Jean Reynolds, "A New Speech," from Pygmalion's Wordplay
It is difficult to fully appreciate the radical use of dialect and language for a modern American, when reading Shaw's play "Pygmalion." However, Sally Reynolds' essay upon "A New Speech," from her longer text on Shaw entitled Pygmalion's Wordplay provides a window of insight into what she calls not simply a play, but a creation myth for British English, for the author in question, and the characters of the play. Reynolds stresses that Shaw not only did Shaw introduce mutability and flexibility into the seemingly insurmountable and impregnable British structure of class and language. By highlighting the importance of language in the creation of the human social self, he became an early postmodernist. Shaw brought Marxist class theory to language in a way that Marx never envisioned.
Through this process, Shaw created his first, truly popular and populist play and thus reinvented himself, in essence assuming in postmodern celebrity fashion the guise of Henry Higgins, deconstructing genius, gadfly, philosopher, social scientist, and teacher extraordinaire. But this creator, much like Shaw the creator...
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