Language and Meaning: An American Tradition

Abstract

SCHOLARS have been remiss in not bestowing enough attention on nineteenth-century American thinkers whose assessments of the nature of language provide a sharp focus on American Romantic literature and parallel some of the concerns of contemporary literary theorists. Although in our own intellectual history we do not find a unique systematization of such topics as coherence or signification-a body of texts to rival Nietzsche's, for example-we do have several thinkers whose ideas about language offer important counterpoint not only to the aesthetic achievement of writers in the American Renaissance who grappled with similar philosophical problems but also to the obsessive concern with semantics evident among contemporary theorists. Until we have recognized the relevance of the linguistic speculation of people like A. B. Johnson and Horace Bushnell (who occupy opposite ends of a spectrum of nineteenth-century American assessments of language and meaning) to the artistic enterprise of Thoreau, Melville, and other of their contemporaries, we neglect an important but little-understood current in American thought, one which connects the early nineteenth century's interest in philology to the explorations into semantics by C. S. Peirce, Ferdinand de Saussure, and the literary modernists. The reason for the lack of sustained interest in American language study is not hard to uncover. Put quite simply, it involves the fact that many American theorists initially developed their ideas within an ideological framework which by modern consensus is now not so relevant as that elaborated by Kant or Hegel. Indeed, as I have shown elsewhere, the Americans' interest in the philosophy of language, even among the most important literary artists, revolved