Wanderwords

Download or read book Wanderwords written by Maria Lauret and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-09-25 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Post-poststructuralism and psychoanalysis, and in an era of global migration in which English is the lingua franca but not necessarily the lingua aesthetica for migrants, readers and critics are more aware than ever that words and meanings wander, that writers cannot be taken at their word, and that the borders between literary forms (fiction, poetry, life-writing, essays) often do not hold. What happens, then, with writers who work in English but have more than one language at their disposal? Do their words wander from one language, one life, one self, one literary form to another; do the psychic and cultural worlds of their languages split apart or merge? Does their English betray the presence of another language, is that other language erased, or does it appear here and there, on special occasions with special meanings? What, in different forms of literature, is the aesthetic effect of such wandering, splitting, or merging? How do writers negotiate their representation of a multilingual world for a monolingual audience? Wanderwords brings together literary and cultural theory with areas of research that have a bearing on, but do not directly address, the problems of representation that creative writers face when the dilemma of what language to write in, and consequently what audience to write for, presents itself. The result is, of necessity, interdisciplinary, and involves socio- and psycholinguistics as well as psychoanalysis and neuroscience, history and theory of migration and ethnicity, and of course literary and cultural theory, specifically of life-writing"--