21L.705  Major Authors

“Speak the speech, I pray you,” says Hamlet in his advice to the Players, but more often in a Literature class we read the speech and thereby miss an opportunity to hear voices in a literary text. In the case of Mark Twain, an accomplished orator, performer, humorist, and oral storyteller, these voices may include the Western dialects of African slaves, white farmers, itinerant preachers, con men, homeless children, and ruffians; the Eastern twang of Yankee factory workers and telephone operators; the cultured tones of actors, lawyers, doctors, and young ladies; and the sounds of Malory, Shakespeare, Cervantes, the Bible, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, P. T. Barnum, Abraham Lincoln, and Walt Whitman.  In this class, we will study the language of Twain’s novels and Twain’s America by tracing its oral and written sources; by listening to songs, stories, oral histories, and dramatic adaptations and monologues; by practicing public speaking, theatrical performance, and reading aloud; and by researching the cultural texts that inspired Twain’s writing and which he remixed and adapted in works like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and Pudd’nhead Wilson.  We will address such questions as: What are the assumptions we make about characters on the basis of how they speak? Who gets to speak for and in America?  How are dialects efficient, comic, or meaningful?  How does Twain’s language survive and get read in the twenty-first century?  How do we evaluate writers who adapt and adopt the speech patterns of others? Can they (rightfully, accurately, ethically) speak their speech?