Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education

Public Planet Books

by Doris Sommer

Knowing a second language entails some unease; it requires a willingness to make mistakes and work through misunderstandings. The renowned literary scholar Doris Sommer argues that feeling funny is good for you, and for society. In Bilingual Aesthetics Sommer invites readers to make mischief with meaning, to play games with language, and to allow errors to stimulate new ways of thinking. Today’s global world has outgrown any one-to-one correlation between a people and a language; liberal democracies can either encourage difference or stifle it through exclusionary policies. Bilingual Aesthetics is Sommer’s passionate call for citizens and officials to cultivate difference and to realize that the precarious points of contact resulting from mismatches between languages, codes, and cultures are the lifeblood of democracy, as well as the stimulus for aesthetics and philosophy. Sommer encourages readers to entertain the creative possibilities inherent in multilingualism. With her characteristic wit and love of language, she focuses on humor—particularly bilingual jokes—as the place where tensions between and within cultures are played out. She draws on thinking about humor and language by a range of philosophers and others, including Sigmund Freud, Immanuel Kant, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hannah Arendt, and Mikhail Bakhtin. In declaring the merits of allowing for crossed signals, Sommer sends a clear Making room for more than one language is about value added, not about remediation. It is an expression of love for a contingent and changing world.

280 pages, Paperback

First published March 17, 2004

About the author

Doris Sommer is the Ira and Jewell Williams Jr. Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, where she is Founder and Director of Cultural Agents: Arts and Humanities in Civic Engagement. She is the author of The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities, Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education and editor of Cultural Agency in the Americas.

Reviews

[Abby · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is a great resource for anyone interested in language politics and aesthetics, but be prepared to do some decoding.

Sommer intends to encourage Americans to embrace cultural and linguistic diversity as fundamental to the health of democracy. She suggests that, while mainstream American culture traditionally values clarity at the expense of profundity, if we learned to appreciate the awkward and ambiguous spaces in language and between languages, as bilingual people and artists do, we could open new political possibilities and revitalize democratic culture.

Unfortunately, while Sommer makes some excellent points (and I agree wholeheartedly with her recommendations) her arguments are poorly organized. As the earlier review re name-dopping suggests, she often seems so eager to support her arguments with literary theory and philosophical references that her own ideas disappear into a maze of others. While the purpose of each chapter is stated explicitly more than once, I sometimes felt she'd written 200 pages of (well-crafted) paragraphs, then threw them up in the air and rearranged them haphazardly. The same book, better written (or edited maybe?), could have made a lasting impact.

[Andrea · Rating 3 out of 5]

The idea that Sommer proposes in this book is revolutionary. Unfortunately, however, she spends so much time name-dropping and flaunting her previous reading that she does not develop her own ideas adequately.

[Brooke · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit too anecdotal to use for research, but Sommer makes some relevant points.