© 2025 Johns Hopkins University Press This appears as an afterword to a special issue of the print journal Modernism/modernity (Volume 32, Number 3, September 2025): The Language Challenge: Modernisms in Multilingual South Asia, gueste edited by Preetha Mani and Jennifer Dubrow In the work I’ve been doing over the past ten years, I have discussed the emergence of historically new examples of multilingual literature, culture, and entertainment and called for new ways of counting, organizing, and...

In literary texts, speech is often taken for granted as simply dialogue delivered by characters. But this assumption belies what occurs in speech between people in everyday life — we interpret speech, we try to see what the speaker really means, beyond what they are saying in a strict sense. Michael Lucey’s intervention with What Proust Heard is to turn a closer eye (and ear) to speech in texts (“language-in-use,” as he calls it) in order to investigate not only what particular speakers might...

© 2017 Johns Hopkins University Press Incubation Period In the 1965 movie Incubus, a pre- Star Trek William Shatner, with characteristic avidity, plays the role of Marc, a wounded soldier who comes to the village of Nomen Tuum in search of curative water (fig. 1). While there, he is seduced by a beautiful young succubus, whose appointed task is to prevent Marc’s recuperation and instead deliver his soul to hell. What transpires is a bit too complicated, or silly, to merit recounting in detail...