Synopses & Reviews
Monolingualism--the idea that having just one language is the norm--is only a recent invention, dating to late-eighteenth-century Europe. Yet it has become a dominant, if overlooked, structuring principle of modernity. According to this monolingual paradigm, individuals are imagined to be able to think and feel properly only in one language, while multiple languages are seen as a threat to the cohesion of individuals and communities, institutions and disciplines. As a result of this view, writing in anything but one's "mother tongue" has come to be seen as an aberration.
Beyond the Mother Tongue demonstrates the impact of this monolingual paradigm on literature and culture and charts incipient moves beyond it. Because newer multilingual forms and practices exist in tension with the paradigm, which alternately obscures, pathologizes, or exoticizes them, this book argues that they can best be understood as "postmonolingual".
Focused on canonical and minority writers working in German in the twentieth century, Beyond the Mother Tongue examines distinct forms of multilingualism, such as writing in one socially unsanctioned "mother tongue" about another language (Franz Kafka); mobilizing words of foreign derivation as part of a multilingual constellation within one language (Theodor W. Adorno); producing an oeuvre in two separate languages simultaneously (Yoko Tawada); and mixing different languages, codes, and registers within one text (Feridun Zaimoglu). Through these analyses, Beyond the Mother Tongue suggests that the dimensions of gender, kinship, and affect encoded in the "mother tongue" are crucial to the persistence of monolingualism and the challenge of multilingualism.
Review
"A bold, ambitious, and timely evaluation of philosophical and literary imagination of language."-B. Venkat Mani, Author of Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish-German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk
"A welcome, necessary, and well-crafted addition to a variety of studies in the fields of German-Turkish and German-Jewish studies--studies that increasingly participate in the much broader discussion of modernity/modernism, postmodern identities, globalization, multiculturalism, and ethnicity studies."-Amir Eshel, Stanford University
"Yildiz offers an enlightening argument against the monolingual paradigm that has dominated linguistic thinking since the 18th century, that insists that the mother tongue connects a people to their nation and culture, allowing them to communicate at the deepest level."-Choice
"Beyond the Mother Tongue is an ambitious and deeply fascinating book, written in a clear and accessible style."-Matthew Hart, Columbia University
Review
"Yildiz offers an enlightening argument against the monolingual paradigm that has dominated linguistic thinking since the 18th century..."- R.C. Conard, CHOICE
"'Beyond the Mother Tongue' is an ambitious and deeply fascinating book, written in a clear and accessible style."-Matthew Hart, Parallax
Synopsis
Beyond the Mother Tongue examines distinct forms of multilingualism, such as writing in one socially unsanctioned "mother tongue" about another language (Franz Kafka); mobilizing words of foreign derivation as part of a multilingual constellation within one language (Theodor W. Adorno); producing an oeuvre in two separate languages simultaneously (Yoko Tawada); and mixing different languages, codes, and registers within one text (Feridun Zaimoglu).
Synopsis
bWinner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and LiteraturesrbHonorable Mention for The 2014 Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studiesr
Beyond the Mother Tongue examines distinct forms of multilingualism, such as writing in one socially unsanctioned "mother tongue" about another language (Franz Kafka); mobilizing words of foreign derivation as part of a multilingual constellation within one language (Theodor W. Adorno); producing an oeuvre in two separate languages simultaneously (Yoko Tawada); and mixing different languages, codes, and registers within one text (Feridun Zaimoglu).
About the Author
Yasemin Yildiz is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Illinois.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Beyond the Mother Tongue? Multilingual Practices and the Monolingual Paradigm 1
1. The Uncanny Mother Tongue: Monolingualism and Jewishness in Franz Kafka 30
2. The Foreign in the Mother Tongue: Words of Foreign Derivation and Utopia in Theodor W. Adorno 67
3. Detaching from the Mother Tongue: Bilingualism and Liberation in Yoko Tawada 109
4. Surviving the Mother Tongue: Literal Translation and Trauma in Emine Sevgi Özdamar 143
5. Inventing a Motherless Tongue: Mixed Language and Masculinity in Feridun Zaimolu 169
Conclusion: Toward a Multilingual Paradigm? The Disaggregated Mother Tongue 203
Notes 213
Works Cited 259 Index 285