What does it mean to live in more than one language? Is “being multilingual” a personal talent, a burden of circumstance, a political necessity, a source of pleasure and knowledge, or a curse of history? In the new interdisciplinary honors seminar "The Multilingual Subject", Students will work with a range of philosophical, literary, historical, cognitive-scientific, and filmic texts in order to gain a richer understanding of the human condition in multiple-language settings and situations. Students will seek to discover how competence in more than one language has enriched intellectual traditions, given rise to new aesthetic forms, and changed the course of history. Considering how many University of Arizona students engage in spontaneous translation and “code-switching” on a daily basis, the goal of this course is to provide you with a conceptual vocabulary through which to identify and analyze the many benefits—and dilemmas—of living in multiple languages. The course will be thought by Prof. David Gramling and will be offered for the first time in Spring 2012, Monday and Wednesday from 4.00 to 5.15pm.
David Gramling's research interests include multilingual film and literature, Turkish German migration and literary history, theoretical approaches to monolingualism, transnational Berlin, literary translation and stylistics, gender and disability studies. He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled The Invention of Monolingualism.
Readings to include: M. M. Bakhtin, J. Derrida, W. Benjamin, P. Bourdieu, E. Canetti, G. Lewis, J. Diaz, E. Apter, F. Kafka, R. Rodriguez, I. E. Zohar, R. Schwartz, H.