Josiah Mitchell Morse

Josiah Mitchell Morse (January 14, 1912 – December 25, 2004), known professionally as J. Mitchell Morse, was an American writer, professor, and literary critic. He was one of the first James Joyce scholars in the United States, and helped establish Joyce in the American literary canon.

Life Morse received his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of South Carolina In 1933, he earned a master's degree in English from USC with his thesis Eugene O’Neill and the New Romanticism. with a dissertation entitled Some Philosophical Influences on Literature in England, 597–1450. He taught at Pennsylvania State College until 1966.

He died peacefully in his home in Haverford, PA, on Christmas Day, 2004.

Morse contributed the chapter on Proteus to James Joyce’s Ulysses: Critical Essays.

Morse contributed the first chapter to A Conceptual Guide to Finnegans Wake. He corresponded with Adaline Glasheen, who credited him with several discoveries in her Third Census of Finnegans Wake.

Matters of Style Morse wrote Matters of Style, a composition textbook on literary style. The book presents examples of writing from classical antiquity to the 20th century. The student is intended to learn from these styles by imitation. Morse writes of the book's method:

Language, thought, and politics Morse was a staunch grammarian who believed that one who cannot write clearly cannot think clearly.

Morse believed that it was in the political interest of his students for him not to teach books merely for their political relevance, but to cultivate their literary sensitivity with by having them read and write well. In The Irrelevant English Teacher Morse wrote that good writing is “inherently subversive.” arguing that Standard English ought to be required as the standard language of instruction for black students as well as for white students. Morse objected to what he considered ”a current form of the romanticism that recurrently softens the human brain: a demand that Black English (‘I goes, you goes, he go’) be recognized as an effective medium for intellectual work.” He discusses “phantoms” created by taking metaphors and abstractions literally, such as the Body Politic, the Heir to Culture, the Natural Man, the Unstable Woman, and the Evil Intellectual. He argues in the first chapter that a “cultural ‘heritage’—a specific body of arts, sciences, letters, customs, manners, and amenities that some people by virtue of their race or nation ‘inherit’ and others don't—is a metaphor that ruins millions of people's lives, but [...] is accepted by some of those whose lives it ruins.”