Wallace’s Dialects

Mary Shapiro

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781501371134
• eBook ISBN: 9781501348488
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistics
• Index: Literature

Mary Shapiro explores the use of regional and ethnic dialects in the works of David Foster Wallace, not just as a device used to add realism to dialogue, but as a vehicle for important social commentary about the role language plays in our daily lives, how we express personal identity, and how we navigate social relationships.

Wallace's Dialects straddles the fields of linguistic criticism and folk linguistics, considering which linguistic variables of Jewish-American English, African-American English, Midwestern, Southern, and Boston regional dialects were salient enough for Wallace to represent, and how he showed the intersectionality of these with gender and social class. Wallace's own use of language is examined with respect to how it encodes his identity as a white, male, economically privileged Midwesterner, while also foregrounding characteristic and distinctive idiolect features that allowed him to connect to readers across implied social boundaries.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Series Editor’s Introduction
• 1 Language, Linguistics, and Literary Dialectology
• 2 Foreigners and Foreignness
• 3 Ethnicity and Segregation
• 4 Ethnicity and Assimilation
• 5 Regionality and the White Working Class
• 6 Texan Pride and Southern Shame
• 7 Midwestern and Rural
• 8 Boston and Urban
• 9 “Dave Wallace” and His Readers
• 10 Language and Humanity
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright