Contemporary Poetry

chapter 5

Dialects, Idiolects and

Multilingual Poetries

GLOBAL POETRY OR, ENGLISH AS A GLOBAL
LANGUAGE

J

onathan Arac voices concern for the situating of nation in a
period of globalisation. In tandem with recent debates over ideas
of ‘post-nation’ literatures, Arac identifi es that the processes of
globalisation are linked to the proliferation of English as a global
language:

Globalisation pluralizes: it opens up every local, national

or regional culture to others and thereby produces ‘many

worlds’. Yet these many worlds can only be known through a

single medium: just as the dollar is the medium of global com-

merce, so is English the medium of global culture, producing

‘one world’.^1

Almost 200 years after Goethe proposed the idea of Weltliteratur
( 1827 ), or a world literature, debates proliferate on how to respond
to the impact of English upon the perception of national litera-
tures. Romana Huk notes: ‘There are very few conversations today
that escape the g words global, globalization.’^2 Mostly associated
with actions in ‘market trading, corporate fi nance, mass media...
political negotiations’ (p. 758 ), Huk questions what such proc-
esses might mean for literary studies. Distinguishing between