On the question of the gendering of the English tongue, I heartily recommend
Margaret Ferguson's terrific new book _Dido's Daughters: Literacy, Gender,
and Empire in Early Modern England and France_ (Chicago, 2003). Among the
advantages of English in the early modern period was that it could
(eventually) be differentiated from languages with which English was
uncomfortably allied or to which it was indebted -- French, Welsh, Gaelic,
Scots -- languages that all "shared the paradoxical (and labile) quality of
being 'abnormal' with respect to a norm associated with English masculinity
[, w]hether the abnormality took the form of too little masculinity
(effeminacy) or too much (barbaric aggressivity)" (Ferguson 161)..
Katherine Eggert
Associate Professor of English
Associate Chair and Director of Graduate Studies
Department of English
University of Colorado
226 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309-0226
tel and Voicemail (303) 492-8643
fax (303) 492-8904
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----- Original Message -----
From: "Kenneth Gross" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, February 10, 2004 7:54 PM
Subject: Re: what was English good for?
> Some years ago William Kerrigan wrote an essay entitled "The Articulation
> of the Ego in the English Renaissance," published in The Literary Freud,
> edited by Joseph Smith. I recall a somewhat relentless but suggestive
> account of the psychodynamics of moving between Latin (the Father tongue)
> and English (the mother tongue).
>
> One of the things English was good for, I suppose, was to translate the
> literature of other languages into, on which process Tom Greene wrote so
> eloquently.
>
> Ken Gross
>
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