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Mizumura Minae: The Fall of Language in the Age of English by Philip Riley is a Arts and Humanities article available to read on EtoBox.

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This is a strange book, both intriguing and irritating. The author, Minae Mizumura, is an award-winning Japanese novelist who was born in Tokyo and moved to New York with her family at the age of twelve. She stayed in the United States for some twenty years before returning to Japan andthis is the strange bitduring that time she did everything she could to avoid contact with or contamination by the English language, whereas one would have expected her to become a highly competent Japanese-American bilingual. In this memoir, she recounts how her adolescent self took refuge in her bedroom, voraciously reading and re-reading a sixty-volume anthology of canonical Japanese literature. Later, as a student at Yale University, she chose to study French literature as a deliberate strategy to ward off inquiries about or attention to her relationship with English. For the whole of that period she seems to have felt desperately homesick for Japan and the Japanese language and people, a misfit. Unfortunately, in my opinion, she does not attempt to set her personal experience in any wider context, psychoanalytic or historical, giving the impression that she believes her case is unique. This is a

Who reads Mizumura Minae: The Fall of Language in the Age of English?

Author

Philip Riley

Publisher

Walter de Gruyter GmbH

Published

2016

Language

EN

Field

Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)