Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T08:33:08.753Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“The Poe Test: Global English and The Gold Bug”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 December 2019

Michael Malouf
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay examines the production of Global English through literary texts by examining three adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Gold Bug” in the 1930s by competing figures in the vocabulary control movement—Harold Palmer, Michael West, and C. K. Ogden—leaders in the formation of the field of applied linguistics. The first part of the essay explains the colonial origins of the vocabulary word list and its ascendant value in the interwar period for the new discipline of applied linguistics, and as part of the competition for English language textbooks. This leads to an analysis of these three simplifications of Poe’s story that demonstrates how the language politics in Poe’s story provides a structure through which to express a nascent Global English ideology regarding race, vernacular, and auxiliary languages.

Keywords

Global Englishvocabulary controlauxiliary languagesPoecolonial readers
Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , January 2020 , pp. 35 - 49
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press, 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Palmer, Harold, The Gold Beetle, This being the simplified version by Harold E. Palmer of The Gold Bug by Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Institute for Research in English Teaching, 1932)Google Scholar; Rossiter, A. P., The Gold Insect. Being the “Gold Bug” put into Basic English. By A. P. Rossiter. Preface by Ogden, C. K. (London: Kegan Paul, 1932)Google Scholar; West, Michael, “The Gold Bug,” in Tales of Mystery and Imagination: Edgar Allan Poe, simplified by John, Roland and West, Michael, Longman Classics Stage 4 (London: Longman, 1988), 15–27Google Scholar.

2 On the vocabulary control movement, see Carter, Robert and McCarthy, Michael, Vocabulary and Language Teaching (London: Longman, 1988), 1–7Google Scholar. On Palmer and West see Howatt, A. P. R. and Widdowson, H. G., A History of English Language Teaching 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 264–93Google Scholar.

3 On the significance of Carnegie, see Howatt and Widdowson, A History of English Language Teaching, 288–93; Smith, Richard, “Introduction,” in Towards Carnegie (London: Routledge, 2003), xi–xxixGoogle Scholar. The major works from West and Palmer cited here are reprinted in Teaching English as a Foreign Language, 1912–1936: Pioneers of ELT, ed. Richard Smith, vols. I–V (London: Routledge, 2003). Hereafter cited as Smith, Pioneers.

4 On auxiliary English, see James, Allan, “Theorising English and Globalisation: Semiodiversity and Linguistic Structure in Global English, World Englishes, and Lingua Franca English,” Apples—Journal of Applied Language Studies 3.1 (2009): 79–92Google Scholar; Halliday, M. A. K., “Written Language, Standard Language, Global Language,” in The Handbook of World Englishes, eds. Kachru, Braj B., et al. (London: Blackwell, 2006), 362–63Google Scholar. On language and ideology see Holborow, Marnie, “Language, Ideology, and Neoliberalism,” Journal of Language and Politics, 6.1 (2007): 53–57Google Scholar; Saraceni, Mario, World Englishes: A Critical Analysis (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 135–68Google Scholar.

5 For examples of the popular, positivist version of Global English, see McCrum, Robert, Globish: How English Became the World’s Language (New York: Norton, 2010)Google Scholar; Crystal, David, The Stories of English (Woodstock: Overlook Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

6 Ashcroft, Bill, Caliban’s Voice: The Transformation of English in Post-Colonial Literatures (New York: Routledge, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Walkowitz, Rebecca, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mufti, Aamir, Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Huddart, David, Involuntary Associations: Postcolonial Studies and World Englishes (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014)Google Scholar; Gikandi, Simon, “Provincializing English,” PMLA 129.1 (2014): 7–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dawson, E. Varughese, Beyond the Postcolonial: World Englishes Literature (New York: Palgrave, 2012)Google Scholar.

7 Walkowitz, Rebecca, “Response,” Interventions 20.3 (2018): 362CrossRefGoogle Scholar. “World Englishes” refers to the theories associated with the academic journal World Englishes.

8 Palmer, Harold, The Grading and Simplifying of Literary Material: A Memorandum (Tokyo: Institute for Research in English Teaching, 1934)Google Scholar; reprinted in Smith, Pioneers, vol. V, 309.

9 Palmer, The Grading and Simplifying of Literary Material, 311.

10 For the purposes of this article, I use adaptation as a generic term and use their respective terminologies when describing them specifically.

11 Palmer, The Grading and Simplifying of Literary Material, 272.

12 Rossiter, The Gold Insect, 62, n. 1.

13 West, Michael, Bilingualism (with Special Reference to Bengal), Bureau of Education, India, Occasional Reports, no. 13 (Calcutta: Government of India Central Publication Branch, 1926)Google Scholar; reprinted in Smith, Pioneers, vol. III, 277.

14 Palmer, The Gold Beetle, vii.

15 C. K. Ogden, “To the Reader,” in Rossiter, The Gold Insect, 13.

16 Viane, Vincent, “King Leopold’s Imperialism and the Origins of the Belgian Colonial Party, 1860–1905,” The Journal of Modern History 80.4 (2008): 767Google Scholar.

17 Lemaire, Charles, Vocabulaire Pratique: Francais, Anglais, Zanzibarite (Swahili), Fiote, Kibangi-Irébou, Mongo, Bangala, 2nd ed. (Brussels: Bulens, 1897Google Scholar); Fabian, Johannes, Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo, 1880–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 19–22Google Scholar; Samarin, William J., “Language in the Colonization of Central Africa, 1880–1900,” Canadian Journal of African Studies/Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines 23.2 (1989): 232–49Google Scholar.

18 Lemaire, Charles, “Tra Mez-Afriko (A travers l’Afrique centrale),” The Geographic Journal 29 (1907): 86Google Scholar. This article is described in the journal as “an account of Major Lemaire’s journey given before the Geneva Esperanto Congress in September, 1906.”

19 Palmer, , “Préface Dédicatoire: á mon vieil ami le commandant Charles Lemaire, actuellement Directeur de L’Institute Supérieur Colonial á Anvers,” in The Principles of Language Study (London: Harrap, 1921), 5Google Scholar, reprinted in Smith, Pioneers, vol. II, 1–186. My translation.

20 Palmer, “Préface Dédicatoire,” 34.

21 West, Bilingualism, 32–33; Wallas, Graham, The Great Society: A Psychological Analysis (London: MacMillan, 1914)Google Scholar.

22 For more on Macaulay and interwar language policy in the colonies, see Evans, Stephen, “Macaulay’s Minute Revisited: Colonial Language Policy in Nineteenth-Century India,” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 23.4 (2002): 279CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Langendoen, Terence D., The London School of Linguistics: A Study of the Linguistic Theories of B. Malinowski and J. R. Firth (Cambridge: M.I.T Press, 1968)Google Scholar; Szymura, Jerzy, “Bronislaw Malinowski’s ‘Ethnographic Theory of Language,’ ” in Linguistic Thought in England, 1914–1945, ed. Harris, Roy (London: Duckworth, 1988), 106–31Google Scholar.

24 In writing about the colonialist influence of Basic English in China, the critic Yunte Huang classifies word lists as an apparatus of modernity “where the cultural logic of Panopticism is manifested and the technology of control applied.” In “Basic English, Chinglish, and Translocal Dialect,” in English and Ethnicity: Signs of Race, eds. Brutt-Griffler, Janina and Davies, Catherine Evans (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 I am following here Brutt-Griffler’s theory that world English derived more from British imperialism’s “reactive policy of containment” than from a desire to dominate other languages; see Brutt-Griffler, Janina, World English: A Study of Its Development (Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2015), 78Google Scholar.

26 On language politics in “The Gold Bug,” see Toner, Jennifer Dilalla, “The ‘Remarkable Effect’ of ‘Silly Words’: Dialect and Signature in “The Gold-Bug,” Arizona Quarterly 49.1 (1993): 1–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Williams, Michael, “ ‘The Language of the Cipher’: Interpretation in ‘The Gold Bug,’ ” American Literature 53.4 (1982): 646–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Quoted in Weissberg, Liliane, “Black, White, Gold,” in Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race, eds. Kennedy, J. Gerald and Weissberg, Liliane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 139Google Scholar.

28 Quoted in Whalen, Terence, “Average Racism: Poe, Slavery, and the Wages of Literary Nationalism,” in Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race, eds. Kennedy, J. Gerald and Weissberg, Liliane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 31Google Scholar.

29 Morrison, Toni, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 13Google Scholar.

30 Weissberg, “Black, White, Gold,” 139–40.

31 Williams, “The Language of the Cipher,” 650.

32 Palmer, The Grading and Simplifying of Literary Material, 328.

33 Palmer, The Grading and Simplifying of Literary Material. Emphasis mine.

34 , Ineke, “The Translation of Sociolects: A Paradigm of Ideological Issues in Translation?” in Language Across Boundaries, eds. Cotterill, Janet and Ife, Anne (New York: Continuum, 2001)Google Scholar, 171. For more on this problem of an “adequate equivalent patois” as well as how nineteenth-century French translations differ in their treatment of Jupiter’s dialect, see McKee, Clayton Tyler, “Translation and Audience: Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Gold Bug,’ ” International Journal of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies 5.4 (2017): 1–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 McKee, “Translation and Audience,” 2

36 McKee, “Translation and Audience,” 4.

37 The phrase “traduction positive” quoted in Benoit Léger, “Traduction négative et traduction littérale: les traducteurs de Poe en 1857,” Études françaises 432 (2007): 97.

38 Léger, “Traduction négative et traduction littérale: les traducteurs de Poe en 1857,” 98.

39 Rolls, Alistair and Sitbon, Clara, “Traduit de l’américain’ from Poe to the Série Noire: Baudelaire’s Greatest Hoax?” Modern and Contemporary France 21.1 (2013): 43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Palmer, The Gold Beetle, 3, 5, 9.

41 Poe, Edgar Allan, “The Gold Bug,” in Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Tales and Sketches, 1843–1849, ed. Mabbott, Thomas Ollive, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 813Google Scholar.

42 Poe, “The Gold Bug,” 809.

43 West, The Gold Bug, 20.

44 See Seth, Sanjay, Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 Poe, “The Gold Bug,” 835.

46 Poe, “The Gold Bug,” 833. Italics added.

47 Poe, “The Gold Bug,” 835. Italics in original.

48 Raley, Rita, “Machine Translation and Global English,” The Yale Journal of Criticism, 16.2 (2003): 291CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49 Quoted in Raley, “Machine Translation and Global English,” 295.

50 This view of English as “a virtual language” for “specialist communication” is one of the definitions of Global English given by James, “Theorising English and Globalisatioin,” 84–85.

51 For cultural associations with Legrand’s methods of deduction see Rosenheim, Shawn, The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing from Edgar Poe to the Internet (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

52 Poe, “The Gold Bug,” 841.

53 Weissberg, “Black, White, Gold,” 140.

54 On I. A. Richards in China, see Keoneke, Rodney, Empires of the Mind: I. A. Richards and Basic English in China, 1929–1979 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.