Abstract
In this article, I define the notion of a plurilingual literary space. While drawing from Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, I adopt a critical stance towards the highly autonomous, territorialized, and monolingual French case that he studied. Even though language is the material that the writers work with, the legitimate representation of the nation remains the major issue for non-central literary spaces, among which are plurilingual spaces. I elaborate on a typology of plurilingual literary spaces, which are heavily related to the political structure and language policies of the state. Then I concentrate on one of the types, that of plurilingual literary fields, where the language issue is the most significant. I argue that tensions or collaborations between the different linguistic groups depend on the symbolic balance of power between them as well as on official language policies. The most autonomous writers do not always desire to build bridges across language barriers, and they would sometimes rather create identity walls. I distinguish between unitarian policies that lead some linguistically dominated writers to reject collaborations and monolingual policies which lead the autonomous writers to reject the linguistic divisions.
Highlights
Many national and regional spaces are located at the crossroads of linguistic areas and harbour several literary languages: they are ‘plurilingual literary spaces’.1 The study of these spaces has been neglected until now, due to what I have called methodological monolingualism,[2] itself a consequence of what Yasemin Yildiz has named the ‘monolingual paradigm’,3 which has emerged since the nineteenth century
Even though language is the material that the writers work with, the legitimate representation of the nation remains the major issue for non-central literary spaces, among which are plurilingual spaces
I elaborate on a typology of plurilingual literary spaces, which are heavily related to the political structure and language policies of the state
Summary
Francosphères, Liverpool University Press, 2021, Traduire, la contrainte, 10 (2), pp.185203. HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés
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