Thomas Paul Bonfiglio Knihy

Focusing on race-consciousness, the study explores its impact on American English pronunciation and the ideology of standardization throughout the twentieth century. It highlights how prescriptivist discourses, xenophobia towards immigration, and the closing of the western frontier shaped perceptions of proper speech and ethnicity in the American West and Midwest. This work holds significance for scholars and students across various fields, including linguistics, American studies, and cultural studies, particularly in relation to race, class, and gender dynamics.

This monograph examines the ideological legacy of the the apparently innocent kinship metaphors of ""mother tongue"" and ""native speaker"" by historicizing their linguistic development. It shows how the early nation states constructed the ideology of ethnolinguistic nationalism, a composite of national language, identity, geography, and race. This ideology invented myths of congenital communities that configured the national language in a symbiotic matrix between body and physical environment and as the ethnic and corporeal ownership of national identity and local organic nature. These ethno-nationalist gestures informed the philology of the early modern era and generated arboreal and genealogical models of language, culminating most divisively in the race conscious discourse of the Indo-European hypothesis of the 19th century. The philosophical theories of organicism also contributed to these ideologies. The fundamentally nationalist conflation of race and language was and is the catalyst for subsequent permutations of ethnolinguistic discrimination, which continue today. Scholarship should scrutinize the tendency to overextend biological metaphors in the study of language, as these can encourage, however surreptitiously, genetic and racial impressions of language.

Exploring the intersection of psychoanalysis and linguistics, this innovative work delves into the research that connects these two fields. It challenges conventional thinking and offers new insights into how language shapes psychological processes. By examining the interplay between linguistic structures and psychoanalytic theory, the book invites readers to reconsider the implications of language in understanding the human psyche.

This book synthesizes psychoanalytic and Marxist techniques in order to illuminate the resistance to a socialization of the American economy, the protectionist discourses of anomalous American capitalism, and the suppression of the capitalist welfare state. After the Second World War, Democrats and Republicans effectively eliminated the communist and socialist parties from the American political spectrum and suppressed their allied labor movements. The right-wing shift of both parties fabricated a false opposition of left and right that does not correspond to political oppositions in the industrialized democracies. Marxist perspectives can account for the massive inequality of the political economy, but they are insufficient for illuminating its preservation. Psychoanalysis is necessary in order to explain why Americans continue to vote within a two-party system that neglects the lower classes, and why the working class tendsto vote against its own interests. The psychoanalytic techniques employed include doubling, repetition, displacement, condensation, inversion, denial, fetishizing, and cognitive repression. In examining the fixation upon the proxy binary of Democrat vs. Republican, which suppresses the true opposition of left vs. right and neutralizes alternatives, the work analyses numerous contemporary political issues through applications of Marxist psychoanalytic theory.