Queequeg's Coffin: Indigenous Literacies and Early American Literature

Abstract

Birgit Brander Rasmussen quotes Jean-Jacques Rousseau from his “Essay on the Origins of Languages” (published posthumously in 1781): “the depicting of objects is appropriate to Savage people; signs of words and propositions, to a barbaric people, and the alphabet to civilized peoples” (pp. 28–29). She argues that this ethnocentric stage theory is false and inhibited efforts to decipher Mayan and Egyptian writing, which are not so pictographic as European philologists at first assumed. Moreover, European languages are not rigorously alphabetic or phonemic, and we Anglophones use many emoticons, mathematical symbols, and popular icons such as I ♥ NY. Queequeg's Coffin builds upon recent books by Matt Cohen and Phil Round, and other “innovative scholarship that pays attention to previously overlooked sites of literacy and to the intersections between radically different semiotic systems and textual traditions” (p. 140). She therefore aims to add to the study of “the encounter and conflict between indigenous and European forms of literacy” (ibid.).