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INTRODUCTION
answers to the following questions: Do the above-mentioned bilingual Rus¬
sian-French authors have common stylistic traits in their novels written in
French? Can we distinguish between them and non-bilingual French writers’
texts? Is the phenomenon of interference, i.e. traces of Russian language and
culture, observable in French texts of Russian-French authors? In order to
answer these questions, this chapter explores, on the one side, factors that
determined Makine’s, Afanassiev’s, Fedorovski’s, Gran’s, and Jurgenson’s lan¬
guage choices; and on the other side, cases of Russian linguistic interference
in their French novels.
The following chapter written by Malou Brouwer, entitled Poems—as—lan¬
guage-lessons. Translingualism in Naomi Mcllwraith's kiyam, investigates
linguistic and literary diversity of Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island, North
America. Due to the immense linguistic diversity in terms of the Indigenous
and colonial languages being spoken among them, a wide range of code¬
switching strategies are reflected in their Indigenous literatures. Naomi Mcll¬
wraith, for example, writes in English and Cree in her multilingual collection
of poetry kiydm. In this paper, Brouwer argues that kiyam can be read as
“poetry—as—language—lesson”™ as she reflects on learning Cree, on the one
hand, but the collection is presented as language lessons for the reader, on the
other. Her poetry thus reflects the linguistic context, challenges the settler
colonial effects of the imposition of colonial languages, and celebrates the
revitalization of Indigenous languages in the face of and despite colonial at¬
tempts at erasure and assimilation. In creating translingual poems and using
paratextual materials, McIlwraith demonstrates the effects of settler colonial¬
ism but also succeeds in countering them.
The next paper addresses a linguistic shift carried out very recently by a re¬
nowned French writer. Levente Selaf’s article “Um Mich neu zu Machen”. Switch¬
ing the Language of Poetry by Jacques Jouet discusses the recent language change
by Jacques Jouet, French member of the Oulipo (an acronym for Ouvroir de
Littérature Potentielle, a group of writers and mathematicians who seek to cre¬
ate works using constrained writing techniques). Jouet switched to German, and
since April 2022 he has been writing poetry exclusively in German, instead of
his native French. It is shown how the genres of his French poetry reappear in
German, and what the major steps of the evolution of his compositional tech¬
nique are as he acquires a higher level of this new language of poetry after a
spectacular code-switching at the age of 74.
The final paper of the literary code-switching section, Lisa Schantl’s First
Language Roots. Intra-sentential Literary Code-switching in ESL Poetry and
Prose, examines how multilingualism and migration come together in
°4 Heid Erdrich: Curator of Ephemera at the New Museum for Archaic Media, Michigan, Mich¬
igan State University Press, 2017.
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