Publications

Literature in Late Monolingualism: Literacies for the Linguacene

by David Gramling, published by Bloomsbury Academic, 2024

Monolingualism is bad; literature is good – right?

For many of us monolingualism is associated with closed-mindedness, political nationalism, and a general hostility to diverse knowledges and experiences of the world. In contrast, literature continues to stand allegedly unbeholden, as a symbolic beacon for expansive human expression and insight – making meaning astride Earth’s thousands of human languages.

But what if this division of virtue and vice isn’t quite right, leading us to overlook the uninterrupted historical and aesthetic collusion between political monolingualism and literary novels today? What if novels made in a European mold tend to be much more indebted to monolingual structures, ideologies, and styles than their publishers, and even their critics, care to acknowledge?

Instead of whistling past such a discomfort, Literature in Late Monolingualism recognizes it squarely – detailing the important ways in which many authors of contemporary novels do so too. As it turns out, these authors and their novels tend to be far less skittish than their marketers are about the vast implications of monolingualism in literature, literary critique, and civic life. Rather than rebuking monolingualism as a social vice or a personal shortcoming, authors from China Miéville to Dorthe Nors to Karin Tidbeck to Neal Stephenson investigate it dauntlessly, aiming to show us in vivid terms how monolingualism is still often calling the shots in our globalized aesthetic and political cultures today.

The Invention of Multilingualism

By David Gramling, published by Cambridge University Press, 2021

Multilingualism is a meaningful and capacious idea about human meaning-making practice, one with a promising, tumultuous, and flawed present – and a future worth caring for in research and public life. In this book, David Gramling presents original new insights into the topical subject of multilingualism, describing its powerful social, economic and political discourses. On one hand, it is under acute pressure to bear the demands of new global supply-chains, profit margins, and supranational unions, and on the other it is under pressure to make way for what some consider to be better descriptors of linguistic practice, such as translanguaging. The book shows how multilingualism is usefully able to encompass complex, divergent, and sometimes opposing experiences and ideas, in a wide array of planetary contexts – fictitious and real, political and social, North and South, colonial and decolonial, individual and collective, oppressive and liberatory, embodied and prosthetic, present and past.

The Invention of Monolingualism

By David Gramling, published by Bloomsbury Academic, 2016

Winner of the 2018 Book Award awarded by the American Association for Applied Linguistics

The Invention of Monolingualism harnesses literary studies, applied linguisitics, translation studies, and cultural studies to offer a groundbreaking investigation of monolingualism. After briefly describing what “monolingual” means in scholarship and public discourse, and the pejorative effects this common use may have on non-elite and cosmopolitan populations alike, David Gramling sets out to discover a new conception of monolingualism. Along the way, he explores how writers-Turkish, Latin-American, German, and English-language-have in recent decades confronted monolingualism in their texts, and how they have critiqued the World Literature industry’s increasing hunger for “translatable” novels.

Linguistic Disobedience: Restoring Power to Civic Language

By Yuliya Komska, Michelle Moyd, and David Gramling, published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2018

This book asks how we—as citizens, immigrants, activists, teachers—can counter the abuse of language in our midst. How can we take back the power of language from those who flaunt that power to silence or erase us and our fellows? In search of answers, Linguistic Disobedience recalls ages and situations that made critiquing, correcting, and caring for language essential for survival. From turn-of-the-twentieth-century Central Europe to the miseries of the Third Reich, from the Movement for Black Lives to the ongoing effort to decolonize African languages, the study and practice of linguistic disobedience have been crucial. But what are we to do today, when reactionary supremacists and authoritarians are screen-testing their own forms of so-called disobedience to quash oppositional social justice movements and their languages? Blending lyric essay with cultural criticism, historical analysis, and applied linguistics, Linguistic Disobedience offers suggestions for a hopeful pathway forward in violent times.

Diversity and Decolonization in German Studies

edited by Regine Criser and Ervin Malakaj, published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2020

This book presents an approach to transform German Studies by augmenting its core values with a social justice mission rooted in Cultural Studies. ​German Studies is approaching a pivotal moment. On the one hand, the discipline is shrinking as programs face budget cuts. This enrollment decline is immediately tied to the effects following a debilitating scrutiny the discipline has received as a result of its perceived worth in light of local, regional, and national pressures to articulate the value of the humanities in the language of student professionalization. On the other hand, German Studies struggles to articulate how the study of cultural, social, and political developments in the German-speaking world can serve increasingly heterogeneous student learners. This book addresses this tension through questions of access to German Studies as they relate to student outreach and program advocacy alongside pedagogical models.

Monatshefte, Volume 114, Issue 3

edited by Kyle Frackman and Ervin Malakaj, published by University of Wisconsin Press, 2022

From the Introduction: Drawing on the traditions of scholarship cited above—both in queer theory and in queer German Studies—this special issue of Monatshefte seeks to use the insights from scholarship about queer temporality as points of departure to examine queer German cultural history and media. Like the work of earlier scholars who began explicitly interrogating time and its relationship to cultural texts, this issue’s articles convey how temporal issues lie at the heart of how we can interpret cultural phenomena pertaining to sexual difference and embodiment. Can one distinguish recurring patterns of queerness in German cultural texts? Are there modes of historiography that are more amenable to the questions entertained by queer German Studies? Which forms of temporality and timeliness are most apposite to these objects’ study? In addressing these and related questions, this special issue aims to present methodological and theoretical examples from queer German Studies. As a vibrant subfield, queer German Studies will continue to yield scholarship integral for the understanding of queer lived experience and cultural history. We believe that considerations about queer time will continue to play an important role in this work and see this special issue as a means to catalyze more on this line of inquiry.

English Language Notes, volume 63, issue 1: Refuge and Displacement

edited by Beverly Weber and Ervin Malakaj, published by Duke University Press, 2025

This special issue focuses on sites of relational and cultural practice at which border violence is challenged by solidarity, a major technology of resistance to border regimes. This form of collective action describes the social formation among displaced peoples crossing borders. It also describes the social formation of anyone who enters into solidarity with those displaced people crossing borders. The issue assembles articles that highlight solidarity relationship building in the face of forced displacement and amid the violence that structures national borders. It also touches on experiences of failed, disappointed, and seemingly impossible solidarities. This introduction brings together the discourses that inform the thinking the issue exemplifies and reflects on some of the lessons it teaches.