Singular Voice Research Articles

The Legacy of Paul Goodman

Abstract On August 2 of this year, Paul Goodman died of a heart attack at his farm in North Stratford, New Hampshire. As poet, scholar, essayist, novelist and social critic, his articulate disregard of conventions profoundly challenged accepted moral and social beliefs in American society. As Susan Sontag said in a memorable eulogy in the New York Review of Books, “There has not been such a convincing, genuine, singular voice in our language since D. H. Lawrence.” He passionately criticized the institutions of American education, insisting against all contemporary trends that our colleges and universities should be the preserve of a “community of scholars.” A native New Yorker, he became widely known with the publication of Growing Up Absurd in 1956 and later addressed himself to questions of education in Compulsory Mis-education and The Community of Scholars. Although he lectured throughout the country and taught briefly at a number of colleges and universities, he never held a permanent faculty position at a major university. In the belief that people concerned with higher education should be reminded once again of the power of his indictments and the persuasiveness of his example, Change asked four people whom Goodman had deeply moved to discuss his beliefs and their influence: Nat Hentoff, staff writer for The New Yorker and author of Our Children Are Dying; Gloria Channon, a teacher in the New York public schools and author of Homework; George Dennison, author of The Lives of Children, an account of his experiences in a community free school on Manhattan's Lower East Side; and Wilbur Rippy, an adviser in the graduate program at the Bank Street College of Education. Their discussion ranged far beyond matters of higher education, as it had to if they were to be true to the richness and complexity of Paul Goodman's thought.

The Punctual and Segmentative Aspects of Verbs in Hopi

Verbs in the Hopi language are noteworthy for their very rich and expressive development of verbal aspects and voices. I shall say nothing in this paper of the nine voices (intransitive, transitive, reflexive, passive, semi-passive, resultative, extended passive, possessive, and cessative); and of the nine aspects (punctual, durative, segmentative, punctual-segmentative, inceptive, progressional, spatial, projective, and continuative) I shall deal with only two. It may be noted that there are no perfective and imperfective aspects; in fact Hopi does not in any way formalize as such the contrast between completion and incompletion of action. Its aspects formalize different varieties of the contrast between point-locus and extent-locus of phenomena, indifferently in time or space, or in both. Hopi also has three tenses: factual or present-past, future, and generalized or usitative. Hopi verbs belong to seven classes or conjugations having slightly different inflectional systems. Class 1, the largest and most creative class, contains a few categories not found in the other classes, among them the segmentative aspect. The simplex of the Class 1 verb is a bare root of the form CVCV, and is in the third person singular intransitive voice, punctual aspect, and present-past tense. The segmentative aspect is formed by final reduplication of this root plus the durative suffix -ta, and produces a change in the meaning of the simplex of the folloxving character: the phenomenon denoted by the root, shown in the punctual aspect as manifested about a point, becomes manifested as a series of repeated interconnected segments of one large phenomenon of a stretched-out segmental character, its extension usually being predominantly in one dimension, indifferently of space or time or both. The nature of the change can best be shown by examples. ha'ri it is bent in a rounded angle hari'rita it lies in a meandering line, making successive rounded angles (applied for instance to meander patterns in decoration)