Weird English

""With increasing frequency in literature, readers are encountering barely intelligible and sometimes unrecognizable English created through the blending of one or more languages with English."" Or so writes Ch'ien, an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Hartford, whose literary study argues that a new movement of writers is blending postcolonial ideas with modernist sensibilities. Their trademark, she claims, is""weird English,"" a linguistic style that has four main characteristics. It revolts against Standard English, thus depriving it of its dominance. It breaks the rules of English grammar with its""aesthetic adventurousness."" It stems from nonnative English. And it gives unique expression to the various""diasporic cultures"" that are schooled in Standard English. Ch'ien focuses her study on the novels of Vladimir Nabokov, Maxine Hong Kingston, Arundhati Roy, Junot Diaz and Salman Rushdie, but she also proposes that Jonathan Safran Foer and Irvine Welsh are""weird-English writers."" At times, her analysis is concise and revelatory, particularly in the chapters focusing on Roy and Diaz. At other times, however, her attempt to link disparate works by their authors' status as nonnative English speakers seems simplistic. One problem is that her convoluted definition of weird English could be applied to any number of writers, including specialists in regional dialect, such as Flannery O'Conner. Some readers may also be put off by the author's reliance on invented and academic jargon (""Lolita signifies a step beyond imaginary estate: linguistic property is metaphorized as an unruly child""). While Ch'ien's combination of postcolonial and modernist literary theory is certainly provocative, her argument lacks the kind of precision necessary to be truly convincing.