Why Can't the English Teach Their Children How to Speak? Matt Cohen (bio) and Samantha Gilmore (bio) American culture of the early republic has long been described as a revolution against British culture. The development of American literary style was, consequently, studied through the ways in which American writers supposedly distinguished themselves from British writers: a matter of negations, creations, novelties, or inevitable expressions of the land or spirit. Ezra Tawil's Literature, American Style: The Originality of Imitation in the Early Republic (Philadelphia, 2018) joins a chorus of critics of early American literary exceptionalism, insisting that American literary style initially grew less out of a push back against than a dialectical embrace of British literary patterns. Like Leonard Tennenhouse and Elisa Tamarkin most recently, Tawil insists that American writers were not Anglophobic so much as Anglophilic.1 Tawil approaches the "uncomfortable problem of cultural indebtedness" by tracing the origins of "national distinctiveness" and outlining how such an aspiration became embedded in literary style (13). He distills the way this question has tended to be posed: "Is American literature an allochthonous body of Old World learning and letters that has been transferred to the New World, or is it an autochthonous growth from American earth? From where does its prestige and vitality originate, its transatlantic origins or its cisatlantic destination?" (16). Tawil's answer is, in effect, both: the "American voice" was derived "out of a deliberate operation of cultural negation or subtraction" (35). It took a lot of thinking about transatlantic connections, Tawil observes, for white American authors to come up with what could be claimed as homegrown literature. Paradoxically, U.S. literature by Anglo-American writers from 1780 to 1800 exhibits both a self-conscious differentiation from European norms and a preservation of those same tendencies—particularly when the norms were models of how to be literarily distinctive. Tawil calls this process—in an apropos echo of John Keats—"negative affiliation" (17). His evidence comes partly from [End Page 525] literary marketplace positioning but is more significantly drawn from style. The British conversation about "taste" in writing formed the imaginative framework within which American stylistic differentiation emerged. The specific stylistic straw men were Britain's supposedly "hypercultivated and artificial" writing, counteracted by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's earnest "incorrectness"; its "art of the polished and the beautiful," contrasted with Charles Brockden Brown's erratic gothic sublime; its fictions of "artifice, disguise, and hypocrisy," which writers such as Susanna Rowson and Hannah Webster Foster would counter with their "artless, sincere, and plainspoken" style (11). These contrasts were already built into British writing, Tawil observes, in infra-Anglophone struggles over religious and class morality. Tawil's first chapter on "Noah Webster's American-Style English" is compelling. Webster walked a tightrope in moderating a linguistic debate between his American lexicographical project and that of Samuel Johnson. "Webster's solution to the problem of a national language," Tawil writes, "was not to invent a new vernacular but rather to 'reform the mode of spelling' " (35). But he also did not elect to uncover the elements of vocabulary or syntax that North American denizens had invented or evolved that differentiated them from English speakers elsewhere, as later writers such as Walt Whitman would do. A top-down change of style was prescribed instead, one that impacted the "middle register between surface and depth, form and content" (39). Tawil observes that this approach, a "modal change," was a model for how imaginative writers would proceed: like keeping the English alphabet while adding a diacritical mark to indicate pronunciation, literary stylists retained European precedents but in tasteful, virtuous modes. It may be equally significant for thinking about style as a cultural phenomenon to note that Webster's plan didn't work: articulated as a reform as such, Webster's plan drew public mockery.2 Still, Tawil's useful caution is that while it's tempting to see in Webster's rhetoric a "linguistic declaration of independence," in practical fact his propositions were rooted in "a deeply dialectical understanding of transatlantic cultural relations, the balance between tradition and innovation, and the interplay of cultural adoption and adaptation" (41–42). It wasn...
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Feb 24, 2020
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