Seite 14 [14]
INTRODUCTION
The studies in this volume have emerged out of several international events
including four international workshops in November and December 2021
concentrating on zero-type code-switching, a symposium organized on code¬
switching with unknown languages by the International Comparative Litera¬
ture Association in July 2022, and an international conference on code¬
switching in arts.”’ All of these events included not only academic presentations
but also artistic reflections, which led to very fruitful discussions between
artists and researchers. A few of these artists have been “Elephant-Zookeepers”
as Natasha Lvovich called the multilingual artists based on a story related to
Roman Jacobson and Vladimir Nabokov, who have not only artistic but aca¬
demic backgrounds as well.”” The contributions to this book were therefore
structured into academic and artistic contributions. Besides the above—men¬
tioned events, a group of international researchers supported by Karoli Gaspar
University Budapest and the University of Bielefeld have been meeting regu¬
larly to synchronize their research on code-switching. We have learned very
much from each other’s work and feedbacks, and the process will go on even
after the publishing of this book.”
In the opening study of the first section dedicated to literary code-switching
and entitled The Politics and Poetics of Language Use in “The Parisian or Al¬
Barisi” of Isabella Hammad, Helge Daniéls analyzes five salient examples of
code-switching and relexifications in “The Parisian or Al-Barisi” by the Brit¬
ish—Palestinian author Isabella Hammad. These examples illustrate how
English, the matrix language, interacts with French and Arabic, the embedded
languages, and how the multilingual language choices are deeply imbedded in
the politics and poetics of the literary text. The code-switches and relexifica¬
tions not only underscore key moments in the plot and personal traits of the
main characters, they also draw attention to implicit authorial comments on
gender, orientalism and colonialism ethnography.
Literary history usually presents authors as if they had a monolingual back¬
ground, whereas the multilinguality of the authors and of the readers is given
short shrift. In her study entitled Interference in Literary Texts Written in
French by Russian—French Authors (1990-2000), Margarita Makarova sets in
her focus recent publications by contemporary French writers of Russian ori¬
gin, such as Valéry Afanassiev, Vladimir Fédorovski, legor Gran, Luba Jurgen¬
son and the Goncourt Prize winner Andrei Makine. This chapter looks for
2 See the website of langueflowwordpress.com.
2 Natasha Lvovich: “Elephant-Zookeepers:” Scholars and Makers of Multilingual Creativity,
conference talk, Code-Switching in Arts, online conference, 29 September 2022. The story that
inspired this naming is recounted in Victoria A. Beana: Past Tense: Nabokov and Jakobson,
The Harvard Crimson, 4 October 2012, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/10/4/no¬
bokov-jakobson-harvard-academy/, accessed 30 December 2022.
°3 Past and current events including workshops, conferences and Multea monthly meetings are
listed at https://langueflow.wordpress.com/
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