Grotesque Multilingualism

Pieter Bruegel, "The Fight Between Carnival and Lent," 1559
(http://fishmarketblog.wordpress.com/2009/12/04/why-feast-of-fools/)

One matter we frequently discuss in HEL is the relationship between English and other languages.  Inevitably, such discussions lead to talk about movements toward official English, loan words, and the status of English as a global language.  I'm especially interested in how the digital world is becoming increasingly multilingual, especially in the face of the assumption that English is the dominant language on the Internet.  While it's true that English dominates, it is no longer the exclusive online tongue it once was. Those of us who only know one language may be surprised to learn that there are more multilinguals than monolinguals.  How then should we deal with the diminishing value of a lingua franca?  And I'm curious: how many of us consider ourselves to be multilingual?

As complex as communication may become, I have to admit that I'm thrilled by the challenges that an increasingly multilingual world offers, especially to the classroom.  This coming Monday, a friend and colleague of mine, Tom Friedrich, and I will be sharing a paper that addresses these issues at the Penn State Conference on Rhetoric and Composition: Rhetoric and Writing Across Language Boundaries.  We will be presenting in a session titled "Rhetoric and Identity in Online Spaces," which includes other papers on iPhones and street harassment and the collapse of the private/public binary in digital discourse.  Our paper is titled, "Grotesque Multilingualism: Male Literacy in a Globalized Era."  Here's the abstract:

           Mikhail Bakhtin suggests that the grotesque body is perpetually "in the act of becoming."  This unfinished and dynamic corporeality characterizes male student writers, who often resist traditional models of composition instruction that encourage them to mimic formal models and promote a “standard” register as a shared ideal. Such a monolingual environment limits the diverse rhetorical and linguistic corpora available to multilingual students, whom we take to include not only L2 or marginalized dialect speakers, but also native English speakers whose multiple literacies go unrecognized in US English classrooms.

            This presentation turns to student and teacher authored-texts to theorize multilingual males’ "act[s] of becoming" within two contexts: online fan fiction and an undergraduate new media course and the compositions it assigned. Mueller documents how ELLs are increasingly contributing to fan fiction websites, within which contributors revise and elaborate upon fan texts, ranging from manga to Harry Potter.  He argues that these multilingual spaces have a long history that reaches back into the medieval classroom, in which students and teachers glossed and rewrote Aesopic fables, developing an expanding corpus that was produced in multiple languages. Friedrich describes an undergraduate new media course where an emphasis on cultivating an identity as an informed consumer-producer allowed male millenials to see, value, and extend their histories of creating digital texts.  In this way, these participants came to see themselves as multilingual speakers, a stance that allowed them to claim ownership over the course and to create more inclusive pedagogies.

If you want to read more, see below.  And I apologize for the inconsistent documentation styles - it's APA meets Chicago!