Tagungsbroschüre_Zweisprachigkeit_Vecjezicnost

Monolingualism and Plurilingualism of Literary Systems
MARKO JUVAN
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, national and world literatures
emerged as literary systems because of their interdependent
relations. Whereas world literature evolved as a purportedly autonomous
system that was believed to transcend national literary systems
(these were considered building blocks of the world-system) thanks to
its universal aesthetic and humanist values, particular national literatures
could fashion their presumed individuality only in the international
space and with regard to the aesthetic transcendence of world literature.
In Europe, national literary systems normally show the transition from
the nonstandard multilingualism of vernaculars to the standardized
monolingualism of the standard language, which ideologically constituted
a unified public sphere of the otherwise socially, differentiated,
and dispersed community imagined as the modern nation. On the other
hand, the literary world-system was originally plurilingual and, promoting
the role of translation, required cosmopolitanism and polyglottism
from its actors. However, due to the asymmetric distribution
of cultural capital, the literary world-system tends towards monolingualism;
that is, the global hegemony of world languages. Contrary to
the cores of literary systems, national and global alike, which lean
towards monolingualism, the systemic margins reproduce and even
stimulate plurilingualism. Based on these premises, this presentation
addresses the role of multilingual zones of literary systems that were
foregrounded by recent literary transnationalism (e.g., minority,
regional, or mobile literary practices). In addition, it calls attention to
the fetishization of multilingualism in current ideologies of
multiculturalism.
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