The Death of Literature by Alvin Kernan (review)

Book Reviews91 the French for their linguistic chauvinism, past and present. The obvious implication by Swiggers, however, is that all language users are biased. Paul Roberge concludes the middle section of the book with a chapter on the development of Afrikaans. This chapter has relevance for linguists and other scholars not only because Afrikaner linguistics illustrates some of the many complex ideological factors involved in language development, but because the politics of South Africa continue to hold world interest. Part three contains the last four chapters and embraces several key issues concerning language and ideology. Roy Harris begins this section by revealing why, how, eind to what extent linguistic science is capable ofdecontextualizing language, basing much of his argument on important precepts of Mill and Rousseau. Following Harris, a chapter by Pieter Desmet, Johan Roorych, and Swiggers presents an examination of several dictionaries from the French Revolutionary era, an examination showing the difficulty in separating linguistic form from content, meaning from ideology. Next, Peter Mühlhäusler demonstrates the primacy ofwriting over speech, as documented in the contact between South Pacific Islanders and Europeans. He shows that the advent of literacy in non-literate societies, regardless of the language used, ultimately leads to the immersion ofthe minority culture's leuiguage, customs, and vedues within the larger cultural group. The final contributor to this collection, Paul Laurendeau, challenges the tendency within contemporary linguistics toward "decontextualizing" and "ahistoricizing" the subject matter of linguistics. He proposes instead "a historical-materialistic approach to the history of linguistics" (208), an approach demanding the recognition of our propensity to politicize our subject—whatever it may be. Only the book's last essay suffers any from the impenetrability for which linguists are often cited. On the whole, as a scholarly text of core readings for linguistics courses (with some application, as in chapter two, to literary criticism), Ideologies ofLanguage may indeed prove to be a widely read and enduring text. WnLLIAM MATTA Emporia State University ALVIN KERNAN. TAe Death of Literature. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. 230 p. One major problem confronting Alvin Kernan in TAe Death ofLiterature is the absence of a corpse. And just to make matters worse, the putative victim continues to fill libraries and bookstores faster than shelves cein be built, to appear on endless talk shows plugging its latest offspring, eind to consume the lives of most who read these pages. So in what sense is literature "dead"? To answer that question you have to understand Kernan's assumptions about literature's mode of existence, about how literature once "lived." The literature whose passing Kernan marks is literature as social institution. There yet remain, he admits, books (or texts anyway) and readers 92Rocky Mountain Review (albeit barely literate ones), authors and critics and teachers, but our culture has ceased to invest these phenomena with the same high seriousness that it invests in the law or science or any of the more established institutions. And according to Kernan, unless literature can offer culture something positive soon, it's headed toward the status of a cultural curiosity, more akin to "the Peking opera" than to physics. Initially, Kernan's rhetoric would seem to resonate well with recent canonist and anti-deconstruction jeremiads. These groups, too, have been declaring literature—ofthe right sort—dead for a decade. Serious literature, we're told, was murdered by the forces of relativism, narcissism, TV, politics, and bad prose—all of which appear in Kernan's lineup of suspects as well. Indeed many portions of Death are guaranteed to send murmurs of assent rippling through the literary right. In Kernan's treatment of "l'affaire de Man," for instance, one hears echoes ofSam Johnson briskly dismissing ideedism with a kick and a quip: "It confronts deconstruction with the monstrous and passionately felt fact of the Holocaust and asks, is this too only a texfí" (187). In the end, however, Kernan's analysis offers cold comfort to the right emd left alike. If the left often uses literature to apologize for its dubious politics, Kernan argues, the right often uses it to promote venal self interests. And Kernan dismisses out ofhand the right's mystification and canonization of literature...