Timothy Sweet

Reading the Earth: New Directions in the Study of Literature and the Environment (review)

ole, Tigua Pueblo, Turkish, Chinese, Spanglish, and American Sign Language. The collection constitutes an imaginative and critically important revision of ‘‘American literature.’’ Sollors, to his credit, does not segregate the languages into rigid geographic or racial categories. Instead, he allows the different cultures to interact freely, producing a complex, multifaceted dialogue about the meaning(s) of American literature written in languages other than English. There are many fine moments here: Doris Sommers’s study of the ‘‘unscored counterpoint’’ between democratic difference and universal sameness that is resolved in the Spanglish term AmeRíca; Manahem Blondheim’s archeology of the Orthodox Jewish sermon as an unexplored yet meaningful dimension of the American literary tradition; Te-hsing Shan’s insightful analysis of the collision of Sinocentrism andU.S. centrism in Americanwritings in Chinese; Douglas C. Baynton’s fascinating history of American Sign Language and the long tradition of nativism that seeks to impose ‘‘normalcy’’ through standardized language use. At its best, Sollors’s thematic groupings produce a finely wrought dialogic tension revealing the contradictions and intriguing nuances of studying literature in a multicultural context. Any collection that makes so bold a claim is, of course, always open to the ‘‘sin of omission’’ critique. That said, it must be acknowledged that the ‘‘literary geography’’ of the collection remains largely centered in Europe. There are eighteen essays on European languages, none concerning Africa. There are seven essays that explore the complexities of Jewish culture and none on Arabic language or culture. One of the dangers, it seems to me, of focusing too closely on language is the risk of losing sight of issues of race, sexuality, gender, and class. This project would be richer if it addressed questions of how class, gender, or sexuality inflect language and included essays that consider African American vernacular English, the vast diversity of Native American languages, and a more historically complicated awareness of the many languages within ‘‘Asian American literature.’’ Nevertheless, Multilingual America is one of those rare books that can utterly change one’s understanding of even the most familiar academic territory. Nathan Glazer may believe that ‘‘we are all multiculturalists now’’; in reality, a great deal more work needs to be done to define multicultural studies. Multilingual America is an important step in the right direction.