The Materiality of Language: Gender, Politics, and the University - Softcover

Bleich, David

 
9780253007728: The Materiality of Language: Gender, Politics, and the University
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0253007720 ISBN 13: 9780253007728
Verlag: Indiana University Press, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

Winner, 2014 Conference on College Composition and Communication Outstanding Book Award

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David Bleich is Professor of English at the University of Rochester and author of Know and Tell: A Pedagogy of Disclosure, Genre, and Membership and The Double Perspective: Language, Literacy, and Social Relations, among other books.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

The Materiality of Language sees the human body, its affective life, social life, and political functions as belonging to the study of language. To recognize language as material and to treat it as such, maintains David Bleich, is to remove restrictions to language access due to historic patterns of academic censorship and unfair gender practices. Language is understood as a key path in the formation of all social and political relations. Language becomes available for study by all speakers, who may regulate it, change it, and make it flexible like other material things. The book addresses the need to end centuries of limiting access to language and to its many contexts of use, especially by universities.

The book engages the eight-century history of the university documenting how it was protected by the church, the crown, the state, and by corporate interests to this day. It describes how this protection has promoted the continuation of androcentric values that have excluded women and most men from access to language and the study of language. It shows that earlier forms of materiality, derived from nominalism, were repeatedly suppressed and censored, sometimes with death as a punishment for defiance. It suggests that even today, science and other academic subject matters, using their social and political respectability, have collaborated with universities and corporate interests to limit the study of language by depending on common abstractions such as instinct, intelligence, meaning, truth, knowledge, free market, rational choice, autonomy, and many others, treating their referents as self-evident. It offers that the historic uses and understandings of literature, which were recognized since classical times as material, have been similarly limited and censored, placed in the category of fiction, and prevented from exercising their materiality on their readerships and societies.

Aus dem Klappentext

The Materiality of Language sees the human body, its affective life, social life, and political functions as belonging to the study of language. To recognize language as material and to treat it as such, maintains David Bleich, is to remove restrictions to language access due to historic patterns of academic censorship and unfair gender practices. Language is understood as a key path in the formation of all social and political relations. Language becomes available for study by all speakers, who may regulate it, change it, and make it flexible like other material things. The book addresses the need to end centuries of limiting access to language and to its many contexts of use, especially by universities.

The book engages the eight-century history of the university documenting how it was protected by the church, the crown, the state, and by corporate interests to this day. It describes how this protection has promoted the continuation of androcentric values that have excluded women and most men from access to language and the study of language. It shows that earlier forms of materiality, derived from nominalism, were repeatedly suppressed and censored, sometimes with death as a punishment for defiance. It suggests that even today, science and other academic subject matters, using their social and political respectability, have collaborated with universities and corporate interests to limit the study of language by depending on common abstractions such as instinct, intelligence, meaning, truth, knowledge, free market, rational choice, autonomy, and many others, treating their referents as self-evident. It offers that the historic uses and understandings of literature, which were recognized since classical times as material, have been similarly limited and censored, placed in the category of fiction, and prevented from exercising their materiality on their readerships and societies.

|

The Materiality of Language sees the human body, its affective life, social life, and political functions as belonging to the study of language. To recognize language as material and to treat it as such, maintains David Bleich, is to remove restrictions to language access due to historic patterns of academic censorship and unfair gender practices. Language is understood as a key path in the formation of all social and political relations. Language becomes available for study by all speakers, who may regulate it, change it, and make it flexible like other material things. The book addresses the need to end centuries of limiting access to language and to its many contexts of use, especially by universities.

The book engages the eight-century history of the university documenting how it was protected by the church, the crown, the state, and by corporate interests to this day. It describes how this protection has promoted the continuation of androcentric values that have excluded women and most men from access to language and the study of language. It shows that earlier forms of materiality, derived from nominalism, were repeatedly suppressed and censored, sometimes with death as a punishment for defiance. It suggests that even today, science and other academic subject matters, using their social and political respectability, have collaborated with universities and corporate interests to limit the study of language by depending on common abstractions such as instinct, intelligence, meaning, truth, knowledge, free market, rational choice, autonomy, and many others, treating their referents as self-evident. It offers that the historic uses and understandings of literature, which were recognized since classical times as material, have been similarly limited and censored, placed in the category of fiction, and prevented from exercising their materiality on their readerships and societies.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

The Materiality of Language

Gender, Politics, and the University

By David Bleich

Indiana University Press

Copyright © 2013 David Bleich
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-00772-8

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction: The Contested Subject, 
Part One. The Materiality of Language, 
1. Premises and Backgrounds, 
2. Received Standards in the Study of Language, 
3. Materiality and Genre, 
4. The Unity of Language and Thought, 
5. Materiality and the Contemporary Study of Language, 
6. Recognizing Politics in the Study of Language, 
Part Two. Language in the University, 
7. Frustrations of Academic Language, 
8. The Protected Institution, 
9. The Sacred Language, 
10. Language Uses in Science, the Heir of Latin, 
11. Language and Human Survival, 
12. The Materiality of Literature and the Contested Subject, 
Bibliography, 
Index,


CHAPTER 1

Premises and Backgrounds


I. The Materiality of Language and the Sacralization of Texts

The premise that people exchange language and not meaning governs this study. The materiality of language is a description that follows from this premise.

Uses of language, oral or written, mark the growth and cultivation of language in any society. Different art forms, sciences, and professional interests have distinctive genres of discourse and dialects, which are collective practices—rather than concepts—that are eligible for public assimilation, for testing, and for appropriation toward social adaptation.

Genres in different subject matters are gestures of language use. "Gestures" includes reference to the bodily action of speech and writing. This reference contrasts with the common use of the term "language," which usually implies that thought or ideas are prior, more fundamental, and more essential than words. The Platonic tradition, which the common use of the term "language" reflects, is sometimes identified as "realism." According to this tradition, words are transient and mortal. Ideas (meanings), however, are the essence of language and are eternal; they are passed through generations and survive individual human mortality. Emerging from this tradition is the almost universal assumption that language is not bodily because its essence is "meaning"—ideas and thought, which reside in and emerge from an incorporeal zone of existence.

To stipulate the materiality of language is to move away from the Platonic tradition. In classical and medieval times, nominalists questioned the Platonic premise and opposed the tradition that was derived from it. They did not attribute to language use its function as a conduit of intangible meaning. They treated the uses of language as self-evident within their immediate contexts and experiences. Seeing language in this way enabled them to use "faith" as a belief in something not in evidence. Yet Church authorities who had custody of language uses and of their study opposed nominalism and maintained, instead, that there was indeed evidence for religious beliefs. If one held a language philosophy that accepted that there was no evidence for faith either within language or outside of it, religious authorities and institutions would be discredited and endangered. Nominalism held that language does not give evidence of anything beyond its living functions, nor does it predict future events.

My extended consideration of the materiality of language is founded on a tradition of language philosophy that had been on the record for (at least) two millennia but has remained a minority perspective. However, the twentieth century's proliferation of popular literacy and greatly increased access to education has brought about a new collective recognition of the materiality of language. This development is due in part to the reduction of religious authority, to the increased respect for secularism, and to the rapid spread of technology and other material benefits such as medicines. In the twentieth century, materiality was urged and suggested by changes in society that brought tangible benefits to millions of people.

From one standpoint, the recognition by several thinkers of the materiality of language could be seen as part of a growing respect for and dependence on material things more generally. The increasing number of educated people willing to challenge the acceptance of transcendental spirituality and God led inevitably to the recognition that language itself—long held to be special, unique to humans, and immaterial—to be, in the final analysis, material like everything else. This view is plausible enough for me to take seriously, but it is not the principal focus of this book. Rather, this study does not seek any explanation of why, in a brief period during the twentieth century, fewer than a dozen figures paying attention to language and how it is conceived arrived at similar understandings of how it worked and how we might continue to view it. I try only to show that these figures are, finally, similar to one another in basic ways, and although they share no one common feature, their similarity may be described as an understanding that language is more usefully treated as a material entity than as an incorporeal, ineffable, intangible, or spiritual phenomenon. I try to show how the work of this group of thinkers shares the sense of the revolutionary role language would take on if consciously received, taught, used, and understood as a material entity.

I hope to show that because these figures came to similar conclusions at more or less the same point in history, those of us who value learning and teaching should pay attention to them—on the grounds that our searches for knowledge and understanding depend on how language is used, who is using it, and what circumstances of its authority are being established. No one locus of language use is more or less important than any other because there is no subject matter that does not finally depend on the use of language. The use of language is fundamental throughout the individual life cycle, and throughout history.

I describe the language practice that follows from the use of Platonic realism as the sacralization of texts. During times when only a minuscule fraction of the total population was literate, those who could write had the most access to language. Almost automatically, those who could produce texts were in position to proclaim the authority of these texts, as well as their value, to the total population. All cultures have received an array of sacred texts; today we view them as the oldest and most venerated in our possession, and as having the greatest value to our societies. We continue to refer to various bibles as sacred texts, which means that religious institutions have more authority to read, interpret, and use them than those who are not part of such institutions, or who are not religious themselves.

Emerging from this practical religious tradition has been the view that an author of a text has a special claim on our attention by virtue of having created that text. Texts created by authors carry a heightened status resembling that of sacred texts. Until recently the creation and production of texts has remained restricted to the most privileged members of society. During the medieval period, authoritative texts were considered valid only if they were written in the one official language, Latin. Those who knew Latin were church members or were trained in universities that were sponsored by the Church....

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Indiana University Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2013
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0253007720
ISBN 13 
9780253007728
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
576
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Mare Nostrum Group B.V.
gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk

Doelen 72
Breda
4831 GR
Niederlande

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9780253007711: The Materiality of Language: Gender, Politics, and the University

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  0253007712 ISBN 13:  9780253007711
Verlag: Indiana University Press, 2013
Hardcover