Do You Speak American . Sea to Shining Sea . Power of Prose . Voice | PBS - Kiến Thức Cho Người lao Động Việt Nam

American literature is unique in the number of voices
and cultures it conveys, giving it the power to transform opinions and
challenge stereotypes in both obvious and subtle ways. Christa
Smith Anderson embarks
on an ambitious journey across
America,
showing how voice writing evokes a profound sense of time and
place in ways no other medium can.

If the ideal of achieving a true political equality eludes
us in reality — as it continues to do — there is still available that
fictional vision of an ideal democracy in which the actual combines
with the ideal and gives us representations of a state of things in
which the highly placed and the lowly, the black and the white, the
Northerner and the Southerner, the native-born and the immigrant are
combined to tell us of transcendent truths and possibilities such as
those discovered when Mark Twain set Huck and Jim afloat on the
raft. Ralph Ellison[1]

Over the centuries, American authors have shaped a vast body of
work, often reflecting voices that are distinctly American. From the
river-raft philosophizing of a poor Mississippi Valley boy, to the
“words walking without masters” filling the journey of a woman
descended from slaves, to the border tongue blends increasingly finding
a place on the page, the language of American literature has many
voices and variations.

American voice writers demonstrate the potential of literature to
capture realities of time, place and, above all, people. Uniquely
American voices illuminate the power of language. Many times, these
works teach readers that the makings of great literature can be found
in their own communities, in the languages and speech and dialects they
hear everyday.

For Lee
Smith, a preeminent American voice writer who often looks to
her
Appalachian roots for material, a work of literature validated the
speech with which she grew up. “I had not understood that the language
of my childhood could be the language of great literature,” she told
writer Silas House when speaking about the personal impact of James Still’s
novel, River of
Earth.[2]

Ralph Ellison
credited his
background as a jazz
musician, as well as the time he spent working in barbershops where
“oral art flourished,” for helping him to create such groundbreaking
works as Invisible Man.[3]
Ellison
turned to “fictional truth, to reveal the human complexity which
stereotypes are intended to conceal.”[4]

The power of literature to transcend stereotypes and
debunk myths is apparent in the many works of American literature

The power of literature to tell truths, to transcend stereotypes and
debunk myths is apparent in the many works of American literature.
Often these voices are artful in their own right. It’s the reason why,
in Tobias Wolff’s
short story Bullet
in the
Brain, a cynical book critic who can’t stop being sarcastic — even
to save his life — returns to a voice-driven childhood memory just
before his death.[5]

In his dying moments, Anders (the ill-fated critic) doesn’t recall
his first love or the birth of his daughter. Instead, he recalls a
baseball game with childhood friends, when someone’s cousin, visiting
from Mississippi, says he wants to play shortstop. “Short’s the best
position they is,” the boy says.[6]
Anders wants
to hear that again, but he’s afraid the other boys will think he’s
making fun of the grammar. “But that isn’t it, not at all — it’s that
Anders is strangely roused, elated, by those final two words, their
pure unexpectedness and their music. He takes the field in a trance,
repeating them to himself.”[7] This
is the
proverbial light into which the jaded book critic walks as the story
ends:

Time for shadows to lengthen on the grass, time for the
tethered dog to bark at the flying ball, time for the boy in right
field to smack his sweat blackened mitt and softly chant, They is, they
is, they is.[8]

Do You Speak American . Sea to Shining Sea . Power of Prose . Voice | PBS

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