Literature & Multilingualism: Translanguaging & Code-Switching in the Literary Context
How does multilingualism manifest in literary works? To what extent does the reader's linguistic knowledge influence the interpretation of a multilingual novel or poem? What motivates authors to use several languages in their texts - and are they always aware of their multilingual writing practice?
Participants engaged with these and numerous other related questions at the "Literature & Multilingualism" event, organised by the GEWI focus area Multilingualism, Migration and Cultural Transformation, on the 10th of March, 2025, in the ITAT Rechechierraum (research room).
Following a welcome by Nadja Grbíc, co-spokesperson of the first cluster of this research area and professor at the Department of Translation Studies, and Lisa Schantl, organiser of the event and doctoral candidate at the Department of English Studies, the invited researchers Marianna Deganutti (Institute of World Literature, Bratislava) and Johanna Domokos (Bielefeld University and Károli University, Budapest) began by presenting the essential and current considerations in research on literary multilingualism. They then invited the participants to engage with these theoretical concepts through practical writing exercises.
The teaching of tools played a central role in analysing multilingual literary works and raising awareness of the various forms and manifestations of multilingual artistic expression. Literary multilingualism occurs on different levels of the text —from the text itself to the multilingualism of the fictional world and the author’s and readers’ multilingualism, as well as any relevant epitexts (Deganutti and Domokos 2023). These levels may or may not be interdependent. The researchers presented the various forms of literary language change based on a model first published by Domokos in 2017 which has since been expanded. It is made up of seven types which differ mainly in the intensity of the language changes that occur. "Zero-degree code-switching", for example, refers to latent multilingualism, i.e., to a work that does not show any actual language changes, but to which multilingualism can be attributed through more subtle tools. The most intensive form, type 6 or "syntactic translingualism", on the other hand, describes an extremely pronounced mixing of the languages present through interlanguage practices such as pidginization or relexification (Domokos and Deganutti 2021-2023). These techniques were illustrated using excerpts from the poetry of Cia Rinne and Sabira Ståhlberg.
After a brief excursion into the multimodal component of multilingual creativity as exemplified by music, presented by Deganutti, the event concluded with a writing exercise. The participants reflected on their own language backgrounds and skills and expressed these thoughts in the form of a short multilingual poem.
For further information on the topic, please visit the website of the interdisciplinary research group LangueFlow and the Journal of Literary Multilingualism (JLM).