Seth Lerer
Author of Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language
About the Author
Seth Lerer is Distinguished Professor of Literature and the former Dean of Arts and Humanities at the University of California, San Diego. He is known nationally for his audio and videotape series, The History of the English Language, for the Teaching Company.
Image credit: Stanford University
Works by Seth Lerer
Reading from the Margins: Textual Studies, Chaucer, and Medieval Literature (1996) 6 copies, 1 review
Associated Works
The King James Version at 400: Assessing Its Genius as Bible Translation and Its Literary Influence (2013) — Contributor — 11 copies
Medievalia Et Humanistica: Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Culture, New Series No.12 (1984) — Contributor — 2 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1955-11-10
- Gender
- male
- Education
- Wesleyan University (BA|1976)
University of Oxford (BA|1978)
University of Chicago (PhD|1981) - Occupations
- professor
administrator - Organizations
- Princeton University
Stanford University (professor)
University of California, San Diego (Dean of Arts and Humanities) - Awards and honors
- National Book Critics Circle Award (in Criticism (2008))
- Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Brooklyn, New York, USA
- Associated Place (for map)
- New York, USA
Members
Reviews
Lowest rating I've ever given to a Great Courses program. Now this, granted, is strictly an audiobook and not a video (even if it runs in the GC video player), but that's not the point. First of all, it's too short – just twelve half-hour lectures (a mere six hours) for the greatest poet. And too much of it is taken up with the lecturer's reading from the poetry. One ought to assume that anyone interested in Milton would at least take the effort to read the poetry oneself.
Contrast this show more with the superb GC course on Augustine's Confessions, which is substantially longer but, more importantly, consists of commentary and not primarily textual reading.
There are some good moments in this Milton course, primarily the instructor's close readings (in the style of explications de texte) as well as some references to particular imagery (e.g., hand-holding in Paradise Lost). But overall, just read the poetry for yourself and then go to some of the criticism. You might try the Norton Critical Edition for a good sampler. show less
Contrast this show more with the superb GC course on Augustine's Confessions, which is substantially longer but, more importantly, consists of commentary and not primarily textual reading.
There are some good moments in this Milton course, primarily the instructor's close readings (in the style of explications de texte) as well as some references to particular imagery (e.g., hand-holding in Paradise Lost). But overall, just read the poetry for yourself and then go to some of the criticism. You might try the Norton Critical Edition for a good sampler. show less
This feels surprisingly like a bunch of kids getting together and saying, "Hey! Let's have a show!" Only, here, it's "Hey! Let's publish some scholarly essays on Chaucer!" There is that same air of disorderly spontaneity.
In all, there are seven items here -- an introduction, five essays, and a postscript. They are a very miscellaneous lot. The first essay, "What is a text?" is relevant to Chaucer, given the unfinished state of the majority of his major works, but it has the unfortunate side show more effect of encouraging one of the worst movements in textual criticism: The stress on the changes in a text over time as opposed to trying to figure out what the author originally wrote. (For those who have some idea what I'm talking about, "Thus do I refute Jerome McCann." For those who don't... go ahead, use the Riverside Chaucer and forget I ever said anything.)
The first essay, "Rothelay, the De Vere Circle, and the Ellesmere Chaucer," is a useful attempt to wring information out of the material copied into the flyleaves of the Ellesmere Chaucer over the centuries, but it sadly cannot prove anything; it can only suggest.
"Proverbial Chaucer and the Chaucer Canon" looks at the way an author's "authority" could might apply to a canon of works other than what the author actually wrote. It's an interesting thesis, but I find that I remember almost nothing about the essay, so it obviously didn't teach me much....
"Mise-en-page in the Troilus Manuscripts: Chaucer and French Manuscript Culture" is perhaps the essay closest to the topic of the introduction: How the presentation of a piece affects how we respond to it. A valid point, but none of us are reading Troilus and Criseyde in a medieval manuscript.
"Social Texts, Bodley 686, and the Politics of the Cook's Tale" was perhaps the most interesting essay to me. Chaucer never finished the Cook's Tale in the Canterbury Tales, and that fact gave scribes a lot of trouble. Some admitted defeat and left blank space on the page. Many inserted another story, the romance of Gamelyn. Bodley 686 managed to pad out the Chaucer fragment into a short but coherent (if much too moralizing) tale. This essay discusses that process.
"Phylum-Tree-Rhizome" should have been my favorite essay, since it talks about the stemmatic method of textual criticism, which we use to try to reduce the mass of manuscripts into a coherent text. But author David Greetham's goal seems to be to introduce as much irrelevant science as possible (the only thing Murray Gell-Mann's hypotheses about quarks have to do with copies of Chaucer is that Chaucer manuscripts are, at a fundamental level, made of quarks and leptons. The mention of quarks in this essay is at best irrelevant and at worst obfuscation; my considered judgment would file it with "balderdash").
The postscript, "The Bindings of the Ellesmere Chaucer," is interesting in its way -- there is a lot of information about the manuscript here -- but is not in any way unique to this volume. I say that because I literally chanced, at the very time I was reading this volume, to be reading another one, The Ellesmere Chaucer: Essays in Interpretation, which happens to contain another summary of the conservator's report. If you haven't seen the report, then this is useful. But if you have, obviously, then having a second, not-too-different, copy is not helpful.
The bottom line is that there is no coherence to this volume. It feels as if the editor had high hopes and couldn't get anyone to deliver. I really think at least one of the items should have been left out, and probably two or three. Or get more essays and publish two books, one on the text of Chaucer and one on the way it has been presented. Something. This was no doubt a fun idea, but it needed a stronger script. show less
In all, there are seven items here -- an introduction, five essays, and a postscript. They are a very miscellaneous lot. The first essay, "What is a text?" is relevant to Chaucer, given the unfinished state of the majority of his major works, but it has the unfortunate side show more effect of encouraging one of the worst movements in textual criticism: The stress on the changes in a text over time as opposed to trying to figure out what the author originally wrote. (For those who have some idea what I'm talking about, "Thus do I refute Jerome McCann." For those who don't... go ahead, use the Riverside Chaucer and forget I ever said anything.)
The first essay, "Rothelay, the De Vere Circle, and the Ellesmere Chaucer," is a useful attempt to wring information out of the material copied into the flyleaves of the Ellesmere Chaucer over the centuries, but it sadly cannot prove anything; it can only suggest.
"Proverbial Chaucer and the Chaucer Canon" looks at the way an author's "authority" could might apply to a canon of works other than what the author actually wrote. It's an interesting thesis, but I find that I remember almost nothing about the essay, so it obviously didn't teach me much....
"Mise-en-page in the Troilus Manuscripts: Chaucer and French Manuscript Culture" is perhaps the essay closest to the topic of the introduction: How the presentation of a piece affects how we respond to it. A valid point, but none of us are reading Troilus and Criseyde in a medieval manuscript.
"Social Texts, Bodley 686, and the Politics of the Cook's Tale" was perhaps the most interesting essay to me. Chaucer never finished the Cook's Tale in the Canterbury Tales, and that fact gave scribes a lot of trouble. Some admitted defeat and left blank space on the page. Many inserted another story, the romance of Gamelyn. Bodley 686 managed to pad out the Chaucer fragment into a short but coherent (if much too moralizing) tale. This essay discusses that process.
"Phylum-Tree-Rhizome" should have been my favorite essay, since it talks about the stemmatic method of textual criticism, which we use to try to reduce the mass of manuscripts into a coherent text. But author David Greetham's goal seems to be to introduce as much irrelevant science as possible (the only thing Murray Gell-Mann's hypotheses about quarks have to do with copies of Chaucer is that Chaucer manuscripts are, at a fundamental level, made of quarks and leptons. The mention of quarks in this essay is at best irrelevant and at worst obfuscation; my considered judgment would file it with "balderdash").
The postscript, "The Bindings of the Ellesmere Chaucer," is interesting in its way -- there is a lot of information about the manuscript here -- but is not in any way unique to this volume. I say that because I literally chanced, at the very time I was reading this volume, to be reading another one, The Ellesmere Chaucer: Essays in Interpretation, which happens to contain another summary of the conservator's report. If you haven't seen the report, then this is useful. But if you have, obviously, then having a second, not-too-different, copy is not helpful.
The bottom line is that there is no coherence to this volume. It feels as if the editor had high hopes and couldn't get anyone to deliver. I really think at least one of the items should have been left out, and probably two or three. Or get more essays and publish two books, one on the text of Chaucer and one on the way it has been presented. Something. This was no doubt a fun idea, but it needed a stronger script. show less
This took a while to finish--I read a chapter a day. Most of the chapters end like the grand finale of a book--Lerer writes in his intro that chapters don't need to be read in sequence. Lerer loves his subject and language in general, but sometimes I (maybe peevishly) think that his great enjoyment comes a little bit at his reader's expense. There is a glossary in back, but for me it could be twice as long. It doesn't include all the many polysyllabic words with Latin and Greek roots ending show more in "-ology", or "-graphy", or etc., that (for me) clog up the text and make reading sometimes have the cumbersome feel of translating. Lerer uses dramatic figurative language, and like early English poets he loves alliteration. (It's a lively lexical landscape!) His words bristle with so much life and almost self-aware purpose that sometimes his pages feel noisy and crowded. And then there are the sentences like, "Behind them lies a conception of vernacular character and the character of the vernacular." (P 116)
Those mild complaints aside, this is a fascinating subject and Lerer is a knowledgeable and enthusiastic guide. I really love his Teaching Company lectures on the history of the English language and it's nice to have some of that information in book form. show less
Those mild complaints aside, this is a fascinating subject and Lerer is a knowledgeable and enthusiastic guide. I really love his Teaching Company lectures on the history of the English language and it's nice to have some of that information in book form. show less
I am no linguist, and not particularly skilled at finessing the subtleties of sounds we humans speak into meaning: monopthongs versus dipthongs, vowels held long in the front versus short in the back. But I am a person endlessly fascinated by the English language, and the way its history reflects the greater history of the people who have spoken it and shaped it over the years. As a passionate non-specialist, then, I found Seth Lerer's Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language show more highly satisfying: Lerer's essays on English lingual history are clear and juicy, with just enough patient explanation of technical linguistic terms to enable the casual reader to follow along easily. More than that, he analyzes the unexpected ways in which social and political movements have influenced the course of the language's evolution.
The theme that struck me most, through all of Lerer's chapters, was how fundamentally political language is, and how double-edged. From the very beginning of our history as English speakers, we've been engaged in a complicated relationship with how (or whether) our language should expand to include outside influences, and what lingual "purity" would even look like. This may sound familiar: it's still being played out in the fight to establish English as the official language of the United States, a move motivated by fear of the growing Spanish-speaking populations here. But it's nothing new. In one early section I found particularly fascinating, Lerer discusses the first known rhymed poem written in English. Some background for those who don't know: Anglo-Saxon or Old English poetry didn't generally rhyme; instead, it was organized around principles such as alliteration, kennings (novel compound words that expressed a single concept, like the coinage "whaleroad" for the ocean), and numbers of stressed syllables per line. Rhymed poetry was typical of Latinate literature, and began to filter into English after the Norman (French) invasion of 1066. But what I found so striking was that this poem, which incorporated a brand-new verse technology learned directly from the French, was in content a protest poem against those very same invaders, a lyric composed on the death of William the Conqueror, which catalogued his atrocities:
This poem strikes me as so poignant. The author (a monk at the outlying Peterborough monastery) must have consciously chosen to write it in rhyming form, as the vast majority of the English poetry of the period wasn't rhymed. I can't resist speculating on why, therefore, he didn't take the more obvious route of a defiantly Anglo-Saxon verse form to protest the Norman tyranny. Was it a melancholy gesture away from the poetic forms he felt were his own, looking toward a period of colonization? Or did the mixed messages of the poem reflect his own conflicted feelings, his resentment of Norman oppression battling with admiration of the new French styles in verse and culture? Lerer points out that the very first word in the poem, "castelas" or castles, was an importation from Norman French: Anglo-Saxons didn't build in stone, but in wood, and readers of Beowulf will remember their vast-timbered halls. The Normans, on the other hand, peppered English soil with stone castles as part of their program of commandeering the land for royal use. In this poem, then, we can see the simultaneous transformation of language, landscape, and ways of thinking. Fascinating stuff.
And this tension between the old and new, between expansive cosmopolitanism and protective nativism, continues through nearly every essay in Lerer's book. There are intriguing debates, in the centuries after his life, about whether Chaucer's popularization of so many French-derived words was a boon or a curse: Edmund Spenser wrote that Chaucer had tapped "the well of English undefiled," whereas early philologist Alexander Gil said that he "rendered his poetry notorious by the use of Latin and French words," going on to call the resulting English an "illegitimate progeny" and a "monster." Interestingly, in both these cases the "undefiled" English is perceived as of a higher class: to Spenser, the addition of the colonizer's French-derived words raises the language to new poetic heights, whereas by Gil's time it's possible to complain that "everyone [e.g., even the commoner] wishes to appear as a smatterer of tongues and to vaunt his proficiency in Latin, French (or any other language)." Gil, therefore, as a mark of educated difference, advocates a return to the "purity" of Anglo-Saxon-derived words. (The irony? His anti-Latinate treatise is written in...Latin.)
But Lerer makes the point, again and again, that attempts to restrict the growth of the language are both misguided and doomed to failure. From the huge influx of foreign-derived words during the commerce and exploration boom of the sixteenth century, to the formation of Atlantic creoles as a product of the slave trade, to the jargon introduced into our speech by the soldiers of successive wars, Lerer insists that our language reflects the way we live, and that to expect anything else is foolhardy. I strongly agree with this idea: modern English is not debased, any more than Anglo-Saxon English encapsulated some mythical "purity." We should revel in the richness and diversity of our language, not fight it.
One of the most touching chapters of Inventing English deals with Samuel Johnson's personal transformation over the course of writing his Dictionary. Beginning the task with the goal of "fixing" the language in place, of ascertaining proper usage and recording it for all time, he gradually came to appreciate the untameable flow of the English tongue:
I was cheering Johnson on here. His journey was not an easy one - he spent eight years basically despondent - but to me, the outcome was so worthwhile: an appreciation of the strength, richness, and changeability of his mother tongue.
Inventing English was full of fascinating little tidbits; I was constantly reading this or that juicy anecdote out loud to David as I perused it. "Did you know," I would say, "that 'hubbub' was originally an onomatopoetic term based on what English people heard in the speech of the Irish and Welsh?" Or "Wow, did you know 'dude' originated as a term for a citified dandy? I always thought it originally described cowboys!' These little insights are fascinating and thought-provoking, but Lerer also does a good job of taking his history beyond the anecdotal, and tying these small examples into a larger context of social and political change. I ardently enjoyed it, and might even follow up a few of the chapters with some more in-depth reading. show less
The theme that struck me most, through all of Lerer's chapters, was how fundamentally political language is, and how double-edged. From the very beginning of our history as English speakers, we've been engaged in a complicated relationship with how (or whether) our language should expand to include outside influences, and what lingual "purity" would even look like. This may sound familiar: it's still being played out in the fight to establish English as the official language of the United States, a move motivated by fear of the growing Spanish-speaking populations here. But it's nothing new. In one early section I found particularly fascinating, Lerer discusses the first known rhymed poem written in English. Some background for those who don't know: Anglo-Saxon or Old English poetry didn't generally rhyme; instead, it was organized around principles such as alliteration, kennings (novel compound words that expressed a single concept, like the coinage "whaleroad" for the ocean), and numbers of stressed syllables per line. Rhymed poetry was typical of Latinate literature, and began to filter into English after the Norman (French) invasion of 1066. But what I found so striking was that this poem, which incorporated a brand-new verse technology learned directly from the French, was in content a protest poem against those very same invaders, a lyric composed on the death of William the Conqueror, which catalogued his atrocities:
Castelas he let wyrcean,
7 earme men swi∂e swencean,
Se cyng waes swa swi∂e stearc,
7 benam of his underþeoddan manig marc
goldes 7 ma hundred punda seolfres.
Det he name be wihte
7 mid mycelan unrihte
of his landloede
for littelre neode.
He waes on gitsunge befeallan,
7 graedinaesse he lufode mid ealle.
He saette mycel deorfri∂,
7 he laegde laga þaerwi∂
þet swa hwa swa sloge heort o∂∂e hinde,
þet hine man sceolde blendian.
[He had castles built
and poor men terribly oppressed.
The king was very severe,
and he took from his underlings many marks
of gold and hundreds of pounds of silver.
All this he took from the people,
and with great injustice
from his subjects,
to gratify his trivial desire.
He had fallen into avarice,
and he loved greediness above everything else.
He established many deer preserves,
and he set up laws concerning them,
such that whoever killed a hart or a hind
should be blinded.]
This poem strikes me as so poignant. The author (a monk at the outlying Peterborough monastery) must have consciously chosen to write it in rhyming form, as the vast majority of the English poetry of the period wasn't rhymed. I can't resist speculating on why, therefore, he didn't take the more obvious route of a defiantly Anglo-Saxon verse form to protest the Norman tyranny. Was it a melancholy gesture away from the poetic forms he felt were his own, looking toward a period of colonization? Or did the mixed messages of the poem reflect his own conflicted feelings, his resentment of Norman oppression battling with admiration of the new French styles in verse and culture? Lerer points out that the very first word in the poem, "castelas" or castles, was an importation from Norman French: Anglo-Saxons didn't build in stone, but in wood, and readers of Beowulf will remember their vast-timbered halls. The Normans, on the other hand, peppered English soil with stone castles as part of their program of commandeering the land for royal use. In this poem, then, we can see the simultaneous transformation of language, landscape, and ways of thinking. Fascinating stuff.
And this tension between the old and new, between expansive cosmopolitanism and protective nativism, continues through nearly every essay in Lerer's book. There are intriguing debates, in the centuries after his life, about whether Chaucer's popularization of so many French-derived words was a boon or a curse: Edmund Spenser wrote that Chaucer had tapped "the well of English undefiled," whereas early philologist Alexander Gil said that he "rendered his poetry notorious by the use of Latin and French words," going on to call the resulting English an "illegitimate progeny" and a "monster." Interestingly, in both these cases the "undefiled" English is perceived as of a higher class: to Spenser, the addition of the colonizer's French-derived words raises the language to new poetic heights, whereas by Gil's time it's possible to complain that "everyone [e.g., even the commoner] wishes to appear as a smatterer of tongues and to vaunt his proficiency in Latin, French (or any other language)." Gil, therefore, as a mark of educated difference, advocates a return to the "purity" of Anglo-Saxon-derived words. (The irony? His anti-Latinate treatise is written in...Latin.)
But Lerer makes the point, again and again, that attempts to restrict the growth of the language are both misguided and doomed to failure. From the huge influx of foreign-derived words during the commerce and exploration boom of the sixteenth century, to the formation of Atlantic creoles as a product of the slave trade, to the jargon introduced into our speech by the soldiers of successive wars, Lerer insists that our language reflects the way we live, and that to expect anything else is foolhardy. I strongly agree with this idea: modern English is not debased, any more than Anglo-Saxon English encapsulated some mythical "purity." We should revel in the richness and diversity of our language, not fight it.
One of the most touching chapters of Inventing English deals with Samuel Johnson's personal transformation over the course of writing his Dictionary. Beginning the task with the goal of "fixing" the language in place, of ascertaining proper usage and recording it for all time, he gradually came to appreciate the untameable flow of the English tongue:
[A]fter years of false starts, failures, and impediments - he was unable to complete the task in the three years he set himself; his wife died in the process; his amanuenses found his work almost impossible to follow; he abandoned Chesterfield's patronage - after all this he realized that it is impossible to fix a language. In the preface to the Dictionary that finally appeared in 1755, he saw a language not imperial but "sublunary," mutable and transitory. Like Caxton, who saw English living under the "domynacioun of the moon," Johnson found himself incapable of fixing usage. His purpose, now, had become "not to form, but register the language; not to teach men how they should think, but relate how they have hitherto expressed their thoughts."
I was cheering Johnson on here. His journey was not an easy one - he spent eight years basically despondent - but to me, the outcome was so worthwhile: an appreciation of the strength, richness, and changeability of his mother tongue.
Inventing English was full of fascinating little tidbits; I was constantly reading this or that juicy anecdote out loud to David as I perused it. "Did you know," I would say, "that 'hubbub' was originally an onomatopoetic term based on what English people heard in the speech of the Irish and Welsh?" Or "Wow, did you know 'dude' originated as a term for a citified dandy? I always thought it originally described cowboys!' These little insights are fascinating and thought-provoking, but Lerer also does a good job of taking his history beyond the anecdotal, and tying these small examples into a larger context of social and political change. I ardently enjoyed it, and might even follow up a few of the chapters with some more in-depth reading. show less
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