnd them in the literary pieces they read.

3. A more careful presentation of the deﬁnition and explanation of dialect and
nonstandard usage so that the textbook, itself, does not send messages of negativity toward

variant forms of English. Judgmental words like "peculiar," "corruptions," "deviations,"

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"norms," "dominant," and "queer" should not appear in discussions of language variants.

The communicative effectiveness of all dialects should be stressed and demonstrated. The
tendency to associate non-standard English usage with either " shabby " thought or "shabby "
lives should be avoided as should the presentation of dialect primarily as a tool for humor.

4. The direct opening of discussion of the role of standard English in the United States,
the link between prestige variants of a language and power, and students’ own attitudes
toward their own languages and those of others.

5. The elimination of standard English grammar exercises from the main body of the
anthology.

6. The opening of discussion on gendered labelling and the use of the generic "he" and
"man" as well as the opening of discussion on other ways language practices and use
discriminate against women.

7. The head-on discussion of racist language as well as the more subtle texts of racism
that permeate language use and practices.

8. More probing and searching questions on language control, naming, and
sociolinguistic issues not addressed by this study including bilingualism, a topic brieﬂy opened
by ML in conjunction with a Richard Rodriguez piece.

9. The elimination of name-calling in the non-selection portions of the anthology and the

Opening of discussion on that which occurs in selections.

Questions Raised

Reviewing the above raises several questions, some of which were posed in Chapter
Five. Why, despite all that has been written on the exclusionary nature of traditional

canonical approaches to literature study, do these anthologies include relatively few selections

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by women and persons of color? Why is a relatively narrow range of English variants
presented in relatively few pieces? Why do so few questions and/or comments and in-depth
discussions about the sociolinguistic aspects of language use occur, particularly in those three
which refer to themselves as integrated approaches to language arts study (PH, HRW, ML)?
Why do all of the examined anthologies appear to contain subtexts which may be read as
discriminatory toward women, various ethnic groups, and less educated persons? And, what
do all of these questions and their possible answers mean to English education professionals
who help prepare pre-service teachers as well as to current high school English language arts
teachers? The questions evade easy answers. The answers most likely consist of a
combination of factors.

As to why so few authors from non-white groups appear in anthologies, Rudolfo Anaya,
author of Bless Me, Ultimo, described by Frankson in The English Journal as "a must for any
collection" (1990, 31), argues that "publishers and extremists" working in concert with
"teachers who hold narrow views of what literature should be" keep "the ethnic literature of
this country out of the curriculum." The "censorship of neglect" keeps "rich ethnic literatures
out of teacher training programs" (in Allen and Bianchini 1992, 102). He is even more blunt
when he declares that "those who hold political power in the country have used it to try to
create a homogenous, monolithic curriculum" (1992, 19). Frankson wonders if so little ethnic
literature appears on school reading lists because teachers are unaware of it or do not know
where to locate suitable materials (1992, 30). She offers an "Annotated Bibliography of
Chicano Literature For Young Adults" in the hopes such a list will spark teachers awareness.
Romero and Zancanella take much the same stance in their "Expanding the Circle: Hispanic
Voices in American Literature" (1990) and offer commentary on several works by Chicano(a)

authors .

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In the recent Modern Language Association publication Redrawing Boundaries, Richard
Marius ties the exclusion of new and/or different textbook content to both the market place
and teacher conservativism. "Teachers will not buy a textbook radically different from the
textbooks they have always taught, even if the textbook embodies the latest theory" (1992,
469). "The secret to a successful textbook," he says he has learned from publishers, "is that
about eighty percent of its content agrees with the best sellers in its ﬁeld" (470). If true, this
would account, in part, for the slow pace of change in textbooks’ selection inclusions and in
the theoretical approaches to those inclusions as they are discussed as well as for the sameness
that prevails when several American literature textbooks are examined.

Michael Apple (1991), concerned that scholars pay far too little attention to a critical
means through which " legitimate knowledge is made available in schools—the textbook" (24),
contends that economics plays a major role in textbooks’ contents. Textbook publishers "print
only those titles which satisfy a clientele...at a price which withstands competition....Finance
and costing take an immensely important place in the decisions of publishers and booksellers"
(25). The vast majority of persons who have the power to exercise authority "over the goals
and policies of publishing" are white and male. Most of these persons have sales, not
education, backgrounds. Women are most often found in publishing companies in subsidiary
roles; few sales persons are women (29). Despite the surprisingly "progressive" attitudes of
many publishers, the "cultural commodiﬁcation" found in textbooks tends to replicate
"patriarchal relationships within the ﬁrm itself" and within the society at large (34).
"Textbook producers want the assurance of knowing that their series will sell" (33). Thus,
too often, the political and ideological climate of those states with state-wide adoption policies
such as California and Texas, who account for over 20% of the sales of any particular book,
"determine the content and form of the published curriculum (textbook series and ancillary

materials) throughout the rest of the nation" (34-35). Since sales in California and Texas are

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critical to textbooks’ success, publishers hesitate to include materials that might be seen as too
progressive or offensive in those conservative states.

Yet Apple reminds readers that:

hegemonic forms are not imposed from outside by small groups of corporate owners
plotting how to do in workers, women, and people of color. Some of this plotting
may go on, of course. But just as signiﬁcant are the routine bases of our daily
decisions, in our homes, stores, ofﬁces, and factories. To speak somewhat
technically, dominant relations are reconstituted on an ongoing basis by the actions
we take and the decisions we make in our own local and small areas of life....Rather
than ideological domination and the relations of cultural capital being something that
is imposed on us from above, we reintegrate them within our everyday discourse
merely by following our commonsense needs and desire as we go about making a
living, ﬁnding sustenance and entertainment, and so on (34-35).

Thus, while "past histories of gender, class, and race relations" and the actual "local
political economy of publishing set boundaries within which publishing decisions are made"
(33), all persons participate in one way or another in the creation and/or maintenance of
those histories. Their stories are neither inevitable or immutable. We can perpetuate them by
living them out, often unexamined, as "common sense" or received text. Or we can work to
create and provide oppositional and alternative versions of their stories, that is, "new"
histories. What that means to the English education professional will be examined later in
this chapter.

Why a limited range of "Englishes" and why relatively little sociolinguistic discussion are
found in the examined anthologies may well relate to Apple’s comments on the combined
effects of a market economy and cultural forces determining boundaries for publishing
decisions when one recalls that the two states which practice state-wide adoptions and account
for 20% of a book’s market are states in which a strong English-Only movement thrives
(Daniels, 1990). James Stalker projects that successful English-Only movements may well
become Standard English-Only as considerations of which English are undertaken. He
contends that underlying English-Only movements is the assumption that the English being

legalized will be standard English (1990, 64). Apple’s assertions that everyone participates in

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the "writing" of cultural histories also seem applicable. All members of the culture
participate, some by directly acting to reinforce standard English through law, through
prescriptives, through demeaning nonstandard speakers, through a token approach to the
inclusion of nonstandard speakers’ stories in literature anthologies. I would suggest that far
more standard speakers ensure the primacy of standard English, unwittingly, by the
unexamined acceptance of standard English norms and traditional literary canons as
"commonsense" or "natural."

Alternative and oppositional languages and literature, as they form emergent traditions
which appear to threaten the dominant tradition, may be included in anthologies to create
conditions which give validity to standard norms and canons by providing the dominant
tradition something to deﬁne itself against, to play off. As Williams suggests, the
preservation of actively residual cultural elements, i. e. , standard English norms and traditional
literary canons, which are in reality some part of the dominant culture (1977, 123), through
mentioning, tokenism, appropriation, selection, and exclusion may account for the version of
"the American literary tradition " found in current high school anthologies. Pieces written in
nonstandard English variants as they are critiqued in these anthologies as "peculiar," "funny,"
"substandard," and "queer," rather than serve to broaden, challenge, and open dominant
cultural perspectives may, inadvertently, serve to reinforce them. Without such critique it
may be feared, perhaps unconsciously, that nonstandard dialects will act as "contaminants"
which will teach students to use and accept a "substandard version of the language, " as Ismail
bin Said Talib theorizes in "Why Not Teach Non-native English Literature?" (1992).

In the telephone interview with Arthur Applebee referred to in Chapter One, he
suggested that so little emphasis is placed on the sociolinguistic aspects of language use in
high school anthologies because the critical approach that dominates them is New Critical. To

the New Critics, sociolinguistic concerns would have little bearing on close textual analysis

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(October 13, 1992). Whether or not Applebee is correct, it is interesting to note that ML, the

anthology for which he and Judith Langer were senior consultants and which espouses a
reader-response approach to literature Langer describes as "envisionment" (ML 18-21 pre-
text; 1992), provides only limited sociolinguistic discussion, especially when that amount is
contrasted with the large portion of the anthology devoted to standard English exercises and a
standard English handbook. Both SF and HRW provide a good deal more discussion of the
non-grammatical aspects of language.

Applebee also suggested that so little sociolinguistic discussion is found in anthologies
because the English teaching profession is divided on how to discuss, treat, and teach about
language. The "Letters to The Editor" in two issues of The Chronicle of Higher Education
(July 22, 1992; July 29, 1992) which followed Baron’s article, "Why do Academics Continue
to Insist on ‘Proper’ English, " bear out Applebee’s remarks. Baron is "myth-taken" said one
respondent who added that students’ rights to their own language stop "where my corrective
red pen begins" (July, 22, 1992, B3). Another stated that students suffer from a decline in
language proﬁciency; "the university is an oasis in the rising sea of illiteracy" (July 22, 1992,
B3). The following week another said that he found "it hard to believe that Baron is
sincere....error is not a tolerable luxury" (July 29, 1992, B3). The Chronicle printed nine
responses to Baron’s article. Seven of the nine were negative.

As I advocate the inclusion of the sociolinguistic aspects of language use in high school
literature and composition classes in presentations at the state, national, and local levels, I
often ﬁnd myself "preaching to the converted." However I also regularly encounter resistance
from colleagues who contend that the topic is of no importance, that my ideas will ensure that
soon no one understands anyone else, and that there are far better ways to spend class time.
Such resistance is predictable. It is terribly threatening to consider that one’s own language

use may be permeated by subtle subtexts of ethnic, social class, and/or gender discrimination.

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It is equally threatening to realize that literary works which one has taught for years and come
to love may contain similar subtexts as may the non-selection materials in the anthology one
uses and may have helped select.

Yet another factor contributes to the limited discussion of sociolinguistic issues found in
the anthologies I examined, to these textbooks’ reinforcement of standard English in ways that
may seem racist, classist, and sexist, and to these textbooks’ relative exclusion of women and
persons of color. That factor is ignorance. One of the two positive responses to the Baron
article came from Rudolph C. Troike, Head of the English Department of The University of
Arizona. He asserts, "the literate public today knows more about plate tectonics and DNA
than about its own speech. It is this ignorance, staunchly maintained, despite the efforts of
generations of linguists to dispel it, that allows a linguistic-police mentality to survive" (July
29, 1992, B3). Milroy and Milroy simply state, "There is a depressing general ignorance of
the nature of language and the complexity of linguistic issues in society" (1985, 175). Out of

the hundreds of presentations at the November 1992 NCTE Conference, only 23 were listed

under the "Language " category.

Implications for Teachers and Teacher Educators

The above, all partial answers to the questions posed before them, have many
implications for teachers of English language arts and to teacher educators. To respond to the
calls from linguists, theorists, researchers, and pedagogues for the inclusion of sociolinguistic
study in the English curriculum, self-education may be a ﬁrst step. As teachers of literature,
writing, and language to an increasingly linguistically diverse population, we have an
obligation to heighten our own language awareness and to examine our own language attitudes

in the light of current theory and research. Works already discussed in this study serve as

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excellent starting points, especially those by Coates (1986), Flynn and Schweikart, eds.
(1986), Smitherman (1977), Bosmajian (1974), Kramarae, Schultz, O’Barr, eds. (1984),
Baron (1989), (Daniels, 1990), and Willinsky (1988). The English Journal provides frequent
practical suggestions and annotated bibliographies to assist teacher-awareness of literary texts
which feature ethnic and language diversity. Occasionally articles on sociolinguistic
applications to the literature/composition classroom appear. A few worth noting are the
Christiansen and Lake articles discussed previously, Lockhart’s "‘We Real Cool’: Dialect in
the Middle School Classroom" (December 1991); Rovano’s "Preparing for a Fireﬁghter’s
World: How to Teach Non-sexist Language (December 1991), and Wansor’s "Student Self-
Awareness: One Value of Language in Thought and Action" (February 1991).

As teacher educators we must provide our pre-service teachers with the knowledge of
sociolinguistic issues. As the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education
(NCATE) lists "Qualiﬁcations for Teachers of English Language Arts" in its Guidelines for
the Preparation of Teachers of English Language Arts (NCTE 1986), it mandates
sociolinguistic study for pre-service teachers. Of its 41 directives, 9 speak to the necessity of
teacher education in the sociolinguistic issues covered by this investigation of literature
anthologies. Teachers must know how "social, cultural, and economic environments inﬂuence
language learning....All teachers must be aware of language diversity" and see "English as a
language which has undergone many changes. . .[which] have kept the language vital and rich"
(7-8). Teachers must learn that verbal and visual images may be used to "inﬂuence the
thinking and actions of others"; they must help students "develop the ability to recognize and
use language appropriate in different social and cultural situations" (8). Well versed in the
social and regional varieties of English, English teachers need to be able to "strengthen
students’ pride in and respect for the varieties of English that they and their communities use"

(12-13) as well as "establish an environment that encourages respect and appreciation for all

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languages and all dialects" (15). Additionally, teachers must "be knowledgeable about

literature by male and female writers, by people of many racial and ethnic groups. . . " (9).

If, as language experts assert, our students’ languages are a critical part of their
identities, our language attitudes and theirs will greatly affect how they view themselves and
others as well as how they view the classroom and its activities as Ogbu has pointed out.
Classroom teachers and teacher educators can alert students to the importance of their own
and others’ language use, attitudes and practices as they assist their students to become self-
aware users of language. As teacher educators we can alert our pre-English teachers to
methods through which they can assist their future students gain language tolerance and
appreciation and become language-aware speakers, writers, and readers.

At Saginaw Valley State University my colleague, Dr. Kerry Segal, and I have proposed
the addition of a 200-level "Introduction to Language" course to be taken by all English
majors and minors as well as all education students. The course will focus on sociolinguistic
issues and will be followed by a 344 "English Language" course for all English education
students. In my BSD-Teaching the Art of Writing Class, following discussions of the NCTE
Expanding Opportunities pamphlet, the Student’s Rights to Their Own Language Resolution,
the Ann Arbor case, and the CCCC National Language Policy, we read Farr and Daniels’
(1986) and Rigg and Allen’s (1989) suggestions for applications of these to the classroom.
My students, wanting something more speciﬁc, developed their own list of 14 suggestions for
helping students both retain their home languages and learn the language of wider
communication. My students’ suggestions, which I have used as a guide for my 482 English
Methods students as they prepare lessons and units, can be found appended to this study. In
both classes we read a variety of essays, poems, and stories featuring language use, some of
which are listed in Chapter Two. And I share my collection of news articles, cartoons, and

magazine articles about language use with them. Soon I ﬁnd my students defending the

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teaching of works in dialect and bringing me articles and cartoons. I do not recount my
experiences as models. I am a relative novice at the inclusion of sociolinguistic study in my
classes. I present them to demonstrate the ease with which interested teachers can incorporate
such study into their regular course offerings.

English education professionals can serve on boards and committees where they can be
inﬂuential in asserting the importance of language issues study. While we can not affect past
cultural attitudes and past histories of race, class, and gender discrimination, we can help
create "new" histories as we work to open perspectives and broaden tolerance and
appreciation of linguistic diversity. I have served as a member of a state committee charged
with writing literature outcomes and objectives for the K-12 public schools in Michigan. I
plan to use the objectives I wrote for Outcome Seven: "Understand the Social and Political
Aspects of Language Use Including Issues of Age, Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Class" as the
basis of the sociolinguistic component of my 482 class this fall. (A copy of these objectives is
appended to this study.)

English educators can publish. Few theory based practical assists exist to aid classroom
teachers and pre-teachers eager to incorporate language issues study into their English
language arts classrooms. And English educators can create markets for classroom materials
that open discussion of sociolinguistic issues, that contain more equitably balanced selections,

and that do not seem to regard some variants of English inferior.

Implications for Further Research

English educators can engage in further research. Questions that merit further

exploration include:

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1. Do students read the non-selection materials in anthologies? For what purposes do
they read them? Are they assigned the questions which follow pieces? How are these
questions used in classrooms?

2. Are student responses to non-selection materials "dominated," "negotiated, " or
"oppositional" as deﬁned by Apple and Christian-Smith (1991). That is, do students accept
textual messages at face value? Do they accept some and reject or dispute others? Do they
reject all "dominant tendencies and interpretations" (14)? Flynn and Sweickart’s categories
differ somewhat from Apple and Christian-Snrith’s. Do readers of non-selection materials
"dominate" the text by resisting it? Do they "submit" to the text in such a way that the self
is effaced? Or do they "interact" with the text, balancing involvement with critical
detachment (xxvii)? Either set of categories may prove useful as student responses to
anthologies’ non-selection materials are researched.

3. To what extent do the gender, ethnicity, and/or social class of student readers affect
their responses to the non-selection materials?

4. To what extent does reading the non-selection materials affect students’ readings of
literary works in the anthology? This study has taken the perspective of a sociolinguistics
scholar and a long-time American literature and language scholar and teacher. The messages
I read may be very different from those students read; my reactions to those messages may
also be very different. Research needs to focus on students’ readings of non-selection
materials.

Both Foucault and Willinsky assert that discourse can be used to counter and undermine
discourse. As English teachers and teacher educators we are in positions to do just that as we
assist students to recognize and discuss the subtle and, sometimes, not so subtle sexist, racist,
and classist messages of exclusion and discrimination the language around us and the language

of classroom materials may carry and perpetuate. Through the application of suggestions like

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the fourteen complied by my 380 students or those listed under Outcome Seven, we can assist
our students to become self-aware language users. We can encourage our pre-service teachers
to exercise that awareness as they create their own classroom atmospheres and choose
materials and as they alert their own students to sociolinguistic issues.

Apple reminds his readers that we all participate in one way or another in the creation
and/or maintenance of cultural (and linguistic) histories which exclude and/or discriminate
against women, some ethnic groups, and some social classes. As English teachers and teacher
educators we have the power and must, if necessary, acquire the linguistic lmowledge to
create new markets by demanding and by encouraging our pre-teachers and colleagues to
demand textbooks which do not exclude or merely mention large groups of our students and
render inferior the language of our nonstandard speakers.

In doing so, we can help, if not eliminate, at least defuse and decrease the
disenfranchisement, the silence, the embarrassment, the lowered self respect, the oppositional
hostility that results when the language of classroom materials name-calls in a derogatory
fashion, when one is excluded from meaningful representation in classroom materials, or
when one’s language is demeaned. To some degree we can withdraw our participation from
cultural and linguistic histories which exclude or humiliate social, ethnic, and gender groups.
By working toward alternate and oppositional renderings of language and culture on the local
level through the decisions we make in our own classrooms and the awareness we help create
in our students, our pre-service teachers, and our colleagues, we can help create more

equitable classrooms and "write" more equitable histories.

APPENDIX

APPENDIX

380’s Suggestions for Assisting English Language Arts Students Maintain Their Home
Languages While Having Opportunity To Learn The Language Of Wider
Communicaﬁon—So-caﬂed Standard English.

1. Frequently allow for writing situations that emphasize ﬂuency.
2. Provide rhetorical situations in which a variety of dialects and social registers are
appropriate: journals, letters, ﬁction, poetry, drama, advertisement, some speeches, some

personal essays.

3. Provide reading, listening, viewing materials in a variety of dialects, discourse genre,
discourse styles.

4. Provide for the discussion of situations in which so-called standard English is not
appropriate as well as those in which it is.

5. Actively afﬁrm dialect differences, assisting students to recognize and value their own
dialect as well as those of others.

6. Provide for instruction about language-its social and political importance, its relationship
to power.

7. Explore the arbitrary nature of "standard" English as well as the power associated with
its use.

8. Know and point out distinctions between students’ languages and the language of wider
communication. Help students hear those differences as well as acknowledge them in writing.

9. Eliminate labels such as "good," "proper," or "bad" English. Speaking and writing
standard English is not next to cleanliness and godliness; it should have no special moral
implications.

10. Offer reading materials, when available, in both students’ dialects and the language of
wider communication.

11. Be sensitive to the identity conﬂicts code-switching may cause for some students who
may encounter oppositional hostility in their home communities.

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184

12. Strive to overcome your culturally embedded attitudes toward language use and recognize
that attitudes toward language are often a veneer for attitudes toward people.

13. Avoid correcting your students’ grammar and syntax publically. Students have the right
to their own dialects.

14. Avoid the English teacher tendency to hyper-correction. Point out patterns of errors in
written work. Remember the writing skills hierarchy we’ve developed: focus, organization,
development, voice/tone, style, syntax, mech/tech, spelling.

15. Concentrate on what students already do well; build on their inherent linguistic
competency.

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OUTCOME 7: Understand the social and political aspects of language use, including
issues of age, gender, ethnicity, and social class.

Primary students will:

Read, view, listen to dialects in a wide variety of situations such as stories, poems, ﬁlms,
television shows, songs, conversations.

Begin to explore dialect distinctions and variants among their peers and in print and non-print
texts.

Recognize and appreciate their own dialects and those of their peers.
Begin to explore how language use changes in varied social contexts.

Begin to explore the effects of derogatory ethnic, sexist, classist, religious labels and name-
calling on both targets and users.

Intermediate students will:
Read, view, listen to dialects as in #1 in primary.

Recognize and explore the social purposes of language and note language changes in varied
social contexts as well as in print and non-print texts.

Continue to explore the effects of derogatory ethnic, sexist, classist, religious labels and
name-calling on their targets and users.

Begin to recognize euphemisms and discuss their purposes.

Begin to recognize the use of stereotypic language to portray social and political attitudes in
jokes, cartoons, television shows, advertising, song lyrics, ﬁlms, and print media.

Middle school students will:

Read, view, and listen to dialects as in #1 in primary and intermediate.

Explore and begin to analyze the social purposes of language and the language which occurs
in varied social and political contexts as found in print and non-print and in speaking and
listening contexts.

Recognize euphemisms, cliches, slang, and doublespeak and discuss their purposes.

Begin to recognize and explore sentimentalized and value-laden language use and discusss the
purposes and effects of such usage.

Explore and begin to analyze the effects of derogatory ethnic, classist, sexist, religious labels
and name-calling on both users and targets.

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Recognize, explore and begin to analyze stereotypic language in jokes, song lyrics, cartoons,
comics, television, advertising, ﬁlms, and print media as it is used to portray a person’s
educational level, social class, religion, gender, age, ethnicity, political attitudes.

Explore the status or stigma attached to various kinds of language use and to various dialects
and begin to theorize as to why status and stigma exist in regard to language use.

Begin to discuss the arbitrary nature of standard English.
Secondary students will:
Read, view, and listen to dialects as in #1 in primary, intermediate, and middle school.

Analyze ﬁlmed, written, and oral texts for doublespeak, slang, cliches, euphemisms, value-
laden, or sentimentalized langauge use and speculate as to why such usages occur.

Analyze oral, written, and ﬁlmed texts to determine the social and political purposes of the
language they use as well as the social and political contexts of that language.

Recognize and explore the overt or underlying social and political implications of language
use and their own and others’ attitudes toward language.

Analyze stereotypic language in jokes, song lyrics, cartoons, etc. (as above) to determine the
social and political motivations of such language as it portrays educational level, social class,
ethnicity, gender, age, religion, political attitudes, and power relationships.

Engage in research, recording and analyzing, their own language use and that of peers,
parents, community members, authority ﬁgures.

Understand the arbitrary nature of standard English.

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