Weird English [Paperback]

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 Englishexplores 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 D?az 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.

Evelyn Ch'ien'sWeird Englishoffers 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 Englishposits 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 sensitivl3œ