Multilingualism in literature
A socio-pragmatic reading of Leila Aboulela’s The Translator (1999) and Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love (1999)
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11294045 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Dina Hassan (University of Oklahoma, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 37 |
| Issue | 5 |
| Pages | 515-534 |
| Publication date | 2018-08-28 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Multilingua (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0167-8507 • E-ISSN: 1613-3684 |
| Publisher | Walter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE) |
| DOI | 10.1515/multi-2017-0005 |
| OpenAlex | W2783794397 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 6 |
The turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed a growing preoccupation with multilingual texts across the world. Literary code-switching is becoming significantly valuable as it allows readers access to the trans-lingual and transcultural experiences of bilinguals in monolingual majority societies. More importantly, as the recent surge in the body of contact literature in general, and Anglo-Arab fiction in particular, has witnessed a major shift in its purpose, in this paper I argue that it is high time researchers made a similar shift in scholarly investigations of literary code-switching. The new texts are becoming less concerned with contesting the colonizer. Instead, contact literature is becoming increasingly focused on cross-cultural negotiations. Therefore, I attempt to explore the purposes of code-switching in Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love (1999) and Leila Aboulela’s The Translator (2005), while re-evaluating its assumed direct link to asserting the author’s primary identity – a purpose that has been the focus of scholarly work tackling literary code-switching for decades. Two other main purposes are highlighted in this paper, namely: (i) changing attitudes towards multilingualism; and (ii) adding authenticity to the experiences delineated in a foreign language
Aesthetics · Art · Articulation (sociology · Code (set theory · Code-switching · Focus (optics · Identity (music · Linguistics · Multilingualism · Negotiation · Neuroscience of multilingualism · Pedagogy · Political science · Reading (process · Social science · Sociology · Computer Science · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Law · Multilingual Education and Policy · Philosophy · Translation Studies and Practices
| Highly cited | No |
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