In studying these activities as ways of constituting social worlds, students are learning to examine

Legends of the Center: System, Self, and Linguistic Consciousness Janet Giltrow Department of English University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada V6T 1Z4 giltrow@interchange.ubc.ca Abstract Commentators on language standardization, including Bourdieu and Bakhtin, provide various perspectives on what this chapter calls modern linguistic consciousness: speakers’ awareness of their own speech in relation to others’ and in relation to the operation of centralizing system. In this chapter, these formulations are used to analyze interview data collected from readers and writers at a South Asian university—and, in turn, these data elaborate the picture of modern linguistic consciousness. Readers and writers can pick out self amidst the words of others, and in the presence of centralizing mandates; they can position themselves in working spaces adjacent to system, and, while recognizing speech norms, imagine themselves as not occupying those norms. Linguistic consciousness can be detected in the expression of rules—but rules themselves turn out to be complex spaces hosting diverse possibilities. Moreover, modern systems, in managing the speech of populations, may not always operate exclusively in the service of the centre. Modernity has struggled to locate system in diversity, and then self in system. Reasoning about language has hosted many episodes of the struggle, as the normative face of speech confronts the private one—the rise, decline, and ...