In Babel's Shadow: Multilingual Literatures, Monolingual States PDF
Preview In Babel's Shadow: Multilingual Literatures, Monolingual States
In Babel’s Shadow This page intentionally left blank In Babel’s Shadow Multilingual Literatures, Monolingual States Brian Lennon university of minnesota press minneapolis • london Passages from the Introduction and chapter 5 appeared in modified form in “The Antinomy of Multilingual U.S. Literature,” Comparative American Studies6, no. 3 (September 2008). A portion of chapter 3 was published as “Two Novels by Arno Schmidt,” The Iowa Review29, no. 1 (Spring 1999). Selections of quotations in chapter 2 are reprinted from William N. Locke and A. Donald Booth, Machine Translation of Languages: Fourteen Essays(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1955); reprinted courtesy of MIT Press. Copyright 2010 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lennon, Brian. In Babel’s shadow : multilingual literatures, monolingual states / Brian Lennon. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn978-0-8166-6501-3 (hc : alk. paper) —isbn978-0-8166-6502-0 (pb : alk. paper) 1. American literature—20th century—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 2. Multilingualism and literature. 3. Literature publishing—United States. I. Title. ps225.l46 2010 809.´.9334—dc22 2009016600 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Nergis’e . . . This page intentionally left blank Contents Preface / ix Acknowledgments / xix Introduction: Antinomies of Literature / 1 1 Language as Capital / 27 2 Translation Being Between / 55 3 Containment / 93 4 Language Memoir and Language Death / 123 5 The Other Other Literature / 141 Afterword: Unicode and Totality / 167 Notes / 175 Index / 225 This page intentionally left blank Preface This book is not an archivally or forensically exhaustive study of its re - search object, multilingual literature. Rather, it is a critical essay on that object’s conditions of possibility—an approach I believe is requested by its liminal character. This declaration entails a consequence best recog- nized straightaway. Following as it did precisely a decade of post–Cold War New Economic euphoria—a senescence that saw the decline of the bitter postmodern- ism debates and a new, broad consensus on globalization—September 2001, we can now say, was a moment of both material and symbolic trauma for United States–based literary humanists. Powerless to influence either the subsequent terms of public debate (such as it was) or the policy of the U.S. state they serve as educators, both liberal centrist and left- leaning humanists revived world-scaled discourses of interconnection in crisis, even conspiracy, that stood all along in the shadow of spontaneous and inevitable globalization. This anachronistically more sinister (and realistic) sense of contraction is, we could say, partly natural—as persons, intellectuals feel as literally vulnerable as anyone else—and partly per- formed, in conscious or not entirely conscious self-adjustment within the power grid of higher education on a war footing. For reasons at once beyond and not beyond suspicion, perhaps, literary humanism in the wake of what is called “9/11” was newly receptive to synoptic models of its domain, culture, as a world-system—models reactivating the scientism of ix
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