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Charlotte Burck, Multilingual living: Explorations of language and subjectivity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 May 2007

Aneta Pavlenko
Aneta Pavlenko
Affiliation:
College of Education, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122 USA, apavlenk@temple.edu
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Extract

Charlotte Burck, Multilingual living: Explorations of language and subjectivity. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 218. Hb $75.

What are the pros and the cons of writing a book outside one's main field of expertise? Multilingual living, a book about bilingualism written by a psychotherapist whose previous work has focused on gender and family therapy, offers interesting answers to this question. Among its advantages are a fresh perspective and the considerable body of expertise in the field of family relationships that Burck brings to the table. She asks intriguing questions about living in more than one language and answers them in engaging and compelling ways. Yet her outsider status also carries its price: Scholars who do not take part in an academic conversation within a field do not always have a clear idea of whether their work is truly novel or whether previous work has already attempted to answer the same questions in similar ways. Rather, they are at the mercy of a body of literature they are able to locate through a time-constrained search, without a clear feeling for which sources can be considered central in the field and which are peripheral, or which debates are still going on and where scholars might have reached a consensus.

Type
BOOK REVIEWS
Information
Language in Society , Volume 36 , Issue 3 , July 2007 , pp. 448 - 452
Copyright
© 2007 Cambridge University Press

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References

REFERENCES

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