Literature and Multilingualism

Has literature ever really been monolingual? Has it not spoken, from the outset, with a split tongue, from the interstices between languages, cultures, and identities? In this seminar, we will examine a range of authors from the twentieth century for whom speaking is always speaking otherwise: speaking about the other, speaking as other, as something other than merely speaking. Our goal is to think beyond the ‘monolingual paradigm’ – the assumption that we are, in the beginning, just one thing and therefore speak just one language. With the help of the writers that we’ll be exploring, we will try to come up with ways to describe a life of linguistic multiplicity, beyond the easy binaries of native vs foreign, self vs other.