Justin Quinn
(University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, Czech Republic)
28 October 2026 (Wednesday) at 14:00 CET
Institute of World Literature SAS + online
Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89232071275?pwd=SOi5muBs4zraAqLCMVQbnb0y0ZHK6N.1
Meeting ID: 892 3207 1275
Passcode: 447146
The lecture is organized as part of the IMPULZ Translation and cross-lingual stylistic transfer: Towards a theory of language contact in literature.
What connects an African-American novelist, an Irish EFL teacher in Hong Kong, and an Indian graduate student in Oxford University? The protagonists of three contemporary anglophone novels all encounter difficulties with the variety of English they speak, and the difficulties, in large part, create the drama of their stories. In my recent book, Literature in the Age of Lingua Franca English: The Zero Style (2025), I described the emergence of a new style in anglophone writing that has a narrow vocabulary, straightforward syntax, and minimal cultural references. Percival Everett’s Erasure (2001), Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times (2020), and Amit Chaudhuri’s Afternoon Raag (1993), a foundational text that anticipates later developments, toggle between this zero style and regional, less prestigious varieties of English, raising questions of power and mobility in globalized environments. The novels are more usually considered within older categories (such as African-American literature, contemporary Irish and Indian literatures, and postcolonial literature). Still, their commonalities become evident when we focus on their relationship with global Englishes. By analyzing how these protagonists navigate the tension between the zero style and regional dialects, I argue that linguistic mobility has become a central metaphor for structural inequality in the global age. The play of English varieties itself is one of the major emerging themes of contemporary anglophone literature, and this presentation proposes a new framework for reading mobility that prioritizes linguistic register over national origin.
Justin Quinn works at the Faculty of Education, University of West Bohemia, Czech Republic. He is the author of Between Two Fires: Transnationalism and Cold War Poetry (Oxford UP, 2015) and Literature in the Age of Lingua Franca English: The Zero Style (Routledge, 2025), among other books. With Gabriela Kleckova, he edited Anglophone Literature in Second-Language Teacher Education Curriculum Innovation through Intercultural Communication (Routledge, 2021). And with Julie Hansen, he recently edited a special issue of Svět literatury on Czech Anglophone literature. He also translates Czech poetry into English (Petr Borkovec, Bohuslav Reynek, and Jan Zábrana).