Bilingual Aesthetics

Learning a second language entails some unease; it requires a willingness to make mistakes and work through misunderstandings. Renowned literary scholar Doris Sommer argues that this inevitable awkwardness should not just be tolerated--it should be embraced. Bilingualism, Sommer contends, is serious fun. In Bilingual Aesthetics she invites readers to make mischief with meaning, to play games with language, and to allow errors to stimulate new ways of thinking. As she says, today's global world has outgrown any one-to-one correlation between a people and a language. Liberal democracies can either encourage difference or stifle it through exclusionary policies. Bilingual Aesthetics is Sommer's passionate call for citizens and officials to cultivate difference, to realise that those precarious points of contact resulting from mismatches between languages, codes, and cultures are the lifeblood of democracy. Sommer encourages readers to entertain the creative possibilities inherent in multilingualism. With her characteristic wit and love of language, she focuses on humour--particularly bilingual jokes--as the place where tensions between and within cultures are played out. She draws on thinking about humour and language by a range of philosophers and others, including Sigmund Freud, Immanuel Kant, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hannah Arendt, and Mikhail Bakhtin. In declaring the merits of allowing for crossed signals, Sommer sends a clear message: Making room for more than one language is about value added, not about remediation. It is an expression of love for a contingent and changing world.