The translingual self

About this book

This dissertation proposes that the study of bilingual writers has become ever more crucial as literary scholars confront the increasing porousness of national borders and the subsequent call for a "littérature monde." Centering on three bilingual writers, and conversing more broadly with recent interventions in the fields of world literature, translation theory, and autobiography studies, this project asks how bilingual oeuvres situate authors between and within discrete linguistic communities. Cross-linguistic readings of the autobiographical works of Héctor Bianciotti, Jorge Semprún, and Raymond Federman foreground instabilities in generic, national, and linguistic categories and position bilingual life-writing as a productive site for exploring dislocations in narrative, memory, and representation. Chapter 1 analyzes Bianciotti's autobiographical tetralogy to contend that bilingualism generates a project and theory of autofiction, whereby the linguistic gap comes to mark the inevitable ruptures that emerge when retrospectively reimagining and recording the self. Bianciotti's "conversion" to the French language, coupled with his resistance to writing about France, encourages a reexamination of the unrealistic expectations named by the term autobiography. The following two chapters consider how Semprún's French and Spanish texts reconfigure the role of the author as translator. The earlier chapter provides a comprehensive survey of his autobiographical works and argues that through his textual references to translation and his insistence upon "linguistic authenticity," Semprún points up the necessity of the translator figure for responding to the traumas of the 20 th century and offers himself as an exemplary "homme européen" ready to shape the transnational landscape of the 21 st century. Elaborating a theory of textual translation, the next chapter focuses on Semprún's sole self-translated memoir, which critically engages with the concepts of "originality" and "translation" and radically posits that originality itself is contingent upon an act of translation. The final chapter suggests that while Raymond Federman's multiple self-translations between French and English relentlessly expose the disruptions that surface between languages and narratives, they recuperate, despite the author's adamant claims to the contrary, a certain vision of originality and experience as deeply rooted in reality.