Language as Social Action: Gertrude Buck, the ‘Michigan School’ of Rhetoric, and Pragmatic Philosophy

• In Event: Movement and action: between life and discursive knowledge

English Abstract

In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Gertrude Buck and collaborators developed a sociologically- and pragmatist-informed approach to written communication that has been neglected in later scholarship. Buck approached the study of language from the standpoint of pragmatist functional psychology, which is indebted to John Dewey’s pragmatism at the University of Michigan, and which views language as a normal, dynamic action of human organisms engaged in necessary cooperative relations with one another. Thus, the act of communicating, even in a written form, must be defined in terms of its social-historical and bodily situatedness; and the hermeneutic processes of interpretation should ultimately be grounded in the dynamics of practical social conflict and cooperation. Her approach overcomes the small-minded pragmatism that would criticize figurative or poetic language as impractical, and instead shows how figuration is essential to the particular ways in which language is action that conveys meaning to others and serves broader social functions. Buck’s forgotten work helps overcome criticisms of the application of pragmatic action-theory to language and literature, sketching how language structure may be explained on the basis of language as a natural social-communicative act, how figurative language is inherent in the normal act of communicating situated bodily experiences to others, and how rhetorical speech and writing contributes to participation in democratic social processes. This paper also indicates how Buck’s work prefigures later reader-response aesthetics, conceptual metaphor theory, and sociology of literature; and it considers whether new forms of media are susceptible to Buck’s social-pragmatic theory of literary action.

Author

• Daniel Huebner, University of North Carolina Greensboro