| This dissertation argues that twentieth-century multilingual authors writing in dominant languages engaged in a poetics of aesthetic constraint, rather than a process of cultural assimilation. The historically disparate, yet critically kindred texts I consider---those of Franz Kafka, Primo Levi, Emine Sevgi Ozdamar, and Orhan Pamuk---translate their authors' multilingual dilemma into spatial figurations---whether in the form of uncanny "other rooms" and inaccessible castles in Kafka; indecipherable and distant utterances in Levi; an inn with two doors in Ozdamar; or an "identityless" modern library in Pamuk. In foregrounding spatial relations that allegorize the multilingual world beyond the constraints of Western Europe's (national) literary traditions, these texts potently critique the limits of monolingual epistemology in the modern German context.;Were cultural identity the implied concept linking these authors, Primo Levi and Emine Sevgi Ozdamar might appear an odd pairing for analysis. Even the assertion of a textual kinship between Primo Levi and Franz Kafka based on their relative Jewishness---or one between Ozdamar and Pamuk based on their Turkishness---would present all the problems of reductive identarianism. The constellation of texts I have chosen here is rich for conceptualization precisely because it does not rely on shared background and heritage---but rather on a common double-bind with monolingualism in the German twentieth century. From the Jewish German Kafka to the Turkish German Ozdamar, from the Italian Levi to the Turkish Pamuk, what remains salient is a productive irreconcilability between the multilingualism of their narrative worlds and the monolingualism of their texts. Whether in Kafka's anxious travelers, Levi's comrades at Birkenau, Ozdamar's itinerant lyricists, or Pamuk's disoriented poet Ka---each strives to signal how linguistic plurality is in a passionate conflict of interest with twentieth century literary norms.;If we may speak of a linguistic lineage among these texts, it is therefore one of adverse positioning within the modern project of (linguistic) nation-building. Each of these authors draws on subjugated linguistic sources to which their respective implied readerships do not and cannot have adequate access, given the meta-formal constraints of monolingual writing. Whether Yiddish, Czech, and Hebrew for Kafka, camp language [lagerzspracha] for Levi, or Turkish and Ottoman for Ozdamar and Pamuk, the linguistic Other remains menacingly sequestered in the spatial landscapes of these texts. This basic asymmetry between monolingual text and multilingual hypotext gives such prose experiments as Kafka's The Missing Person (1914) and The Castle (1924), Ozdamar's Life is a Caravanserai (1994) and Pamuk's Snow (2002) their lateral, horizontal structure and their air of unfinishability.;Resulting from this research are a number of conceptual hypotheses about monolingualism in the domain of literary studies: (1) that monolingualism remains an unmarked critical category, as whiteness, maleness, and heteronormativity once were, and is in need of a parallel critical conceptualization, (2) that monolingualism and "the native speaker" are inventions of early modern Europe, (3) that being multilingual is an epistemic and social position, as opposed to a set of acquired proficiencies---in other words, that multilingualism is differential, rather than additive, (4) that manifest code-switching and language-mixing are not the only proper domain for literary inquiry about multilingualism, and that monolingual texts can be imminent---even from a formalist perspective---with an awareness (or apprehension) of neighboring languages, and (5) that one of the greatest challenges for literary history and German Studies in the twenty-first century will be to conceptualize monolingualism as it relates to culture, text, and prevalent theoretical traditions.;In future writings, I will supplement this dissertation with research on the following questions: to what extent were post-structuralism, formalism, New Criticism, and New Historicism---not to mention the "New Formalism"---motivated by dilemmas of, or apprehensions about, multilingual subjectivity? How does gender identity parallel or undermine monolingualism? How can film history---with its enduring debates about synchronization, dubbing, accents, and authentic representation---offer a fruitful counter-context for a nascent discourse about literary multilingualism? How can the texts considered in this dissertation contribute to a language and literature curriculum that critically engages with monolingualism in its historical and textual dimensions?... |
