Buying into English: Language and Investment in the New Capitalist World

by Catherine Prendergast

Overview

Many developing countries have little choice but to “buy into English” as a path to ideological and material betterment.
Based on extensive fieldwork in Slovakia, Prendergast assembles a rich ethnographic study that records the thoughts, aspirations, and concerns of Slovak nationals, language instructors, journalists, and textbook authors who contend with the increasing importance of English to their rapidly evolving world. She reveals how the use of English in everyday life has becomes suffused with the terms of the knowledge and information economy, where language is manipulated for power and profit.
Buying into English presents an astute analysis of the factors that have made English so prominent and yet so elusive, and a deconstruction of the myth of guaranteed viability for new states and economies through English.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822960010
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	05/20/2008
Series:	Composition, Literacy, and Culture , #31
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	3 Months

About the Author

Catherine Prendergast is professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Literacy and Racial Justice: The Politics of Learning after Brown v. Board of Education.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: The First Language of Capitalism 1

1 Lingua Non Grata: English during Communism 23

2 Other Worlds in Other Words 50

3 "We Live and Learn" 74

4 Real Life in English 98

5 The Golden Cage 126

Appendix English: A Kind of Sport 149

Notes 157

Bibliography 171

Index 177

Editorial Reviews

Raising serious sociolinguistic and social issues, Prendergast’s book reads like an inspiring fiction.”
—World Englishes

“Full of stories, large and small, about the cheapening of English in a country where people had once fetishized it, going to great lengths to learn it for themselves and their children under a regime that placed as many obstacles as possible in their path.”
—The Nation

From the Publisher