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
Diaz, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Bharati Mukherjee, Edward Bok and
Truus van Bruinessen, Susana Chavez-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.
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