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Tracing how anxieties, insecurities, and moral desire about English instilled through South Korea's neoliberal transformation led to the country's heated pursuit of English in the 1990s and 2000s, this book presents subjectivity as a theoretical and analytical perspective for studying the intersection of language and political economy.
About the author
Joseph Sung-Yul Park is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore. He is the author of The Local Construction of a Global Language: Ideologies of English in South Korea and co-author of Markets of English: Linguistic Capital and Language Policy in a Globalizing World and A Reference Grammar of Wappo.
Summary
Tracing how anxieties, insecurities, and moral desire about English instilled through South Korea's neoliberal transformation led to the country's heated pursuit of English in the 1990s and 2000s, this book presents subjectivity as a theoretical and analytical perspective for studying the intersection of language and political economy.
Additional text
In this elegantly written book, Joseph Park uses the telling case of South Korea to explore how and why English currently presents such a powerful object of investment and desire, both at the level of states, and, perhaps most importantly, for individuals. His exploration of the formation and expression of the neoliberal subjectivity in terms of which orientation to English is cast shows powerfully how productive the lens of affect is for understanding the link between material conditions, institutional processes, the value of languages and the agency of social actors."-Monica Heller, University of Toronto
