Literary Slumming: Slang and Class in Nineteenth Century France by Eliza Jane Smith

Abstract

Reviewed by: Literary Slumming: Slang and Class in Nineteenth Century France by Eliza Jane Smith Amanda Dalola Smith, Eliza Jane. Literary Slumming: Slang and Class in Nineteenth Century France. Lexington Books, 2021. ISBN: 978-1793621146. Pp. 298. Combining sociolinguistic methods and literary analysis, this volume seeks to demonstrate how writers in the nineteenth century represented slang in French literature and ultimately helped define lower-class and criminal culture via linguistic means. True to its title, the book revolves around a concept the author coins "literary slumming," a sociolinguistic style shift in which writers from privileged backgrounds explore forbidden social realms via the appropriation of aspects of lower-class culture, and then fashion them for a bourgeois public in a way that creates a collective cultural image of what it means to be socially disadvantaged, criminal, immoral, or sexually deviant. The phenomenon is heavily mediated by the concept of "indexicality," a process in which context-bounded ways of speaking reference attached cultural ideologies like social class, gender, race, etc., in both referential, e.g., the overt use of informal tu pronouns, and non-referential ways, e.g., the use of a certain dialect, gestures, or slang. Because indexes are subject to an infinite number of interpretations, they exist within an "indexical field," a constellation of meanings that are fluid but ideologically linked. The author's main argument in this text is that the non-referential indexes of slang presented in nineteenth-century French literature are part of a larger adaptable system of ideological interpretation that witnessed a noticeable shift during this time: whereas slang in texts early on often served to index criminals, it later served to index hip Parisians or working-class prostitutes. A new indexical order emerged altogether in Victor Hugo's Les misérables, where slang was used for the first time to index victims, poverty, and social misery, performatively positioning its larger referential group of criminals and working-class figures as individuals in need of assistance from the upper classes. Following an introduction that situates the sociolinguistic framework, the text branches off into six thematic chapters, each exploring a different indexical value for nineteenth-century French slang: criminal code, embodied language, language politics, language of misery, language of Parisians, and language of whores. Within each chapter, discussion proceeds through a series of literary excerpts, each of which is analyzed in terms of its non-referential indexes informing the larger indexical field of slang at various moments in history. The book closes with an epilogue that contextualizes literary slumming even outside the confines of nineteenth-century French literature, e.g., during the Renaissance, in American and British writers, even among 21st-century white hip-hoppers. While advances in printing technology leading to the proliferation of serials for the public may have first accelerated it in the nineteenth century, the mechanism of literary slumming is still alive and well today, not only in literature, but also in music, film, and Internet culture, propagated by the continued presence of social, racial, and gender inequalities. [End Page 254] The book concludes with a call to arms for the dominated to reclaim their self-stylized languages (and not necessarily those popularized by outgroup writers) as an act of resistance against the dominant culture, a message that both literary scholars and sociolinguists alike will agree must never go out of style. [End Page 255] Amanda Dalola University of Minnesota Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French