Language and Perception, Part 2

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Language, Perception, and Caricatures

Last class we talked about how the ways in which a person or character speaks (e.g., vocabulary, grammar, etc.) shape how others perceive them. As an example, we noted that Jupiter’s broken English in “The Gold Bug” marks him as unintelligent or at least uneducated, while the more sophisticated English of the narrator and Legrand mark them as upper class and well educated.

Now I want to turn to how African American Language plays out in society and literature beyond “The Gold Bug,” starting by discussing some of the comments posted to Jones’s blog.

Slang vs dialect. People in class felt that “slang” tends to refer to words and phrases that are only in use for a relatively short time, while a dialect is more enduring. Words that are initially seen as slang may make their ways into an evolving dialect (or any language) though.

Should you write (or speak) in a “native language,” or in one accepted as “standard”? Personally, I encourage you to write in ways you are comfortable with. But your audience matters (even if it shouldn’t), so it’s in a writer’s interest to also write in ways they believe the audience will understand. More and more, it might be possible to expect listeners to adapt and make the effort to follow an unfamiliar but intelligible language. Class discussion seemed to feel that younger audiences, e.g., college-age, were more likely to accept a variety of dialects in writing or conversation than older ones.

Code-switching has a cognitive cost for people who do it, in that it requires them to constantly be thinking about the language they should use as well as what they want to say in it.

Be aware of cultural and/or linguistic appropriation, i.e., seeming to mock another culture or language by adopting features of it you don’t really understand. Such adoption is often seen as insulting or belittling that other culture, and people who don’t know you well may believe you are doing it even if you do know the culture in question (e.g., comments in Jones’s blog give several examples of Whites raised in AAL-speaking communities accused of appropriation when heard speaking the language). In the case of African American Language in America, this is particularly fraught because of the role language has played in racist caricatures, e.g., white performers imitating “plantation dialect” in minstrel shows, Jupiter’s speech in “The Gold Bug” (which I suspect, although I don’t know for sure, is what Poe imagined his readers would think Black language should be like rather than what free Blacks in South Carolina actually spoke), etc.

Next

Continue this discussion of language and questions about who uses it for what from the specific perspective of authors.

Please read chapter 9 of They Say, I Say for Wednesday.

And…

Essay 2

Continue the past week or so’s conversation about racism in American entertainment in writing.

Specifically, pick a piece of current entertainment that you are familiar with and analyze it in terms of how it interacts with (i.e., supports, challenges, modifies, etc.) the thesis that racist caricatures have been and are an ongoing element of American entertainment.

We’ll peer critique drafts a week from Monday (September 27), probably via Zoom. Final versions are due October 4.

See the handout for more information.

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