Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgment
- Abbreviations and Editions Cited
- Introduction
- Part I The American Logocracy: The Nexus of Word and Act
- 1 Political and Linguistic Representation: Confidence or Distrust?
- 2 Language and Legal Constitutions: The Problem of Change and Who Governs
- Part II Political and Linguistic Corruption: The Ideological Inheritance
- Part III The American Language of Revolution and Constitutional Change
- Part IV From Logomachy to Civil War: The Politics of Language in Post-Revolutionary America
- Afterword
- Notes
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture
1 - Political and Linguistic Representation: Confidence or Distrust?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgment
- Abbreviations and Editions Cited
- Introduction
- Part I The American Logocracy: The Nexus of Word and Act
- 1 Political and Linguistic Representation: Confidence or Distrust?
- 2 Language and Legal Constitutions: The Problem of Change and Who Governs
- Part II Political and Linguistic Corruption: The Ideological Inheritance
- Part III The American Language of Revolution and Constitutional Change
- Part IV From Logomachy to Civil War: The Politics of Language in Post-Revolutionary America
- Afterword
- Notes
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture
Summary
“Distrust is a stage to confidence.” “I have confidence in distrust.”
Herman Melville, The Confidence-ManBesides, to distrust words, and indict them for the horrors that might slumber unobtrusively within them – isn't this, after all, the true vocation of the intellectual?
Václav Havel, “Words on Words”Call it misrepresentation: “Indian,” the name given to Native Americans; “America,” a name still appropriated to denominate the United States; “Lake George,” a name imposed on a lake “robbed,” Cooper writes, of “its original appellation of ’Horican‘”; “We, the people,” an inclusive term that excluded more people than it included; “person held to service,” the euphemism for a slave in the Constitution. The names of a people, the names on the land, the words of the Constitution all testify to a nature “disturb'd” by names and to the hold that the word has had over fact in a country invented by a declaration, governed by a constitution, and defended, in the words of Washington Irving's Mustapha Rub-a-Dub Keli Khan, “vi et lingua, that is to say, by force of tongues” (ILA, 144).
In several of the Salmagundi letters attributed to Mustapha and in The History of New York, Irving probes the nexus between word and act, language and violence, misrepresentation and tyranny in the American logocracy. Every man who has “the gift of the gab” in this state becomes “a soldier outright” (ibid.).
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- Information
- Representative WordsPolitics, Literature, and the American Language, 1776–1865, pp. 19 - 36Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993