Note 34 in the author's " Promising "Post-colonialism": Deleuze-Guattari's "Minor Literature" and the Poetry of Arthur Yap"
In Deleuze-Guattari's Kafka, they initially say that "minor literature," which I am considering Arthur Yap's poetry to be here, "doesn't come from a minor language" (16). This claim therefore seems to problematize my attempt to relate my proposition of Singapore English as "minor language" and the proposition of Arthur Yap's poetry as a "minor literature" in its use of the "minor language" of Singapore. However, in Deleuze and Guattari's later text of A Thousand Plateaus, the potentiality, or the possibility, of a "minor language" evolving into a "minor literature" resolves to be not a problem. If in the Kafka text, Deleuze and Guattari considers Kafka's �uvre to be a "minor literature," then in A Thousand Plateaus, they will write that it is because the writing is inflected with a minor language. As they say in the latter text: "Kafka, a Czechoslovakian Jew writing in German, submits German to creative treatment as a minor language [my emphasis], constructing a continuum of variation�" (104). Obviously, my argument aligns itself with this revised perspective of Deleuze and Guattari on "minor language" and "minor literature."
Last modified: 31 May 2001