Monolingualisms of the Other: A Focus on Exophony and Self-Translation

The turn of the 21st century witnessed an increasing awareness of the dynamic character of cultural and linguistic boundaries in social and literary contexts. This shift was marked by the introduction of neologisms such as “translanguaging” (Williams; García and Wei) and “literary translingualism” (Kellman), generally subsumed under the umbrella term of “multilingualism” (Taylor-Batty and Dembeck). However, emerging multilingual perspectives also provided fresh insights into the bearing of Romantic, gendered ideas of monolingualism on modern and contemporary views of language (Yildiz). As a result, (theories of) contemporary multilingual literatures are shaped by the tension between the more or less explicit agenda of promoting a ‘multilingual ethos’ in contrast to neo-nationalist discourses, and the critical tools inherited from European Romanticism. The seminar explores how the tension between these two poles shapes the relationship between exophony (i.e. the literary practice of writing in a language that is not the author’s dominant one) and self-translation (i.e. the literary practice of translating one’s own work into a different language), in contemporary literature by women writers who identify as either American or Italian while consistently writing across the language divide: how do we make sense of the multilingual genesis of ostensibly ‘monolingual’ works? What relationship obtains between exophony and self-translation vis-à-vis their common nature as instances of what Derrida called “monolingualism of the other”? And what do exophony and self-translation entail for the negotiation of women writers’ position in post-Romantic, gendered and monolingualised literary fields?