1st Edition
Literary Multilingualism in the Borderlands The Challenge of Trieste
This book focuses on literary multilingualism and specifically on the challenging condition of writing in Trieste, a key European borderland located at the intersection between the Latin, Germanic and Slav civilisations.
By focusing on some of the most representative modern writers operating in the area, such as Italo Svevo, Boris Pahor, Claudio Magris and James Joyce, this work offers a wide-ranging discussion of multilingual practices deriving from the different language choices made by these writers. Along with the most common manifest strategies, such as code-switching and hybridisations, Deganutti highlights how Triestine writers found innovative latent practices to engage with multilingualism, such as writing in an analogical way or exploiting internal linguistic stratifications. Moreover, she shows how they provided answers to the several linguistic, cultural and even political challenges they were subjected to, with the result of redefining linguistic boundaries that clearly separate different tongues.
This book will be of interest to graduate students, researchers and academics interested in literary multilingualism in the fields of sociolinguistics, borderland studies and comparative literature.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Notes on the Translations
Introduction: Languages and Borderlands
Chapter 1 Literary Multilingualism in Borderlands: Theoretical Premises
Chapter 2 The Choice of the First Language
Chapter 3 Poetry in Triestino
Chapter 4 Exploiting an Extensive Repertoire
Chapter 5 Writing in the Dominant Language
Conclusions: On Literary Borderlanguaging
Appendix: Notes for the sonnet L’Eco del Klutsch [The Echo of Klutsch]
Biography
Marianna Deganutti studied in Italy, Slovenia and the UK. She holds a DPhil (PhD) in Modern Languages at the University of Oxford. From 2016 to 2018, she was a Research Associate at the University of Bath, where she worked for the Horizon 2020-funded project UNREST. She has just completed a postdoc at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
