Knowing a second language entails some unease; it requires a willingness to make mistakes and work through misunderstandings. The renowned literary scholar Doris Sommer argues that feeling funny is good for you, and for society. In
Bilingual Aesthetics Sommer invites readers to make mischief with meaning, to play games with language, and to allow errors to stimulate new ways of thinking. 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 and to realize that the precarious points of contact resulting from mismatches between languages, codes, and cultures are the lifeblood of democracy, as well as the stimulus for aesthetics and philosophy.
Sommer encourages readers to entertain the creative possibilities inherent in
Trade Review
“Doris Sommer’s book is the most thorough exploration of the possibilities that bilingualism opens to public life in contemporary societies. Written in a rigorous way, it is also punctuated by witticisms, insightful historical and sociological comments, and a cultural richness which makes its reading both pleasurable and eye-opening. It is a major contribution to an insufficiently explored field in contemporary scholarship.”—Ernesto Laclau, State University of New York, Buffalo
“This is a tour de force—a brilliantly conceived and executed performance of scholarly seduction.”—Diana Taylor, author of The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas
Table of Contents
Thanks vii
Invitation xi
1 Choose and Lose
3
2 Aesthetics is a Joke 29
3 Irritate the State 71
4 The Common Sense Sublime 115
5 Let’s Play Games 157
Notes
193
Index of Proper Names 251
