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Accented America
The Cultural Politics of Multilingual Modernism
Joshua L. Miller
432 pages
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10 illustrations
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235x156mm
978-0-19-533700-6
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Paperback
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26 May 2011
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- A work of broadly comparative American Studies that differentiates among African American, Jewish, Latina/o, and Asian American histories and cultures while finding points of intersection, collaboration, and competition among them
- Traces a long history of U.S. national language politics and argues that language matters have been a subject of contentious popular and policy debates consistently since the 1890s
- Uncovers new materials from archival and documentary sources to demonstrate how language politics affected writers like Stein, Larsen, Toomer, Dos Passos, and others
- Argues boldly for the primacy of language mixing in U.S. literature across historical periods, while claiming a special place in this tradition for the experimentalism of literary modernism
Accented America is a sweeping study of U.S. literature between 1890-1950 that reveals a long history of English-Only nationalism: the political claim that U.S. citizens must speak a nationally distinctive form of English. This perspective presents U.S. literary works written between the 1890s and 1940s as playfully, painfully, and ambivalently engaged with language politics, thereby rewiring both narrative form and national identity.
The United States has always been a densely polyglot nation, but
efforts to prove the existence of a nationally specific form of English turn out to be a development of particular importance to interwar modernism. If the concept of a singular, coherent, and autonomous 'American language' seemed merely provocative or ironic in 1919 when H.L. Mencken emblazoned the phrase on his philological study, within a short period of time it would come to seem simultaneously obvious and impossible. Considering the continuing presence of fierce public debates over U.S. English and domestic multilingualisms demonstrates the symbolic and material implications of such debates in naturalization and citizenship law, presidential rhetoric, academic language studies, and the artistic renderings of novelists.
Against the backdrop of the period's
massive demographic changes, Accented America brings a broadly multi-ethnic set of writers into conversation, including Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, Henry Roth, Nella Larsen, John Dos Passos, Lionel Trilling, Américo Paredes, and Carlos Bulosan. These authors shared an acute sense of linguistic standardization during the interwar era and contend with the defamiliarizing sway of radical experimentation with invented and improper literary vernaculars. Mixing languages, these authors spurn expectations for phonological exactitude to develop multilingual literary aesthetics. Rather than confirming the powerfully seductive subtext of monolingualism-that those who speak alike are ethically and politically likeminded-multilingual modernists composed interwar novels that were characteristically
American because, not in spite, of their synthetic syntaxes and enduring strangeness.Readership: Readers of American Quarterly, PMLA, American Literature, American Literary History, MLQ, ELN, Callaloo,
American Speech; scholars of modernist studies; those interested in American vernacular and writers like Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos, H. L. Mencken, Nella Larsen, and others.
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Joshua L. Miller, Associate Professor of English, University of Michigan Joshua L. Miller is Associate Professor of English at the University of Michigan where he teaches courses in twentieth-century U.S. literature and visual culture. He has written broadly on language politics, transnational modernism, and photography. He is currently at work on a book on twentieth-century photo-text collaborations and a collection of essays on translation, new media, global English, and cultural critique.
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Series Editors' Foreword
Introduction: "every kind of mixing"
1.: Reinventing vox Americana
Language, Hygiene, and National Security
Mencken and the Cultural Work of Polemical Philology
Contemporary "American" as Standard Vernacular
2.: Documenting "American"
"A Standardization Not Imposed But Voluntarily Accepted"
3.: Foreignizing "english"
The Making of Americans' Speech: Stein's Aural "english"
Multilingual Fusion and the Limits of Cosmopolitan Expression: Dos Passos's U.S.A.
Locutions of Dislocation and the Political Uses of Despair
4.: Vernacularizing Silence
"Flesh of their Language"
"Been Shapin Words T Fit M Soul": Toomer's Cane
5.: Translating "Englitch"
"Kent'cha Tuck Englitch?": Linguistic Dissonance in Call It Sleep
"The Purpose of Jewish Life is Cultural, is it not?": The Politics of Trilling's Style
The Return of the Depressed
6.: Spanglicizing Modernism
U.S. Empire and Imposed Syntax
"Born a Foreigner in his Native Land": Paredes and Binational Speech
"Citizenship, then, is the basis of all this misunderstanding?": Bulosan's America
Idioms of Annexation
Conclusion: "say something american if you dare"
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The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.
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