Literary Multilingualism I: General Outlines And Western World

The term literary multilingualism primarily refers to the more or less extended mix of two or more languages in the same text, entailing a cross-cultural or experimental effect. Besides intratextual multilingualism, or mixtilingualism, there is an intertextual multilingualism between heteroglot works of different authors linked to each other in a specific way (like those of the European and Latin American corpus of Petrarchan poetry) or between the heteroglot works of the same bilingual author (like Samuel Beckett’s alternative English and French fiction and drama). Intratextual multilingualism was a marginal phenomenon during the predominantly monolingual periods of literary history from Greek and Roman antiquity until the end of the 19 century. Generally, it was regarded as barbarian owing to the ruling rhetorical principle of purity. Nevertheless, there were some important enclaves of traditional multilingualism that reached from medieval diglossia and courtly polyglossy to the linguistic hybridism of baroque and the comic genre. Modern world traffic and global communication as well as the transgression of the limits between the literary genres have been fundamental conditions for the increasing multilingualism of modern world literature since the 20 century. A manifold variety of paradigms of literary multilingualism has been produced in the modern and postmodern era: the simultaneist paradigm, combined with both futurism and primitivism, in addition to a new cosmopolitan Babelism, the onomatopoetic and the panlinguistic paradigm, with its experimental and its ludic, punlinguistic dimensions, the holographic and the zerographic paradigm, the conflictive paradigm of multilingualism in colingual areas, and finally the technologically based multilingualism of mass-media genres, such as the new Internationale of polyglot concept albums.