22-Twenty-Two Young Indiana Writers: Winners of the National Council of Teachers of English 1978 Achievement Awards ed. by Howard K. Nixon (review)

BOOK REVIEWS77 Alleen Pace Nilsen et al., Sexism and Language. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1977. 200 p. Sexism-in-language studies currently face a danger: that of alienating nonfeminists and hence creating polarization rather than increased awareness and communication. It is undeniably true that many persons perceive the feminist linguist as an enraged being, deranged by an ungodly mélange of Whorfianism and consciousness-raising, attempting to make a meteorologist call a tropical disturbance a himicane. Yet, starting with Mary Key Ritchie's 1970 MLA paper on the topic, the implicit characterization of sex role in language has attracted much principled semantic study and interested such established investigators as R. Lakoff (1975). Hence the importance of essays, such as several of those in Sexism and Language, that impressively demonstrate the possibility of doing carefully-elaborated work in this controversial area. Alleen Pace Nilsen's "Sexism in the Language of Marriage" is an accessible but substantive presentation. Her corpus is exceptionally wellselected , limited to current usage among educated speakers (it seems singularly pointless to castigate past generations for calling women frail blossoms). Particularly worthwhile is the identification of expressions that presuppose only women aspire to marriage or concern themselves with family. The essay goes beyond its inquiry into sex role to augment the reader's overall awareness of semantic phenomena. Nilsen's "Sexism as Shown through the English Vocabulary" and Julia P. Stanley's paper on gender-marking touch upon the sorest issues in this area of studies, particularly the problematical existence of the generic person in English. Some readers will remain convinced that masculine forms can also function as forms unmarked for gender, but they will have to admit that the opposing proposition can be supported with rational arguments. It should be mentioned that not all essays included are equally worthwhile . For instance, an examination of the oratory of opponents of women's suffrage exhibits such (justifiable) outrage that analysis suffers. However, the presence of conscientious and insightful presentations more than compensates for the weaker portions of the volume. NAOMI LINDSTROM, University of Texas Howard K. Nixon, ed. 22-Twenty-Two Young Indiana Writers: Winners of the National Council of Teachers of English 1978 Achievement Awards. Muncie: Ball State University, 1979. 36 p. For seventeen years, the English Department at Ball State University has supported the NCTE writing achievement awards by publishing a sample of the work of the Indiana winners. This active concern on the part of a university department is outstanding when compared to the common attitudes of university English departments that cease to ignore the high 78ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW schools only when they lament the woeful inability of high school graduates to read and write. Ball State's encouragement of student writers may be small, but it is a solid, positive step. This little pamphlet collects twenty-two complete offerings by the winning high school juniors. All entrants submitted a sample of their writing and were asked to write a sixty minute essay on rebels in society. The pamphlet includes a number of those impromptu essays as well as fiction, opinion essays and even an essay on "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." While the publication of the pamphlet is designed to encourage writers and sustain the program, it may be of practical value to those of us who use student writing in composition courses. The writing of these juniors compares favorably with the standard writing in composition courses and could compliment the writing of students in the course. Perhaps we could encourage the high school writer in each of our states through publication and by extension, perhaps the publication of the good student writing we receive in all of our classes in college could nurture the kind of desire and care that produces good writing. JIM RUPPERT, Navajo Community College Maureen Quilligan, The Language ofAllegory: Defining the Genre. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979. 305 p. A curious contradiction exists in literary studies concerning allegory. On one hand, the term is often used so loosely as to be virtually meaningless in its underdistinctiveness. On the other hand, there is a certain loathing, even among serious scholars, for classic allegorical literature. Quilligan's...