Description

The Invention of Monolingualism harnesses literary studies, applied-linguisitics, translation studies, and cultural studies to offer a ground-breaking 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, non-cosmopolitan populations, Gramling sets out, across four chapters, to discover a new conception of monolingualism. Along the way, he explores how writers-Arabic, 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. Moving from surprising and startlingly original case studies to brilliant reappraisals of widely-taught concepts in literary studies, The Invention of Monolingualism is a book to be reckoned with for students and scholars of literary theory, world literature, and the political and cultural implications of translation.