Dayhoff Westminster Soundtrack: Harvard: That time the Linguistics Department accused female students at the Divinity School of pronoun envy.

Monday, April 14, 2014

Harvard: That time the Linguistics Department accused female students at the Divinity School of pronoun envy.

Harvard: That time the Linguistics Department accused female students at the Divinity School of pronoun envy.: "By Mike Vuolo"is a phrase
coined by Cal Watkins of the Harvard Linguistics Department in November 1971

Above are the opening, very matter-of-fact lines of "Pronoun Envy," written by the poet and classicist Anne Carson and published February in the New Yorker. The poem unfolds briefly as a straightforward narrative—involving "female students" and male pronouns—before lifting off, as Carson put it to me, "as a sort of air balloon whose buoyancy depends on bits of 'meaningless plunging' that hold up the corners." Beneath the exquisite wordplay, though, and the compelling imagery and the meaningless plunging, a phrase borrowed from the poet Wallace Stevens, is a real story about language and gender.

In the fall of 1971, Linda Barufaldi, then a student in the master's program at Harvard Divinity School, enrolled in "Eschatology and Politics." The class, also known as "Church 174," was about the influence of religion and spirituality on liberation movements, fertile ground after a decade of protests, marches, and many an "-in" in the service of social change.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2014/04/10/harvard_that_time_the_linguistics_department_accused_female_students_at.html?wpisrc=newsletter_jcr:content&mc_cid=00546b2049&mc_eid=b27361148d

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