Translingual Events

Abstract

This article outlines a theory of world literary reading that takes language and the making of boundaries between languages as its point of departure. A consequence of our discussion is that world literature can be explored as uneven translingual events that make linguistic tensions manifest either at the micro level of the individual text or at the macro level of publication and circulation-or both. Two case studies exemplify this. The first concerns an episode in the institutionalization of Shakespeare as a global canonical figure in 1916, with a specific focus on the South African writer Sol Plaatje's Setswana contribution to A Book of Homage to Shakespeare. The second case discusses how Edwidge Danticat's novel The Farming of Bones (1998) evokes the bodily and affective charge of boundary-making by troubling the border between Haitian and Dominican speech. Keywordstranslingualism -World Literature -Edwidge Danticat -Solomon T. Plaatje -Shakespeare * We wish to express our gratitude for generous funding from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, facilitating the writing of this article.

Shifting Comprehension in Novels by Abdulrazak Gurnah and Zoë Wicomb: Lingualism in Action

“…Derived from a few statements by Michel Foucault, the notion of "regimes" has tended to highlight the mutually constitutive relationship between truth and power (Lorenzini, 2015). Although I am not making strong Foucauldian claims on my own behalf, the heuristic of regimes of comprehensibility is intended to alert us to the condi-Journal of Literary Multilingualism 1 (2023) 118-133 tional nature of lingualism, or what I and a colleague elsewhere called "translingual events" (Helgesson and Kullberg, 2018). To say that translingual events are conditioned by regimes is therefore to say two things: first, that only some varieties of multilingualism, but not others, will in a given context be made publicly and textually visible; second, that regimes themselves are not only multiple but amenable to adaptation and change.…”

Post-monolingual Anglophone Novels

“…In this article, I will offer sample readings of Owuor's novel The Dragonfly Sea and Lickorish Quinn's The Dust Never Settles considering these interrelated dimensions: Each interpretation will first examine the poetics of post-monolingualism, focusing on the aesthetic potentiality of literary language-in other words, its specific "affordances" (Levine, 2015). Second, I will explore the readability of these texts, asking what it means to read beyond the monolingual paradigm-and what it means for different readers (see Tidigs and Huss, 2017;Helgesson and Kullberg, 2018). And, third, I will take a brief look at the "mediating factor" (Brouillette and Thomas, 2016: 511) of the nature of literary production, exploring the implications of writing in English at a time in which the book market has turned into a veritable 'anglo-sphere.…”

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“…But we can, at the same time, aspire to a particular conception of it: one which is "renewed, human-centred, community-responsive, macroeconomically inconvenient, planetary-rather-than-global" (2021: 37). For other recent reflections on what centring alternative visions of language and languaging might do for the discipline of world literature, see Helgesson and Kullberg (2018). On language in digital social networks, see Jacquemet (2019).…”