Writing the Multilingual in Maghrebi Literature: Debating World Literature (original) (raw)
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Introduction: Literary Multilingualism Studies: Key Questions and Debates
Journal of Literary Multilingualism, 2023
This is an exciting time to be working in literary multilingualism studies. When we each began researching literary multilingualism many years ago, the pioneering twentieth-century work of critics such as Leonard Forster, Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour, Rainier Grutman, Monika Schmitz-Emans or Steven G. Kellman was only gradually taking hold.1 Postcolonial and migrant writers had already been openly and publicly grappling with the politics of linguistic plurality for some time, and important theoretical approaches had been formulated by influential thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Édouard Glissant and George Steiner.2 Despite this, the study of multilingualism within literary criticism was seen as something of a niche interest: Much of the work focused on individual authors or specific historical contexts which were seen as exceptional or 1 We think of monographs such as Forster's The Poet's Tongues (1970), Beaujour's Alien Tongues: Bilingual Russian Writers of the "First" Emigration (1989), Grutman's Des langues qui résonnent (1997), Schmitz-Emans's Die Sprache der modernen Dichtung (1999) and Kellman's The Translingual Imagination (2000). Other important studies start to appear in the early years of the twenty-first century, such as Azade Seyhan's Writing Outside the Nation
Introduction: The processes and practices of multilingualism in literature
The Aesthetics and Politics of Linguistic Borders: Multilingualism in Northern European Literature, 2019
Co-authored with Markus Huss and Heidi Grönstrand. The “Introduction” presents a new approach to literary multilingualism by demonstrating it as a phenomenon that emerges as a result of interactions between authors, texts and readers, as well as literary and political institutions on different societal levels. It emphasizes the practices and processes of linguistic borders, as opposed to a notion of multilingualism as a stable entity, identifiable by analysing texts against a set of fixed criteria. The “Introduction” also provides an overview of research on literary multilingualism in the last decades, including emerging new directions. The chapter concludes by providing a novel theoretical framework for the study of literary multilingualism, demonstrating how linguistic borders are actively formed in the production, circulation and reception of literature, and that processes of “bordering” have large-scale effects on conceptions of literature and its value.
In Babel’s Shadow: Multilingual Literatures, Monolingual States
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
A study of the limits of multilingual literary expression in print culture. Beginning with the insight that multilingual literature defies simple translation, Brian Lennon examines the resistance multilingual literature offers to book publication. Looking closely at the limit of multilingual literary expression and the literary journalism, criticism, and scholarship that comments on multilingual work, In Babel’s Shadow presents a critical reflection on the fate of literature in a world gripped by the crisis of globalization.
Monolingualism and multilingualism of literary systems
In the 18th and 19th centuries, national and world literatures emerged as literary systems because of their interdependent relations. Whereas world literature evolved as a purportedly autonomous system that was believed to transcend national literary systems (these were considered building blocks of the world-system) thanks to its universal aesthetic and humanist values, particular national literatures could fashion their presumed individuality only in the international space and with regard to the aesthetic transcendence of world literature. In Europe, national literary systems normally show the transition from non-standard multilingualism of vernaculars to standardized monolingualism of the literary language, which ideologically constituted a unified public sphere of the otherwise socially differentiated and dispersed community imagined as the modern nation. On the other hand, the literary world-system was originally plurilingual and, promoting the role of translation, required cosmopolitanism and polyglottism from its actors. However, due to the asymmetric distribution of cultural capital, the literary world-system tends towards monolingualism, that is, the global hegemony of world languages. Contrary to the cores of literary systems, national and global alike, which lean towards monolingualism, the systemic margins reproduce and even stimulate plurilingualism. Based on the above premises, my paper will address the role of multilingual zones of literary systems that were foregrounded by recent literary transnationalism (e.g., minority, regional, or mobile literary practices); on the other hand, it will call attention to the fetishization of multilingualism in current ideologies of multiculturalism.
Configurations of multilingualism and world literature
Bloomsbury Academic eBooks, 2021
The history of English is a fascinating field of study in its own right, but it also provides a valuable perspective for the contemporary study of the language […] This historical account promotes a sense of identity and continuity, and enables us to find coherence in many of the fluctuations and conflicts of present-day English language use. Above all, it satisfies the deep-rooted sense of curiosity we have about our linguistic heritage. People like to be aware of their linguistic roots.
Multilingua, 2018
The turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed a growing preoccupation with multilingual texts across the world. Literary code-switching is becoming significantly valuable as it allows readers access to the trans-lingual and transcultural experiences of bilinguals in monolingual majority societies. More importantly, as the recent surge in the body of contact literature in general, and Anglo-Arab fiction in particular, has witnessed a major shift in its purpose, in this paper I argue that it is high time researchers made a similar shift in scholarly investigations of literary code-switching. The new texts are becoming less concerned with contesting the colonizer. Instead, contact literature is becoming increasingly focused on cross-cultural negotiations. Therefore, I attempt to explore the purposes of code-switching in Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love (1999) and Leila Aboulela’s The Translator (2005), while re-evaluating its assumed direct link to asserting the author’s primary ide...
New Horizons in International Comparative Literature 2024 PDF
Cambridge Scholars, 2024
The aim of this article is to trace the roots of literary translingualism, starting from classical and medieval translingual literature, and comparing these to more modern contemporary post-colonial literatures. It explores literatures that use more than one language, a language variety or a second language, and it considers these literatures as emerging from situations of linguistic contact. In this regard, it uses what I have termed, a literary translingual practice (LTP), to analyse the ways languages are used in their contexts, and for which aesthetic purposes. This article explores the historical context that gives rise to the Roman Empire and the adoption of Latin in classical literature. It also examines the growth of vernacular languages into dominant languages in the Middle Ages in Europe, to understand the ways in which languages have been created and shaped by translingual writers. It aims to identify a parallel with the rise ofEnglish as a Lingua Franca in contemporary literatures, to link past translingualism with more contemporary counterparts. In this regard, it also discusses the ways language varieties decentralise and challenge the notion of standardisation, and the monolingual paradigm. It investigates the ways languages and language varieties interact in contact, and focuses on the ways linguistic elements are exchanged between or synthesised from two or more linguistic systems. In each context, these unique texts, from diverse backgrounds, histories, cultures and geographies, create and produceinnovative and generative texts in situations of linguistic and cultural contact.
International Journal of Bilingualism, 2003
Multilingual literacies: reading and writing in different worlds edited by Marilyn Martin-Jones & Kathryn Jones (2000, pp.395) is the tenth volume in "Studies in Written Language and Literacy" edited by Street and Verhoeven. Collectively this volume provides rich and textured accounts of multiliteracies and how the study of multilingual groups can inform, as Barton argues, the overall field of literacy research. The volume has a coherence of theoretical framework(s) across studies, a varied set of methodological approaches, and careful and systematic presentation of empirical evidence. The collection makes visible ways in which languages and literacies shape, and at times perpetuate, asymmetrical power relations, especially between minority language groups and dominant language and literacy practices in host countries. This concise readable volume is itself testimony to the theme it addresses, that of multilingual literacies. Its organization enables readers to (re)examine the intersection of language and literacies, and to explore new areas of research in the construction of identities, multiliteracies, and social relations. Finally, the book embodies a reflexivity in which researcher and researched, reader and writer, theory and practice, languages and literacies are viewed as mutually shaping one another, an issue often ignored in literacy research.