Untying the Mother Tongue explores what it might mean today to speak of someone’s attachment to a particular, primary language. Traditional conceptions of mother tongue are often seen as an expression of the ideology of a European nation-state. Yet, current celebrations of multilingualism reflect the recent demands of global capitalism, raising other challenges. The contributions from international scholars on literature, philosophy, and culture, analyze and problematize the concept of ‘mother tongue’, rethinking affective and cognitive attachments to language while deconstructing its metaphysical, capitalist, and colonialist presuppositions.
ISBN 978-3-96558-048-0 | Hardcover | 30 EUR
ISBN 978-3-96558-049-7 | Paperback | 15 EUR
vi, 252 pp. | 22.9 cm x 15.2 cm
ISBN 978-3-96558-050-3 | PDF | Open Access
ISBN 978-3-96558-051-0 | EPUB | Open Access
Cultural Inquiry, 26
ISSN (Print): 2627-728X
ISSN (Online): 2627-731X
Contents
- Introduction
- But You Don’t Get Used to Anything: Derrida on the Preciousness of the Singular
- Philosophy’s Mother Envy: Has There Yet Been a Deconstruction of the Mother Tongue?
- ‘My Mother Tongue Is a Foreign Language’: On Edmond Jabès’s Writing in Exile
- The Mother Tongue at School
- Scarspeak: Thinking the Mother Tongue as a Formative Mark
- The Shuffling of Feet on the Pavement: Virginia Woolf on Un-Learning the Mother Tongue
- ‘I know you can cant’: Slips of the Mother Tongue in Fred Moten’s B Jenkins
- The Mother Tongue of Love and Loss: Albert Cohen’s Le Livre de ma mère
- The Staircase Wit: or, The Poetic Idiomaticity of Herta Müller’s Prose
- Wandering Words: Translation against the Myth of Origin in Fritz Mauthner’s Philosophy
