Ellen Johnson
 

Harryette Mullen is an African-American avant-garde poet whose book Sleeping with the Dictionary made her a National Book Award finalist.  The book includes poems with metalinguistic titles like “Wipe that Smile off Your Aphasia” (analyzed in Beall 2005) and “Mr. Roget’s Neighborhood.”  Discourse analysis of her poems and what she says about them reveals a refreshing take on language and power.  This paper looks at the implicit and explicit messages in Mullen’s work about the value of heteroglossia, as the poet attempts to draw from both oral and literary traditions and “transform the materials of orality into text” (Bedient 656).  As Mullen wrestles with the dictionary, “proper” English is sometimes, but not always, trumped by other voices.

Work Cited

            Beall, Emily P.  2005.  “As reading as if”: Harryette Mullen’s ‘cognitive similes’.  Journal of Literary Semantics 34: 125-137.
            Bedient, Calvin.  1996.  The Solo Mysterioso Blues:  An Interview with Harryette Mullen.  Callaloo 19.3: 651-669.
            Mullen, Harryette.  2002.  Sleeping with the Dictionary.  Berkeley:  Univ. of California Press.