The Poetics of Multilingualism – La Poétique du plurilinguisme

Book excerpt: Poetica et Metrica 2. One of the most fascinating aspects of the poetics of multilingualism is that it reveals national literatures to be an outcome of transcultural reflection. This kind of reflection can surface in lexical borrowings and inventions, in attempts at imitating foreign language features, and in combining and improvising stylistic and linguistic devices. The experiments presented in this book range from idiosyncratic and “forced” solutions to the partly unconscious creation of new genres from situations of cultural contact. Multilingualism, as such, turns out to be basic for the emergence of vernacular literatures. While research on the poetics of multilingualism is usually restricted to specific authors, languages, genres or epochs, this book addresses the issue from the perspective of its general systematics, and reflects the diversity of the phenomenon. It provides facets from individual authors’ poetics to conventionalised features of poetics, and from written to oral and sung products of multilingual creation. By focusing on the topic’s ontology, its basic categories and relations, the volume demonstrates the fundamental importance of multilingualism for literary and linguistic theory with studies on a number of European countries and regions, including multilingualism in the literature and literary traditions of the Alsace, the Basque Country, England, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands, Russia, Sardinia, and Spain.