Guest lecture – Reading Multilingual Fiction: Yann Martel’s Self as a Multilingual Mosaic
13. 10. 2025 | 238 visits
The Institute of World Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, v. v. i., invites you to a guest lecture by Rainier Grutman from the University of Ottawa, Canada, entitled Reading Multilingual Fiction: Yann Martel’s Self as a Multilingual Mosaic.
The event will take place on Wednesday, October 15, 2024 at 2:00 p.m. in the meeting room of the Institute of World Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, v. v. i., and also online. It will be in English.
Meeting ID: 889 8992 6723
Access code: 251712
This talk completes and complicates traditional mimetic (‘realist’) readings or multilingual fiction by highlighting the aesthetic effects of heterolingualism and the structuring role of languages in terms of plot. Using Yann Martel’s Self (1996) as case study, it shows how overt use of French, Spanish, Czech, and Hungarian forces readers of this English-Canadian novel to confront its multilingual poetics. Czech and Hungarian are perhaps especially relevant in Bratislava: the former partner language of Slovak appears only briefly, but Hungarian occupies entire pages of dialogue. These linguistic fragments are left untranslated, furthermore, thus pushing readers beyond their linguistic comfort zones. Ultimately, they connect to the narrator’s two central love interests (a girl from Prague and a member of Slovakia’s historic Magyar minority), with Hungarian discreetly preparing the explosive and tragic finale of a novel that is as much about words as it is about the world.
Source: Institute of World Literature SAS