Asian literature in English: Creativity, translanguaging, and language education

This CRAC proposal aims to foreground the linguistic creativity, translanguaging tactics, and pedagogical importance of contemporary Asian literature in English, a rich body of works that has been understudied in world literature. Though undeniably imperial in its origin, literary English has become localised and reinvented by writers of Asia. Specifically, the present study poses a series of interrelated questions: What constitutes Asian literature in English now? How could this emergent repertoire be examined for its literary inventiveness and educational potential? To what extent is such literary English Asian? In what ways might it contribute to revising the categories of “English,” “English literature,” “English linguistics,” and “English education”? What is central to all these questions is a fundamental one:

What are the contributions of Asian literature in English to the world in terms of stylistics, linguistics, culture and education?

Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, the research project brings together the ostensibly disparate insights of literature, linguistics, culture and education in order to create a set of online corpora that facilitate research in each of these areas to answer the above key research question and see how synergies can be created by juxtaposing findings from different perspectives. Methodologically innovative, the project incorporates digital humanities methods in its construction of data, processing of data sets (e.g., syntactic tagging), analysis of literary and linguistic features, and discussion of pedagogical implications. As we envision it, Asian literature in English has much to contribute to the ongoing debate on English as a global language and a medium of literary instruction in digital humanities and language education.