One Speaker, Two Languages: Cross-disciplinary Perspectives on Code-switching ed. by Lesley Milroy and Pieter Muysken (review)

200Rocky Mountain Review us the determining influence of race and culture in their more recent, anthropological senses, especially as our writers (whatever their literary merits) embrace the centrality of race in defining their sustaining values. Michaels is at his best in treating black and Native American writers for whom race was clearly a major subject. Through these brief but incisive discussions , he earns many of his generalizations about what sets the American 1920s off from the Progressive period, as he calls it. When he cites his major writers, however, Michaels offers readings for which he needed to provide much more extended explanation. At least three times he quotes Jason Compson's remark, "blood is blood," as if Jason speaks for Faulkner (6, 40, 100); on one occasion he even refers to "The Sound and the Fury's insistence that 'blood is blood' " (3); and he makes no apparent distinction between Jason's and Faulkner's views on Jews (9). Remarkably, Michaels elsewhere asserts that Quentin Compson desires incest with Caddy "as a strategy for keeping the blood uncontaminated" (12). Hemingway fares no better. His racial views are all but identified with those of Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, truly notorious racists (94): "Mr. and Mrs. Elliot," we are told, is a story in which the Elliots' repeated failures to conceive should be understood as a form of success because Hemingway believed that procreation contaminates racial purity (95-96); and at one point Michaels writes ofJake Barnes, "one might say that Jake's war wound is simultaneously a consequence of the war and of unrestricted immigration since, as interpreted by the racial discourse of the '20s, immigration and the war were simply two aspects of the same phenomenon, the rising tide of color" (29). One might say anything, of course, but before saying this one might offer a little evidence that Hemingway shared the view of World War I and of immigration expressed here and that in any case this view is relevant to The Sun Also Rises. Indeed, virtually everything said in this book about Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald strikes me as ill-considered, inaccurate, and unproven , as if Michaels needs to get to know these writers a good deal better. Michaels refers to Catherine Barkley as "Catherine Barclay" (95), a mistake I can't imagine being made by anyone who knows Hemingway's work well. If I'm right about this, perhaps Our America is too ambitious a book for Michaels to write at this time. However suggestive and intermittently persuasive , this study raises more questions than it answers whenever it turns from the Thomas Dixons and Lothrop Stoddards to consider writers ofwhat we used to call, in our innocence, "permanent" interest. ROBERT MERRILL University ofNevada, Reno LESLEY MILROY and PIETER MUYSKEN, eds. One Speaker, Two Languages: Cross-disciplinary Perspectives on Code-switching. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 365 p. 1 his text, the result of a collaborative effort which was funded by the European Science Foundation, is intended for researchers in linguistic Book Reviews201 bilingualism. This interdisciplinary project brings together an excellent representative collection of theoretical essays on bilingual code-switching. The authors of these essays present data from a variety of studies that provide new information on bilingual competence and performance. The book is at times difficult to read, but I attribute the difficulty to my limitations in the field and not to a fault of the editors; I am a sociolinguist, and the essays on bilingual code-switching as a determinant of social change or stability were naturally more accessible to me than those on bilingual language processing in aphasia and dementia cases, but the breadth of the research areas, nonetheless, makes this volume worthwhile reading. The book has four sections: code-switching in institutional and community settings; code-switching and social life; grammatical constraints on code-switching; and code-switching in bilingual development and processing . There are fifteen studies which give the reader a well-balanced review of current directions in bilingual code-switching research, including a lengthy introduction and conclusion which one may perhaps find cumbersome , depending on the reader's prior knowledge of the field. These essays are drawn from field work...