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  • Rhetorics of Literacy: The Cultivation of American Dialect Poetry by Nadia Nurhussein
  • April C. Logan
Rhetorics of Literacy: The Cultivation of American Dialect Poetry. By Nadia Nurhussein. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2013. 292 pp. $64.95.

Did readers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries read, recite, and hear American dialect poetry the same way we do today? This is the question at the center of Nadia Nurhussein’s impressively-researched Rhetorics of Literacy: The Cultivation of American Dialect Poetry. Nurhussein offers surprisingly novel answers to this question in her formalist study, reconstructing the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through astute textual analyses of the works of the well- and lesser-known dialect poets Bret Harte, James Whitcomb Riley, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Maggie Pogue Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay, along with a range of print culture, including but not limited to editorials, book reviews, newspaper advertisements, personal letters, and drawings. She “[explores] the production and reception of dialect in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American poetry, examining the contexts in which dialect poetry was written, read, and performed” (4). Although she offers original perspectives on longstanding debates about the works of Hughes, Harper, Dunbar, and McKay, Nurhussein’s greatest contribution with Rhetorics of Literacy: The Cultivation of American Dialect Poetry is her detailing of dialect poetry’s history in America.

Another important insight that Nurhussein develops over the course of six chapters is that dialect poetry is a paradoxical genre in that, as much as people associate it with replicating speech and illiteracy in particular, it is, in reality, a particular poet’s imaginative rendering of the acquisition and possession of the ability to read and write in Standard English. In the Introduction, she explains, “Throughout this book, I use the terms ‘dialect’ and ‘literary dialect’ to describe the limitless ways in which writers evoke so-called nonstandard speech in written English and not speech itself. Written English does not correspond to a particular spoken dialect; thus orthographical alteration wrongly suggests deviation from a correct standard” (6–7). This theory makes it possible for her to reevaluate the bodies of criticism on Dunbar, Riley, and McKay that have focused largely on questions of whether their dialects are realistic representations of their heritages or, at the very least, the personas portrayed in their dialect poetry.

Late nineteenth-century America underwent several historic transitions that, according to Nurhussein, shaped the projects of these poets: increases in literacy among African Americans and Euro-Americans, “nostalgia for a primarily oral culture” (9), and the “emergence of the figure of the silent dialect poetry reader” (10). For example, “Strange spellings, in the forms of both dialect writing and orthographies encouraging phonetic spelling reform … [End Page 98] reflected cultural dissatisfaction with the inaccuracy of written English and the desire to have American spelling correspond closely to the way people really spoke,” notes Nurhussein (9). In other words, dialect poets joined advocates of spelling reform, educators, and dictionary publishers, such as Webster, in a national dialogue about the very nature of the English language and how it could be better understood through their bound and performed poetry. Debates about educational opportunities for African Americans, shifting attitudes toward oral culture(s), misconceptions about the relationship between dialects and literacy, and racial prejudice also greatly influenced Harte, Riley, Harper, Pogue, Hughes, and McKay.

In Chapter 1, “The Difficulty of Dialect Poetry,” Nurhussein argues that James Whitcomb Riley’s success and artistry embody late nineteenth- and twentieth-century American attitudes towards language, orality, and literacy. In addition, she articulates her criterion for evaluating the level of difficulty involved with reading a particular poem: “Because I argue that the most unintelligible feature of dialect poetry, the feature inhibiting our ability to ‘read it at an optimum speed’ and the feature to which most detractors of dialect poetry objected, is spelling and not, for example, syntax, I use the number of dialect spellings as my measure of readability” (30). The moderate readability of Riley’s poetry and the venues in which it appeared—elocution books rather than school textbooks and “highbrow” magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly—help scholars see that a...

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