Accented America: The Cultural Politics of Multilingual Modernism

ISBN-13: 9780195337006 / Angielski / Miękka / 2011 / 432 str.

Joshua L. Miller

Opis

American literary works written in the heyday of modernism between the 1890s and 1940s were playfully, painfully, and ambivalently engaged with language politics. The immigrant waves of the period fed into writers' aesthetic experimentation; their works, in turn, rewired ideas about national identity along with literary form. Accented America looks at the long history of English-Only Americanism-the political claim that U.S. citizens must speak a singular, shared American tongue-and traces its action in the language workshop that is literature. The broadly multi-ethnic set of writers brought into conversation here-including Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, Henry Roth, Nella Larsen, John Dos Passos, Lionel Trilling, Americo Paredes, and Carlos Bulosan-reflect the massive demographic shifts taking place during the interwar years. These authors share an acute awareness of linguistic standardization while also following the defamiliarizing sway produced by experimentation with invented and improper literary vernaculars. Rather than confirming the powerfully seductive subtext of monolingualism-that those who speak alike are ethically and politically likeminded-multilingual modernists compose literature that speaks to a country of synthetic syntaxes, singular hybrids, and enduring strangeness.

Recenzje

this book is absolutely indispensable for any future consideration of how the experimental languages of American modernism negotiated and helped shape the complex language politics of the early twentieth century. Its combination of lucid and scholarly cultural historicism and agile close readings of verbal texture is exemplary. I can foresee using this in graduate seminars for years to come.

O autorze

Joshua L. Miller is Associate Professor of English at the University of Michigan where he teaches courses in twentieth-century U.S. literature and visual culture. He has written broadly on language politics, transnational modernism, and photography. He is currently at work on a book on twentieth-century photo-text collaborations and a collection of essays on translation, new media, global English, and cultural critique.