Bilingual Aesthetics , livre ebook

281

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English

Ebooks

2004

Écrit par
Sommer Doris Sommer

Publié par
Duke University Press

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281

pages

English

Ebook

2004

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Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus

Publié par

Duke University Press

Date de parution

07 avril 2004

Nombre de lectures

EAN13

9780822385790

Langue

English

Knowing a second language entails some unease; it requires a willingness to make mistakes and work through misunderstandings. The renowned literary scholar Doris Sommer argues that feeling funny is good for you, and for society. In Bilingual Aesthetics Sommer invites readers to make mischief with meaning, to play games with language, and to allow errors to stimulate new ways of thinking. Today's global world has outgrown any one-to-one correlation between a people and a language; liberal democracies can either encourage difference or stifle it through exclusionary policies. Bilingual Aesthetics is Sommer's passionate call for citizens and officials to cultivate difference and to realize that the precarious points of contact resulting from mismatches between languages, codes, and cultures are the lifeblood of democracy, as well as the stimulus for aesthetics and philosophy.Sommer encourages readers to entertain the creative possibilities inherent in multilingualism. With her characteristic wit and love of language, she focuses on humor-particularly bilingual jokes-as the place where tensions between and within cultures are played out. She draws on thinking about humor and language by a range of philosophers and others, including Sigmund Freud, Immanuel Kant, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hannah Arendt, and Mikhail Bakhtin. In declaring the merits of allowing for crossed signals, Sommer sends a clear message: Making room for more than one language is about value added, not about remediation. It is an expression of love for a contingent and changing world.

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Publié par

Duke University Press

Date de parution

07 avril 2004

Nombre de lectures

EAN13

9780822385790

Langue

English

Philosophy

Public Planet Books A series edited by Dilip Gaonkar, Jane Kramer, Benjamin Lee, and Michael Warner

Public Planet Books is a series designed by writers in and outside the academy—writers working on what could be called narratives of pub-lic culture—to explore questions that urgently concern us all. It is an attempt to open the scholarly discourse on contemporary public culture, both local and international, and to illuminate that discourse with the kinds of narrative that will challenge sophisticated readers, make them think, and especially make them question. It is, most im-portantly, an experiment in strategies of discourse, combining report-age and critical reﬂection on unfolding issues and events—one, we hope, that will provide a running narrative of our societies at this par-ticular ﬁn de siècle. Public Planet Books is part of the Public Works publication project of the Center for Transcultural Studies, which also includes the journalPublic Cultureand the Public Worlds book series.

Bilingual Aesthetics

A New Sentimental Education

Doris Sommer

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Durham and London 

Printed in the United States of

America on acid-free paper 

Typeset by Tseng Information

Systems, Inc. in Berthold Bodoni

Library of Congress Cataloging-

in-Publication Data appear on the

last printed page of this book.

1 2 3 4 5

Contents

Thanks

Invitation

vii

Choose and Lose

Aesthetics is a Joke

Irritate the State







The Common Sense Sublime

Let’s Play Games

Notes





Index of Proper Names





Thanks

Bilingual Aestheticsbegan as an adventure when a few gradu-ate students and I designed a course and then took it. The theme had been suggesting itself through studying a ‘‘rhetoric of particularism,’’ which issued in a book calledProceed with Caution, When Engaged by Minority Writing in the Americas. And though the sequel ﬁxed on a speciﬁc range of gatekeep-ing tropes (to syncopate communication and to signal social discontinuities), bilingual moves opened onto the broadest and most thrilling range of inquiry we could imagine. I am grateful to all my ﬁrst collaborators for their fearlessness and stamina, especially to José Luis Falconí, companion from beginning to end, Miguel Segovia, and Joaquín Terrones, along with Carmen Oquendo, Carolina Recio, Jane Almeida, Esther Whitﬁeld, and Wanda Rivera. At the School for Criticism and Theory during the summer of , I graduated to a veritable United Nations of interlocu-tors interpellated by a call unfamiliar to aesthetics but com-monplace in each of their fascinating lives. Josiane Peltier, for example, writes about detective ﬁction in her native French and elegant English when she is not reading in Spanish and Chinese literatures; historian Olga Dror’s original Russian and

viii

acquired Hebrew added Vietnamese, Latin, and Chinese to study popular religion in Vietnam; Laura Ceia-Minjares re-veals Tristan Tzara’s private Romanian reveries between his public antics in French. I thank them and all the equally cre-ative participants from Europe, Asia, and the Americas: Con-stance Anderson, John Barnes, Alexandra Chang, Tanya Gon-zalez, Andres Lema-Hincapie, Krystyna Mazur, Marilyn Miller, Mario Moroni, Jeannine Murray-Roman, Cathrine Orkelbog, Hector Perez, Jason Phlaum, Alexander Regier, Carrie Shef-ﬁeld, Paul Tenngart, Bonnie Wasserman, Yasemin Yildiz, and Gang Zhou. Mostly I thank Seyla Benhabib and Dominick La Capra for the opportunity to oﬀer the seminar. The result of these explorations is a range of friendly provo-cations about the beneﬁts of bilingualism. They will be self-evident to some readers, but others will prefer informed argu-ments. I could not have presumed to argue the points without the guidance, and blessings, of the experts. Many gave me detailed written comments with a generosity that I humbly acknowledge: Benedict Anderson, Peter Elbow, Juan Flores, Eugene Gendlin, Neil Herz, Ernesto Laclau, David Lloyd, Rich-ard Rosa, Greta Slobin, Diana Sorensen, Henry Staten, David Suchoﬀ, Diana Taylor, and Jay Winter. Other colleagues oﬀered much needed general advice and support: Henry Abelove, Homi Bhabha, Judith Butler, Luis Carcamo Huechante, David Carrasco, Arnaldo Cruz Malavé, Roberto G. Fernández, Juan Gelpí, Sander Gilman, Stephen Greenblatt, David Theo Gold-berg, Warren Goldfarb, Juan Carlos Godenzzi, Paul Guyer, Michael Holquist, Yunte Huang, Claudio Lomnitz, J. Lorand Matory, José Antonio Mazzotti, Sylvia Molloy, Alejandro Portes, Mary Louise Pratt, Rubén Ríos Avila, Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, Guadalupe Valdés, Kathryn Woolard, and Ana Celia Zentella. Also, my gratitude goes to the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard, which supported the writ-

ing process of this book. Throughout the writing, my most vigi-lant reader was Ken Wissoker, who knows that a light touch can carry weighty themes. To him and to all my instructors and companions, I oﬀer my most heartfelt thanks.

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