New Books in Language and Translation

Latest Episodes:

Karen Stollznow, "On the Offensive: Prejudice in Language Past and Present" (Cambridge UP, 2020) Mar 24, 2021

Show notes

Whether framed as complaints about cancel culture or as increased awareness of prejudice, stories about offensive language are common in our daily news cycle. In On the Offensive: Prejudice in Language Past and Present (Cambridge UP, 2020), linguist Karen Stollznow explores the history of language that offends, including talk about race and ethnicity, gender, religion, mental health, physical appearance, and age. Her book tells the origin story of how terms come to have the power to offend. It also investigates the euphemism treadmill, the phenomenon of offensive terms being replaced with new, neutral terms which eventually become offensive as well. Despite the large number of terms the book deals with, she argues that it isn’t impossible to keep track of what’s offensive and what isn’t. By explaining the background to our language and its implications for the lived experiences of human beings, Stollznow hopes the book will enable its readers to examine their own language and its power—for harm and for good.

Malcolm Keating is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit philosophy of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras (and stuff).

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Kamran Khan, "Becoming a Citizen: Linguistic Trials and Negotiations in the UK" (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2019) Mar 23, 2021

Show notes

Citizenship is acquired and constructed through various mechanisms, including language tests, that require individuals to demonstrate a sufficient national identity. For some recent migrants, acquiring citizenship and passing rigorous language testing still is not enough to feel like they belong. Becoming a Citizen: Linguistic Trials and Negotiations in the UK (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2019) provides valuable context for how language and sociolinguistics impacts citizenship in both official and unofficial ways.

Kamran Khan, a sociolinguist at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, explores the process of acquiring UK citizenship and investigates how the naturalisation process is experienced, with an explicit focus on language practices. This ethnographically-informed study focuses on W, a Yemeni immigrant in the UK, during the final phase of the citizenship process. In this time, he encounters linguistic trials and tests involving the Life in the UK citizenship test, community life, ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages), adult education and the citizenship ceremony. The richness of linguistic data featured in this book allows for a nuanced portrayal of the complexities of becoming a citizen. This is especially so in the context of the UK's assimilationist form of citizenship which is reflected in the introduction of a citizenship test within a broader socio-political climate.

Becoming a Citizen offers a detailed analysis of the linguistic process of naturalisation in the UK and is relevant to scholars working in sociolinguistics, language policy, migration studies and ethnographic research.

Nafeesa Andrabi is a 4th year Sociology PhD student at UNC-Chapel Hill, a Biosocial Fellow at Carolina Population Center and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow.

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Jeffrey Shandler, "Yiddish: Biography of a Language" (Oxford UP, 2020) Mar 22, 2021

Show notes

The most widely spoken Jewish language on the eve of the Holocaust, Yiddish continues to play a significant role in Jewish life today, from Hasidim for whom it is a language of daily life to avant-garde performers, political activists, and LGBTQ writers turning to Yiddish for inspiration. In Yiddish: Biography of a Language (Oxford University Press, 2020), Jeffrey Shandler presents the story of this centuries-old language, the defining vernacular of Ashkenazi Jews, from its origins to the present.

Shandler tells the multifaceted history of Yiddish in the form of a biographical profile, revealing surprising insights through a series of thematic chapters. He addresses key aspects of Yiddish as the language of a diasporic population, whose speakers have always used more than one language. As the vernacular of a marginalized minority, Yiddish has often been held in low regard compared to other languages, and its legitimacy as a language has been questioned. But some devoted Yiddish speakers have championed the language as embodying the essence of Jewish culture and a defining feature of a Jewish national identity. Despite predictions of the demise of Yiddish-dating back well before half of its speakers were murdered during the Holocaust-the language leads a vibrant, evolving life to this day.

Jeffrey Shandler is Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Gert-Jan van der Heiden, "The Voice of Misery: A Continental Philosophy of Testimony" (SUNY Press, 2020) Mar 18, 2021

Show notes

In this episode, I interview Gert-Jan van der Heiden, Professor of Metaphysics and Philosophical Anthropology at Radboud University in Amsterdam, about his book, The Voice of Misery: A Continental Philosophy of Testimony, recently published by SUNY Press. In the book, van der Heiden takes up the question of testimony, which is popular in philosophical discourses today—from analytic epistemological approaches to those that emerge from critical race and feminist theory. While important advances are made in these disciplines, van der Heiden argues that contemporary continental philosophy offers a rich source for another approach to testimony that combines the ontological, epistemological, ethical, and logical elements of testimony in order to more fully understand what occurs in the event of bearing witness.

Beginning with six literary experiments, The Voice of Misery approaches the event of testimony and its connection to language at the limits of what can be expressed: in the silent, the unspeakable, the mute. From this grounding, the text then moves into a more traditionally philosophical investigation of the peculiarity and particularity of testimony in a dazzling dialogue with the most well-known figures of recent continental thought: Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Giorgio Agamben, and Martin Heidegger, amongst others. Ultimately, van der Heiden extrapolates from the thinkers and authors with whom he engages an effective and moving overview of the acts of witnessing and bearing witness, allowing us to better understand how these twinned acts structure our realities.

Britt Edelen is a Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. He focuses on modernism and the relationship(s) between language, philosophy, and literature. You can find him on Twitter or send him an email.

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Stephen Pihlaja, "Talk about Faith: How Debate and Conversation Shape Belief" (Cambridge UP, 2021) Mar 16, 2021

Show notes

Religious people have a range of new media in which they can share their beliefs and reflect on what it means to believe, to act, and to be members of their religious communities. In Talk about Faith: How Debate and Conversation Shape Belief (Cambridge UP, 2021), Stephen Pihlaja investigates how Christians and Muslims interact with each other through debates broadcast online, podcasts, and YouTube videos. He explores the way in which they present themselves and their faiths and how they situate their ideas in relationship to each other and to their perceived audiences Pihlaja argues that people position themselves and others differently depending on conversational contexts and topic, generalizing about themselves in relationship to a range of already-existing storylines, whether they're talking about biblical inerrancy, the nature of Islam, to homosexuality and interracial dating.

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Shonna Trinch and Edward Snajdr, "What the Signs Say: Language, Gentrification, and Place-Making in Brooklyn" (Vanderbilt UP, 2020) Mar 01, 2021

Show notes

Two stores sit side-by-side. One with signage overflowing with text: a full list of business services (income tax returns, notary public, a variety of insurance) on the storefront, twenty-two words in all. It provides business services (a lot of them). The other showing a single word—james—in small font in the corner of a drab, brown-colored overhanging sign. It’s a restaurant (obviously). Such a juxtaposition has become increasingly common in gentrifying neighborhoods, revealing more than just commercial offerings.

In their new book, What the Signs Say: Language, Gentrification, and Place-Making in Brooklyn (Vanderbilt University Press, 2020), Shonna Trinch and Edward Snajdr examine the importance of signs and “linguistic landscapes” in shaping urban spaces as well as how we experience them. It argues that the public language of storefronts is a key component to the creation of place in Brooklyn, New York.

Using a sample of more than 2,000 storefronts and over a decade of ethnographic observation and interviews, Trinch and Snajdr chart two types of local Brooklyn retail signage: Old School, which uses many words, large lettering, and repetition to convey inclusiveness, and New School, with hallmarks of brevity, wordplay, and more exclusive meanings.

Through in-depth ethnographic analyses they reveal how gentrification and corporate redevelopment in Brooklyn are connected to public communication, literacy practices, the transformation of motherhood and gender roles, notions of historical preservation, urban planning, and systems of racial privilege.

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Writing in Disciplines: A Discussion with Shyam Sharma Feb 24, 2021

Show notes

Listen to this interview of Shyam Sharma, Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at Stony Brook University. We talk about how mutually appreciative attitudes advance Writing in the Disciplines, about how other languages matter to writing in English, and about how US Presidents have changed the ways we teach writing and learn to write.

Interviewer: "Where does language come in to the sort of writing development called Writing Studies or English for Academic Purposes or Academic Literacies?"

Shyam Sharma: "Well, there are language-focused academic curriculums around the world. But language is not writing. If it was, then I wouldn't have my job. You know, for the most part, students who speak English as a native language wouldn't need to learn anything about genres and conventions and writing and rhetoric and communication. And so, where English is taught in non-English-speaking regions, the concern about language buries everything so far down that it is difficult for people to foreground it and to pay specialized attention to it and to develop research programs and to be funded and to be recognized and so on."

Daniel Shea, heads Scholarly Communications, a Special Series on the New Books Network. Daniel is Director of the Heidelberg Writing Program, a division of the Language Center at Heidelberg University, Germany. Just write Daniel.Shea@zsl.uni-heidelberg.de

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I. Stavans and J. Lambert, "How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish" (Restless Books, 2020) Feb 23, 2021

Show notes

Is it possible to conceive of the American diet without bagels? Or Star Trek without Mr. Spock? Are the creatures in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are based on Holocaust survivors? And how has Yiddish, a language without a country, influenced Hollywood? These and other questions are explored in this stunning and rich anthology of the interplay of Yiddish and American culture, entitled How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish (Restless Books, 2020), and edited by Ilan Stavans and Josh Lambert.

It starts with the arrival of Ashkenazi immigrants to New York City’s Lower East Side and follows Yiddish as it moves into Hollywood, Broadway, literature, politics, and resistance. We take deep dives into cuisine, language, popular culture, and even Yiddish in the other Americas, including Canada, Argentina, Cuba, Mexico, and Colombia. The book presents a bountiful menu of genres: essays, memoir, song, letters, poems, recipes, cartoons, conversations, and much more. Authors include Nobel Prize–winner Isaac Bashevis Singer and luminaries such as Grace Paley, Cynthia Ozick, Chaim Grade, Michael Chabon, Abraham Cahan, Sophie Tucker, Blume Lempel, Irving Howe, Art Spiegelman, Alfred Kazin, Harvey Pekar, Ben Katchor, Paula Vogel, and Liana Finck.

Readers will laugh and cry as they delve into personal stories of assimilation and learn about people from a diverse variety of backgrounds, Jewish and not, who have made the language their own. The Yiddish saying states: Der mentsh trakht un got lakht. Man plans and God laughs. How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish illustrates how those plans are full of zest, dignity, and tremendous humanity.

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020).

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Leon S. Brenner, "The Autistic Subject: On the Threshold of Language" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) Feb 17, 2021

Show notes

Leon Brenner's The Autistic Subject: On the Threshold of Language (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) makes a forceful case for the relevance of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the understanding and treatment of autism. Refusing both cognitive and identitarian approaches to the topic, Brenner rigorously theorizes autism as a unique mode of subjectivity and relation to language that sits alongside the classical Freudian structures of psychosis, neurosis, and perversion. In this interview, Brenner dispels misconceptions around psychoanalysis "blaming the mother," as we explore his conceptualisation of autistic subjectivity alongside clinical examples.

Jordan Osserman is a postdoctoral research fellow and psychoanalyst in training in London. He can be reached at jordan.osserman@gmail.com.

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Wesley C. Robertson, "Scripting Japan: Orthography, Variation, and the Creation of Meaning in Written Japanese" (Routledge, 2020) Jan 29, 2021

Show notes

Imagine this book was written in Comic Sans. Would this choice impact your image of me as an author, despite causing no literal change to the content within? Generally, discussions of how language variants influence interpretation of language acts/users have focused on variation in speech. But it is important to remember that specific ways of representing a language are also often perceived as linked to specific social actors. Nowhere is this fact more relevant than in written Japanese, where a complex history has created a situation where authors can represent any sentence element in three distinct scripts.

In Scripting Japan: Orthography, Variation, and the Creation of Meaning in Written Japanese (Routledge, 2020), Wesley Robertson provides the first investigation into the ways Japanese authors and their readers engage with this potential for script variation as a social language practice, looking at how purely script-based language choices reflect social ideologies, become linked to language users, and influence the total meaning created by language acts. Throughout the text, analysis of data from multiple studies examines how Japanese language users' experiences with the script variation all around them influence how they engage with, produce, and understand both orthographic variation and major social divides, ultimately evidencing that even the avoidance of variation can become a socially significant act in Japan.

Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing.

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