In the preface to his collection of essays Living in Language: The Literary Word at Work in the World, David Bosworth argues that utterances–words, sentences, and sounds–express and shape human culture and relationships. Bosworth’s task is ambitious. In just nine essays, he explores communication’s primacy in creating and reflecting culture, human consciousness, and interpersonal relationships from ancient protolanguage to written text to contemporary forms of communication (social media, for example). Against such a wide-ranging backdrop, Bosworth gives insights into what on first consideration may seem an obvious argument, eventually proposing his theory on how to achieve a “literature of awe.”
The book opens with Bosworth’s response to an unnamed lecturer who claimed that “language only refers to itself,” inspiring Bosworth’s dismay– “The audience was small: to leave would seem rude” (1). Though he stayed, Bosworth regretfully admits he did not take the opportunity to respond in the moment; instead, the lecture inspired Bosworth’s meditation on how language shapes and is shaped by humanity. The result is this collection, where Bosworth challenges the lecturer’s stance that there is a distance between language and lived experience.Bosworth insists that language always refers to more than itself and that it is through the fusion of humans’ lived experiences with words and sounds, both spoken and written, that humanity advances.
In making his case, Bosworth pushes back against the privileging of logos-minded thinking, particularly in twentieth-century literary theorizing, and makes a case for honoring mythos-minded understanding. Narrative has always, beginning with our ancestors’ first sounds, conveyed practical and communal knowledge, long before the printed page of postmodernism. From this starting point, Bosworth brings forth canonical Anglo-American literature–Shakespeare, Dickens, and Melville, to name a few–to illustrate the emotional and moral depths of language, taking on a prevailing sentiment of the twentieth-century literary academy that text should be understood apart from the individual reader. His rereading of Shakespeare, for example, which began with a citation search and ended in renewed awe captures this spirit: “to live like this; to feel this keenly the full palette of emotions, to know this acutely the moral and psychological complexities of any given human moment” (39). This “this”-ness, Bosworth proposes, is foundational to a “literature of awe.”
Bosworth’s investigation is undoubtedly fascinating. The idea that narrative shapes identity–personal, communal, and national–is not exactly new, but locating moments within literary history and literary critique to assess what authors and their creations do is a useful project, particularly today when much of the world is in flux as we fight for narrative control through various media. In particular, an “American” identity is at stake today in ways that have not appeared in quite some time. (Granted, this American identity struggle has always existed under the surface; it has only more contentiously, one might argue, come to the fore today in ways that haven’t appeared in over fifty years.) But set against Bosworth’s claims of mythos-minded thinking and narratives passed down orally within and among members of communities, a reliance on established literary figures and lineages raises a critical concern. As Bosworth writes, “When a once vital cultural identity is breaking down, as ours is now, the emerging confusion about how we [italics added] should behave inevitably leads to reconsiderations of who we truly are” (97). Yet who exactly constitutes “we”? Writers of color, immigrants, and women are noticeably underrepresented in his calculus. This oversight risks reinforcing the very academic biases Bosworth initially critiques: an older academic tradition centering white male voices as universal.
At times, Bosworth suggests these tensions. One example of his awareness is in chapter 5 when he examines two books that reconceptualize Genesis and the Adam and Eve story. Bosworth questions what these works do in terms of meaning making as regards the Bible. Of Bruce Feiler’s book The First Love Story: Adam, Eve, and Us–a work that “strives to turn the West’s first couple into a romantic model for our post-millenial selves” (98), he asks “[w]hom exactly is [the book] aiming to teach? (99). Bosworth recognizes the intended audience conceived as a heteronormative, upper socioeconomic class couple, though without explicitly interrogating who is left out of this rhetorical construction.
Toward the end of this collection, however, Bosworth gestures toward a more inclusive vision through what he terms a “literature of awe,” which transcends individual language to include any narrative that transmits information and viscerally moves its audience. A literature of awe includes “qualities of our complex, sense-drenched experience of life” (142), an objective his detractors may deem “impossible to achieve” (147). Rather than respond at length to this disbelief, Bosworth acknowledges his project is about the pursuit, rather than an exploration of possibility. Music–or more simply, sound–plays an integral role in creating “awe,” the emotional power of language Bosworth introduces in the book’s preface and is a compelling point toward the union of “plotted myth and the plotless splendor” (151) that could redefine literary analysis.
Living in Language is a neatly book-ended work offering global narrative reflections through a distinctly Anglo-American lens using canonical publications but hinting toward an extended conversation challenging academia’s prioritization of logos-minded rationality. The book ultimately succeeds in provoking important questions about language, culture, and identity, and I look forward to future essays that include a fuller tapestry of voices.
Cheryl Weaver is a writer and teacher in Buffalo, NY. Her scholarly interests include nineteenth-century American literature, epistolary fiction, the pragmatics of postal delivery, and postal history. She received the 2022 Emily Dickinson International Society Graduate Fellowship supporting research related to her dissertation, “‘You know it is customary’: Emily Dickinson and Nineteenth-Century Epistolary Practice.” Her poetry and flash fiction have appeared in The Palisades Review,Per Contra, FRiGG, and Yankee Pot Roast, and her book reviews have appeared in the Colorado Review, Literary Review, and Heavy Feather Review.