Page 11 [11]
INTRODUCTION
a terminological disarray. Bearing in mind the rhetorical argument of Paul de
Man in Semiology and Rhetoric (1973) or such deconstructive philosophical
studies as Jacgues Derridas Monolingualism ofthe Other (1998), we may con¬
clude that the analytic depth we possess today to approach linguistic diver¬
sity of contemporary art appears rather fragmented, as well as confusing.
This publication pays special attention to the dynamically rising code¬
switching phenomenon especially in the field of literature and performative
arts and elaborates innovative frameworks that can be modeled multidimen¬
sionally. Here, by multidimensional we mean that our framework takes into
account different aspects or dimensions in their interaction between themselves.
In this respect, especially thematic, compositional, stylistic, functional and
intermedial aspects of multilingual practices of contemporary arts are high¬
lighted. These aspects may vary considerably according to the way multiple
languages are qualitatively and quantitatively employed and defined. As sug¬
gested by Grutman, “texts can either give equal prominence to two or more
languages or adda liberal sprinkling of other languages to a dominant language
clearly identified as their central axis.””” Therefore the same multilingual cat¬
egory would cover not only works with titles in a different language than the
rest of the book, but also works which include wider multilingual insertions
taking up entire paragraphs or monologues. Furthermore, a multilingual art¬
work could feature multilingualism in an even more remarkable way, for instance
blurring the boundary between the matrix or dominant and embedded or
incorporated languages. This brief list obviously confounds multilingual prac¬
tices of different orders, which are probably not suited to being inserted
within the same theoretical framework.
In their previous works, Domokos and Deganutti differentiated between
seven major types of code-switching,'* which can be detected on the level of
the text, narration, communication of the fictional world and even in the
paratexts of contemporary art works. In defining the types of code-switching
from the most common to the less often used ones on a scale of zero (latent
to narratological film analysis, in Poems, Plays, and Prose: A Guide to the Theory of Literary
Genres, English Department, University of Cologne, 2003, http://www.uni-koeln.de/~ame02/
pppn.htm, accessed 20 October 2022; Gaélle Planchenault: Displacement and plurilingualism
in Inch’Allah Dimanche: Appropriating the other’s language in order to find one’s place, in V.
Berger and M. Komori (eds.): Polyglot Cinema: Migration and Transcultural Narration in
France, Italy, Portugal and Spain, Berlin, Lit Verlag, 2011, 99-111.
7 Rainier Grutman: Traduire l’Heterolingualisme, 19.
#8 Johanna Domokos — Marianna Deganutti: Four Major Literary Code-switching Strategies in
Hungarian Literature: Decoding Monolingualism, Hungarian Studies Yearbook 3 (2021),
43-63, https://doi.org/10.2478/hsy-2021-0004; Johanna Domokos — Marianna Deganutti:
Overt and Covert Zero Code-switching in Sandor Petéfi’s Janos vitéz (John the Valiant) and
Mark Twain’s A Tramp abroad, Studia Caroliensia (2021), 135-149; Johanna Domokos —
Marianna Deganutti: Zero degree code-switching and the narrative framework, Polyphonie
(2022) http://www.polyphonie.at/?op=publicationplatform&sub=viewarea&area=1, accessed
28 October 2022.