ABSTRACT
The quotation above from Hamina lisa (1995) offers a humorous glimpse at Orly Castel-Bloom’s practice of interspersing English phrases within her Hebrew. It also, however, demonstrates the easy intersection between television and the real world. American English is the lingua franca that connects these two realms. More specifically, the type of English popularized by television asserts itself as a valid possibility of expression even within the heroine’s Hebrew world, elements of which are described in terms of a television show. Of course, English varies from one type of show to another. The English spoken on a talk show is not the same English spoken on news broadcasts. To organize these various types of television-speak, I use Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of ‘speech genres’. He writes that ‘each sphere in which language is used develops its own relatively stable types of these utterances. These we may call speech genres [ . . . ] [Each] sphere of activity contains an entire repertoire of speech genres’ (1986: 60). If television is one such ‘sphere’, then newspeak or sitcom-speak are only two of its characteristic ‘stable types’, or ‘speech genres’. The English used here has a ‘generic nature’ (64) that is clearly linked to the sphere of television. In Bakhtin’s formulation, ‘[even] in the most free, the most unconstrained conversation, we cast our speech in definite generic forms’ – that is, all spoken language is subject to the speaker’s choice of speech genre (78). The emphasis on choice is significant: if the speaker can choose to express herself using a particular speech genre, then the consistent use of any genre reveals as much about the speaker as does the content of her expression. As the opening quotation demonstrates, the type of English present in much
of Orly Castel-Bloom’s work is distinguished from other foreign languages because of its function as a distinctly generic linguistic style.
