The Multilingual Subject

Abstract

This book explores the experience of adolescents and young adults who learn a foreign language or use more than one language in daily life. Through ‘language memoirs’ and learners’ testimonies, it documents how these multilingual subjects occupy an embodied, socially and culturally inflected third place in language, filled with memories of other languages and fantasies of other identities. In its referential and mythic dimensions, language performs and creates subjectivities that these multilingual speakers use to conjure alternative worlds and virtual selves, both in real life and on the internet. Teaching to the multilingual subject would mean capitalizing on the potential playfulness, heightened reflexivity and aesthetic sensibility of the increasing number of people around the world who, by choice or necessity, experience life in several languages.