I’ve been reading a lot of bell hooks lately and have noticed relatively frequent grammatical and spelling mistakes in her works. A quick google search of “bell hooks and grammar” just led me to reviews complaining about this and how it’s absurdly unprofessional for a published writer. But I can’t help but think that bell hooks kept these errors in her works intentionally.
I keep thinking about descriptive vs prescriptive grammar, and how descriptive grammar favours a successful communication that understands the intended meaning, whereas prescriptive grammar forces (sometimes unnecessary) syntactical rules onto written and spoken language, often with the unspoken and subconscious intent of sorting people into their place in society. A notable example is the double negative, where almost everyone understands that the sentence “I don’t got none” means that the person doesn’t have any, but it is accepted as ungrammatical and implies that the speaker is uneducated and poor. On top of this, double negatives are common in African American dialect, so you have a layer of racism present in the educated, white upper class deciding what’s “acceptable” language and what isn’t.
All this to say, I have a theory bell hooks keeps these errors in her works intentionally to challenge most readers’ ideas of what is “trustworthy,” “educated,” and generally worthy of discourse. If she wanted the errors fixed, she could have. Kind of how her pen name is intentionally left uncapitalized to emphasize that a work is more important than its author.
What do you guys think? Do you have a theory on this? Has there been discussion about this topic elsewhere that I’m missing?
by Automatic_Anxiety926