Beyond the Mother Tongue

The Postmonolingual Condition

Yasemin Yildiz

Pages: 306

Fordham University Press
Fordham University Press

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Paperback / softback
ISBN: 9780823255757
Published: 01 December 2013
$28.00
Hardback
ISBN: 9780823241309
Published: 02 January 2012
$80.00
eBook (ePub)
ISBN: 9780823255764
Published: 01 December 2013
$27.99

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Beyond the Mother Tongue examines distinct forms of multilingualism, such as writing in one socially unsanctioned “mother tongue” about another language (Franz Kafka); mobilizing words of foreign derivation as part of a multilingual constellation within one language (Theodor W. Adorno); producing an oeuvre in two separate languages simultaneously (Yoko Tawada); and mixing different languages, codes, and registers within one text (Feridun Zaimoglu).

Yildiz offers an enlightening argument against the monolingual paradigm that has dominated linguistic thinking since the 18th century, that insists that the mother tongue connects a people to their nation and culture, allowing them to communicate at the deepest level.---—CHOICE

Yasemin Yildiz has written an award winning monograph that deconstructs the conceptual frameworks of multilingualism and monolingualism that canonical and minority writers have been limited to.---—TRANSIT

. . .Yildiz's Book [is] a particularly timely intervention in debates about multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, and integration of immigrants everywhere.---—Cultural Critique

“A welcome, necessary, and well-crafted addition to a variety of studies in the fields of German-Turkish and German-Jewish studies—studies that increasingly participate in the much broader discussion of modernity/modernism, postmodern identities, globalization, multiculturalism, and ethnicity studies.”

- —Amir Eshel

“A bold, ambitious, and timely evaluation of philosophical and literary imagination of language.”

- —B. Venkat Mani

'Beyond the Mother Tongue' is an ambitious and deeply fascinating book, written in a clear and accessible style.

- —Matthew Hart