Dialect and Dichotomy
Literary Representations of African American Speech

Lisa Cohen Minnick (Author)

9780817354237

Paperback / softback, published 17 June 2007

216 pages, illustrations
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.346 kg

The unique contribution of this book is the combination of methods the author uses to approach the study of literary dialect. While incorporating computational analysis of language made possible by recently available text-analysis programs, she also uses more traditional techniques of literary criticism and dialect study to evaluate dialect in literary texts. - Cynthia Bernstein, editor of The Text and Beyond: Essays in Literary Linguistics ""Minnick considers the social and political implications of African American English as depicted in four literary works: Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Charles W. Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman, and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. The author's wise choice to view her topic through the work of two Caucasians and two African Americans gives the study a desirable and necessary balance.... Minnick notes that Caucasian authors have employed African American English to make their writing realistic and, in Faulkner, to arrive at subtle interpretations of the racial attitudes of his characters. But she acknowledges that African American writers face the question of whether the desire to represent black experiences authentically competes both with the demands of the market and with trends within the political and literary movements of African American thinkers and artists. This is an important and highly original study."" - Choice

Applies linguistics methods for a richer understanding of literary texts and spoken language.
Dialect and Dichotomy outlines the history of dialect writing in English and its influence on linguistic variation. It also surveys American dialect writing and its relationship to literary, linguistic, political, and cultural trends, with emphasis on African American voices in literature.
Furthermore, this book introduces and critiques canonical works in literary dialect analysis and covers recent, innovative applications of linguistic analysis of literature. Next, it proposes theoretical principles and specific methods that can be implemented in order to analyse literary dialect for either linguistic or literary purposes, or both. Finally, the proposed methods are applied in four original analyses of African American speech as represented in major works of fiction of the American South—Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Charles W. Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Dialect and Dichotomy is designed to be accessible to audiences with a variety of linguistic and literary backgrounds. It is an ideal research resource and course text for students and scholars interested in areas including American, African American, and southern literature and culture; linguistic applications to literature; language in the African American community; ethnicity and representation; literary dialect analysis and/or computational linguistics; dialect writing as genre; and American English.