The language that bleeds: exophony, subjectivity, and exile in contemporary literature

• Grant number: 24/10716-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: January 01, 2025
• End date: December 31, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Comparative Literature
• Principal Investigator: Márcio Orlando Seligmann-Silva
• Grantee: Ana Carolina de Carvalho Mesquita
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant(s): 25/03787-9 - XXIV ICLA Congress, AR.EXT

Abstract

This research aims to examine the implications, in contemporary literature, of exophony - the choice to write in a language other than one's mother tongue. In the first part, it analyzes how the rise of the monolingual paradigm in the 18th century, linked to the conception of nation-states and national literatures, weakens from the 20th century onwards, especially due to decolonial and globalization processes, which problematize the connection between language, territory, and identity. In the second part, in light of Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan, it discusses how the voluntary adoption of another language can give rise to poetics in which the monolingual paradigm is confronted due to its lack of support for issues of subjective (re)constitution and identity, often linked to trauma and exile. To this end, it draws on three comntemporary authors with different exophonic paths - Yiyun Li, Ailton Krenak, and Gloria Anzaldúa - to investigate the possible existence of a Benjaminian double bind (necessity and impossibility) in the process of writing in another language, discussing some of its manifestations. It is our assumption that translational processes which are typical of exophonic literature (both self-translational ones and the ones that resort to mechanisms of appropriation and displacement between languages) raise questions of otherness and estrangement, thus inevitably bringing about not only changes in the language they choose to adopt, but in the very literary system in which through it the authors are inserted. Theferore, it helps to problematize the consolidated notions of what constitutes a national literature. The relativization of language as an element to unify nation and territory, and to determine the constitution of individuals and their subjectivities, is a process that has intensified in contemporaneity.While it raises questions regarding mother language and identity, it also gives rise to new intercultural paradigms for literature. We believe that this research becomes particularly pressing due to the intensification of migratory flows worldwide.