Bilingual Knowledge/Bilingual Stories

Palestinian-Israeli novelist, columnist and TV-writer Sayed Kashua, Anastasia Giannakidou (University of Chicago, Linguistics) and Na’ama Rokem (University of Chicago, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations) explore the possibilities and limits of bilingualism in a project that creates a crossover between different methods of engaging the question, “what do bilinguals know?

Dimensions of Bilingualism offered in Spring 2015 through Linguistics (43050) and cross-listed in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (43050), Creative Writing (31506) and Comparative Literature (43050).  

Mondays 1:30-4:20p, Logan Center for the Arts, 801

This course/writing workshop on bilingualism will be co-taught by Na'ama Rokem (Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations), Anastasia Giannakidou (Linguistics) and Visiting Fellow Sayed Kashua (novelist). 

Studying bilingualism has broad implications for our understanding of language, cognition, and culture, and has the potential to (at least partly) redefine the disciplines that study it.  In this class, we study aspects of the bilingual experience, with emphasis on linguistic, cognitive, and socio-cultural implications of bilingualism, including artistic expression. Our goal is to understand bilingualism and code switching as a multi-dimensional phenomenon, and familiarize ourselves with numerous tools to study it. We raise the central questions of how languages co-exist in the mind, in speech, and in (popular) culture. We study phenomena such as code-switching and code mixing, second language learning, the bilingual conceptual organization, the relation between bilingualism and thought, and the impact of bilingualism on cognitive processes such as decision making, executive control. We also discuss how bilingualism is perceived in creative processes and literary texts, and what the impact of bilingualism is in the self-perception and emotions of individuals and social groups. 

This course is sponsored by a Mellon Collaborative Fellowship for Arts Practice and Scholarship.