L2: Volume 07 Issue 1

Introduction to Special Issue: Literary Translingualism: Multilingual Identity and Creativity

The guest editors introduce L2Journal readers to an emerging field of translingual literature–texts by authors using more than one language or a language other than their primary one. The diverse contributions by scholars of literary translingualism presented here contribute to multilingualism studies a unique lens of literary texts infused by multilingual creativity.

‘The Heartache of Two Homelands…’: Ideological and Emotional Perspectives on Hebrew Transnational Writing

The work of immigrant writers, whose professional identity is built around language, can deepen understandings of sociolinguistic and psychological issues, including aspects of the immigration experience; the position of language in the ideological and emotional value systems, and the significance of language for individual development. This paper deals with a number of translingual writers …

Eugene Jolas: A Poet of Multilingualism

Eugene Jolas, the first-time publisher of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939 / 2012), started his career as a translingual journalist and poet. A French-German bilingual, Jolas acquired English in adolescence, crossing the Atlantic to refashion himself as an American man of letters. A “Man from Babel,” as he styles himself in his posthumous autobiography of the same title (1998), Jolas …

Comment Dire: A Neurolinguistic Approach to Beckett’s Bilingual Writings

Recent studies from the field of neurolinguistics and psycholinguistics suggest that bilinguals and multilinguals are in many ways fundamentally different from monolinguals, a difference that starts with a different cerebral structure for language. This difference will constitute the point of departure for my paper: If multilingual people are intrinsically different from monolingual people, it should follow that …

Nancy Huston’s Polyglot Texts: Linguistic Limits and Transgressions

Throughout her career, Nancy Huston has both accepted and transgressed the limits of bilingualism. Limbes / Limbo (1998), L’empreinte de l’ange (1998), The Mark of the Angel (2000), Danse noire (2013), and Black Dance (2014) are five texts that demonstrate Huston’s diverse use of polyglot writing. While Limbes / Limbo is characterized by …


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