In 1966, John William Corrington delivered a lecture titled “The Uses of History and the Meaning of Fiction” as part of a discussion series created by the National Defense Education Act.

Corrington used the occasion to attack what he dubbed “realism” and to decry the use of verisimilitude in fiction. Corrington focuses on “dialogue” and suggests that, although his fiction is praised above all for its dialogue, the dialect spoken by his characters does not actually exist. He developed what he calls “synthetic speech,” a mix of Southern or Appalachian dialect coupled with African-American dialect.

Corrington surveys several “canonical” writers in his lecture for the way in which they employed dialogue and speech in their work, i.e., whether they were after the sounds that are actually spoken or some form of manufactured speech that served the rhetorical function of fiction.

Corrington believed that writers ought to strike a balance between actual and imaginary speech.

Although primarily a commentary on craft, this lecture reveals elements of Corrington’s traditionalism. His use of such phrases as “the best literature in the Western world” indicates his abiding conservatism and his belief in a literary canon characterized by fixed and unchanging aesthetic standards.

“The Uses of History and the Meaning of Fiction” has been printed in my recent edition of Corrington’s work, which is available for purchase by clicking on the image below: