Assignment for Wednesday, February 29
There are no readings for today. We will be reviewing what we’ve covered so far. Please do, however, prepare the following things for Wednesday’s discussion. 1) Sit somewhere (probably in public) where you can observe multilingualism or linguistic diversity in action / practice—i.e. where there are several speakers producing meaning together (or at least in the same space) in various codes, languages, dialects, registers, genres, anti-languages, and symbolic systems. Describe in detail, in the form of a blog post, what you see, hear, and otherwise notice about the situation(s) you’re observing. Who understands what? Who is excluded from comprehension and how? You may choose to use Mary Pratt’s description of the wedding scene, at the beginning of her essay below, as a model. 2) Bring in a multilingual artifact to share with the class—i.e. an object or item that exemplifies and embodies linguistic diversity, collision, translation, or multilingualism. If you can’t come up with such an item, bring in an item that embodies monolingualism. Be ready to describe the object and what it shows us.
Readings for Monday, February 27
Please read Franco Moretti’s essay Conjectures on World Literature and Abram de Swaan’s essay Language Systems. One of these texts is speaking to literature, while the other speaks to linguistics. Where do they intersect in their concerns? Can the insights / analyses in these pieces help us understand the literary work and societal position of Kafka, Anzaldúa, Syjuco, or other multilingual writers? Are there any claims in these pieces by Moretti and de Swaan that are particularly surprising to you? Consider consulting page 221 in the paperback of Illustrado, as Crispin gives Miguel advice about being a world literary writer. The paragraph begins “First step, get over it, man…” A second useful passage is page 172-175, the conversation between Furio, Rita, and Miguel about Filipino writers.
Readings for Wednesday, February 22
Please finish Illustrado. Choose one passage you found revealing, disturbing, beautiful, truth-telling, or otherwise important for one reason or another, which you would like to show-and-tell in class—particularly a passage that epitomizes or speaks to some aspect of the issues we have been discussing thus far in the class. Please let me know what that is by Wednesday morning, so I can locate the page numbers in both versions.
Readings for Monday, February 20
Please read Franz Kafka, Report to an Academy, in which the ape Red Peter describes his process of becoming a human speaker. What strikes you most about his self-description?
Please read the Editor’s Introduction to Pierre Bourdieu’s Language and Symbolic Power. Choose one passage or concept from this reading that you feel you understand well, and provide an example of what this phenomenon looks like in everyday life and interaction.
Survey question: Please ask 5 different people over the weekend what they think monolingualism is—preferably 5 people from different backgrounds, professions, political orientations etc. What do they say?
Readings for Wednesday, February 15
Read to the beginning of Chapter 7 in Illustrado. Thinking back to the Kramsch and Pratt texts from Monday (below), choose one aspect / passage from the novel that demonstrates what Kramsch or Pratt think of as “the privilege of the nonnative speaker” or the privilege of “multilingual subjectivity.”
Readings for Monday, February 13
The following are three pieces that describe some essential aspects of the emotional, political, and subjective experience of learning foreign languages. Please choose a passage from one of the texts—a passage you find either challenging, important, controversial, or revealing—and either blog on it or bring it to class to discuss. Claire Kramsch “The Privilege of the Nonnative Speaker” and Chapter One of The Multilingual Subject, and Mary Louise Pratt Building a New Public Idea About Language.
Readings for Wednesday, February 1
Please read Meir Sternberg, Polylingualism as Reality and Translation as Mimesis
Please read to the beginning of chapter 5 in Illustrado.
Discussion / blog / check-in questions for Wednesday: 1) Sternberg talks about the “mimetic challenge” of representing the multilingual world, with all of its heterogeneous speech practices, in published literature that is constrained by the dictates of a market that demands a translatable monolingual format. How do you see Syjuco’s novel dealing with this conflict between monolingual text and multilingual world? Does Syjuco engage in any of the techniques that Sternberg talks about? 2) We talked outside about the following topics, among others, that come up in Ilustrado: reliable narrators, originals and copies, translation and publishing, the performance of social rituals, multiple and split identities, intergenerational transnational tensions, authenticity and artificiality in self-presentation, alienation effects (Verfremdungseffekte), heteroglossia, multiperspectival narration, the juxtaposition of genres, and the way life experiences are sometimes experienced through stories and narrative templates we’ve encountered previously. Where do you see one of these phenomena at work in Chapters 4 or 5 of the novel?
Readings for Monday, January 30
Please read Michael Wex, Kvetch Que C’est? The Origins of Yiddish
Please read Aneta Pavlenko, Learning the Language of the Enemy
Please read up to the beginning of Chapter 4 in Illustrado.
Discussion / blog / check-in questions for Monday: 1) How does Wex characterize the relationship between Yiddish language and the culture / history that has nourished it? Do you find his characterizations in this regard convincing? Do you know of other languages / styles / speech genres that reflect their historical / cultural context in a particularly potent way? 2) Wex’s argumentation about Yiddish-English linguaculture mirrors Doris Sommer’s claims about the playful pleasures of “bilingual aesthetics.” Can you think of a good joke, practical joke, prank, or play on language that exemplifies this principle of “ludic” multilinguality? 3) After reading the Pavlenko piece, think about a language you have studied, or go to one of the University websites of a department that teaches a language (including English). How does that department justify, advertise, or promote the learning of that particular language as opposed, implicitly, to learning others? Does it emphasize romantic imagery, real-world pragmatics, professional usefulness, literature, social justice, national security, or something else? How does this promotional / ideological image of the language correspond to your own potential motivations for learning it?
Readings for Wednesday, January 25
Please read up to the beginning of Chapter 3 in Illustrado. Choose one passage that you’d like to discuss in class.
Discussion Question: How does Anzaldúa’s essay resonate or shed light on Kafka’s short fable about Odradek? Where do their themes / concerns converge?
Please blog about either of these questions above, if you haven’t yet posted for this week.
Readings for Monday, January 23
Gloria Anzaldúa, How to Tame a Wild Tongue
Erik Camayd-Freixas, Interpreting after the Largest ICE Raid in US History
Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado (Up to the beginning of Chapter 2)
Blog Questions:
1) The first person narrators in Anzaldúa’s and Camayd-Freixas’ texts, as well as both the narrator and the main character of Syjuco’s novel Iluustrado, are all “multilingual subjects.” That is, they traffic in multiple languages, dialects, genres, and symbolic systems on a regular basis. Choose a detail or narrative thread in one of these pieces that resonates with, complicates, or clarifies your understanding of some aspect of multilingual identity/experience.
2) Describe one of the “speech genres” that you see in one of these texts. (Bear in mind that the authors often participate in multiple speech genres within one text.)
3) Anzaldúa’s and Camayd-Freixas’ pieces add a new layer to the tension between Apter’s precarious and Sommer’s ecstatic / aesthetic vision of multilingualism. What new aspects of multilingual subjectivity do they add that Apter and Sommer had not really spoken to in their pieces?
Check-in Question: Be ready to do a “speech-genre show-and-tell.” That is, describe a speech genre that you have witnessed or participated in, and describe its “relatively stable” conventions, constraints, possibilities, rules, and regularities. Remember that Bakhtin claims that we are never NOT speaking in a speech genre, we often just can’t identify which one we are participating in in a given moment. Please give a critique of the speech genre you have chosen—a “critique” being, of course, a discerning description of all its constituent parts, rather than a “criticism,” i.e. a moral judgment upon it. Your critical description of the speech genre—whether “chill dude” or “Jersey Shore” or “self-help therapeutic talk”—might involve linguistic (i.e. syntactic, morphological, and semantic), paralinguistic (i.e gesture, bodily qualia, intonation, affect, facial expression, rheumatization, posture, accessories, etc.) and/or spatial aspects (i.e. where does it typically take place and among which speech communities?)
Readings for Wednesday, January 18 (approximately 125 pages)
Franz Kafka, The Cares of a Family Man / Die Sorge des Hausvaters
Doris Sommer, Bilingual Aesthetics, Introduction and “Choose and Loose”
Emily Apter, Translation after 9/11
Mikhail Bakhtin, The Problem of Speech Genres
Anthony Pym, The Moving Text, Chapter 1 “Distribution”
Please respond on the blog site to one of the following questions by Wednesday, Jan. 18 at 6am (250 words). These questions will also serve as discussion prompts for our in-class conversations, so please make sure to prepare one or two thoughts on most of them. You can get ideas by reading your colleagues posts on the blog as well.
1. Kafka: What is Odradek, really, do you think? Is it a thing, a symbol, an abstraction, an avatar, a human? Does it have a subjectivity, an identity, an essence, a language? What characteristics does it display that make the patriarch / family man respond to it in the way that he ultimately does at the end of the story?
2. Bakhtin: In this essay, Bakhtin sketches out his concept of “speech genres” (as opposed to literary / textual genres) in an attempt challenge a conventional notion about language(s) and the ways human speakers actually use them. How does Bakhtin’s theory differ from the commonplace notion that language is a neutral “tool” that speakers apply toward various communicative ends?
3. Bakhtin and Kafka: In what “speech genre” is Kafka’s story “The Sorrows of a Family Man” written? Based on what specific details and patterns in the text do you notice this? How well does that speech genre correspond to the substantive claims that the narrator makes in the story?
4. Bakhtin: Take a tour around campus or a highly trafficked neighborhood in Tucson, like 4th Avenue. How many different speech genres (and languages) do you hear over the course of an hour walk? How do those genres correspond to the spaces, situations, and contexts in which they appear? Do people code-switch, i.e. mix genres, lects, and languages?
5. Sommer and Apter: In these two pieces, the literary comparatists Doris Sommer and Emily Apter approach multilingual identity / subjectivity / practice from two vastly divergent points of view. How would you describe these points of view? Do they ever converge, and are they necessarily in conflict? With which one do you identify more, and why?
6. Pym: In his chapter, Pym talks about the dilemmas, procedures, and infelicities of multilingual translation and distribution in the Internet age. This branch of industrial production, which arguably did not exist until 1990 or after, is often referred to as GILT, which stands for Globalization, Internationalization (or i10n), Localization (or L8n), and Translation. Given Pym’s anecdotes and examples, can you think of other examples of glitches or hindrances to an easy, instantaneous, global flow of information and signage back and forth across hundreds of languages via mechanical translation?
