Code-Switching as a Linguistic and Metalinguistic Narrative Resource: Translational and Affective Assemblages

This Special Issue understands code-switching as a key narratological tool available to writers to build their narratives. It includes seven contributions based on the literary production of writers who employed code-switching in their works. These authors belong to diverse literary traditions and contexts, spanning key classic authors (such as Leo Tolstoy, Kafka and Joyce); borderland authors (Chicano literature); self-translators (Nancy Huston); migrant, post-migrant, exilic and postcolonial writers (Junot Díaz, Ágota Kristóf and Monica Meneghetti). These writers employ different languages in their works: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Italian dialects, Russian, Bulgarian and other Slavic tongues, Filipino, Waray and, in the case of Joyce, the seventy languages detected in his last work, Finnegans Wake. The differences that exist among the writers considered in this Special Issue help us to demonstrate that the fictionality of the code-switching practice concerns world literature as a whole, regardless of writers’ specificities. At the same time, other carefully crafted theoretical tools and approaches are needed to pinpoint the writers’ code-switching idiosyncrasies aside from the narratological type. In this respect, the contributors employ a variety of key theoretical perspectives such as sociolinguistics applied to code-switching, analysis of language biographies and metalanguage, postcolonial studies, trauma studies, food studies and queer temporalities. However, the narratological lens unites all the contributions and, in some cases, even the narratological approach alone outlines productive new ways in which to understand code-switches.