TY - JOUR
AB - Hefner, Brooks E. The Word on the Streets: The American Language of Vernacular Modernism. Charlottesville, VA; London: University of Virginia Press, 2017. 296 pp. $35.00. ISBN 978–0–8139–4041–0. Hefner offers a revisionist study of North American Modernism from the viewpoint of vernacular language use. He argues that the vernacular, as often used in popular forms of fiction, filtered into and strongly affected high-brow experimentation. His reconsideration of American Modernism fits into the paradigm of Modernist writing elsewhere, especially on the imaginary margins of the former British Empire, where writers experimented with a radical extension of genteel English vocabulary and syntax, drawing their energies from local and vernacular sources. The vernacular is defined here as a linguistic fiction: the language of the street as represented in the American fiction of the 1910s and 1920s; a democratic linguistic experience emerging from popular, ethnic and working-class genres of literature, characterized by interaction between speech forms and meant to overcome the ascendancy of ‘English’. Hefner locates the provenance of this linguistic struggle in Mark Twain’s ironically self-reflexive treatment of the (im)possibility of translating spoken dialectal forms into phonetic transcription. Then he carries out a systematic inquiry into the theoretical practices as put forward, foremost, in the magazines of the age such as Translation and H. L. Mencken’s polemical writings on the subject, bluntly challenging the notion of a monolithic, high-brow and linguistically polite, transatlantic English-language Modernism. Hefner explores numerous uses of American slang in as many genres, such as Ring Lardner’s and Anita Loos’s parodic social commentaries, Anzia Yezierska’s popular fiction on ethnic assimilation (which mapped English vocabulary onto Yiddish syntax), 1920s and 1930s hard-boiled crime fiction (which juxtaposed expressionist violent jargon with ‘genteel small talk’), and African-American fiction outside the more widely-discussed writers of the Harlem Renaissance. All demonstrate the hybridity of the modern American language, adapted to the ‘real’ rather than realism, and feeding on native and immigrant, socially and ethnically diverse, but mainly ‘low-brow’, sources. These voices fostered Modernist experimentation and, challenging nineteenth-century modes of realist narration, created a genuinely American Modernism rather than merely importing British or European formulas. Out of respect for the vernacular, Hefner calls on a national(ist) discourse to counter now-fashionable transatlantic or hemispheric approaches. However, his claim that American Modernism is distinguished by being more experimental than other vernacular literatures of the age is open to debate – see Scotland, where Modernism coupled with not only nationalism but also extreme left-wing politics and extreme linguistic experiments. It remains ironic, though, that Joyce’s Irish vernacular Modernism has become a staple reference point in transatlantic studies alongside the more conservatively English-language-centred Modernism of Virginia Woolf, and that both are given meticulous attention in this study on vernacular Modernism while other genuinely vernacular Modernist projects are sadly overlooked, such as that of the Scottish Hugh MacDiarmid, who was patrolling the same linguistic field at the very same time and was celebrating the potentials of the vernacular with much the same vigour and in a similarly unforgiving vein as Mencken. Hefner’s essential study is a relevant reminder that the rhetorical and stylistic toolkit of Modernism was put to use to assert the linguistic and cultural autonomy of communities seen from London as marginal. He convincingly argues that the complex phenomenon simply referred to as ‘Modernism’ needs even more deconstruction for us to perceive it in its multifaceted reality and as a movement which empowered English-speaking writers with a linguistic means to articulate themselves in a form of speech that was at once universal and local. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press for the Court of the University of St Andrews. All rights reserved. The University of St Andrews is a charity registered in Scotland: No. SC013532. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Hefner, Brooks E. The Word on the Streets: The American Language of Vernacular Modernism
JF - Forum for Modern Language Studies
DO - 10.1093/fmls/cqz042
DA - 2019-10-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/hefner-brooks-e-the-word-on-the-streets-the-american-language-of-UXG1ameEpc
SP - 495
VL - 55
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -