David Gramling

Epilogue: Finding Our Minds

It is difficult to change our minds about language—or anything else—when our minds feel or appear lost. This, losing one’s mind, is the effect of constant “shock events,” unsolicited, unexpected, and unregulated, and the attendant rolling barrage of bad news, falsehoods, and partisan invectives. In the epilogue, the authors suggest faster-acting antidotes than the more durable routines of critique, correction, and care endorsed in the book. In three personal reflections, they ask what other kinds of jolts—surprises or confrontations—can help bring the readers closer to “refusing the spoils of interactional hegemony,” which is how the book defines linguistic disobedience. The suggestion is to turn to the artifacts, writings, or objects that can baffle without inducing chaos or harness visual and material properties of language generatively.

Introduction: Obeying and Disobeying

In the introduction, the authors account for traditional understandings of “obedience as decorum” and “obedience as deference to power.” These models, they suggest, no longer characterize linguistic obedience in 2018, when far-right bloggers, troll armies, and the US President style themselves as underdog insurgents, despite having immediate access to the levers of political power. The focus is on how the free market in linguistic disfiguration, legitimated since the 1990s by self-appointed language experts, turns the incentive to speak in civically destructive ways into a lucrative political economy. The authors accordingly define linguistic disobedience as those practices of language care, critique, and correction that—amid such a political economy of incentivized disfiguration—forgo the spoils of everyday interactional domination, in pursuit of better, more just contributions.

Un/Translatables: New Maps for Germanic Literatures ed. by Bethany Wiggin and Catriona MacLeod (review)

Gramlings The Invention of Monolingualism darf als neues Standardwerk zum Thema Einsprachigkeitsforschung gelten. Als solches ist das Buch für Sprach-, Kulturund Übersetzungswissenschaftler gleichermaßen interessant. Gramling beleuchtet die Thematik in bisher nicht dagewesener Weise. Insbesondere seine Erkenntnisse zur Einsprachigkeit in den Romanen von Franz Kafka (Kapitel 2) und die Frage, was deutsche Sprachkenntnisse, die beispielsweise im Einbürgerungstest geprüft werden, mit einer Identifikation mit Deutschland zu tun haben (Kapitel 4), sind für Germanisten von Bedeutung und bergen Diskussionspotential. Übersetzungstheorien wie die Verfremdung (foreignization) und die Einbürgerung (domestication) nach Friedrich Schleiermacher oder die Skopostheorie (Hans Vermeer und Katharina Reiß), die Gramling fälschlicherweise allein Christiane Nord zuschreibt, werden jedoch sehr vereinfacht dargestellt und nur am Rande skizziert. Zu den Schwächen des Buches gehört auch, dass so Manches – wie das persönliche Gespräch des Autors mit einem Berliner Kebabverkäufer – eher anekdotisch anmutet als empirisch belegt. Gramling bleibt dem Leser statistische Erhebungen oder detaillierte Studien schuldig, die seine Thesen zum (Mono-)Lingualismus stützen.

Is There a Right to Untranslatability? Asylum, Evidence and the Listening State *

This article focuses on Refugee Status Determination (RSD) procedures, in order to understand the relationships among language, translation / interpreting, evidentiary assessment, and what we call the ‘listening state’. Legal systems have only recently begun to consider whether adjudicative processes ought to take place in multiple languages concurrently, or whether the ideal procedure is to monolingualize evidence first, and then assess it accordingly. Because of this ambivalence, asylum applicants are often left in the ‘zone of uncertainty’ between monolingualism and multilingualism. Their experiences and testimonies become subject to an ‘epistemic anxiety’ only infrequently seen in other areas of adjudication. We therefore ask whether asylum applicants ought to enjoy a ‘right to untranslatability’, taking account of the States responsibility to cooperate actively with them or whether the burden ought to remain with the applicant to achieve credibility in the language of the respective jurisdiction, through interpretation and translation.

My Ardinghello: Heinse and the Importance of Being Epistolary

Wilhelm Heinses 1787 painter-novel Ardinghello und die glückseligen Inseln is an unruly and precarious literary-historical artifact, balancing on the thresholds between text and paratext, archive and translation, excess and omission, Renaissance and Sturm und Drang. This article brings recent work on the queer materiality of epistolary exchange (Garlinger 2005) to bear on long-inherited interpretations of Ardinghello, seeing in it an endeavor to imagine a rhetorical space for protogay literature in late eighteenth century German humanism. Since the 1990s, much effort has gone into studying queer structures and traces in Lenz and Goethe, and Simon Richter (2006) has suggested that Heinses “revolutionary fictions” are perhaps best understood in this light as well. What remains undertheorized, however, is the structural relationship between epistolary disclosure and proscribed desire in Ardinghello, and a century of Heinse research has seen fit to minimize this particular aspect of his work. With its sidelong reference to Willa Cathers 1918 My Ántonia, this essay shores up the consequences of upholding a non-epistolary interpretation of an epistolary novel—particularly in the domain of homosocial desire.