[girzel]

It's odd that in the whole course of this very long article, Moser doesn't use the word "power" in describing the relationship of English and its literature to the rest of the world, or the relationship of the language and literature to its own speakers. Most of his laments and descriptions of decline, the fraught and tricky questions of bringing books and authors into English, boil down to a question of power -- economic and geopolitical power -- and yet he never quite comes out and says that.

Mizimura's "defense" of her writing against English; the elevation that occurs for a non-English writer when they are translated into English; the perceived "universality" of English; the resultant cultural guilt of English speakers: these are manifestations of power.

Likewise, the deracination of English, its divorce from specific place and people, is a result of power. He seems to think it is a result of a change in the culture: "I began to wonder if the culture that threatened other languages was hollowing out English, too. That culture goes by many disparaging names. It was called “corporate,” “capitalist,” “neoliberal”; it was taught as “Business English.” It was the vehicle of the infrastructure, for the most basic communication: for checking into a hotel, sending an email, participating in a sales conference."

But this is not a cultural problem, it is a power problem. Power in our current (American) society is inherent in the infrastructure he mentions. It exists within the movement of capital, within corporate law, within lobbying, within international trade. Language becomes hollowed out and denatured in this situation, because there is no culture, culture is not required to run the machines of power.

Likewise the observation that the international literature that we're comfortable with (I say "we" here, as I am also a white, middle-aged, middle-class, American literary translator) reads much like our own. We seek out foreign literature that feels like it was written for us: it feels that way because it was written by and for an equivalent socioeconomic class, one that simply hails from a different country. Moser says we might benefit more from reading literature from Paris, Texas than we would from Paris, France: that is because this putative literature from Texas comes from a world that does not have power. It is more educational to reach across power boundaries than it is to reach across language boundaries -- if all you end up finding in the latter case is your international peers.

He describes a language as an old city, and says very emphatically that what is needed to keep that city in good repair is people, the participation of people and their community. But that is exactly what we don't need in middle and upper class America. We do not have culture. We have structures of power, and culture is surplus to its purposes. The English language as we speak it now seems flat and vacuous because it is not strictly necessary; it is providing no vital function. Tweets and memes are sufficient for us, because almost nothing that matters in the system we live in depends on the skillful, thoughtful use of language. There's no sense in mourning young people's lack of reading habits. Nothing they find in those books will tell them how they might live in the world. The books are no longer necessary to them in a way that they might have been necessary to earlier generations.

This is an overly pessimisstic statement of the situation! And I am only partly Marxist -- I do not believe that it's all down to economics. But I believe we've created a machine, which we live inside of, which requires us to exercise very few of our human faculties in order to sustain its operation. It is no surprise if we start to lose those faculties.

[zozbot234]

> Most of his laments and descriptions of decline, the fraught and tricky questions of bringing books and authors into English, boil down to a question of power

In my view, "power" is simply not the kind of stuff that these complex and nuanced concerns could possibly "boil down to", even in principle. It's a rather ambiguous word that could easily point to a wide, even unlimited variety of social dynamics, featuring very different sorts of affordance (in the sense of "power to achieve X"), influence or perhaps the effect of physical, material constraints. These more detailed dynamics are what should be inquired upon and interrogated to try and figure out what, if anything, they're "boiling down" to. I suspect that this might boil down to a simple change in the material structure of society, like "communication used to be hard and this forced cultures apart from each other; the exact opposite is going on today, where people are actively seeking to disregard these former boundaries, even at some cost in cohesion and social/cultural development at the smaller scale."

People might argue either way whether or not the word "power" can usefully summarize these developments. Ultimately, it just seems to obscure more than it clarifies.