How to Do Things With Words

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 521 82347 1 hardback ISBN 0 521 53032 6 paperback Contents List of tables page vii Preface to the second edition ix Preface to the first edition xii 1 Why a global language? 1 What is a global language? 3 What makes a global language? 7 Why do we need a global language? 11 What are the dangers of a global language? 14 Could anything stop a global language? 25 A critical era 27 2 Why English? The historical context 29 Origins 30 America 31 Canada 36 The Caribbean 39 Australia and New Zealand 40 South Africa 43 South Asia 46 Former colonial Africa 49 Southeast Asia and the South Pacific 54 A world view 59 v Contents

English as a global language

(1958). Anatomy of Criticism, Four Essays. Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures: Vol. 12, No. 1-2, pp. 211-215.

Anatomy of Criticism, Four Essays

Masks of conquest: Literary study and British rule in India

Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation

Author(s): Legere, Charles David | Advisor(s): Hejinian, Lyn | Abstract: In the prevailing critical reading paradigm, poetry is an exceptional instance of language that projects its own world. Cleanth Brooks holds that a poem should be read as if it were in "dramatic context": any effects the poem might have only apply as if on stage. This dramaturgical metaphor frees poetry of obligation to verisimilitude, and suggests an orientation that Theodor Adorno then construes into a politics: poetry stands so resolutely apart from society as to repudiate it. But the figure also predetermines that the relation between poetry and its immediate referents will be universally vicarious: poets and readers only engage with their worlds through what Kenneth Burke calls "identification," which Paul DeMan darkly extrapolates into the state of all language, a "linguistic predicament" also known as "death." We can only imagine doing something in a poem, never actually do it. In my dissertation, I read eight twenty-first-century poems -- Vanessa Place's Statement of Facts, Ben Lerner's Angle of Yaw, Juliana Spahr's The Transformation, Rob Fitterman's "The Goths," M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong!, Claudia Rankine's "Situation #1," Bhanu Kapil's Humanimal, and Lisa Robertson's "Face/" -- in which the poets try to reclaim agency for poetry by performing poetic acts of reading that mimic or parody the "dramatic" metaphor in poetry criticism. I cast these poets' interventions into twentieth-century institutional, disciplinary, and pedagogical history into relief by the poems with four reading methodologies -- close reading, contextualization, historicization, and lyricization -- in each of my chapters. In my readings, I attend to these poems' direct repercussions--the ways they move their readers; I argue that by pushing back on their readers' readings, contemporary poets are working to re-claim political efficacy for poetry.

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Charles David Legere

Papers

Reading Close Reading: Twentieth-Century Criticism, Twenty-First-Century Poetry