Abstract
The title of her book, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, refuses to stabilize into a single voice. The verb “tries” means “harasses, vexes,” and means “attempts to use.” The word “tongue” splits its referent also, as the organ of speech and then by metonymy as the speech, or language, itself. The book consists in a series of trials—attempts, ordeals—pitting the subject pronoun against the tongue, and staging the subject as the tongue’s operator and manager. It’s a book about a linguistic situation that is unstable, with English in an equivocal position: as mother tongue, as father tongue. But this equivocation does not conceal a truth—we cannot decide between them, nor can we discover a mother tongue elsewhere. We cannot retrieve a mother tongue by any laborious effort.
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Notes
Philip, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (Charlottetown, Canada: Ragweed, 1989), 36. Subsequent citations appear parenthetically in the text.
For a good discussion of visual poetics, see Johanna Drucker’s “Visual Performance of the Poetic Text,” in Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, ed. Charles Bernstein (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 131–161.
Ezra Pound, Personae: Collected Shorter Poems (New York: New Directions, 1971), 130.
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© 2006 Joan Retallack and Juliana Spahr
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McMorris, M. (2006). Performance as Critical Practice: Nourbese Philip’s “Discourse on the Logic of Language”. In: Retallack, J., Spahr, J. (eds) Poetry & Pedagogy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-11449-5_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-11449-5_11
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-73492-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-11449-5
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