The Editors of Critical Multilingualism Studies (cms.arizona.edu) are happy to announce the debut of our most recent issue 5.3, on “Multilingual Approaches to Literary Classics,” which applies some of the most cutting-edge thinking in philology, stylistics, literary history, anthropology, and applied linguistics to the study of canon-making centerpieces of European national philology—including Goethe, Thomas Mann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Grillparzer, and others.
The collective stance animating these essays is that, while the study of multilingualism has progressed rapidly since the 1990s in applied linguistics, the study of literary classics and the idea of “classicism” itself have been left relatively undisturbed by these advances in neighboring disciplines. The scholars in this special issue are thus engaged in a diverse pursuit of a “multilingual philology” that might undo the presumptive monolingualism of national canon-formation/reproduction. This requires from each of the authors a complex and intricate deployment of text-analytical and literary historical methodologies, for which there are few predecessor models in the national philologies.
The guest editor of the special issue is Till Dembeck (University of Luxembourg). We invite you to engage with and share these articles. Three are originally written in German and French (Stockhammer, Brandes, and Weissmann) and are furnished with excellent English translations by Judith Menzl and Christian Steinmetz, which follow the original argument and terminology most carefully. The original German articles are published here as well, for the first time.
Our next issue, 6.1 “Multilingualism in Contexts of Migration and Refuge” is due out in June 2018.
David Gramling, Chantelle Warner, and Amanda Snell