Eloquence In Trouble

Eloquence in Trouble captures the articulation of several troubled lives in Bangladesh as well as the threats to the very genres of their expression, lament in particular. The first ethnography of one of the most spoken mother tongues on earth, Bangla, this study represents a new approach to troubles talk, combining the rigor of discourse analysis with the interpretive depth of psychological anthropology. Its careful transcriptions of Bangladeshi troubles talk will disturb some readers and move others--beyond past academic discussion of personhood in South Asia.

James M. Wilce's study of the complaints of medical patients in rural Bangladesh reveals the patient's social world, social relations, sense of self, ideology of language and his or her relation to power.

The Inarticulate Renaissance explores the conceptual potential of the disabled utterance in the English literary Renaissance. What might it have meant, in the sixteenth-century "age of eloquence," to speak indistinctly; to mumble to oneself or to God; to speak unintelligibly to a lover, a teacher, a court of law; or to be utterly dumfounded in the face of new words, persons, situations, and things? This innovative book maps out a "Renaissance" otherwise eclipsed by cultural and literary-critical investments in a period defined by the impact of classical humanism, Reformation poetics, and the flourishing of vernacular languages and literatures. For Carla Mazzio, the specter of the inarticulate was part of a culture grappling with the often startlingly incoherent dimensions of language practices and ideologies in the humanities, religion, law, historiography, print, and vernacular speech. Through a historical analysis of forms of failed utterance, as they informed and were recast in sixteenth-century drama, her book foregrounds the inarticulate as a central subject of cultural history and dramatic innovation. Playwrights from Nicholas Udall to William Shakespeare, while exposing ideological fictions through which articulate and inarticulate became distinguished, also transformed apparent challenges to "articulate" communication into occasions for cultivating new forms of expression and audition.

In The Inarticulate Society, Thomas Shachtman persuasively argues that Americans have lost the ability to respond to other points of view - to argue - without coming swiftly to blows. His case is forcefully punctuated by the rising tide of political violence in America and the hateful and intolerant speech that appears to incite it. We are in danger of moving our political debates from the Senate chamber to the streets, in the process of losing the social stability needed for a working democracy. Shachtman pins the blame for this decline on the jargon-spouting "specialists" in the professions and academia, who use parochial vocabulary to erect linguistic barriers between themselves and "ordinary" citizens; on teachers who are barely articulate themselves; on the pervasiveness of popular entertainment geared to the lowest common denominator; on insipid advertising and marketing campaigns that deliberately bypass reason to appeal to emotions; and especially on our political leaders who find it easier to play the demagogue than to give substantive explanations of policy choices. Shachtman proposes a concrete, multifaceted program for rehabilitating eloquence through the constructive use of media together with political and educational reform.

Ranging from Cicero's Rome to contemporary politics, Words on Fire is a provocative rethinking of political eloquence for our time.