On his book The Word on the Streets: The American Language of Vernacular Modernism
Cover Interview of October 29, 2017
In a nutshell
The Word on the Streets is a book, first and
foremost, about slang: how slang and vernacular language gain purchase as
experimental and self-conscious forms in American literature. The book charts how
a variety of popular genres underwent a transformation in the early twentieth
century, as authors began to see slang as a way of reformulating their
respective genres’ aesthetic practices. This reformulation, I argue, is a part
of what we understand as literary modernism, that multifaceted movement that
famously sought to “make it new” in all aspects of the arts. Central to these
modernist goals was the self-conscious alienation of language, which could take
forms from stream of consciousness narration to the impenetrable incorporation
of ancient languages and neologisms.
Modernism also defined itself against commercial art (or
“mass culture” as critics like Andreas Huyssen would have it), though scholars
in recent years have been quick to note that even these difficult texts
participated in a specialized market. So, it’s become easy to see how modernist
giants like Gertrude Stein or William Faulkner crossed the line into commercial
zones. But scholars have been reluctant to imagine any of that “mass culture”
as crossing the line into self-conscious literary experimentation. This is
where The Word on the Streets comes in. In the early twentieth century,
popular writers in a wide variety of genres began to understand slang and
vernacular language as a way to experiment with new forms of representation, to
raise questions about knowledge, and to challenge entrenched boundaries based
on race, class, and ethnicity.
The “vernacular modernism” of my subtitle refers to this
loose aggregation of writers, working in wildly different popular traditions, who
turn to slang and vernacular language(s) to enact a kind of experimental
transformation within their received genres. This practice is contemporaneous
with a growth of scholarly and popular interest in the so-called “American
language” (best exemplified by H.L. Mencken’s magnum opus of the same name).
But it goes far beyond any kind of linguistic standardization: multi-ethnic and
cross-class slang was a moving target during this period, and Mencken claimed
that this “American language” was defined by its “steady reaching out for new
and vivid forms.”
The vernacular modernist writers I examine include humor
writers, crime fiction writers, Jewish American memoirists, and African
American urban novelists. They were published in middlebrow and lowbrow venues
for popular audiences, but nearly every one of them grazed the boundaries of
capital-M Modernism. In The Word on the Streets I hope to give these
writers their due and to shatter the (often unspoken) presumption in modernist
studies that popular writers are not really worthy of close formalist analysis.
I also hope to provide a way for thinking about American modernist practices
that cuts across traditional boundaries of race, class, and ethnicity.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
The Word on the Streets is a book, first and foremost, about slang: how slang and vernacular language gain purchase as experimental and self-conscious forms in American literature. The book charts how a variety of popular genres underwent a transformation in the early twentieth century, as authors began to see slang as a way of reformulating their respective genres’ aesthetic practices. This reformulation, I argue, is a part of what we understand as literary modernism, that multifaceted movement that famously sought to “make it new” in all aspects of the arts. Central to these modernist goals was the self-conscious alienation of language, which could take forms from stream of consciousness narration to the impenetrable incorporation of ancient languages and neologisms.
Modernism also defined itself against commercial art (or “mass culture” as critics like Andreas Huyssen would have it), though scholars in recent years have been quick to note that even these difficult texts participated in a specialized market. So, it’s become easy to see how modernist giants like Gertrude Stein or William Faulkner crossed the line into commercial zones. But scholars have been reluctant to imagine any of that “mass culture” as crossing the line into self-conscious literary experimentation. This is where The Word on the Streets comes in. In the early twentieth century, popular writers in a wide variety of genres began to understand slang and vernacular language as a way to experiment with new forms of representation, to raise questions about knowledge, and to challenge entrenched boundaries based on race, class, and ethnicity.
The “vernacular modernism” of my subtitle refers to this loose aggregation of writers, working in wildly different popular traditions, who turn to slang and vernacular language(s) to enact a kind of experimental transformation within their received genres. This practice is contemporaneous with a growth of scholarly and popular interest in the so-called “American language” (best exemplified by H.L. Mencken’s magnum opus of the same name). But it goes far beyond any kind of linguistic standardization: multi-ethnic and cross-class slang was a moving target during this period, and Mencken claimed that this “American language” was defined by its “steady reaching out for new and vivid forms.”
The vernacular modernist writers I examine include humor writers, crime fiction writers, Jewish American memoirists, and African American urban novelists. They were published in middlebrow and lowbrow venues for popular audiences, but nearly every one of them grazed the boundaries of capital-M Modernism. In The Word on the Streets I hope to give these writers their due and to shatter the (often unspoken) presumption in modernist studies that popular writers are not really worthy of close formalist analysis. I also hope to provide a way for thinking about American modernist practices that cuts across traditional boundaries of race, class, and ethnicity.