The Paradoxes and Pitfalls of Multilingualism in U.S. Latino Writers

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-7968.2020v40nespp50

Abstract

Terms such as globalization and World Literature suggest that multilingualism rather than monolingualism is the sign of the present times. Celebratory discourse in Literary Studies seems to confirm this trend in Academia. In spite of the increased symbolic capital of the multilingual, real literary practices of authors with Latin American roots living outside Latin America only partially reflect this hybridity. “Soft multilingualism” is rather the norm. Analyzing examples of German literature, Yasemin Yildiz (Beyond the Mother Tongue) identifies this contradiction between multilingual realities in society and the persistence of the monolingual paradigm in literature as “the postmonolingual condition”. In my article, in which I present an ongoing research project, I will focus on four contemporary intercultural autobiographies where language choices are explicitly connected to questions of identity. By doing so, I intend to shed light on the paradoxical strategies through which bilingual authors (English and Spanish) in the U.S. shape their struggle towards the postmonolingual paradigm.

Author Biography

Ilse Logie, University Ghent, Ghent,

Ilse Logie has been teaching modern Latin-American literature at Ghent University since October 2005. She obtained her PhD, with a dissertation titled La omnipresencia de la mímesis en la obra de Manuel Puig, at the University of Antwerp. Her area of study is Latin-American literature, with a special focus on the representation of violence in the Southern Cone (Argentina, Chile, Uruguay). She is currently doing research on the cultural production of the Post-Dictatorship Generation in Argentina. She has published extensively on contemporary Argentinian and Chilean literature (covering authors such as Borges, Bolaño, Chejfec, Cohen, Copi, Cortázar, Pauls, Puig and Saer) as well as on translation issues, and has also been active as a literary critic. She has supervised a research project on “Imaginary Renderings of the Apocalypse in Contemporary Latin-American Literature”  and co-supervised a project on canon formation in the Southern Cone and the Caribbean. She is a member of the international network VYRAL  (Violencia y Representación en América Latina; www.redvyral.com).

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Published

2020-07-17

How to Cite

Logie, I. (2020). The Paradoxes and Pitfalls of Multilingualism in U.S. Latino Writers. Cadernos De Tradução, 40(esp. 1), 50–70. https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-7968.2020v40nespp50

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Vol. 40 No. esp. 1 (2020): Multilingualism and Cultural Transfer

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Articles

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