Exophonic word and image relations in the work of Yoko Tawada, Vladimir Nabokov and Bruno Schulz
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Date
13/01/2023Embargo end date
13/01/2024Author
Migut, Beata
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Abstract
This thesis explores the relationship between exophony and intermediality in the
works of Yoko Tawada, Vladimir Nabokov and Bruno Schulz. All three authors refer
to and incorporate images into their texts, while also blurring the distinction between
word and image: this is the intermedial dynamic of their work that this thesis
analyses. As to exophony, it is commonly used as a term alternative to
translingualism and designates writers, who write in a language other than their
mother tongue. The starting point of this thesis is that apart from being intermedial,
all three authors could be seen as exophone. That said, exophone status might be
arguable in the case of Schulz, who wrote primarily in his mother tongue, or even
Nabokov, one of the most famous exophones, who growing up with Russian, English
and French could not quite designate which language was his first. This is a
problematic that echoes this thesis’ approach to exploring the relationship between
exophony and intermediality: I investigate the idea that exophony could be seen as a
broader phenomenon than its common definition. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari suggest, it is possible to be a foreigner in one’s own language, and this is an
idea often evoked in the work of Tawada, Nabokov and Schulz. In addition to
Deleuze and Guattari, my exploration of exophony and intermediality draws on
Tawada’s elaboration of the notion of exophony and relates to Yasemin Yildiz’s
destabilization of what she calls the monolingual paradigm. Engaging with the ways
in which Tawada, Nabokov and Schulz reflect on issues of identity, the self, ‘nature’
versus culture, the transparency of language, the relation between body and voice,
origins, and language as a sign, I show how intermediality can be a strategy used by
writers to interrogate some central premises of the monolingual paradigm and
question the mother tongue’s ‘naturalness’. One of the aims of this thesis is to
explore the idea that intermediality can be a form of exophony.