(replace by updated CfP by guest editors; currently CLIC-day description)
Call for Contributions: Special Issue on "Multilingualism and Literature"
The Journal for Literary and Intermedial Crossings invites contributions for a special issue that will be entitled “Multilingualism and Literature”. It will be guest-edited by Ann Peeters, Eva Ulrike Pirker, Arvi Sepp, Ceydanur Temurok and Cedric van Dijck, who co-organised an eponymous study day at the Centre for Literary and Intermedial Crossings at Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 2024.
Bringing together different disciplines such as cultural studies, intermediality studies, translation studies, and comparative literature, the special issue aims to offer a new engagement with multilingualism as a theoretical concept, analytical category, textual practice and lived experience in the study of literature.
Rainier Grutman defines literary "multilingualism" as "the use of two or more languages in the same text" (Grutman, "Multilingualism", 183). Following on from Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of polyphony, literary multilingualism can also be combined with social language differences and diversity of speech. This is not only a question of language mixing, but first and foremost of various discourses, idiolects, sociolects, as well as dialects and historical varieties of a language whose interplay Grutman called "heterolingualism" in his work on the novel in Québec in the 19th century (Grutman, Des langues qui résonnent). These heterolingual differences in the text can correspond to speaker differences by expressing the social and cultural location of the respective speakers (Dembeck, "Für eine Philologie der Mehrsprachigkeit", 28).
The processing of linguistic differences in literature often also means the dismantling of a national language ideology and the highlighting of linguistic-cultural border crossings in the text. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Kafka. Pour une littérature mineure refers to how Kafka, as a German-speaking Jew from Prague, incorporates the foreign-language elements - Czech, Yiddish - in his literary texts. Against the background of the First World War and nationalism in Europe, the combination of national language and collective identity is also radically questioned by the historical avant-garde. The international DADA movement takes nationalism ad absurdum by consciously multilingualizing its performances and at the same time deconstructing the alleged 'purity' of individual languages by replacing them with a childlike, pre-rational idiom. In postcolonial literature, the adopted colonial language can paradoxically also be used as an idiom of emancipation or subversion, as can be observed not only in Anglophone postcolonial literature, but also frequently in French-speaking Maghreb literature. In this light, the Algerian writer Kateb Yacine therefore describes French as a "booty of war", a "butin de guerre" (Yacine, Le Poète comme un boxeur, 132), to say in French to the French reading public that it is explicitly not French. In an interview, the French-Algerian author Malika Mokeddem claims that the Arabic words in her French texts have a political meaning because she wants to "coloniser le français" in and with her linguistically hybrid literature (Mokeddem in Helm, Malika Mokeddem, 29). Hybridization of the former colonial language plays an important ethical role not only in postcolonial literature, but also in the discourse of postcolonial literary theory. Thus, Gayatri Spivak strives to enrich English with Bengali in her works. According to her, writing in an imposed (e.g. colonial) language comes with the ethical responsibility of drawing on one’s mother tongue in order to hybridise the 'target' language through the ethical concept of matririn (maternal debt) (Spivak, "Translation as Culture", 14-15).
The pronounced linguistic reflexivity in multilingual literature, which goes hand in hand with an emphasis on the fundamental polysemy of linguistic expressions, has an ethical dimension to the extent that it can demonstrate the multiplicity of thought and thus also the diversity of human coexistence. In language criticism (Sprachkritik), as found in authors such as Yoko Tawada or philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, the notion of language as 'possession' is constantly repeated. Derrida indeed calls into question the relationship between birth and blood on the one hand and language on the other in Le monolingualisme de l’autre. Taking this critique further, Yasemin Yildiz frames monolingualism as a dominant paradigm that needs to be overcome (in Beyond the Mother Tongue).
The special issue will touch on questions of multilingualism from different perspectives, and on their methodological implications for literary studies, first and foremost with regard to literary multilingualism as a political and cultural practice. Contributions may take a theoretical approach or explore case studies from a broad spatial and temporal spectrum. We especially encourage contributions that center on:
- authors’ experiences of multilingualism, their function, opportunities and problems as cultural mediators.
- comparative assessments across time, space, culture and genre.
- the revision of theoretical approaches to the concept of ‘multilingualism’ in (translated) literature
- multilingualism as agency and medium of political commitment (issues of freedom, resistance and human rights)
- the relevance of multilingualism in and for diasporic communities
- the influence of multilingualism on canon formation, assessing, for instance, the role of postcolonial studies in relation to multilingualism and translation
- the hegemonic field in which multilingual literary practices are situated, touching on questions of censorship and possibilities of writing back
