Abstract
For creative writers and for readers, opportunities to work with language in ways that engage two linguistic systems and/or two writing systems continue to expand with the growing influence of international and regional lingua francas. At the same time, we have witnessed the continuing development of literary creation in languages with fewer speakers, even in communities facing the outright erosion and replacement of their language. Alongside the tendencies of globalization, literature has also become more diverse, a new recognition of multilingualism and multiculturalism emerging among writers and readers alike. The special circumstances of composition and understanding that the different kinds of language and cultural interaction highlight also present us with an opportunity to study what it is that is fundamental in verbal art. After reviewing three historical examples of European origin (in Section 2) we will turn our attention to problems of language, writing system and poetry in East Asia (in Section 3). The examples from history will help us to put the current situation of multilingual and multicultural contexts for literature into a broader perspective. This is will allow us to return to consider a proposal for research on cross-language poetics.
Highlights
After a long development of the national literatures, a new valorization has come forward in recent years of writing in a language that is not one's mother tongue, or writing in a language that is not official, national or customary, and that may be one's first or heritage language
As in ritual discourse, presents unique examples of bilingual and multilingual contact of its own kind involving language systems that are sometimes only partially intelligible (Wirtz 2005). These exceptional uses of language for aesthetic purpose call our attention to the musical foundations of poetic expression in general, in turn presenting considerations not even relevant to transcription or translation, in the usual sense
Can we identify degrees of accessibility of a Chinese-language text for a kanji-literate reader, and vice versa, for different kinds of written discourse and under different conditions of written language processing?7 In this regard, would poetic genres present circumstances distinct, in some important way, from those of other discourse types? These questions fall under the purview of the psycholinguistics of bilingualism and literacy
Summary
After a long development of the national literatures, a new valorization has come forward in recent years of writing in a language that is not one's mother tongue, or writing in a language that is not official, national or customary, and that may be one's first or heritage language. As in ritual discourse, presents unique examples of bilingual and multilingual contact of its own kind involving language systems that are sometimes only partially intelligible (Wirtz 2005) These exceptional uses of language for aesthetic purpose call our attention to the musical foundations of poetic expression in general, in turn presenting considerations not even relevant to transcription or translation, in the usual sense. The more general problem of language choice in highly diverse multicultural/multilingual situations, including dialect variation and author's first and second language competence (Gargesh 2006), allows us to apply the important concept of diglossia (and digraphia) to creative writing Implicit in this last example is the question of whether poetic forms lend themselves more readily, or more productively, to crossing language boundaries.
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