English and Mobility: Linguistic and Stylistic Transformations in New Anglophone Literatures

Authors

  • Esterino Adami Università di Torino

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.13135/1825-263X/1382

Keywords:

Language and mobility, Language and transformation, Englishes, Identity, Xiaolu Guo, NoViolet Bulawayo

Abstract

This article investigates the interconnected themes of language, mobility and
identity and their narrative renditions in the anglophone context by providing
an interdisciplinary analysis of some extracts from two recent novels, A Concise
Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2008) and We Need New Names (2014),
respectively written by Xiaolu Guo and NoViolet Bulawayo, who resourcefully
elaborate new linguistic and textual forms to express the plural questions of
identity. The helpful notion of ‘language and mobility’ discussed by Pennycook
(2010) lends support to the argument that language, identity and mobility
represent coterminous cultural forces at work in the constant shaping and
changing of the contemporary globalised and postcolonial world

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Author Biography

Esterino Adami, Università di Torino

Esterino Adami is a researcher in English language and translation at the University of Turin. His main fields of interest include varieties of English, stylistics, postcolonial literatures, narrative renditions of specialised discourse and the semiotics of graphic narratives. He has extensively published on lexical and stylistic aspects of Indian English, the theme of identity in Anglophone fiction and language methodology in postcolonial contexts, and has co-edited (with A. Martelli) the volume Within and Across. Language and Construction of Shifting Identities in Post-Colonial Contexts (2012). He is currently working on the notion of ‘split self' in Jhumpa Lahiri’s non-literary writing and on the railway metaphor in the graphic novel Snowpiercer.

References

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Bulawayo, NoViolet. 2014. We Need New Names. London: Vintage.

Canagarajah, Suresh. 2013. Translingual Practice. Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations. Abingdon: Routledge.

Cimarosti, Roberta. 2014. “English as a Motion Language. Notes on Theory and Practice”. Paper presented at the ‘Mob-Ility Symposium - Stochastic Citizenship’, Venice, Wake Forest University, 10 October.

Gilmour, Rachel. 2012. “Living between Languages: the Politics of Translation in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret and Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers”. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 47 (2): 207-227.

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Oboe, Annalisa. 2013. “Language, Eros and Culture in Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers”, in The Tapestry of the Creative Word in Anglophone Literatures, eds. Antonella Riem Natale, Maria Renata Dolce, Stefano Mercanti and Caterina Colomba, 267-279, Udine: Forum.

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Zhen, Zhang. 2008. “‘I’m a Modern Peasant’: Encountering Xiaolu Guo”. World Literature Today, 82 (6), 45-48.

Guo Xiaolu, http://www.guoxiaolu.com/index.htm (last access 12/08/2015)

NoViolet Bulawayo, http://novioletbulawayo.com/ (last access 13/08/2015)

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Published

2016-01-27

Issue

No. 18 (2014)

Section

Primo momento – Lingue / Stage One - Languages

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