Alien Voices from the Street: Demotic Modernism in Modern Scots Writing

Abstract

Modern Scottish writing in Scots has been characterized by two apparently contradictory impulses: an interest in direct and demotic utterance, and a move towards a degree of linguistic estrangement. In either case, the end result has been to destabilize the cultural and expressive hegemony of standard English and to liberate a sense of linguistic and imaginative energy. Of course there will always be a degree ofdefamiliarization in any attempt to catch the actual phonetics of street speech, as in the poetry of Tom Leonard, but a more self-consciously literary and modernistic dislocation can also be found in the prose ofJames Kelman and Alasdair Gray, neither of whom is any less concerned than Leonard is with the position of the ordinary 'man in the street'. (The gender bias of this idiom is, for once, accurate.) Leonard and Kelman have been particularly articulate in their opposition to 'English' and the prevailingly middle-class systems of culture and education which have done so much to silence or to undervalue the