Articles

Heterotopian Multilingualism: The Westinghouse Time Capsule (1939)

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Abstract

The article investigates the multilingual features inherent in one of the most elaborate and erudite time capsule projects of the early 20th century, the so-called Westinghouse Time Capsule of Cupalloy, contrived for, and deposited at, the 1939 World Fair in New York. In its endeavor to pass on an authentic snapshot of the material and intellectual culture of its time to a distant future, the Westinghouse Time Capsule had to solve a number of technical and logistic problems. For instance, it had to come up with a paratextual apparatus to keep its message intelligible to those who will receive it in the year 6939, the capsule’s ambitious target date. Part of its paratextual apparatus is a Rosetta Stone-like ‘key to the English language’, which, together with other internal and external provisions thought up by the capsule’s creators, functions much like similar provisions at work in the canonization of classical texts. Central to the classicalness of certain texts and the longevity of the time capsule is an internal multilingualism, which operates underneath a seemingly monolingual surface in order to assure the readibility and timeless significance of the cultural legacy at stake.

How to Cite:

Endres, J., (2017) “Heterotopian Multilingualism: The Westinghouse Time Capsule (1939)”, Critical Multilingualism Studies 5(3), 149–167.