Multilingualism in literature: A socio-pragmatic reading of Leila Aboulela’s The Translator (1999) and Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love (1999)

Abstract

The turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed a growing preoccupation with multilingual texts across the world. Literary code-switching is becoming significantly valuable as it allows readers access to the trans-lingual and transcultural experiences of bilinguals in monolingual majority societies. More importantly, as the recent surge in the body of contact literature in general, and Anglo-Arab fiction in particular, has witnessed a major shift in its purpose, in this paper I argue that it is high time researchers made a similar shift in scholarly investigations of literary code-switching. The new texts are becoming less concerned with contesting the colonizer. Instead, contact literature is becoming increasingly focused on cross-cultural negotiations. Therefore, I attempt to explore the purposes of code-switching in Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love (1999) and Leila Aboulela’s The Translator (2005), while re-evaluating its assumed direct link to asserting the author’s primary identity – a purpose that has been the focus of scholarly work tackling literary code-switching for decades. Two other main purposes are highlighted in this paper, namely: (i) changing attitudes towards multilingualism; and (ii) adding authenticity to the experiences delineated in a foreign language.

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