Buying into English: Language and Investment in the New Capitalist World

Author:   Catherine Prendergast
Publisher:   University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN:  

9780822943464


Pages:   208
Publication Date:   15 June 2008
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   Out of stock   Availability explained
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Buying into English: Language and Investment in the New Capitalist World


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Overview

English has become the language of choice for global economic, political, and cultural exchange. Many developing countries (and, notably, many former Soviet bloc countries) have little choice but to buy into English as a path to ideological and material betterment. As Catherine Prendergast reveals, however, investing in English has not always been easy and has often disappointed expectations.Based on extensive fieldwork in Slovakia, Prendergast assembles a rich ethnographic study that records the thoughts, aspirations, and concerns of Slovak nationals, language instructors, journalists, and textbook authors who contend with the increasing importance of English to their rapidly evolving world. To chart this evolution, she examines globalization's past as well as its present. Through personal histories, she offers a rare glance at how the communist regime was forced to reckon with English's growing global stature. Prendergast contrasts these accounts with chronicles of adept multitaskers learning English during Slovakia's exhausting fast-track incorporation into the European Union and Western capitalism. She reveals how the use of English in everyday life has becomes suffused with the terms of the knowledge and information economy, where language is manipulated for power and profit. Buying into English presents a fascinating study of how language lives in the imagination as much as in the world, an astute analysis of the factors that have made English so prominent and yet so elusive, and a deconstruction of the myth of guaranteed viability for new states and economies through English.

Full Product Details

Author:   Catherine Prendergast
Publisher:   University of Pittsburgh Press
Imprint:   University of Pittsburgh Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 1.70cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.381kg
ISBN:  

9780822943464


ISBN 10:   0822943468
Pages:   208
Publication Date:   15 June 2008
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Undergraduate ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Out of stock   Availability explained
The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available.

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Reviews

Buying into English is a welcome contribution to the current debate on global English, countering the view that a globalized English functions as a neutral lingua franca by demonstrating how its specific value and meaning have changed in response to shifts in international relations. The complicated, often paradoxical shifts in the value that English has carried for the individuals in Prendergast's case studies illustrate the error in identifying English in any fixed way with either imperialism, the 'free' market, or political freedom. --Bruce Horner, University of Louisville


Buying into English is a welcome contribution to the current debate on global English, countering the view that a globalized English functions as a neutral lingua franca by demonstrating how its specific value and meaning have changed in response to shifts in international relations. The complicated, often paradoxical shifts in the value that English has carried for the individuals in Prendergast's case studies illustrate the error in identifying English in any fixed way with either imperialism, the 'free' market, or political freedom. --Bruce Horner, University of Louisville Raising serious sociolinguistic and social issues, Prendergast s book reads like an inspiring fiction. --World Englishes Buying into English is a welcome contribution to the current debate on global English, countering the view that a globalized English functions as a neutral lingua franca by demonstrating how its specific value and meaning have changed in response to shifts in international relations. The complicated, often paradoxical shifts in the value that English has carried for the individuals in Prendergast's case studies illustrate the error in identifying English in any fixed way with either imperialism, the 'free' market, or political freedom. Bruce Horner, University of Louisville Full of stories, large and small, about the cheapening of English in a country where people had once fetishized it, going to great lengths to learn it for themselves and their children under a regime that placed as many obstacles as possible in their path. The Nation


Author Information

Catherine Prendergast is professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Literacy and Racial Justice: The Politics of Learning after Brown v. Board of Education.

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