Across and Beyond. Exophony and Self-Translation in Contemporary Women’s Writing between Italy and the USA

The turn of the 21st century witnessed an increasing awareness of the dynamic character of cultural and linguistic boundaries. This shift was marked by the introduction of neologisms such as “literary translingualism” (Kellman) and “translanguaging” (García and Wei). At the same time, multilingual perspectives provided fresh insights into the bearing of Romantic, gendered ideas of monolingualism on modern and contemporary views of language, as highlighted by the concept of the “postmonolingual paradigm” (Yildiz). As a result, (theories of) contemporary multilingual literatures are shaped by the tension between the notion of traversing what are often clearly perceived language boundaries (or writing across language boundaries) on the one hand, and the outright rejection of Romantic understandings of language boundaries (or writing beyond language boundaries) on the other. My PhD research explores how the tension between these two poles shapes the relationship between exophony and self-translation in contemporary literature by women writers who identify as either American or Italian while consistently writing across the language divide: what relationship obtains between exophony and self-translation in contemporary italo-anglophone literature by female authors? What do exophony and self-translation entail for the negotiation of women writers’ position in the transnational literary field? What are the distinctive features of contemporary exophonic and self-translated texts across the two languages? The research focusses on contemporary fiction by Francesca Marciano, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chiara Barzini, and Heddi Goodrich. A close reading of the authors’ works investigates the tension between crossing and rejecting language boundaries in exophonic and self-translated texts, calling attention to the widely unacknowledged différance that shapes the interval between the two types of text and its implication for contemporary women’s authorship.