Janglican: National Literatures in the Age of Globalization

Does globalization render the idea of a national literature obsolete? In Finnegans Wake, Joyce refers to a certain idiom as "janglish." Thus does the essay employ the neologism "Janglican" to examine the situation in contemporary American letters, including its future in the digital age. The once distinctive ethos of literature in the nineteenth century has mutated, under various geopolitical pressures, into a more diverse language and spirit. But ancient tensions between the concrete and the universal aspects of the mind remain.