Heterolinguïsme en interculturaliteit in hedendaagse Nederlandstalige romans na 2000

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Abstract

This doctoral dissertation comparatively explores the manifestations and implications of literary multilingualism in five intercultural Dutch-language novels published after the year 2000: Izak (2005) by P.F. Thomése, Duizend heuvels (2012) by Koen Peeters, Salam Europa! (2016) by Kader Abdolah, the Ayoub trilogy (2018) by Fikry El Azzouzi and Ik ga leven (2021) by Lale Gül. In this dissertation, the concept of heterolingualism (Grutman 1997/2019), which refers to the embedding of ‘other’ languages in the main language of a (literary) text, is considered as both reflecting and challenging intercultural dynamics in the ‘superdiverse’ (Vertovec 2007) 21st century Flanders and the Netherlands. Drawing on theoretical frameworks from literary theory, postcolonial studies, etymology, sociolinguistics and humor studies, the five novels’ specific heterolingualism is studied from various perspectives: Firstly, in order to grasp its representativeness, the proportion of heterolingualism is quantified by ‘distinguishing’ the different languages present in the novels based on linguistic and etymological principles. Subsequently, the specific heterolingualism of the corpus is inventoried according to the ‘discursive mechanisms’ staging the ‘other’ languages of the text as more or less foreign on a ‘continuum of alterity’ (Suchet 2014). Finally, centered on the analysis of the discursive and thematic heterolingual strategies deployed in the novels, heterolingualism is investigated in relation to the authors’ posture (Meizoz 2010, 2011), to the intercultural competence of ‘model readers’ (Grutman 2023) and actual readers and to the humorous (Kuipers 2015) reading effects of certain heterolingual passages. This doctoral dissertation thus contributes to the study of contemporary Dutch-language literature by highlighting literary multilingualism’s role in the construction and deconstruction of identitarian, cultural and linguistic boundaries and by proposing a new perspective on the analysis of multilingual writing, inspired by the ways in which different languages interact within multilingual Dutch-language novels.