Migrancy And Multilingualism In World Literature

This volume, the third in a series of four on the general issue of Multilingualism in World Literature, is focused upon the relationship between Migrancy and Multilingualism, including its aquatic, terrestrian and globalizing imagery and ideology. The cover picture Wandering Tongues, an iconic translation of the book's title, evokes one of the paradigmatic figures of migrancy and multilingualism: the migrations of the early Mexican peoples and their somatic multi-lingualism as represented in their glyphic scripts and iconography. The volume comprises studies on the literary, linguistic and graphic representation of various kinds of migrancy in significant works of African, American, Asian and European literature, as well as a study on the literary archetype of human errancy, the Homeric Odyssey, mapped along its periplum and metamorphosis in world literature. Ping-hui Liao is Chuan Lyu Endowed Chair Professor and Head of Cultural Studies at the Literature Department of the University of California in San Diego (USA). K. Alfons Knauth is Professor of Romance Philology at the Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum (Germany). The introduction and five of the twelve chapters are in English; the rest are in German, French, Italian, and Spanish. (Series: poethik polyglott, Vol. 3) [Subject: Literature]

How do (im)migrant writers negotiate their representation of a multilingual world for a monolingual audience? Does their English betray the presence of another language, is that other language erased, or does it appear here and there, on special occasions for special reasons? Do words and meanings wander from one language and one self to another? Do the psychic and cultural worlds of different languages split apart or merge? What is the aesthetic effect of such wandering, splitting, or merging? Usually described as “code-switches” by linguists, fragments of other languages have wandered into American literature in English from the beginning. Wanderwords asks what, in the memoirs, poems, essays, and fiction of a variety of twentieth and twenty first century writers, the function and meaning of such language migration might be. It shows what there is to be gained if we learn to read migrant writing with an eye, and an ear, for linguistic difference and it concludes that, freighted with the other-cultural meanings wrapped up in their different looks and sounds, wanderwords can perform wonders of poetic signification as well as cultural critique. Bringing together literary and cultural theory with linguistics as well as the theory and history of migration, and with psychoanalysis for its understanding of the multilingual unconscious, Wanderwords engages closely with the work of well-known and unheard-of writers such as Mary Antin and Eva Hoffman, Richard Rodriguez and Junot Díaz, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Bharati Mukherjee, Edward Bok and Truus van Bruinessen, Susana Chávez-Silverman and Gustavo Perez-Firmat, Pietro DiDonato and Don DeLillo. In so doing, a poetics of multilingualism unfolds that stretches well beyond translation into the lingual contact zone of English-with-other-languages that is American literature, belatedly re-connecting with the world.

Multilingual Literature as World Literature examines and adjusts current theories and practices of world literature, particularly the conceptions of world, global and local, reflecting on the ways that multilingualism opens up the borders of language, nation and genre, and makes visible different modes of circulation across languages, nations, media and cultures. The contributors to Multilingual Literature as World Literature examine four major areas of critical research. First, by looking at how engaging with multilingualism as a mode of reading makes visible the multiple pathways of circulation, including as aesthetics or poetics emerging in the literary world when languages come into contact with each other. Second, by exploring how politics and ethics contribute to shaping multilingual texts at a particular time and place, with a focus on the local as a site for the interrogation of global concerns and a call for diversity. Third, by engaging with translation and untranslatability in order to consider the ways in which ideas and concepts elude capture in one language but must be read comparatively across multiple languages. And finally, by proposing a new vision for linguistic creativity beyond the binary structure of monolingualism versus multilingualism.

Literature, Language, and Multiculturalism in Scandinavia and the Low Countries presents a ground-breaking comparative approach to the study of multicultural literature. Focusing on the development of migration literature in Sweden, Denmark, Flanders, and the Netherlands, the volume argues that the political and institutional preconditions for the development of ‘multicultural’ literatures are still given within the frame of the nation-state. As a consequence, both the field of ‘migration literature’ and the (multi-)lingual quality of literary texts are shaped differently in each state and in each language area. The volume delineates the development of multicultural literature in Scandinavia and the Low Countries as a function of the specific language situations in these countries as well as the various political, institutional, and discursive contexts. This book not only offers a comprehensive theoretical and methodological analysis of multilingualism and multicultural literature, but also provides overviews sketching the discourse on multiculturalism, language and the development of the literary field in Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Flanders. Besides it presents a broad range of in-depth analyses of selected literary texts from each of these countries.

This book examines the relation between geographic and linguistic border crossings in twentieth-century world literature. Exploring the dynamic from a comparative and translingual perspective, this volume reveals differing literary strategies for responding to exile and argues for the crucial role of exile in understanding writing of the period.

This book explores the question of how equitable and inclusive education can be implemented in heterogeneous classes where learners' languages and cultures reflect the social reality of mass migration and everyday plurilingualism. The book brings together researchers and practitioners working in inclusive teaching and learning in a variety of migration contexts from pre-school to university. The book opens with an exploration of the relationship between language ideologies and policies with respect to the inclusion of learners for whom the language of education is not the language spoken in the home. The following section focuses on innovative pedagogical practices which allow migrants to be socially, culturally and institutionally included at school and at university while using their plurilingual competences as resources for learning/teaching and allowing them to fully realise their potential.

This volume investigates outstanding figures and configurations of literary and cultural multilingualism on a transcontinental and on a global scale. Its first focus is on the both subcontinental and transcontinental Indies, on the oxymoronic figure of East West India and on the stirring 'relations through words' in Luso-Afro-Indian, Anglo-Indian, and Indo-European areas. The second focus is on the cross-cultural configuration of East and West shaped by some striking Sino-European and Sino-American events in early modern and modern times. A third issue concerns the glocal and globoglot 'people of paper' in a contemporary Californian town, and, lastly, the all-embracing, all-devouring ouroboros and other multi-lingual ophidians. (Series: poethik polyglott, Vol. 4) [Subject: Linguistics, Multilingualism]

This comparative collection makes the case for the sustained contribution of migrants to European literatures, arts and social cultures, in early modern times and today. Iberia/Maghreb, Sicily/Lampedusa and Calais provide key examples for composing this new chapter in cultural history.