James Hinton Sledd was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1914. He
spent two substantial and significant periods of his career
in the Department of English at The University of Texas at Austin,
each period preceded by achievements of remarkable academic
distinction. He came to Austin as a graduate student in 1939,
having received a B.A. from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar
(1939) and a B.A. from Emory University (1936, Phi Beta Kappa).
After completing his dissertation on “The Alvearie of John Baret” under
the supervision of DeWitt T. Starnes, he received a Ph.D. from
UT in 1947.
He returned to Austin twenty-two years later as professor of
English, after having held an assistant professorship at Duke
University (1946-48) and tenured appointments at the University
of Chicago (1948-1956), the University of California at Berkeley
(1956-59), and Northwestern University (1959-1964). In 1959-1960,
he also taught in Sri Lanka. He declined promotion to professor
twice: first at Chicago and then at Berkeley when he accepted
an offer of professor at Northwestern.
At UT Austin, James Sledd was a stimulating presence both in
the classroom and out—a presence very directly until
his retirement in 1984 and indirectly until his death on July
26, 2003. Among his enduring legacies is his shaping contribution
to the program in English Language and Linguistics, a program
that continues to attract graduate students from excellent
undergraduate programs across the country. He also cared deeply
about the teaching of composition and was stirred to passionate
debates on its practice and ethics.
Readers of Sledd’s published writings—in scholarly
matters, politics, and the overlap of the two—often recall
his wittily stated dissenting views: a collection of his essays
edited by a former student, Richard D. Freed, is aptly entitled
Eloquent
Dissent. Yet it is important to understand the positive
as well as the negative strands running through his books, articles,
reviews, and letters to the editor, not to mention his departmental
memos.
Sledd often referred to the tripod of
literature, linguistics, and
composition. To
name the topics in that order reflects the ascending levels
of controversy that his writings stirred. He could give a contrarian
reading of Chaucer’s “Clerk’s Tale” in
an essay that became a reprinted classic. He could give a critique
of linguistic theory that evoked instant rebuttal but proved
true over time. However, the vexed topics of composition and
its teaching have remained recalcitrantly controversial. As he
put it, “To turn from the linguistic leg of our tripod
to composition is to turn from general confusion to utter chaos,
from neurosis to dementia.” A large part of the problem
is with economic forces beyond the control of individual professors
and departments, though Sledd was never hesitant to decry what
he saw as professorial self-interest.
His writings on language and linguistics always brought clarity
to the subject. A famous review in 1964 of a new history of the
English language began with an ominous acknowledgment:
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A publisher’s reader who recommends that a typescript
should not be published and who is later invited to review
the printed book is on a spot, particularly when the authors
are established scholars. The safe thing is a change of
mind; but if not even prayerful reconsideration will accomplish
that, the only other course is to accept the burden of
proof and take the approach direct: statement of the problem
itself, general description of the book under review, detailed
examination, unchanged conclusion. |
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After four pages of detailed references to bad proofreading,
sloppy mechanics, awkward writing, and inaccurate quotation,
Sledd found the rest of the problems too diverse for generalization.
Sixteen pages follow, the remaining ninety-two problems neatly
numbered. An especially characteristic quality of the review
is his recurring criticism of an attempt to apply new theory
to old topics. Pitfalls could easily have trapped the criticizer.
In this instance, the new theory was Noam Chomsky’s generative
grammar and the old topics were the facts of the history of
the English language. Often a project of this kind is attacked
from the view of a slightly newer theory, which in turn is
soon superseded, or from an older stance that falsely denies
the possibility of progress. A close rereading of Sledd’s
review forty years after its publication shows that nearly
every comment is enduringly timely, with neither the short
brash life of a counter-theory nor the stick-in-the-mud quality
of a presumably non-theoretical view. His review essay remains
a cautionary guide to writing this kind of book long after
the book that prompted it has been forgotten. It is also indicative
of the careful attention that he gave dissertations—to
the initial chagrin but ultimate benefit of the doctoral
candidate.
If James Sledd could be withering in his assessment of other
scholarship, he did not shrink from aiming his ferocious
articulateness and wit at himself. A single complex sentence
captures the nexus of one of the few moments in the humanities
that can truly be called “revolutionary”; Sledd’s
own loss of invested time; his ability to recognize the devastating
value of the superseding theory; and his amusement at the attention
of the popular press. The “Introduction” to
English
Linguistics: An Introductory Reader (1970) is officially
by the three coeditors, though the writing is unmistakably
Sledd’s:
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The spectacular losses of gambling
popularizers of American structuralism are now gruesomely
familiar: in 1959 James Sledd published an English
grammar (drafted between ‘52 and ’54)
which was accurately described as out of date at
the meeting where its publication was announced;
and the thrusts and counterthrusts by more distinguished
combatants like Hockett and Chomsky have been immortalized
by Time magazine itself. |
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Acknowledging the overthrown theoretical setting within
which he had written
A Short Introduction to English
Grammar, Sledd returned to the classroom as an auditor
to inform himself about the new setting—both at
MIT and at UT Austin. Emmon Bach and a very young Stanley
Peters taught a course that Sledd audited along with
graduate students. In his response to the changed world
of theory, he was not at all typical of structural linguists
of the time.
Nor was he typical of sociolinguists in his response
to the real-world urgencies of the 1960s. His two best
known and most widely debated essays are “Bi-Dialectism:
The Linguistics of White Supremacy” (1969) and “Doublespeak:
Dialectology in the Service of Big Brother” (1972).
Sledd questioned both the possibility and the ethical motivations
for requiring African American students to shift between
two dialects as the occasion demanded. These essays were
constantly misread as proposing something they did not
do: deny African American students the opportunity to learn
Standard English. Scrupulously careful as always in his
writing, Sledd repeatedly attached an adjective to the
noun “bidialectism”: “compulsory,” “mandatory,” “imposed,” “coercive,” “enforced,” “obligatory,” “regimented.” His
most poignant and moving plea was that veiled capitalistic
motivations should not remain unexamined. It was the
responsibility of teachers, he argued, to try to change
society rather than coerce students into conformity with
its norms as a means toward a promised upward mobility.
Some dismissed Sledd as quixotic.
Others may have been distracted from his adjectival qualifiers
by his impugning the motives of those he saw as upwardly
mobile academics. Whatever the justice of Sledd’s
attribution of motives, in these attacks his prose style
and metaphors attain Swiftian brilliance:
