Multilingualism and Modernity - Barbarisms in Spanish and American Literature

This book explores multilingualism as an imaginative articulation of the experience of modernity in twentieth-century Spanish and American literature. It argues that while individual multilingual practices are highly singular, literary multilingualism exceeds the conventional bounds of modernism to become emblematic of the modern age. The book explores the confluence of multilingualism and modernity in the theme of barbarism, examining the significance of this theme to the relationship between language and modernity in the Spanish-speaking world, and the work of five authors in particular. These authors - Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Ernest Hemingway, José María Arguedas, Jorge Semprún and Juan Goytisolo - explore the stylistic and conceptual potential of the interaction between languages, including Spanish, French, English, Galician, Quechua and Arabic, their work reflecting the eclecticism of literary multilingualism while revealing its significance as a mode of response to modernity.

List of contents

1. Multilingualism, 'poétique imprévisible de la modernité'.- 2. The barbarous and the divine: ideologies of language in Valle-Inclán.- 3.Equivocation and barbarism: Hemingway's modernist mistranslations.- 4. Transculturation and mistura: Arguedas's provincial poetics.- 5. Totalitarianism and translation in Semprún.- 6. Multilingualism and utopia in Goytisolo.

About the author

Laura Lonsdale is Associate Professor of Modern Spanish Literature at Oxford University, UK, and Fellow of The Queen's College.

Summary

Challenges the tendency to study authors within a monolingual frame
Contributes to debates within Hispanic and literary studies on modernism
Addresses a wide-ranging Hispanic literary context while offering extended analysis of the work of authors of international renown

Product details

• Authors: Laura Lonsdale
• Publisher: Springer, Berlin
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 01.01.2018
• EAN: 9783319884134
• ISBN: 978-3-31-988413-4
• No. of pages: 246
• Dimensions: 148 mm x 14 mm x 210 mm
• Weight: 339 g
• Illustrations: X, 246 p.
• Series: New Comparisons in World Literature
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; B, Literature, Comparative Literature, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature: history & criticism, Literature, Modern—20th century, Twentieth-Century Literature, Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000, Postcolonial/World Literature, America—Literatures, North American Literature, Hemingway;Valle-Inclán;Semprún;Arguedas;Goytisolo