The Invention of Monolingualism

Download or read book The Invention of Monolingualism written by David Gramling and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-10-06 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2018 Book Award awarded by the American Association for Applied Linguistics The Invention of Monolingualism harnesses literary studies, applied linguisitics, translation studies, and cultural studies to offer a groundbreaking investigation of monolingualism. After briefly describing what "monolingual” means in scholarship and public discourse, and the pejorative effects this common use may have on non-elite and cosmopolitan populations alike, David Gramling sets out to discover a new conception of monolingualism. Along the way, he explores how writers-Turkish, Latin-American, German, and English-language-have in recent decades confronted monolingualism in their texts, and how they have critiqued the World Literature industry's increasing hunger for “translatable” novels.