ANGLO-AMERICAN LITERATURE

Fear of a Multilingual America? English, National Identity and the Right to Language in the United States

The contemporary debate on language in the US is not about language itself, but rather about national identity. The question is not "what is the national language of America?" but «who are we as Americans.» As Ronald Schmidt writes in his book on the connections between language policy and identity politics, in the discussion on language issues in the United States two groups confront each other, the assimilationists, who interpret the genealogy of the country in terms of immigration, and the pluralists, who have a more complex idea of the historical forces that shaped the nation and include imperialism, conquest and racism in the picture. The course will initially follow the development of a mythology of American English as a language closely linked to democracy and providing access to the American Dream, which emerged in the Early American Republic and became an exclusivist ideology in the course of the 19th century. In the second part of the course we will focus on how the literature of minorities has contested these assumptions through the creative use of multilingualism.