The Fall of Language in the Age of English

by Minae Mizumura, Mari Yoshihara (Translator), Juliet Winters Carpenter (Translator)

Overview

Winner of the Kobayashi Hideo Award, The Fall of Language in the Age of English lays bare the struggle to retain the brilliance of one's own language in this period of English-language dominance. Born in Tokyo but raised and educated in the United States, Minae Mizumura acknowledges the value of a universal language in the pursuit of knowledge yet also embraces the different ways of understanding offered by multiple tongues. She warns against losing this precious diversity.

Universal languages have always played a pivotal role in advancing human societies, Mizumura shows, but in the globalized world of the Internet, English is fast becoming the sole common language of humanity. The process is unstoppable, and striving for total language equality is delusional—and yet, particular kinds of knowledge can be gained only through writings in specific languages.

Mizumura calls these writings "texts" and their ultimate form "literature." Only through literature and, more fundamentally, through the diverse languages that give birth to a variety of literatures, can we nurture and enrich humanity. Incorporating her own experiences as a writer and a lover of language and embedding a parallel history of Japanese, Mizumura offers an intimate look at the phenomena of individual and national expression.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231163026
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	01/06/2015
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	870,356
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Minae Mizumura was born in Tokyo, moved to New York at the age of twelve, and studied French literature at Yale University. Acclaimed for her audacious experimentation and skillful storytelling, Mizumura has won major literary awards for all four of her novels—one of which, A True Novel, was recently published in English. She lives in Tokyo.

Mari Yoshihara is professor of American studies at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. She is the author of Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism and Musicians from a Different Shore: Asians and Asian Americans in Classical Music.

Juliet Winters Carpenter studied Japanese literature at the University of Michigan and the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Tokyo. In 1980, Carpenter's translation of Abe Kobo's novel Secret Rendezvous (Mikkai) won the Japan–United States Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature.

Table of Contents

Preface to the English Edition
Introduction, by Mari Yoshihara and Juliet Winters Carpenter
1. Under the Blue Sky of Iowa: Those Who Write in Their Own Language
2. From Par Avion to Via Air Mail: The Fall of French
3. People Around the World Writing in External Languages
4. The Birth of Japanese as a National Language
5. The Miracle of Modern Japanese Literature
6. English and National Languages in the Internet Age
7. The Future of National Languages
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

10/13/2014
A bestselling sensation in Japan, this erudite but accessible volume from novelist Mizumura (A True Novel) functions as a stirring call to consciousness about the role of language. Originally focused on concerns particular to Mizumura’s native Japan, the book has been revised and translated with an eye to reaching a broader audience. This is either apt or ironic, considering its main concern is with the fate of national languages at a time when English has become the world’s dominant “universal” language. To explore the subject, Mizumura offers a collection of smartly written meditations, history lessons, and theories about language. She also delves into autobiography to illustrate how her thinking was formed: after living in the United States for 20 years from the age of 12, without ever feeling completely at home there or with English, she first studied French and then moved back to Japan to write in her first language. Though less concerned than the original version with threats posed to the Japanese language by English’s ubiquity, this translation still depicts the country’s linguistic and literary heritage with mesmerizing vividness. For English speakers, the book presents an important opportunity to walk in someone else’s shoes. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

There is incredibly smart stuff in here. . . . Mizumura's ability to weave together so many strands of history (lingual, academic, economic, geopolitical) paints a clear picture of the evolution of Japanese literature, with commentary on the rest of the globe being a pleasant byproduct.

The Rumpus - Graham Oliver

In The Fall of Language, however, Mizumura wryly notes that the plot of The Golden Demon was later discovered to be a rehash of an American dime novel. From the beginning, she suggests, modern Japanese fiction was born out of an engagement with English literature—an engagement that her own work continues. Even readers who have no particular interest in that literary history will find in Mizumura a fascinating example of how a writer can be at the same time imaginatively cosmopolitan and linguistically rooted.

New York Review of Books - Adam Kirsch

Skillfully translated.

Public Books - Harou Shirane

The care with which Mizumura has crafted this book . . . [makes] the reading of it a pleasure, allowing for wit and personality to shine.

Full Stop - Sho Spaeth

[A] highly charged book.

The Chronicle Of Higher Education - Eric Banks

This powerful, insightful work analyzes the predicament of world languages and literatures in an age when English has become the universal language of science and the default language of the internet. . . . Rich, profound meditation on language and literature.

Claremont Review of Books

[Mizumura's] book is a 'text to read' in the 'universal library,' to use her terms.

Journal of Asian Studies - Selma K. Sonntag

The Fall of Language in the Age of English is—or at least can be—valuable to any literature-interested reader. Certainly, it is an interesting personal introduction to aspects of Japanese writing, and its transitions across recent centuries, as Japan's own position internationally has shifted.

The Complete Review - M. A. Orthofer

The Fall of Language in the Age of English provocatively participates in current debates on world literature, translation, reading, and writing in the age of global English and the Internet, bringing forward a new and illuminating perspective on the translingual formation of national languages and the now endangered arc of modern literature. It is written from the viewpoint of a noted Japanese novelist as well as from a wider theoretical and historical perspective.

Tomi Suzuki

Mizumura traces how the myth of the 'national language,' a pure upwelling of political character, coincided with the flowering of the nation-state—and, even more fascinatingly, of the novel itself. . . . 'Language' may be in the book's title, but Mizumura has really crafted a conservationist's plea for literature.

Slate - Katy Waldman

Translators Juliet Winter Carpenter and Mari Yoshihara have done a superb job of rendering [the text] into clear, readable English.

Japanese Studies

Rigorous and wide-ranging. . . . This book is a cracker.

Asian Review of Books - Peter Gordon

A dazzling rumination on the decline of local languages, most particularly Japanese, in a world overshadowed by English. Moving effortlessly between theory and personal reflection, Minae Mizumura's lament—linguistic and social in equal measure—is broadly informed, closely reasoned, and—in a manner that recalls her beloved Jane Austen—at once earnest and full of mischief.

John Nathan

The care with which Mizumura has crafted this book... [makes] the reading of it a pleasure, allowing for wit and personality to shine.

Full Stop

The best book I had ever read about translation and international literature—and the best illustration I had ever seen of how English corrodes even the great literary languages, including French and Japanese.

New York Times Book Review - Benjamin Moser

Mizumura has crafted a book that stimulates thought, excites passions, and encourages debate. For these alone, it is well worth a read.

World Literature Today - Erik R. Lofgren

The Fall of Language in the Age of English deserves wider coverage (and debate).

Flavorwire

Persuasive, elegantly written.... [The Fall of Language in the Age of English] is highly deserving of attention, from English and Japanese speakers alike, as well as from anyone concerned about literature's past and future.

The Quarterly Conversation - Rebecca Hussey

A call to arms for everyone: for all non-native English speakers to embrace and champion literature in their own languages, and for English speakers to be that little less arrogant in their use of their mother tongue, which just happens to have become the world's universal language.

The Japan Times - Sophie Knight

2014-10-22
Are these the last days of writers writing in Finnish, Catalan, Japanese and other languages? This slender book finds reason to worry that with English as the "universal language," national literatures will disappear.Some may find it puzzlingly meta to translate into English a book that complains, to a Japanese audience, that English is swamping the world. The idea of the hegemony of English is not new, of course; George Steiner was writing about it half a century ago. The idea that monoculturalism is undesirable is similarly old. What is new in novelist Mizumura's (A True Novel, 2013, etc.) insistence that at least some of the blame lies with the Japanese government's willingness to roll over, in the case of the Japanese language, before the invader. Defending a national language, after all, is the business of the nation, and in a nation whose educational system is centralized, she finds "astonishing…the meager content of junior and senior high school textbooks for courses in Japanese language arts." A move toward increased substance, she adds, is essential, as is a commitment to the establishment and presentation of a "modern literary canon." It is perhaps uncharitable to wonder whether there is a self-serving element in that call, but one understands Mizumura's frustration that a great artist such as Soseki Natsume should be represented by only six lines from a single novel. Readers of this book would be well-served by some background in the Meiji Restoration and its politics, but Mizumura's unhappiness with things as they are and her unwilling status as intermediary needs no cultural glossing. She wonders whether she is invited to important cultural conferences abroad only because she speaks English, not because of her status as a writer of Japanese literature.A best-seller in Japan, Mizumura's essay is likely to find only a narrow audience here, but that does not diminish its urgency in the least.

Kirkus Reviews

In The Fall Of Language in the Age of English, Minae Mizumura shows, better than anyone ever has, how English is wrecking other languages — reducing even great literary languages, including Japanese and French, to local dialects — and makes a vigorous case for the superiority of the written over the spoken word.

Benjamin Moser