English 271Matthew Vaughn

SUMMARY ANALYSIS

Complete MLA citation:Leigh, Phillip. “Literary Forensics: Fingerprinting The Literary Dialects of Three Works Of Plantation Fiction.”

Texas Studies In Literature & Language 54.3 (2012): 357-380. Academic Search Premier. Web. 21 Jan. 2013.

Summary Analysis:In Phillip Leigh’s article, entitled “Literary Forensics: Fingerprinting The Literary Dialects of Three

Works of Plantation Fiction.” He attempts to investigate the literary dialects used for mainly African American speakers in plantation fiction (stories written in the south during or just after the time of slavery). Leigh introduces his article by referring to the character Wilson in Pudd’nhead Wilson by Mark Twain. He talks about Wilson’s obsession with fingerprinting the citizens of Dawson’s Landing in that story and continues to discuss the scientific relevance of fingerprints on a larger scale (357). Leigh takes this idea of fingerprinting and applies it to literary criticism by claiming each author leaves a “fingerprint” of their social boundaries and/or ignorance by the literary dialects they give to characters in their novels. He cites Michele Birnbaum and Gavin Jones as critics of late-nineteenth-century authors who dug cultural trenches between Standard English speakers (Whites) and nonstandard speakers (African Americans) (358). Leigh continues about the relevance of literary dialogue regarding literary criticism by citing the case of Henry Louis Gates’ and Hazel Carby’s differing interpretations of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s representation of African American speech in Iola Leroy. Gates claimed that Harper’s invented language was one of the most rich and insightful representations of a little known dialect; Carby argued that the language was based of ignorance and perceived inferiority and was of little to no value. Leigh argues that if two of the leading literary critics of the time can have such starkly different interpretations then this justifies a deeper look into the area (358).The article then shifts its attention to technology and how it can be incorporated into reading further into literary texts. While Leigh expresses his respect for Birnbaum and Jones he believes there is more to be uncovered than just merely context of the genre and era. He cites Lisa Minnick and her book Dialect and Dichotomy as being forerunners of incorporating computational tools to find linguistic patterns within literary texts (359). Leigh discusses how he partially agrees with Minnick but expresses concern over such tools can only answer questions of authenticity, and authenticity for this time frame is a vague, if not, impossible concept. He reasons whether or not literary dialects and literary critics can be treated scientifically or not. This thought eventually leads him to conclude that technology and computational tools could help do vast amounts of tedious reading that many critics do not intend on doing (363). At this point, Leigh decides that a computational reading tool could help distinguish different patterns in dialect and aid him on his attempt to understand plantation fiction of the late 19th century. With a concrete foundation, Leigh begins to set up his experiment. He chooses three books to test: Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings (1881), by Joel Chandler Harris; In Ole Virginia (1895), by Thomas Nelson Page; and The Conjure Woman (1899), by Charles W. Chesnutt. He then used the Text Encoding Initiative (a computer based word recognition system) to scan for what he called “nonstandard types and tokens” (364). These nonstandard types and tokens were what would represent unofficial words used by the authors while speaking for African Americans. Leigh chose books with similar frame stories, where a white narrator would begin the book then hand the story off to a speaking African American character with the White narrator coming in briefly

at the end. Before testing, Leigh came up with three hypotheses: Literary dialects are not, in a broad sense, drastically different from standard written English. Second, the percentage of literary dialect in the plantation stories would be quite high. Third, the ratios of nonstandard items in the entire texts, in all quoted speech, and in quoted speech from dialect characters would be roughly the same (365). Leigh ran the experiment by testing words that were quoted by the African American narrators along with the

words the African American narrators used to narrate. To briefly summarize the results, Chesnutt used 38.20% nonstandard token words, Harris tallied 36.34% tokens and Page tallied 25.05% nonstandard tokens (366). Leigh was quick to defend Chesnutt as not necessarily being racist or even ignorant regarding African American dialects. He argued that these results prove little in the political aspect of Chesnutt’s writing; it merely shows the diversity in his language when his characters are speaking a different dialect (366). An important note to add was that Leigh also tested the texts for vocabulary to find which text used the most diverse language of the three. Chesnutt proved to have to most varying language, which Leigh speculated is why his percentage was the highest for nonstandard token words. From these results Leigh decided to ask three questions to be discussed in his subsequent paragraphs (371).His first question was how different are the literary dialects from standard written English. Leigh questions

whether authors create fictitious dialects for their characters to use, especially in his three examples. He finds compelling evidence to support this because all three authors had over 25% nonstandard English words in their stories (367). His second question is how much literary dialect appears in the dialect texts. This is basically asking how much of the story is told through dialogue and quotations. With the plantation texts, Leigh found that over 60% of the story was told through this “literary dialogue” (368). His Final questions for discussion was how different are the literary dialect texts from one another. While Leigh hypothesized that the texts would be closely related they ranged anywhere from 50% total nonstandard (types and tokens) to 37%. This could be rationalized by the fact that Page (the author who wrote the least non-standard types and tokens) was more concerned about readability than authenticity (371).Leigh eventually concludes that his overall results were inconclusive. He remains vocal about not passing

judgment over the authors of his plantation texts and they critics should merely take the text as text (375). Leigh never draws a parallel between the results he gathered and racism in any of the texts he examined. He does praise technology and believes it can lend a useful hand to the rest of the literary world (376). That being said, he claims nothing that he has tested negates the earlier speculation of late 19th century critics, he states he believes a slow paced fusion of the two disciplines should continue. Leigh criticizes his own tests inability to answer most of the questions he raised, mainly due to the small sample size that he tested. He ends the article by praising while also warning of the marriage between social sciences and computation tools (376).Texas Studies in Literature and Language is an established academic journal of literary criticism based out of

Austin, Texas. The University of Texas Press publishes the journal. Kurt Heinzelman is the editor in chief, located at The University of Texas at Austin. Phillip Leigh completed his Doctorate program at the University of Texas at Austin in the summer of 2011. He works there now as an English professor. I believe this article failed in its mission to explore southern dialects in plantation fiction. It was missing texts that could better contrast his numbers; if it had included northern fiction showing the percentage of nonstandard tokens then there would be a standard to reference. By comparing only three texts from the same area he lacked variety and contrast. This article did however open a door for a new branch of research in literary criticism. I believe the marriage between technology and literary criticism is fast approaching. Computational linguistics is a prime example of how well language and technology compliment each other. I think this study is ground breaking in that respect.