Linguistics and Literature with Joseph Rager

I've heard it said that the best way to concretize a friendship is to interview your friend on a podcast. So that's what this episode is: a conversation between myself and my brilliant friend, Joseph Rager. Despite studying both Linguistics and Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard during undergrad, Joseph is now pursuing a doctorate in Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley. How does his knowledge of linguistic methods and theory inform his analysis of literature and poetry? If literature is truly language, how do we study it scientifically? How can literature represent our spoken language, with all its indexicalities and quirks? Joseph and I discuss all these questions and more. We talk about his thesis, which investigated the role of Spanglish and code switching in poetry and poetic analysis. We dive into the politics of aestheticizing of sound, of translanguaging, of linguistics itself; this episode is a reminder that language can and has been used as a means of exploitation and colonization. We express wonder and even frustration at the many barriers to education, the existence of genre, the way that language mediates our world, our conception of self, and our identity presentation. We inevitably gab about literary theory (Derrida! Barthes! Structuralism!), his favorite books, and the "brutal" world of academia—all this encapsulated in an episode that could be mistaken for a conversation between two people on a cross country flight at 3am (which, by the way, we've had). In all teary-eyed-ness, I would like to thank Joseph for being so thoughtful, so intelligent, so kind. He's brought so much joy into my life and he will soon light up yours. I believe we can all learn from his experience and example: literature is fun, and it can be inaccessible, but at the end of the day, anything can be analyzed as a literary object. And it is the methods that matter, not the content of what you read. So start analyzing and questioning, and you might end up in academia. Which can't be such a bad place to be if people like Joseph are in it, right? Roland Barthes' The Death of the Author Unspeakable Sentences by Ann Banfield Tato Laviera Nicolás Guillén Negra, Si Tú Supieras: song based on works of Guillén, heard throughout episode