Lives in translation. The Paradoxes of Spanish-American Multilingual Autobiographical Writing 1980-2015.

This project wants to investigate the complex relations between literary multilingualism and the construction of identity in contemporary autobiographical texts (1980-2015) written by authors from the Southern Cone (Argentina and Chile) and Mexico. The authors under consideration write in different languages simultaneously or alternatingly, or in a mother tongue influenced by other languages. Exile, migration and postcolonial emancipation have led to an increase in the number of multilingual literary texts in Latin-American literature from 1980 onwards. Their dominance on the Latin-American book market of the most recent years is highly remarkable. Our project wants to look into the textual and paratextual reflections of multilingualism in two corpora of selected autobiographical texts (1980-2005 and 2005-2015). By focusing on the stylistic and narratological dimensions of multilingualism in the texts, we want to test the hypothesis that a dominant metanarrative of problematic identity split, as manifested in language struggle, in older texts, has given way to a tendency towards the embrace of productive doubling and playful reinvention of language in the most recent ones. Situating these literary tendencies within their respective societal contexts will help us understand the evolutions and shifts that have taken place in contemporary Latin-American debates on identity and grant new insights into the ways in which literature both shapes and is shaped by these debates.