School of Culture and Communication - Theses

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    Evolving multilingualisms in poetry: third culture as a window on multilingual poetic praxis
    NIAZ, NADIA ( 2011)
    In this thesis, I compare the understanding and construction of multilingualism across linguistics, cultural studies and literature in an effort to interrogate the popular notion that multilingual individuals – and creative writers in particular – are conflicted and fragmented as a result of their multilingualism. I locate the source of that assumption in the monolingual bias that arose when Western European thinkers adopted the idea that nations should be built around and defined by language. I then trace its development and influence on attitudes towards multilingualism and multilingual expression across disciplines to the present day. In particular, I examine the work of contemporaneous multilingual writers and assess how their work is both shaped by and resists these developing popular and academic conceptions of multilingualism. I identify three distinct types of multilingual writers in the process, who I refer to as traditional multilingual poets, cross culture polyglot poets and third culture polyglot poets. The first write in only one language at a time and do not mix codes, the second combine two languages usually connected through a history of colonialism, switching between them in the body of a single poem, and the third weave three or more languages that may or may not have any colonial history into poetry that is meant to be performed rather than read. I argue that polyglot poetry, particularly third culture poetry, as it is marked by a lack of conflict between the languages, represents a challenge to the dominant monolingual perception of multilingualism. Polyglot poetry reframes the idea of the fractured multilingual as a multifaceted one, with each identity and language representing not a shattered fragment but a new dimension. Creating polyglot poetry, then, is a political act in that it takes a dominant, sometimes colonizing, language, claims ownership of it, and then infuses it with the music of the Other. Rather than see their multifaceted identities as a hindrance to national belonging, I argue that polyglot poets represent a large number of people around the world – multilinguals all – whose identities exist harmoniously across multiple languages and national affiliations. This thesis puts forward a new framework for studying the movement of multilinguals between their languages, and specifically provides a new language for studying highly activated multilinguals.