David Gramling is Professor and Department Head for Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies at the University of British Columbia, Canada. They are the author, editor, or translator of eight books, including The Invention of Multilingualism (2021) and The Invention of Monolingualism (Bloomsbury, 2016), which was awarded the American Association for Applied Linguistics Book Award, 2018.
A brilliant and incisive exploration of the real and urgent challenges faced by the contemporary novel form on our multilingual planet. No one who genuinely cares about the future of literary creativity or the diversity and status of human languages in our world can afford to ignore Literature in Late Monolingualism. * Michael Cronin, 1776 Professor of French, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland * From David Gramling, one of the most prominent and sincere thinkers of mono- and multilingualism, comes Literatures in Late Monolingualism, a multifaceted examination of linguistic form of the novel in the contemporary era and a formidable study that diagnoses manifestations of monolingualism from our everyday lives to creative genres. Gramling has a special gift for drawing on and connecting literary studies, AI writing technologies, and translation studies, and leavening his observations with his compellingly powerful scholarly writing! A very rewarding book for anyone interested in language today, within or outside of the academy. * B. Venkat Mani, Evjue-Bascom Professor in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin- Madison, USA * In recent years, David Gramling has produced a series of provocative, searching analyses of the invention and function of both monolingualism and multilingualism in the contemporary world. In Literature in Late Monolingualism, he extends this existing reflection into the sphere of the novel. Navigating his way through meticulously selected texts, Gramling questions as prematurely celebratory any claims that the genre has become a zone of multilingual creativity, and invites us instead to take monolingualism seriously. The result is a book that will be essential reading for any student seeking to understand the interplay of literature, language, translation, and ideology in the opening decades of the 21st century. * Charles Forsdick, Drapers Professor of French, University of Cambridge, UK *