David Gramling (UBC Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies) will give a colloquium talk.
Living with Ordolanguages
Description: Drawing on my past few books on monolingualism and multilingualism, I will take a detour through a Danish novel, Dorthe Nors’s 2015 Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, to explore the ways such literary texts propose theories of “the traffic in meaning” in a period of global “late monolingualism.” In the novel, Sonja is a literary translator from Swedish to Danish who suffers bouts of BPPV (benign paroxysmal positional vertigo), or “otolithic” vertigo. This disorder indicates Sonja’s growing distemper toward orderly, globalized industrial multilingualism and the relations of production for literary translation. This exploration is part of my current book project on Literature in Late Monolingualism, contracted with Stanford University Press (2024).
