Comp. Lit. 85500 – Bilingual/Polyglot Writers
Prof. Beaujour

While it is not unusual for a writer to be a bilingual, it is still rare for a major modern writer to be bilingual or polyglot as a writer and to create a body of work of more or less equal weight in more than one language. Most monolinguals have a visceral belief in the identity of language and self. They find disturbing and anomalous a modern poet or novelist who defines himself in one language and then either switches entirely to another one or continues to alternate with some periodicity between the two. Certainly, being a bilingual writer confronts an artist with painful difficulties: neuro-physiological, and emotional as well as problems of linguistic choice and resistance. All these factors have significant impact on the form and language of the works. Translation and self-translation also pose difficult problems for the bilingual writer.

While each bilingual writer's development is idiosyncratic, it is possible to maintain that bilingual writers, even working in different languages, have more in common with each other than they do with monolingual writers of any of the languages which they master--or which master them. Among other problems, we will address the question of whether or not this hypothesis can be supported.

This course will concentrate on modern writers who are bilingual in the strict sense, as noted above : Ariel Dorfman (Spanish/English), Nabokov (Russian/English) , Beckett (English/ French), Brodsky (Russian /English), and Nancy Huston (English/French) and possibly Kundera (Czech/French), but we will also read short texts by some who have written only in one language, which is not their first (Hoffman (Polish/English), Rodriguez (Spanish/English), etc.) We will look briefly at one or two writers who have decided to write books in mixed or macaronic language, as well as writers who have decided to forge a new language out of their ethnic linguistic practice (e.g. Anzaldua (Spanglish), and those who deliberately combine several languages in the same work (e.g.: Federman (French/English)).

The initial classes will be devoted to an introduction to general problems of bilingualism as they apply to writers: the bilingual brain and problems of language storage and access, psycho-social aspects of bilingualism, and particularly the situation of bilinguals in voluntary or involuntary exile, “identity issues” and questions of “code switching,” the process of switching (permanently or for a length of time) from writing in one language to writing in another.

The first work we shall consider together in detail will be Ariel Dorfman’s Going South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey, which introduces in exceptionally clear form major questions of identity, imagery, and structure that we will see frequently in other texts. We will then spend some time on the career of Vladimir Nabokov, including a discussion of problems of translation and self translation. The central texts here will be PNIN and Speak, Memory!

We will then read several brief works by Beckett and selections from The Unnamable, followed by Lost North and Limbes/Limbo: Homage to Samuel Beckett , two brief works by Nancy Houston, We will read Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation, several essays by Richard Rodriguez and finish with a discussion of Joseph Brodsky.

If the class is small, there will be student presentations that will become the basis of the final paper. If a student prefers, the final paper may, however, focus on a problem of bilingual writing, rather than a specific author. The final paper may also consider pre-modern practices of bilingual writing.