E. Paige Miller (Department of English)
E. Paige Miller’s "The Literary Multilingualism of Malcolm Lowry, G.V. Desani, and James Joyce" is a compelling dissertation that argues for the importance of paying greater attention to the multilingual nature of Anglophone modernism, especially in contexts of global, colonial, and imperial English. "Literary Multilingualism" begins with Lowry’s Under the Volcano, a novel set in Mexico with a protagonist who is mired in mistranslation and linguistic confusion and ending (in reverse chronological order) with the most recognizably modernist multilingual work of them all, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Miller applies contemporary linguistic theories that focus primarily on spoken language to the artful and self-consciously literary language of modernist writers. Approaching multilingualism first through finely developed close readings of novels by Lowry and Desani, which are written almost exclusively in English but depend in very different ways on the presence of multiple languages, "Literary Multilingualism" offers exciting possibilities for new ways of understanding both modernism and global English.
