Summary
Contents
Subject index
`A very welcome and much-needed broadening of current theoretical perspectives' - Professor Norman Fairclough This book offers a major reappraisal of the role of language in the social world. Focusing on three main areas - the global spread of English; Standard English; and language and sexism - The Politics of English: examines World English in relation to international capitalism and colonialism; analyzes the ideological underpinnings of the debate about Standard English; and locates sexism in language as arising from social relations. Locating itself in the classical Marxist tradition, this book shows how language is both shaped by, and contributes to social life.
Women, Language and the Limits of Feminism
Women, Language and the Limits of Feminism
‘Brainwashing that deprecates Western learning’; ‘The closing of the American mind’; ‘A lumpen-feminist assault’ (Bloom 1986, D'Souza 1992, Hughes 1993). No insult, it seems, is contemptible enough to describe those who advocate multiculturalism, sexual equality and the inclusion of black writers on degree courses on American campuses. The shrill attack on ‘political correctness’ in the US, where it originated in the late 1980s, has also found enthusiastic echoes this side of the Atlantic. Paul Johnson, for example, has excoriated this ‘new form of totalitarianism’ and ‘the debased ideological caracoles’ from these ‘sex war puritans’ (Johnson 1996). Political correctness (PC), an indeterminate label, more often invoked by those who oppose it than by ...
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