Rebecca L. Walkowitz is Provost and Dean of the Faculty at Barnard College, where she is also Claire Tow Professor of English. Over the past 25 years, her research and teaching have focused on aspects of cosmopolitanism, multilateralism, and multilingualism in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature. She is the author or editor of 10 books, including Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature, Bad Modernisms, A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism, and Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation. In her dual role as academic leader and literary scholar, she is writing The New Multilingualism: Knowing and Not Knowing Languages in Literature, Culture, and the Classroom, which will be published by Columbia University Press. In this book, she calls for new ways of counting, organizing, and valuing world languages inside and outside the university and traces the emergence of historically new examples of multilingual art and entertainment. Her essay on the value and social impact of research in world languages, “Gutting Language Departments Would Be a Disaster,” was published by The Chronicle of Higher Education in September 2023.
Rebecca L. Walkowitz
Contributions
In the work I’ve been doing over the past ten years, I have discussed the emergence of historically new examples of multilingual literature, culture, and entertainment and called for new ways of counting, organizing, and valuing languages inside and outside the university. I have sought to explain how, why, and when artworks began to use languages differently, where they have drawn on early twentieth-century modernist paradigms and where they have diverged. Along the way, I have highlighted two approaches to the history of modernism and language that have shaped our understanding of multilingualism as a concept and a philosophy.
We’re not arguing for a turn to scale in modernist studies. It’s too late for that. The turn to scale began geographically at least 15 years ago, with the new theories of world literature and with the call, within modernist studies, to recognize larger ambits for the sourcing, making, developing, and adapting of modernist art. What has been called “the transnational turn” and, later, “global modernism” is surely part of a first re-scaling in modernist studies.[1] Around the same time, the turn to scale also began archivally, with the creation, substantial expansion, and significant use of digital collections, which offered new ways of accessing, parsing, and arranging early twentieth-century manuscripts, books, and journals, as well as artworks in several media, including verbal, visual, and audio.[2