Wanderwords: Language Migration in American Literature

Description

How do (im)migrant writers negotiate their representation of a multilingual world for a monolingual audience? Does their English betray the presence of another language, is that other language erased, or does it appear here and there, on special occasions for special reasons? Do words and meanings wander from one language and one self to another? Do the psychic and cultural worlds of different languages split apart or merge? What is the aesthetic effect of such wandering, splitting, or merging? Usually described as “code-switches” by linguists, fragments of other languages have wandered into American literature in English from the beginning. Wanderwords asks what, in the memoirs, poems, essays, and fiction of a variety of twentieth and twenty first century writers, the function and meaning of such language migration might be. It shows what there is to be gained if we learn to read migrant writing with an eye, and an ear, for linguistic difference and it concludes that, freighted with the other-cultural meanings wrapped up in their different looks and sounds, wanderwords can perform wonders of poetic signification as well as cultural critique. Bringing together literary and cultural theory with linguistics as well as the theory and history of migration, and with psychoanalysis for its understanding of the multilingual unconscious, Wanderwords engages closely with the work of well-known and unheard-of writers such as Mary Antin and Eva Hoffman, Richard Rodriguez and Junot Díaz, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Bharati Mukherjee, Edward Bok and Truus van Bruinessen, Susana Chávez-Silverman and Gustavo Perez-Firmat, Pietro DiDonato and Don DeLillo. In so doing, a poetics of multilingualism unfolds that stretches well beyond translation into the lingual contact zone of English-with-other-languages that is American literature, belatedly re-connecting with the world. Cover Half-title Title Copyright Contents Acknowledgements Permissions 1 Beginning Wanderwords: Language Migration in American Literature American literature, global connections The writer’s dilemma Ceci n’est pas un livre sur la traduction: the task of the multilingual critic Americanization, discontents: mass immigration and the ever-changing linguascape Reading wanderwords: theory and practice 2 How Not to Tame a Wild Tongue: Wanderwords in Theory Wanderwords and bi- or multilingualism: the migrant writer’s languages Fault lines: against ‘code-switching’ ‘Populated, overpopulated with the intentions of others’: when languages touch in text ‘Expropriating the language’: wanderwords and other heterolingual strategies Babel’s babble: resistant texts, the virtue of unintelligibility and the linguistic unconscious 3 The Promised Land, Lost in Translation: Mary Antin’s and Eva Hoffman’s Wanderwords The Promised Land and Americanization Antin on English Hoffman on language Hoffman and multiculturalism Antin, Hoffman and the linguascapes of early and late twentieth-century America 4 With and Without a Dutch Accent: the Life-Writing of Edward Bok, Dirk Nieland and Truus van Bruinessen Dutch boy made good in English-only: The Americanization of Edward Bok Yankee Dutch: the funny business of immigrant speech Yankee Dutch as a mixed language Life in a box: the bilingual archive of Truus van Bruinessen Dutch-Canadian migration in the 1950s: gender and language Writing for pleasure, without leisure: bilingualism and its discontents English, ‘the intentions of others’ and a bilingual paradox 5 Richard Rodriguez’s Spanish Psychoanalysis and the abject: Rodriguez and Chicanismo Public, private and personal: languages, voices and the essay form Feo, fuerte, y formal: the language of masculinity and desire Wanderwords: of memory and desire The question of Spanish, and Richard Rodriguez 6 Fusion Writing: Bharati Mukherjee’s Dangerous Languages The safety of English ‘To want English is to want the world’: The Tiger’s Daughter and Jasmine The violence of connection – and the violation of translation The safety of reading? 7 ‘Words Cast to Weather’: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée Dictée: reading in circles Dictée and the question of history Mouth to mouth: the poetics of speech production Dictée’s multilingualism and the absence of Korea(n) Cha’s multilingual aesthetics – and trauma 8 Escribir y Leer, Bilingually: Spanish/English and Spanglish American Literature in the Twenty-First Century Spanishes ‘English is broken here’: in search of bi- or multilingual writing How to read bi- or multilingually ‘You (don’t) know what you’re missing’: the paradox of bi- and multilingual reading Conclusion: Really Reading Junot Díaz and Susana Chávez-Silverman Ancladas en otros lugares: Susana Chávez-Silverman’s Killer Crónicas Really reading Junot Díaz, or Oscar Wao’s wild tongue Notes Bibliography Index