@article{1478283,
      recid = {1478283},
      author = {Ch'ien, Evelyn Nien-Ming,  and Chʻien, Evelyn Nien-Ming, },
      title = {Weird English /},
      pages = {1 online resource (352 p.)},
      abstract = {With increasing frequency, readers of literature are  encountering barely intelligible, sometimes unrecognizable  languages created by combining one or more languages with  English. Evelyn Ch'ien argues that weird English  constitutes the new language of literature, implicitly  launching a new literary theory. Weird English explores  experimental and unorthodox uses of English by multilingual  writers traveling from the canonical works of Nabokov and  Hong Kingston to the less critiqued linguistic terrain of  Junot Díaz and Arundhati Roy. It examines the syntactic  and grammatical innovations of these authors, who use  English to convey their ambivalence toward or enthusiasm  for English or their political motivations for altering its  rules. Ch'ien looks at how the collision of other languages  with English invigorated and propelled the evolution of  language in the twentieth century and beyond. Ch'ien  defines the allure and tactical features of a new writerly  genre, even as she herself writes with a sassiness and  verve that communicates her ideas with great panache. Table  of Contents: Introduction 1. A Shuttlecock above the  Atlantic: Nabokov's Mid-Life and Mid-Geographic Crises 2.  Chinky Writing 3. The Politics of Design: Arundhati Roy 4.  "The Shit That's Other": Unintelligible Languages 5. Losing  Our English, Losing Our Language: The Unintelligibility of  Postcolonial Theory Notes Index Reviews of this book:  Nien-Ming Ch'ien makes a sophisticated theoretical argument  by proposing that with the rise of world literatures in  English, readers are encountering barely intelligible and  sometimes unrecognizable English resulting from a  combination of one or more languages with English. She  terms this combination 'weird English'.Examining the works  of such multicultural writers as Vladimir Nabokov, Maxine  Hong Kingston, and Arundhati Roy, [she] posits that weird  English obliterates the boundary between the sacred and the  profane in language and demands a new literary  theory.[Ch'ien's] somewhat unorthodox and vivacious style  perfectly complements her argument.--Aparna Zambare,  Library JournalEvelyn Ch'ien's Weird English offers up an  innovative, risk-taking, colorful, richly textualized, and  important new text which refigures our tired, familiar, or  overly-representative notions of the "global postcolonial"  or "US ethnic" text as literary and cultural-political  event. Ch'ien's scholarly text is offbeat yet on the social  aesthetic mark in a way that has never quite been done  before. Weird English posits and defines the allure and  tactical features of a whole new writerly genre based and  rooted in the minority deformations of British and American  English. Activating what she talks about as the newness,  stigmata, and social struggle to achieve freedom and  respect of writing in this emerging new genre she calls  "weird English," Ch'ien herself writes/performs like some  scholarly cross between Helen Vendler and Margaret Cho:  everywhere mixing the prosodic insight and sensitivity to  linguistic close-readings and aesthetic valences of the  former, say, with all the sassiness, adventure, and  in-your-face verve and minority-rooted freshness of the  latter. "Insouciance" of language and attitude is both  Ch'ien's subject and, at times, her style, as scholarship  swerves into polemic, probe, joke, song, and the social  energies of mongrel mixture. Her unprecedented writing on  Junot Diaz is especially fine and visceral, close to the  inner-American grain of its ghetto life and  linguistic-social emergences, and thus grants his Spanglish  a new world company and genre. Like some homegrown Deleuze,  Ch'ien comes close to, articulates, and thus activates the  "minority becoming" of Diaz's writing showing how the Diaz  mixed-minority language is seeped in social utterance and  subaltern energies, without writing them out of existence  o},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/1478283},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674029538},
}