The clash of languages: Translation, literature, and the nation-state

Foregrounding the presence of linguistic difference in our age of globalization and mass migration, The Clash of Languages explores the intersection of three territorial entities: nation-states, jurisdictions, and language zones. At the edges of these spaces, translation emerges as a technology of government regulating not only the transfer of meaning, but also the movement of people across borders. Less a means of bridging difference, state-sponsored translation is shown to produce difference in order to identify and subsequently either discipline or deport it. The case studies focus on traditions of linguistic nationalism in the U.S.-American and the German-language contexts; conventionally conceptualized as opposing models, they are in many ways converging Each of the three chapters reads a specific, nationally significant literary genre in conjunction with relevant legal texts codifying the status of ethnic and language minorities within the respective nation-state. The first chapter explores a U.S. Supreme Court opinion that rules bilingualism logically impossible for U.S. citizens, and compares it to contemporary immigrant narratives that question that genre's time-honored goal of assimilation into the English language. In the second chapter, the recent restructuring of German immigration law is analyzed, and its emphasis on (acquired) linguistic identity is related to the Bildungsroman tradition, which is transforming in order to accommodate the wave of immigration that has now also reached Central Europe. The third chapter turns to Austria, and establishes a close connection between the multilingual Habsburg legacy, the State Treaty of 1955, and the popular Heimatroman genre. The Heimatroman emerges somewhat surprisingly as a form ideally suited to undermine the nation-state's monolingual injunction, which is becoming untenable in the face of large-scale displacements of people and their languages. The Clash of Languages thus posits linguistic difference and translational acts as constitutive of both the nation-state, which exhibits increasingly exclusionary tendencies, and its national literature, where an inclusionary aesthetics is becoming apparent.