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IN WHAT is otherwise one of his less mind-expanding books, The Lost World, Michael Crichton articulates one neat idea, using the iconoclastic mathematician Ian Malcolm as his mouthpiece. The framework in which Crichton has his scientist develop the idea is, of course, the return of the Jurassic period and its enchanting animal life and the endless speculations surrounding the relatively sudden demise of the dinosaurs after a long history of dominating the planet. Remarking on the possibility that sudden changes in evolution may be catalyzed not just by cosmic disasters, such as major asteroids crashing into the Atlantic Ocean, but also by far more subtle, yet equally swift evolutionary changes, Malcolm launches into a critique of cyberculture.
“I think cyberspace means the end of our species,” Malcolm boldly proclaims. Asked to explain by his female interlocutor, he says that cyberspace “means the end of motivation.”
This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they’ll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a bog continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovate new behavior to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee, and they get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That’s the effect of mass media—it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. [. . .] Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there’s a McDonald’s on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there’s less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity—our most necessary resource? That’s disappearing faster than trees. But we haven’t figured that out, so now we’re planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it’ll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity. [. . .] And believe me, it’ll be fast. If you map complex systems on a fitness landscape, you find the behavior can move so fast that fitness can drop precipitously. It doesn’t require asteroids or diseases or anything else. It’s just behavior that suddenly emerges and turns out to be fatal to the creatures that do it. My idea was that dinosaurs—being complex creatures—might have undergone some of these behavioral changes. And that led to their extinction. (339)
Malcolm’s diatribe against global media culture isn’t really located in the mainstream of media-bashing from Ahasver Fritsch to Neil Postman. Crichton is groping for a different kind of problem altogether, at least on a subconscious level. So let’s put Malcolm (or Crichton) on the couch.
What’s wrong with cyberspace and the mass media? Crichton isn’t saying, like the Postmans of the world, that we’re “amusing ourselves to death” (that would be somewhat hypocritical for the author of Jurassic Park) or that media culture deadens our sensibilities and dumbs down our cultural experience. Instead he warns that “mass media swamps diversity,” that “regional differences vanish,” that this will lead to an extinction-level loss of “intellectual diversity” and, most (melo)dramatically, that cyberspace “means the end of innovation” [and that] “This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death.”
Some of this we have heard before, particularly from Francophone quarters. But why include cyberspace in his verdict? Isn’t the Internet a communal space that links every corner of the world with every other corner? Doesn’t it give minorities a chance to be heard, to be noticed? Doesn’t it level the playing field so that everybody gets a say? Isn’t cyberspace, as the German media theorist Hartmut Winkler puts it (albeit critically) the latest and most promising media implementation of the Romantic dream of externalizing memory and thus overcoming separated spheres of experience (48-80, 192-268)? Contrary to what Crichton’s post-Jurassic Socrates claims, won’t cyberspace mean an enormous influx of innovative ideas and initiatives into the communal memory sphere that otherwise would have been lost forever because of lack of access?
These are not rhetorical questions I have thrown up in order to deconstruct them. Scaled back to realistic levels of expectation, the Internet actually can accomplish some of these happy goals (it already has, to some extent). But Malcolm has a point if we factor in the one element that he is not adding, simply because it slips below the consciousness level of both him and his creator: the medium that links every corner of the world in such an extraordinary fashion isn’t just the Internet or cyberspace. It is also a language. And the language is English. The medium in this case really is the message!
It is not because mass media and the Internet reach into the remotest corners of the globe that the dire scenario predicted by Crichton’s scientist might come true. It is because the language of this global communication is American English. And with American English come American ideas and American cultural and political norms.
The specter that Malcolm conjures up, without noticing it because it never occurs to his author, is that of a truly English-speaking world. The Orwellian vision is of a Pax Americana as the great pacifier that will lull an obstreperous and unruly globe into complacency. While such a world would presumably stop bombing American embassies around the globe and refrain from voting the United States off major committees in international bodies, it would also have very little to offer to American culture, lacking the catalyst of cultural difference: language. This absence, not the media, is what would “make all the differences vanish.” The disappearance of linguistic diversity, not the rise of cyberspace, would “mean [. . .] the end of innovation.” Global English, not the “wired world,” could result in “mass death” from a lack of ideas.
During the relatively short space of this past academic year the explosive growth of English as the new lingua franca of international commerce, politics, and research has been documented in a number of articles in, among other publications, the Chronicle of Higher Education and the Atlantic Monthly.
In the Chronicle of 6 October 2000, André Schiffrin, director of The New Press, laments that America is “missing out on a world of scholarship” because fewer and fewer books by foreign authors find an American publisher willing to take the financial risk on a translation—in dramatic contrast to the ubiquity in international markets not only of American fiction bestsellers like Crichton’s The Lost World but also of American nonfiction and even scholarly texts. Meanwhile, in the United States, as Schiffrin remarks, “even a very good foreign novel, one that has received high praise in The New York Times and elsewhere, usually ends up selling 1,000 to 2,000 copies—guaranteeing losses that have made most commercial houses give up the translation business.”
If the figures supplied by Schiffrin are both accurate and representative, we may be dealing with a far deeper problem than the unwillingness of major American mainstream publishers to take a risk with foreign translations. If only 1,000 to 2,000 readers in the entire United States are interested in reading a text that was given a strongly positive review in the pages of the New York Times, then we are dealing with an unwillingness to experience foreign ideas and cultures of the American mainstream itself. (The number 1,000 is misleading, since we presumably would have to subtract college and university foreign language library purchases.) If this trend of cultural parochialism is long- term, then we are already in the first stages of Crichton’s scenario, that is, a period when no foreign ideas enter the cultural mainstream of America.
The connection to academic culture is not lost on Schiffrin: “Most universities used to maintain that undergraduates should have some reading knowledge of at least one foreign language, and graduate students of two. But proficiency in foreign languages on college campuses has decreased markedly. Most students cannot read anything but English.” The new intercultural illiteracy threatens to close off entire subdisciplines. Schiffrin cites the growing body of Holocaust literature as an example:
The current worldwide debate over compensation for slave labor under the Nazis emerged in recent decades first in Germany with the publication of key histories of German industries. These histories are still available only in German. Of the 150 Holocaust titles available in the “Black Series” of the renowned S. Fischer publishing house about 20 are available in English (and many of those were written in English to begin with).
Burton Bollag takes us on a tour of largely anglicized academic cultures around the world. In 1997, according to figures from the Science Citation Index quoted in his article in the Chronicle, 95% of the 925,000 articles published by the world’s major science periodicals were written in English (A73). Well, you might say, that’s natural scientists. They might as well be writing in Latin. But the trend is spreading beyond the natural sciences, already engulfing economics departments as well as some of the social sciences. Even the humanities are no longer immune: the Free University of Berlin, one of Germany’s premier academic institutions, runs a summer program that, among other offerings, includes seminars on German literature—in English!
In the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands, the trend toward English as the dominant language is much further advanced, according to the Chronicle article. At academic institutions in these countries, much of the reading is assigned in English, and “if just one foreign student is present in a class, the professor usually switches to English” (A74).
Ironically, much of this English dominance is driven by the competition for international students that has become a sort of shibboleth of institutions of higher education over the last decade or so. It does not seem to have occurred to any of the administrators of these institutions that, in switching to English as the lowest common denominator for their own students, their faculty members, and the international students, they are gradually pulling the rug out from under the rationale for this exchange. If culture is bound up in any way with linguistic experience, then neither the host institution nor the laboriously recruited international students will have much to contribute to whatever common project there is, since there will not be much cultural particularity to spawn different perspectives.
That is another instance of the critical disappearance of difference Crichton’s fictional mathematics professor talks about, and it, too, is based on the ubiquity of English, not the ubiquity of the media or the Internet.
Speaking of English as the lowest common denominator, I mean no disrespect to either British or American English. After all, I live and teach in the United States, not in my native Germany, for a reason. I was a double English-German major in college; I majored in English because I was hopelessly in love with the poetry of W. H. Auden and fascinated by the plays of John Arden. But we do not mean their English when we are discussing global English. Indeed, one concern (among many) is that speakers of global English from various parts of the world will hardly be speaking the same language. Since Latin is frequently used as an analogy to the current status of English, let me assure you that, after taking nine years of Latin in a German gymnasium I can still read Cicero and Caesar (with the help of a good dictionary), but I am unable to understand an American who speaks Latin, because the Latin I have heard (and “speak”) is pronounced very differently from the Latin spoken here—and my suspicion is that both pronunciations are at equal distance from the way Cicero pronounced his language.
Even if communication works better with English, some promoters of English as a new lingua franca worry that the level on which two speakers of different linguistic backgrounds communicate with each other in it would be substantially below the level of discourse they use in their home linguistic environment. That lower level may not be a problem in the natural sciences or perhaps even in economics, where much of the argument is driven by numbers and symbols, but it can lead to major misunderstandings in areas where the accuracy and precision of the argument depend on the word.
Let’s step outside our own discipline for a moment and look at a field that may not immediately come to mind when thinking about this problem. Last year I was invited to attend a conference, Internationalizing the Curriculum, at one of our European partner institutions, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität in Mainz. As one representative after another from various German institutions rose to extol the virtues of teaching classes in English to attract foreign students and perhaps visiting scholars from the international academic community (there is funding available for such endeavors!), only the colleagues teaching German as a foreign language registered objections. My counterparts from the German department at Mainz as well as most other humanities departments had either not been invited or had not bothered to attend. Since the German-as-a-foreign- language people could be expected to object on the grounds of professional self- interest, no one took their resistance very seriously. Then a colleague from the law school got up and declared, in a few clipped sentences, that for his discipline teaching in English was definitely not an option, since the entire edifice of German law is based on a precise understanding of legal nuance as conveyed through the German language and only the German language. Any attempt to teach a German law course in English would necessarily turn into a prolonged translation workshop instead of a legal discourse. This was unacceptable. After he sat down, the discussion shifted toward a consideration of the level of discourse possible in a language that neither the faculty members, German students, nor international visitors truly mastered (unless the visitors happened to come from a country where English was the native tongue). That is what I have in mind when I refer to “global English” as the “lowest common denominator.”
If you would like to find out more about the likely fate of the language of Shakespeare if it actually were to become a global language, I refer you to Barbara Wallraff’s excellent article, “What Global Language?” Besides discussing the amazing varieties of English spoken around the globe, the differences between some of which make my Latin analogy pale by comparison, Wallraff probes the reality of this particularly modern myth. While according to some sources 77% of Danish adults and 75% of Swedish adults say they can take part in an English conversation, studies commissioned by people who can’t afford to rely on myths (e.g., television and advertising executives) show a far more complex picture:
When ad researchers recently tested 4,500 Europeans for “perceived” versus “actual” English-language skills, the results were discouraging. First, the interviewees were asked to evaluate their English- language abilities, and then to translate a series of sample English phrases or sentences. The study produced, in its own words, “sobering” results: “the number of people really fit for English-language television turned out to be less than half the expected audience.” In countries such as France, Spain, and Italy, the study found, fewer than 3 percent had excellent command of English; only in small markets, such as Scandinavia and the Low Countries, did the numbers even exceed 10 percent. (Parker qtd. in Wallraff)
What's more, there are growing signs that people—this may come as a shock to some—actually prefer their own language to English. United States television producers learned this the hard way over the past ten years, as locally produced television programming replaced American imports during prime time on all the major television channels in Germany (and, as I understand, also in France [“Move”]). Wallraff points out that even the Internet may yet work in a very different direction from the one predicted in Crichton’s doomsday scenario: in the late 1990s the trend toward English as the common language on the Internet reversed itself. According to figures obtained from the marketing consulting firm Global Reach and reported in several of Gannett’s United States newspapers, “by 2003 there will be 560 million Internet users with a primary language other than English, and they will outnumber English-speaking Internet visitors by a ratio of more than 2-1” (Wright).1 There are also indications, although inconclusive so far, that the Internet may actually help members of small or dispersed language groups stay in touch with one another across geographic boundaries, which would further impede the transformation of English into a lingua franca: “The numbers of Dutch- speakers and Finnish-speakers on the Internet are sharply up” (Wallraff).
Reality checks such as Wallraff’s thoughtful analysis are rare. For the time being, the glib pronouncements and sound bites that would have English conquer the world are carrying the day with most readers of newspapers and viewers of television news. And among these readers of newspapers and viewers of television news are college administrators, colleagues in other disciplines, students, and the parents of students. The perception of English as a lingua franca has, at least for the time being, created a reality of its own, a reality we need to take into account, no matter what the underlying truth is.
On the one hand, parents want their sons and daughters to spend a semester or a year studying abroad, if only to make sure that their offspring have some “international experience” on their résumé before hitting the global economy. On the other hand, students and frequently colleagues in other disciplines do not always see the need to add a steep language requirement to a course of study that, as they see it, is already chock-full of distribution, concentration, and minor or major requirements.
In this universe, foreign language departments are perceived as quaint pockets of regional parochialism. With their monolingual language classroom; their strange notions that Marcel Proust or Thomas Mann or Gabriel García Márquez or Luigi Pirandello or Fyodor Dostoyevski may have some relevance to a liberal arts education; and, above all, their dogged insistence that students possess enough linguistic skills to actually communicate with the people in whose country they wish to study, foreign language departments do not fit into this brave new world where corporate executives who have lost all sense of place communicate with one another in English, no matter whether they meet in Frankfurt, Detroit, or Tokyo.
In this universe, foreign language chairs often feel under assault by forces from both without and within. In their departments they have to deal with students who bring a largely utilitarian expectation to their curriculum. The enthusiastic foreign language majors who felt somehow misplaced in the country that was their accidental birthplace and who thought that they could find themselves only if they absorbed as much of a particular foreign language, culture, and literature as possible are gone. What we are dealing with instead are students who feel that it may be a good idea to grab some French on the way to their job at Goldman Sachs in London, New York, or Paris. Instilling in these corporate minds a love for French literature or theater is an uphill battle.
From without, language departments are under pressure by college administrators and curriculum committees to share their “human resources” (typically their junior faculty members) with a plethora of inter- and cross- disciplinary programs, including first-year seminars, writing-intensive seminars, humanities core courses, women’s or gender studies, comparative literature programs, international studies, and so on. Since colleagues either embrace these interdisciplinary opportunities (they’d rather teach a seminar in literary studies than Russian 101) or avoid them like the plague (perfectly happy to teach six different courses on eighteenth-century French drama), the task of navigating between these conflicting curricular expectations amounts to an invitation to go clam digging in a minefield. Add that some of these programs gobble up not only faculty resources but also majors, and it is easy to see why colleagues are not climbing over one another to be chairs of foreign language departments.
Let us move a little beyond the comfort of communal commiseration. What is to be done?
Rather than engage in speculative advice about ways of attracting or keeping more students (our colleagues in the Spanish departments are probably quite tired of advice they don’t especially need), I want to address the question that, in my opinion, underlies the marginalization of even well- enrolled foreign language departments, on the assumption that we need to identify, and if possible remove, the underlying causes of this marginalization before we can map out strategies for moving ahead. The question is, At what point, to whom, and for what pressing reasons did language departments relinquish their cultural expertise?
Let me explain what I have in mind by telling you about my own discipline, German. The founding father of Germanistik was Jacob Grimm. Grimm’s contribution to German culture doesn’t end with collecting fairy tales and German myths and sagas; he also edited the Deutsche Wörterbuch, one of the classic resources of German historical linguistics. In 1837 he was fired from his job by the new king of Hannover for his public protest against the king’s suspension of the constitution. In 1848 he was elected to the first German parliament, the Bundestag that gave the name to the present German institution. In his spare time, he laid the foundations for what he termed a new “imprecise” discipline, Germanistics. With his encyclopedic vision of German language, folk traditions, literature, and culture, Grimm surely did not have in mind a discipline that heaps scholarly monograph on scholarly monograph about the lives and works of a handful of German writers. Not that literary and biographical criticism would not have held a prominent place in the scholarly edifice he sought to construct. But I am sure that what he envisioned was a comprehensive project on German culture, much more akin to what is currently termed German studies than the much narrower field of traditional German literary criticism.
Looking beyond the fence of one’s expertise, foraging in other people’s territory, used to be the hallmark of the humanistic project. To be sure, our colleagues in the social sciences and other humanities disciplines, such as history, don’t seem to be afraid of stretching their minds: I have two colleagues in political science, one of whom is embarking on a study of Vaclav Havel (the poet and the statesman) while the other plans to work on an English translation of a major Czech drama. Historians and sociologists routinely assign works of fiction or films to their students in an effort to make the material come to life. They do not fear the cross-disciplinary wrath of literary scholars who might tell them, for instance, that the intertextual frame of reference of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front is the anxiety and political upheaval of the late Weimar Republic (the novel was published in 1929) rather than the experience in the trenches Remarque was conjuring up from over a decade earlier.
My subdiscipline is German film and media studies, which necessitates a close familiarity with German politics and society of the twentieth century. I also know a fair amount about nineteenth-century Germany. But I am embarrassed to admit that I am familiar with Spanish literature only through what I learned in the gymnasium, and I know relatively little about German baroque literature. Yet nobody would think it odd if I were to teach, say, Cervantes as part of an introductory course in world literature or German baroque poetry as part of a survey course in German. Trust me, you don’t want to assign me those classes! Yet there are some institutions (fortunately not Middlebury, which is one of the reasons I like it here) where people both in and out of my discipline would go into cardiac arrest if I were to teach the kind of course I just completed—an international studies capstone seminar on terrorism. It was a course I team-taught with David Stoll, a colleague in sociology and anthropology whose special area of expertise is Latin American studies—which made me the “expert” on European terrorism and terrorist theory. Not since I was a beginning assistant professor have I worked so hard in preparing a class; and not since I was a beginning assistant professor have the intellectual rewards been as great. (I will concede that having students almost literally break down my door to get into this course may have contributed to my enthusiasm.)
In the course of teaching this seminar, it occurred to me that here was another motivation for students to engage in the study of foreign language and culture. While the need for more foreign language expertise in combating terrorism was demonstrated even before the cataclysmic events of 11 September, by the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center by a radical Islamic group, which might have been prevented if the New York police had been able to consult an Arabist about some of the information that had fallen into their hands before the attack,2 relatively little attention has been paid to the role played by cultural and linguistic domination in creating the sense of disillusionment and loss of identity that engenders terrorism. Yet from the prominent role played by Gaelic in the Irish struggle for independence throughout the nineteenth century to the linguistic and cultural separatism of ETA, the “Black October” terrorism of the Front de Libération du Quebec, and the decades of guerrilla warfare and terrorism in Sri Lanka, cultural and indeed linguistic factors have played a major role in supporting the growth of terrorism.
The specter of a violent cultural backlash has already been raised in an article by Humphrey Tonkin, who cautions against a world in which all intelligence and cultural knowledge comes to us secondhand, filtered through the subjective interests, intelligence, and particular agendas of local speakers of “global English”:
We must recognize that a milieu dominated by English will inevitably be a milieu dominated by American modes of thought and American assumptions—and that silence on the part of those we are dealing with may be the silence of the inarticulate (a dangerous condition, giving birth to frustration), not the silence of the convinced. Precisely because other ways of looking at the world are mediated to us through nonnative speakers of English, rather than being experienced firsthand, we may think we understand when we do not. (8)
Tonkin also echoes Crichton’s concern about the loss of cultural diversity—and with that the loss of creativity: “Furthermore, having a single language for global communication may have its advantages, but it comes at a considerable cost to the diversity of cultures” (8).
While the scenario of culturally inflected terrorism lacks the cataclysmic grandeur of Crichton’s extinction-level event, it opens up the disturbing vista of a worldwide backlash against the hegemony of American language and culture. If we are lucky, this backlash, which is already happening here and there, will take the relatively mild form of import quotas, cultural censorship, or language restrictions. If we are unlucky, it will articulate itself in more explosive ways. I personally suspect that some of the terrorist attacks against American installations and American tourists around the world have had a distinctly antihegemonic cultural flavor.
I am not engaging in sensationalism. The ignorance toward the particularity of other cultures that manifests itself as academic disinterest on college campuses grows into cultural arrogance among career diplomats and politicians representing America abroad.
If foreign language departments in this country take seriously their role as not merely linguistic but also cultural mediators (provided administrators allow them once again to assume such a role), they can help diminish significantly the chances of a “clash of civilizations”—and by that I mean not just Samuel P. Huntington’s controversial apocalyptic vision but also less spectacular clashes between civilizations that on the surface appear to have far greater affinities than those between Christianity and Islam.3
Yet to serve as cultural mediators, we must rethink our role within the liberal arts curriculum and rid ourselves of the illusion that the relevance of our project is manifest to everybody.4 To reestablish that relevance we must do more than clamor for extra language requirements (or the preservation of language requirements). We need to pick up our students where they are, not where we would like them to be. We must invite speakers who will address topics—in English—that will link major foreign cultural issues to political, cultural, or social discourses that Americans with even a vague interest in international relations will understand.
We must learn more about what most Americans, students and colleagues alike, actually know of foreign cultures (beyond the usual stereotypes), then figure out ways of linking whatever vague interest they have to what we think they really ought to know.
We must come out of our self-imposed linguistic isolation where we commune with major or (more typically) secondary writers in our target culture and develop an in-your-face strategy of intercultural awareness.
We must enter into dialogue with colleagues in disciplines that have affinities to ours, cosponsor events with them, plan conferences with them, if possible collaborate with them in teaching and research. In that collaboration we must make sure that we are not relegated to the role of linguistic expertise (as opposed to “disciplinary” or “content” expertise). Instead of merely clamoring for the disciplinary role, we must demonstrate to our colleagues that our cultural expertise can lead to readings of documents in their field that they might not have access to without our help. We do not need to become historians, sociologists, or political scientists, but we should acquire enough of a familiarity with major texts and methodologies in other areas to know what those experts are talking about. (I was surprised to see how much narrative theory my coinstructor in the terrorism course had mastered!).
Many of these changes may be easier to make at Middlebury, with its relatively seamless integration of foreign language study into the overall curriculum, with its support for and interest in interdisciplinary projects of which foreign language faculty members are an integral part. But I am convinced that even in places with more rigid disciplinary boundaries than we have at Middlebury, demonstrated interest in sharing in an interdisciplinary project on global or intercultural studies will be welcomed by colleagues in other fields.
Before we can worry about language requirements and ways to attract and keep students, we must establish a presence in the curriculum. The current phase of interdisciplinary initiatives and curricular innovation is a golden opportunity to reclaim some lost ground by demonstrating to our colleagues and students that foreign language departments, with their local knowledge and cultural expertise, can provide the intelligence on the ground that will prevent us from making costly cross-cultural blunders. The master narrative on foreign cultures is written by foreign language departments, and it is not written in English. By reclaiming the cultural expertise we have ceded to other areas of the curriculum, foreign language departments across the country can help prevent a global freeze and other gloomy forecasts.
Who knows—if Crichton’s philosopher-mathematician is right, we may even save humankind from extinction-level boredom in the process!
2See Mike Wallace’s recent interview with leading representatives of the intelligence community. Toward the end, he asked the assembled heads of departments and directors of government institutions, “How’s your Arabic?” No one was able to speak the language, although one of those interviewed responded, “My Vietnamese is pretty good.” They all conceded that foreign language mastery was no longer identified as a major requirement in the intelligence community, since all the necessary information seemed to be available in English.
3Huntington mentions as the root causes of the conflict he projects not just the differences between Western and Eastern civilizations but also the underlying similarities, in particular between Western Christianity and Islam (210-11). The same holds true for less spectacular clashes between value systems, for example, between the United States and Germany, two countries that are superficially very much alike. Germany, as the net recipient of the cultural exchange between the two nations, is forever struggling to dig out from under the surface affinities, whereas Americans tend to simply overlook the cultural divide hidden beneath Americanization. These fault lines are so deeply embedded in the cultural matrix that they will resist any kind of analysis that is not also informed by linguistic skills.
4The historical reasons for the misperceptions concerning the role of foreign languages in an age of “global English” have been nicely contextualized by John Edwards. I would disagree with the two “paths through the woods” he lays out: to resign ourselves to our shrinking pool and “to hope and work for a renewed instrumental interest” (13). The first may not be an option for many foreign language departments except Spanish, and the second may occur too late to save the day—unless we take the idea of working for such a development very seriously and engage in that effort in very creative and perhaps unconventional ways. My remarks are intended to suggest a third path.
Crichton, Michael. The Lost World. New York: Ballantine, 1995.
Edwards, John. “Languages and Language Learning in the Face of World English.” ADFL Bulletin 32.2 (2001): 10–15. [Show Article]
“Global Internet Statistics.” Global Reach. 30 Sept. 2001. 8 Nov. 2001 http://www.glreach.com/globstats/index.php3.
Graddol, David. “Can English Survive the New Technologies?” The English Company. 1997. 8 Nov. 2001 http://www.english.co.uk/docs/iatef.html.
Grimm, Jacob. “Über den Werth der ungenauen Wissenschaften.” Recensionen und vermischte Aufsätze: Vierter Theil. Berlin: Dümmler, 1884. 563–66. Vol. 7 of Kleinere Schriften.
Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. New York: Simon, 1996.
“Move Over Hollywood—Here Comes Euro TV.” Business Week 15 Dec. 1997, European ed.: 24–27.
Parker, Richard. Mixed Signals: The Prospects for Global Television News. Washington: Twentieth Century Fund, 1995.
Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Viking, 1985.
Schiffrin, André. “Missing Out on a World of Scholarship.” Chronicle of Higher Education 6 Oct. 2000: B12.
Tonkin, Humphrey. “Language Learning, Globalism, and the Role of English.” ADFL Bulletin 32.2 (2001): 5–9. [Show Article]
Wallace, Mike. Interview with representatives of the intelligence community. Sixty Minutes. CBS. 16 Sept. 2001.
Wallraff, Barbara. “What Global Language?” The Atlantic Online. Atlantic Monthly. Nov. 2000. 8 Nov. 2001 http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/11/wallraff.htm.
Winkler, Hartmut. Docuverse: Zur Medientheorie der Computer. Regensburg: Boer, 1997.
Wright, Greg. “Non-English Internet: The Wave of Future.” Burlington Free Press 5 Jun. 2001: 1E.
© 2002 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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