Cultural Identity. Negotiated and Questioned in Transnational Literature

peer reviewedThe article shows how literature that has not been written in the author's first language such as works of Yoko Tawada or Marica Bodrozic, not only transgresses geographical or linguistic borders but resists its fixation by concepts of identity and belonging bound to spatiality. These works rather reflect the relationship between changed time structures of the narratives and narrating the self by playing with an understanding of language that is based on the impossibility of a clear distinction between the mother tongue and a 'foreign' language. This essay picks up on Jacques Derrida's concept of the 'monolinguisme de l'autre'. By creating texts that imply several languages at the same moment a well-established understanding of translation that seeks to replace the source language by a target language is undermined