The Materiality of Language

A critique of male-dominated modes of language use, their roots in higher education, their effects, and their spill over into popular culture.
David Bleich sees the human body, its affective life, social life, and political functions as belonging to the study of language. In The Materiality of Language, Bleich addresses the need to end centuries of limiting access to language and its many contexts of use. To recognize language as material and treat it as such, argues Bleich, is to remove restrictions to language access due to historic patterns of academic censorship and unfair gender practices. Language is understood as a key path in the formation of all social and political relations, and becomes available for study by all speakers, who may regulate it, change it, and make it flexible like other material things.
“A potentially foundational text in an emergent field [of] language studies, whose work is to break up the monopoly Linguistics and Philosophy have had on the study of language. . . . The insight that the affective operation of language is elided in nearly all approaches to [language] acquisition is brilliant and astounding. . . . The analysis of subject creation as an affective process of recognizing and sharing the same affective state and language as the means for materializing affective states . . . is fascinating and persuasive. . . . One of the book’s distinctive features is the use of gender as a key normative analytical lens throughout. It would be difficult to exaggerate how rare this is among language thinkers, and how productive it is for the arguments here.” —Mary Louise Pratt, New York University
“A powerful, first-rate book on a crucial topic. It offers a great interpretation of the sacralization and ascendancy of Latin as a language supporting what Bleich calls ‘an elite group of men.’ . . . This is a brilliant codebook to academic language and its coercions.” —Dale Bauer, University of Illinois</DESC>
literary theory;semiotics;literary criticism;philosophy;language philosophy;philosophy of language;gender studies;social science;language studies;communication studies;language arts;language disciplines;gender;sex;language;rhetoric;academic language;colloquial language;language political aspects;language sex differences;language and gender
LIT006000 LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory
PHI038000 PHILOSOPHY / Language
SOC032000 SOCIAL SCIENCE / Gender Studies
LAN004000 LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Communication Studies
9780253016508
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