The Materiality of Language

Gender, Politics, and the University

By: David Bleich

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Paperback | 1 July 2013

At a Glance

Paperback
576 Pages

Grade
17+

Dimensions(cm)
22.86 x 15.24 x 3.3

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David Bleich sees the human body, its affective life, social life, and political functions as belonging to the study of language. In The Materiality of Language, Bleich addresses the need to end centuries of limiting access to language and its many contexts of use. To recognize language as material and treat it as such, argues Bleich, is to remove restrictions to language access due to historic patterns of academic censorship and unfair gender practices. Language is understood as a key path in the formation of all social and political relations, and becomes available for study by all speakers, who may regulate it, change it, and make it flexible like other material things.

Industry Reviews

"Shows how language politics and gender politics go together and how suppression of language is related to suppression of people... The Materiality of Language is a critique (historical and intellectual) of male-dominated modes of language use, their roots in the founding and administering of the university, their effects on what can and can't be studied, and their spill over into popular culture... The argument is by accretion, by finding patterns. That is, Bleich provides analytic resources that are portable. This critique roams broadly over science, social science, [and the] humanities, and both the critique and the alternative are powerfully rendered." Deborah Brandt, University of Wisconsin-Madison "A potentially foundational text in an emergent field [of] language studies, whose work is to break up the monopoly Linguistics and Philosophy have had on the study of language... [An] alternative history of western linguistic thought... [featuring] thinkers who developed "material" or socially-driven philosophies of language... One of the book's distinctive features is the use of gender as a key normative analytical lens throughout. It would be difficult to exaggerate how rare this is among language thinkers, and how productive it is for the arguments here." Mary Louise Pratt, New York University "A powerful, first-rate book on a crucial topic." Dale Bauer, University of Illinois

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