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Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education.

Article Excerpt
Sommer, Doris. Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2004. xxv + 254 pp.

At a moment when the issues of a national language, illegal immigration, and so many other crucial social issues lie unresolved in this country, proponents of bilingualism continue their efforts to establish its credentials with a largely skeptical, if not hostile and uninformed, public. Into this arena comes Bilingual Aesthetics by Doris Sommer, a follow-up to Bilingual Games, a 2003 collection of essays by several authors. Bilingual Aesthetics is a remarkable performance by a literary critic who, in making any of a number of points and building her overall argument for the value and, indeed, necessity of bilingualism in "post-national states," ventures far afield into psychology, aesthetics, and the philosophy of language, and admittedly plays with key notions of each, while acknowledging the limits of her incursions. She does not play at the game of philosophy, for example, but "only with it" (158). "Learning counts," however, and she proposes just that on the way to making one of her main...

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