COML 2270 - [Life and Love in Two Languages]

(LA-AS)

Fall. 4 credits.

Next offered 2014-2015.

N. Melas.

The course explores the multiple and fragmented worlds of the increasing number of those who speak, write or live in more than one language. Examining a range of scholarship on bi-lingualism and multi-literacy as well as multilingual fiction and film –from works written in second or third languages, to texts written in interlects between dominant and subjugated languages, to immigrant texts written between languages– we will study the limits and possibilities of multilingualism within particular texts, even as we survey more broadly the fate of multiple languages in this rapidly globalizing world. Authors range from canonical figures such as Joseph Conrad and Franz Kafka and Chinua Achebe, to contemporary authors such as Luc Sante, Yoko Tawada and Edwidge Danticat. All texts read in translation.