Wanderwords Language Migration In American Literature Maria Lauret by Maria Lauret 9781628921632, 9781628927184, 1628921633, 1628927186 instant download after payment.

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 & there, on special occasions for special reasons? Do words & meanings wander from one language & one self to another? Do the psychic & 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, & fiction of a variety of twentieth & twenty first century writers, the function & 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, & an ear, for linguistic difference & it concludes that, freighted with the other-cultural meanings wrapped up in their different looks & sounds, wanderwords can perform wonders of poetic signification as well as cultural critique.Bringing together literary & cultural theory with linguistics as well as the theory & history of migration, & with psychoanalysis for its understanding of the multilingual unconscious, Wanderwords engages closely with the work of well-known & unheard-of writers such as Mary Antin & Eva Hoffman, Richard Rodriguez & Junot Díaz, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha & Bharati Mukherjee, Edward Bok & Truus van Bruinessen, Susana Chávez-Silverman & Gustavo Perez-Firmat, Pietro DiDonato & 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.