Translingual Writing post-1945 and the Multilingual Spaces of French Fiction

The project examines translingual fiction in French from 1945 to the present day. Literary translingualism refers to the phenomenon of authors who compose creative works in a second language.

In a French-language context, translingual authors have often been viewed as "adoptive francophones" opting for an assimilative adherence to French and to the national literary culture, an approach which has deflected attention from the fact these authors are also multilinguals.

This project aims to expand understandings of translingual writing by asking how this literature can contribute to a re-reading of recent French literary history from the vantage point of multilingualism.Firstly, the project reconstructs the intellectual history of how authors writing in a language other than their mother tongue from the 1940s onwards came to be regarded as a distinct group within French literature, belonging to a "translingual" literary tradition.

Secondly, based on the hypothesis that the monolingual paradigm (assuming a one-to-one correspondence between language, nation and literature) may have been particularly strong in a French context, it considers how three successive generations of translingual authors have negotiated their multilingualism in relation to their creative practices as writers and/or self-translators.

The project contributes to emerging "postmonolingual" approaches to national literary histories and sheds light on the specific conditions of translingual writing in French.