Language's Hopes: Global Modernism and the Science of Debabelization
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2020-12-31
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Abstract
Twenty-first century paradigms of global modernism implicitly endorse “babelization” (the inscrutable styles of literary texts, the addition of lesser taught languages to the field) as a corrective to linguistic imperialism and the reduction of language to a communicative medium. Yet this stance does not fully account for the distinction between natural and artificial languages. “Debabelization,” as linguist C. K. Ogden put it in 1931, motivated rich debates about the nature of language and whether technological intervention could make particular languages more efficient agents of cultural exchange. Designers of Esperanto, Ido, and Basic English each promised that their artificial language would bridge the gap between speakers of different national tongues. This essay shows how the competitive and techno-utopian discourse around auxiliary language movements intersects with the history and aesthetics of modernist literature. While linguists strove to regulate the vagaries of natural languages, modernist writers (for example, Aimé Césaire, G. V. Desani, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, H. G. Wells) used debabelization as a trope for exploring the limits of scientific objectivity and internationalist sentiment.
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Scholars@Duke
Aarthi Vadde
Aarthi Vadde works in the field of 20th-21st century Global Anglophone literature, and is broadly interested in the relationship of literary history to emerging technologies and internet culture. Her forthcoming book We the Platform: How the Internet Changed Twenty-First Century Literature (Columbia UP, 2026) fills a gap in literary and computing history by showing how ideas about literature shape the Web and how Web-based literacies shape authorship, narrative form, and craft in twenty-first century literary fiction. Her book offers the first crowd-based account of literariness in a world of exponentially growing written expression. In addition to her authorial work, Vadde is co-editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol F: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries and co-founder of Novel Dialogue a podcast about how novels are made - and what to make of them.
Past projects: Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism beyond Europe, 1914-2016 was published by Columbia UP in 2016 and won the ACLA's 2018 Harry Levin Prize for outstanding first book in the field of comparative literature. A forum on the book was convened by The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry. Chimeras illustrates how modernist and contemporary writers from Rabindranath Tagore to Zadie Smith reimagine the nation and internationalism in a period defined by globalization. An interview related to the book is available here.
Vadde is co-editor of a volume on the history of literary criticism entitled The Critic as Amateur (Bloomsbury Academic 2019). Read the intro here. She is also the co-editor of an open-access cluster of essays entitled Web 2.0 and Literary Criticism (Post45 Contemporaries) and the Palgrave Handbook of 20th and 21st Century Literature and Science.
She joined Duke in 2011 after completing a postdoctoral fellowship in the English Department at Harvard University.
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