Renaissance Monolingualism and the City
Speaker(s): Melih Levi
The idea of monolingualism as a governing ideology offers powerful insights into language and identity in the aftermath of nationalist outbursts. Jacques Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other remains one of the most provocative theoretical accounts on the subject. However, many theories, including Derrida’s, conflate notions of language (formal system of signs) with metaphorical notions of expression (private speech, self-fashioning, othering). To be sure, language and identity are intricately related. However, monolingual paradigms need not always manifest on a metaphorical axis. Melih’s paper studies the rise of the monolingual paradigm in 16th-century London to argue that monolingualism, in fact, perpetuates a false division within language, causing a deceptive rupture between metaphoric and metonymic signification. He will try to understand why the city (London) as a figural device enters English lyric poetry through the metonymically-oriented plain style tradition, and not through the “eloquent” sonnet tradition (Spenser, Sidney, and Shakespeare). In the last part of the paper, he focuses on the mid-Tudor poet Isabella Whitney to show how she makes figural use of London to heal the semiotic rift between the metaphor and metonymy.
Melih Levi is a PhD student in the Comparative Literature department at ý. He studies the rise of plain style during the mid-Tudor period of the Renaissance and modern revivals of plainness as a rhetorical strategy to escape modernist orthodoxies.