K-effect : Romanization, Modernism, and the Timing and Spacing of Print Culture

Gogwilt, Christopher

ISBN 10: 1531505082 / ISBN 13: 9781531505080

Published by Fordham University Press, 2023

About this Item

Unread book in perfect condition.

Seller Inventory # 45771224

Bibliographic Details

• Title: K-effect : Romanization, Modernism, and the Timing and Spacing of Print Culture
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Publication Date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1531505082
• ISBN 13: 9781531505080
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: As New

About this title

Synopsis

The K-Effect shows how the roman alphabet has functioned as a standardizing global model for modern print culture. Investigating the history and ongoing effects of romanization, Christopher GoGwilt reads modernism in a global and comparative perspective, through the works of Joseph Conrad and others.

The book explores the ambiguous effect of romanized transliteration both in the service of colonization and as an instrument of decolonization. This simultaneously standardizing and destabilizing effect is abbreviated in the way the letter K indexes changing hierarchies in the relation between languages and scripts. The book traces this K-effect through the linguistic work of transliteration and its aesthetic organization in transnational modernism.

The book examines a variety of different cases of romanization: the historical shift from Arabic script to romanized print form in writing Malay; the politicization of language and script reforms across Russia and Central Europe; the role of Chinese debates about romanization in shaping global transformations in print media; and the place of romanization between ancient Sanskrit models of language and script and contemporary digital forms of coding. Each case study develops an analysis of Conrad’s fiction read in comparison with such other writers as James Joyce, Lu Xun, Franz Kafka, and Pramoedya Ananta Toer.

The first sustained cultural study of romanization, The K-Effect proposes an important new way to assess the multi-lingual and multi-script coordinates of modern print culture.

About the Author

CHRISTOPHER GOGWILT is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Fordham University. He is the author of The Passage of Literature: Genealogies of Modernism in Conrad, Rhys, and Pramoedya; The Fiction of Geopolitics: Afterimages of Culture from Wilkie Collins to Alfred Hitchcock; and The Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the Double-Mapping of Europe and Empire.