In this elegantly written book, Joseph Park uses the telling case of South Korea to explore how and why English currently presents such a powerful object of investment and desire, both at the level of states, and, perhaps most importantly, for individuals. His exploration of the formation and expression of the neoliberal subjectivity in terms of which orientation to English is cast shows powerfully how productive the lens of affect is for understanding the link
between material conditions, institutional processes, the value of languages and the agency of social actors."-Monica Heller, University of Toronto
Joseph Sung-Yul Park is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore. He is the author of The Local Construction of a Global Language: Ideologies of English in South Korea and co-author of Markets of English: Linguistic Capital and Language Policy in a Globalizing World and A Reference Grammar of Wappo.