I am a doctoral candidate in the University of Texas's Department of English and an assistant instructor both in the Department of English and in the Department of Rhetoric & Writing.

My research explores grammar and class in American literary realism and naturalism. Specifically, I'm interested in such fascinating moments as the one that occurs near the beginning of The Rise of Silas Lapham. Silas has determined to build a house on Boston’s Beacon Street, but his daughter Irene doesn’t believe he will. Silas playfully interprets Irene’s incredulity as opposition (his gesture is especially prankish since Irene is the Lapham they all imagine will benefit most from moving) and taunts her when her sister Penelope casts her vote in support of the move: Silas says, “I guess the ayes has it, Pen,” and the narrator tells us, “At times, the Colonel’s grammar failed him” (38). But what kind of grammar can fail its speaker? Used in its transitive form, the verb failed here means that Silas’s grammar disappoints him or his expectations or that it doesn’t fulfill its duty. But there’s no sense that Silas himself feels disappointed or let down by his grammar. So the point is really that, judged by some standard external to Silas, his grammar has let him down—or failed to fulfill its duty inasmuch as its duty is the construction of grammatically “correct” sentences.

But where does this standard exist? This is one important question my dissertation examines. Another is how the existence and application of a standard were operationalized during the last quarter of the 19th Century, the period when Americans first began publicly and widely to acknowledge the harmful consequences of industrialization—which is also to say, during the time of Silas Lapham’s publication, as well as the publication of other major works of American realism and naturalism, and which additionally saw the publishing of “verbal criticism” become “a thriving industry,” as one historian notes (123). Finally, this dissertation explores the relationship(s) between and among the new class structure effected by industrial capitalism; the narratives American writers told to describe possibilities for class mobility, class struggle, and class exclusion; and the role of grammar and grammatical criticism in these dynamics.