Rosetta Stone? How is it any more relevant to this discussion than a cereal
box from Quebec?

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>From: Antony Adolf <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Politics & Macaronics
>Date: Tue, Apr 29, 2003, 3:20 PM
>

> I appreciate the belated responses, even though I do not agree with them,
> and would have like them to be a bit more substantiated.
>
> I want to suggest that the multilingual consciousness, found in Pound’s
> Cantos, as well as in all macaronic texts, offers researchers a unique
> environment to contest the so-called “crisis of referentiality” advanced by
> poststructuralists and deconstructionist, according to whom the gaps
> between signifiers, signified and referents render the truthfulness and
> reliability of language at best unstable and at worst undecidable. When two
> different signifiers belonging to two different semiotic systems (i.e.
> languages) are used to signify one and the same referent, I would argue
> that, to a certain extent, the relationship of language to reality—its
> truthfulness or reliability—is made, if not stable and decidable, then at
> least more so. While in agreement with so-called “discourse theorists,”
> such as Michel Foucault and Mikhail Bakhtin, who explicitly trace the
> language of literature to its source in the spoken language of everyday
> life, and insist that literary language is uttered !
>  by embodied subjects situated historically in social spheres regulated by
> institutions, I would argue further that the displaced multilingual
> consciousness exhibited in individual macaronic texts such as The Cantos
> and, for that matter, the Rosetta Stone, suggests that a multilingual
> utterance, unlike its monolingual counterpart, can, thanks to its
> interlingual interplay, remain, to a certain extent, meaningful even if
> disembodied, de-historicized and taken out of its social context: in a
> sense, ‘peaceful’.
>
> Any further thoughts?
>
> tony.