Linguistics has become increasingly important to me in teaching. What I’ve learned is that some of my creative writing students who’ve also enrolled in linguistics-leaning literature courses of mine have found most transferable from those courses not the literary history or interpretation, ironically, but some of the linguistics. One creative writing student began to experiment with sentence construction after learning that linguists describe the way language represents experiential processes as falling into six categories. So, my student asked, why are there six kinds and not seven? Can there be a seventh? What would an experiential process look like that defies the basic types, and what would such a process require of language? These would seem to be speculative questions far removed from the creative writing page, but they speak to how linguistics can pivot a writer towards noticing whatness and thisness not only in language but in literature too.
The point being that some of my students appear to be interested in how linguistics (and there are so many kinds!) offers them ways of speaking and writing about the language that surrounds them and that roils inside them. Linguistics objectifies (yes, reifies) language, from public language to inner speech — including literary language in written and oral forms. But it can enable students to articulate in minute detail why it is they respond the way they do to what they hear (and say) as much as to what they read and write.
Not that I plan to have students exclusively reading linguistics texts in a creative writing class; nor do I wish upon them me lecturing about tongue parts, phonetic variance, or grammatical constituents. Linguistics informs, nonetheless, the way I talk about student writing and the course readings I choose. And when successful, the disciplinary trappings of linguistics — its jargon, methods, theory, and history — remain hidden in plain sight.
The line that makes for a distinction between art and life is sometimes presented as “obvious” by critics and as “unheard of” by poets. Both fail to detail how this line gets to be drawn exactly there. A new poem can draw the line somewhere else. One may perceive the moving targets of such “distinction,” poem to poem, by differentiating and identifying stylistic effects.
Of course, what’s great is that students already have a sophisticated knowledge about the language they fluently speak, even though that knowledge may be unconscious (as it mostly is inside us all) — intuitable, yes, but in a profoundly presupposed way, by everything they say and hear. I reach for linguistics in the creative writing classroom because every teaching year I ask again: how do I introduce formally challenging signage to an undergraduate creative driving class so we can all get drunk? How do I present formally novative poetry to self-immersives (as I was once) who have not yet snorkelled through enough variation in the waters of their repetition — that is to say, have not yet accumulated enough conceptual and experiential differences in their institutional lives as readers of literary and cultural norms and conventions? Enough, anyway, to help themselves grasp — “make clutches with the hand” — at a poem that just might be — fumbling past the insecurity gates of indifference — difficult when whetted and slippery when dry?
To answer questions about difficulty (questions that teachers experience regarding almost any subject) with a lecture — pointing out the literary and cultural norms and conventions operating in a given poem, and the history and aesthetics “placing the work in context” — now has little appeal to me, at least in a creative writing class. Instead of reaching down through literature with a capital “L” for resources to help deliver this kind of lecture, what about reaching across, I’ve thought, to another discipline entirely, if it can articulate just as well “the set toward the message as such”?2 There is a study at the intersection of linguistics and literature — stylistics — which has been around for over half a century (it emerged between new criticism and cultural studies): a “method of textual interpretation in which primacy of place is assigned to language.”3 And what I find compelling about some of its theory and application is the argument that one can present formally challenging poetry by drawing from the students’ own already developed sense of norms — not their sometimes weak sense of literary norms, but their strong — even rigid — sense of the social norms of everyday language use. As when a student exclaims, on first reading Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons: “You can’t write ‘Roast potatoes for,’ because that’s an incomplete sentence.” My fantasy rejoinder: “You have a remarkable and highly developed — even rigid, as in righteous — sense of the norms of everyday language use. Bravo! Let me ask you. What if some poetry draws a reader’s attention precisely to the presence of those norms, even if in order to do so it must contravene them, as Stein has done?”
The idea is to help articulate what it is that any language-user already intuits about acceptable language use (namely, that it is acceptable language use); to show that a linguistic conditioning allows them, at once, to confidently adopt the obvious viewpoint on acceptable language use, to forget they have done so, and to dismiss anything so obvious from reflexive awareness. Turns out that by encouraging recognition of the implicitly agreed-on conventions of acceptable language use, one is able to perceive the constructedness of literary language as well.
That is, stylistics often works from the easily criticized premise that literary language is a “deviation” in language (but I don’t know of any instance of language that isn’t). Thus a stylistics analysis will contrast a present literary deviation to a notionally pre-existing language norm. I’ve asked students to read the following opening two stanzas of “Berkeley St Bridge” by John Wieners:
Petrified the world
wherein we walk.
Frozen the fields.4
“Rewrite these two sentence-like word sequences using the most normative syntax and grammar conceivable and without altering word choice.” Many students come up with something like:
The world is petrified where we walk. The fields are frozen.
I’m then in a position to ask about the literary effects caused by the poet’s words deviating in the way they do from the notional grammatical norms guiding the rewrite. The work of creative writing can lie in the pedagogical direction of collectively making manifest norms at play in the classroom when confronted by literary texts (norms that may underlie hasty judgments upon those texts). Even acceptable literary use, today perceived as cliché-chic perhaps, once may have been perceived as deviating from language norms, or may be perceived as doing so one day. Wieners’s lines are arch, haute-poetic with a capital “P.” Yet such archaisms of reversed subject-verb ordering can paradoxically lead to perceiving the grounds of change.
1 This essay is a revised excerpt from a paper delivered at the Canadian Creative Writers and Writing Programs conference, Humber Institute of Technology, Toronto, May 10–13, 2012.
2 Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Language in Literature, eds. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987), 68.
3 Paul Simpson, Stylistics (New York: Routledge, 2010), 2.
4 John Wieners, “Berkeley St Bridge,” in Selected Poems (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1972), 91.