Bilingual Games: Some Literary Investigations

Sommer asserts that many people normally live that is, think, feel, create, reason, persuade, laugh in more than one language. She claims that traditional scholarship (1 - aesthetics, 2 - language and philosophy, 3 - psychoanalysis, and 4 - politics) cannot see or hear more than one language at a time, and her goal is to create a new field - bilingual arts and aesthetics, which examines the aesthetic product which is produced by bilingual diasporic communities. Sommer invites distinguished writers to examine the fundamental difference it makes to play games between languages. These essays bring home challenging observations of postmodernism (multiple identities, the fragility of meaning, the risks of communication) with the grace and intelligence of seasoned players. The focus of this volume is the Americas, but examples and theoretical proposals come from Europe, too. There, the issue of traditional regional language rights makes points of contact with indigenous rights in the Americas.;In both areas, the issue offers another level of complexity to the migrant and cosmopolitan character of local societies in a global economy.