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International Perspectives on Multilingual Literatures: From Translingualism to Language Mixing
Julian Preece 
,
Katie Jones,
Aled Rees
,
Katie Jones,
Aled Rees
International Perspectives on Multilingual Literatures: From Translingualism to Language Mixing
Swansea University Author:
Julian Preece
Abstract
This carefully curated collection of essays charts interactions between majority languages (including English, French, German, Italian and Japanese) and minority dialects or languages pushed to the margins (including Arabic, Bengali, Esperanto, Neapolitan and Welsh) through a series of case studies...
| Published in: | International Perspectives on Multilingual Literatures: From Translingualism to Language Mixing |
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| ISBN: | 978-1527560178 |
| Published: |
Newcastle upon Tyne
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2021
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| Online Access: |
https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-5275-6017-8 |
| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa55621 |
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| Abstract: |
This carefully curated collection of essays charts interactions between majority languages (including English, French, German, Italian and Japanese) and minority dialects or languages pushed to the margins (including Arabic, Bengali, Esperanto, Neapolitan and Welsh) through a series of case studies of leading modern and contemporary cultural producers. The contributors, who work and study across the globe, extend critical understanding of literary multilingualism to explore migration and translingualism, self-translation and the aesthetics of language mixing, language death and language perseveration, and power in linguistic hierarchies in (post)colonial contexts. From Doris Sommer’s Foreword This book will be celebrated by readers grateful for its erudition and for its fine close readings. Readers will also be moved by the profoundly democratic culture that International Perspectives on Multilingual Literatures acknowledges and thereby promotes. To collect this broad sampling of contemporary essays that may otherwise have been mistaken as marginal contributions to the conventional categories of ‘natural’ language traditions is to re-set the cultural compass. It is to recognize and to name literary arts as non-‘natural’ constructions that use available materials, such as languages, to make new things and to make things seem new. As migrations continue to complicate the colour and the sound of native lands, to ignore the strong current of multilingualism today amounts to a xenophobic purism whose political names are not pretty. Colonial and post-colonial conditions are culturally impure, as are the experiences of migration in search of opportunity or just safety. And the accumulation of native, imposed, and adopted cultures takes the sound and the shape of layered languages. Good readers can hear one underneath the other. Good writers layer their style with enough foreignness to keep the text from congealing into something flat and easily assimilated. Assimilation here, and in general, means monolingualism which amounts to the defeat of nuance. |
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| Item Description: |
Edited by Katie Jones, Julian Preece and Aled Rees |
| College: |
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences |