Pia Petersen, Translingualism and Disruption

Abstract

This article analyses the work of translingual writer Pia Petersen. It situates Petersen’s work within current debates about translingual writing and asks whether a translingual writer should be expected to draw attention to their multilingual background within their work. It argues that Petersen’s work is disruptive in both its form and content. In terms of content, Petersen engages in pointed social critique, highlighting the social injustice of contemporary French and American society. She also defends an approach to literature as an art form that should be respected and valued, not debased by market forces, consumption or popular appeal. Her work is also disruptive on a formal level, since she incorporates a variety of registers and phrases in English into her French language prose. This is not a writer who could be described as a multilingual author who incorporates several languages into her writing. But nor should we except her to do so. Instead, Petersen’s unique style reveals an attention to language, communication and disruption that suggests a translingual imagination.

Keywords:

• Translingual writing
• Multilingual writing
• French literature
• Pia Petersen
• native tongue
• language of adoption

Aren’t all writers translingual? Languages are, after all, inherently multiple: amalgamations of several different languages that have formed over time through a process of inflections of other languages that rub up against each other in a productive contamination. Indeed, languages that have no discernible root or relationship with another language are so anomalous that they are deemed “language isolates”—Basque, Burushaski and Ainu, for example. Even within languages, there are variations of style, register and vernacular—such as in the many versions of Englishes, especially the concept of ‘world Englishes.’ Even authors who write in languages that are more strictly controlled incorporate variations and disruptions; despite the fact that French is a highly standardized language, for example, a writer such as Ahmadou Kourouma weaves Malinké into it to produce what Jean-Marc Moura terms an “interlangue” (Moura, 1999).¹ Many writers have experimented with the inclusion of non-standard, vernacular or irreverent language in order to defy literary norms, such as Virginie Despentes in French or Zora Neale Hurston in English. As Paul Matsuda writes, “wherever there are multiple languages in an individual or in a communicative situation, negotiation and change are inevitable” (Matsuda 2014, 480). Moreover, those who practise literary writing may be readily expected to have a greater interest in words, communication and language, which may well have led them to learn other languages to at least some extent, whether they write in them or not.

Nor is this phenomenon a recent one. While scholarly attention to translingual writing has exploded in the twenty-first century, multilingualism has been the norm throughout the history of writing. Yasemin Yildiz pinpoints the late eighteenth century as the moment in which this changed; after this point, she argues, the multilingual writing of previous times was replaced by a coupling of nation and language that she names the “monolingual paradigm” (Yildiz 2012, 2). Yildiz is one of a large number of scholars who have probed literary writing that breaks free of the shackles of monolingualism—and particularly the phenomenon of translingual writing, or writing in a language other than one’s native tongue.² Critics have proposed definitions of translingual writing in recent years, perhaps partially as a response to Matsuda’s suggestion that much has been written on this topic that is undertheorised (Matsuda 2014, 478). Steven Kellman, in the first book-length study of the concept, famously proposed “monolingual translinguals” (Kellman 2000, 12) to refer to writers who have adopted a language different from their original language. He distinguished these authors from “ambilingual translinguals,” who write in both their original language and another. More recently, he added “isolinguals” (11) to designate those who may have knowledge of other languages but who write only in their original language; whereas Goethe learnt Latin, Greek, French, Italian, English, and Hebrew, for example, he wrote only in his native German, so should be considered isolingual. Kellman refers to the work of linguist Aneta Pavlenko, who divides the category of bilinguals into three distinct sub-categories: coordinate bilinguals, compound bilinguals and subordinate bilinguals (Pavlenko 2014, 18). The first refers to those who learn two languages in distinct environments, so learn two separate systems in which each language operates. The second describes those who learn two languages in the same environment, so that the two languages are always interlinked. The third designates those who have learnt the second language, typically in a classroom and through the medium of their original language.

This article focuses on a writer who could be classed as a monolingual translingual and subordinate bilingual author—but not one who learnt the second language in a typical classroom setting. Furthermore, this writer has achieved success within the literary establishment of her language of adoption—French—but her work has not yet been the subject of much scholarly attention. Pia Petersen was born in 1966 just outside of Copenhagen. She left her native Denmark for France in her early twenties with very little knowledge of the French language. She explains in an interview with Alison Rice: “I had a dictionary. I had a book, Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir, and I translated a dozen words from each page” (Rice 2021, 81). As her literature-fuelled linguistic skills grew, she claims that “afterward, when I was listening in the street, I was able to understand the meaning. I was able to put sentences together and to understand what was being said. I could manage” (81). Fascinated by French literature, culture and philosophy, she enrolled in university courses in philosophy, learning the language in a classroom setting but not one typical of the subordinate bilingual. She has lived in Paris and in the South of France, where she owned a bookshop, and also has a residence in Los Angeles. This multinational and multilingual writer began writing in the French language but her first book was met with mistrust by French readers; Alain Mabankou recalls hearing her complain that “Les choses auraient été peut-être plus simples si j’étais une francophone du Congo comme toi ! Même les éditeurs se méfient de moi, parce que c’est suspect qu’une Danoise écrive en français…” (Mabanckou 2006). Such a comment speaks volumes about the persistent attitude to French literary prose on behalf of the reading public, to the belief in the purity of the French language, and to the prejudice many readers still hold towards the ability of non-native speakers to “master” “their” language. Hopefully such attitudes are beginning to change, as is suggested by the rise of translingual and multilingual writers on the French literary scene, and by the recent success of Petersen herself. Her success began when her work attracted the attention of Actes Sud, where Françoise and Hubert Nyssen included her in their collection Un endroit où aller, which also published works by Michel Butor, Assia Djebar and Nancy Huston. She has written fifteen works to date, and all of them in the French language. She has won numerous prizes, including the Prix marseillais du polar for Iouri in 2008 and the Prix de la Bastide for Une livre de chair (Petersen 2010) in 2009. In 2014 she won the Prix du Rayonnement de la langue et de la littérature française de l’Académie française, which is “destinés à des personnalités françaises ou étrangères ayant rendu à la langue et aux lettres des services particuliers” (L’Académie Française 2023). Previous winners include celebrated authors such as Ananda Devi, Hector Bianciotti and Abdelkebir Khatibi. Petersen’s works represent topics of broad contemporary interest and deserve greater attention. The aims of this article are to articulate the specificities of this translingual author’s writing within the context of contemporary analyses of other writers’ approaches to translingualism, and to bring this author’s work—“Le Danemark Francophone” according to Mabanckou—to the attention of an Anglophone literary audience (Mabanckou 2006).

Petersen’s Translingual Practice

Petersen has been candid about the reasons for her decision to adopt the French language for her literary writing. In the interview with Rice cited above, she claims that Danish “sounds like a saw” but that it is not just the sensory aspect of the language she finds dissatisfying. Petersen finds the Danish language restrictive both for grammatical and cultural reasons, since she claims Danish is bound by rules and its rigidity restricts nuance. Although the French language is frequently referred to as a highly codified language whose standards are overseen by the Académie Française, Petersen finds it liberating since it provides her with greater freedom than her native tongue. She claims that “I think in French. I can’t think all that I can think in French in Danish. I don’t have the means” (Rice 2021, 93) and even claims to no longer have a native tongue (94). Such a position is not without difficulties, however. She complains that “the French have the impression that French is their language. It’s their property. It is their due. It is theirs because they were born into the language. And I, as a Francophile, say ‘No. It’s a language. I choose the language that I want, where I want. I take it. I use it. It’s my language’” (88). Petersen thus questions the notion of “having” a language, as did Jacques Derrida when he wrote “J’ai une seule langue, ce n’est pas la mienne,” reflecting on the illusion of our ability to ever possess a language (Derrida 1996, 13). Rey Chow similarly asks “does ‘having’ a language mean inheriting it like a bequest from authentic ancestors, and/or being able to control the language’s future by handing it down to the proper heirs? Is such possession through descent and/or posterity a privilege that is exclusive to native speakers?” (Chow 2008, 281). Petersen’s response would be firmly negative. Indeed, she questions “Why should someone born in France have more rights over the language than I? I have exactly the same rights, if not more, because I have fought a lot for this. So I consider that the language is also mine” (Rice 2021, 88–89).

So what is specific to Petersen’s practice of translingualism? As Kellman writes, “every translingual is happy or unhappy in his or her own way. But whether they view the switch positively or not, almost all acknowledge that switching languages makes a profound difference in what—and certainly how—they write” (7). Indeed, some writers include words and phrases from another language within their writing, such as Lydie Salvayre’s incorporation of Spanish in Pas pleurer, Hélène Cixous’s use of German in Une autobiographie allemande or Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s use of Swahili, Arabic and Hindi in Wizard of the Crow (which is indeed self-translated from the original Gikuyu). Others leave traces of their original language in their prose, such as Joseph Conrad’s use of calques from Polish in his English prose or the influence of Czech on Milan Kundera’s French.³ Still others leave no traces of another language at all, having elected to write in one language and conforming to its structures and idiom rigidly. Petersen’s approach to translingual writing belongs in this latter category. Indeed, her texts include remarkably few signs of other languages within them. In particular, her native Danish is not to be found in her prose—which is not necessarily surprising, given the large number of translingual writers who follow such a model. Moreover, although the majority of the world’s population is now multilingual, multilingual texts are still in the minority—that is, to return to Yildiz’s point, the conflation of one nation with one language—“French literature,” “German literature” etc.—has been the norm for approximately two centuries. Is it unfair to expect a translingual writer to retain a trace, implicitly or explicitly, of their native language in their work?

Although Petersen’s texts are largely monolingual, her work is very international in focus, which carries linguistic implications. Un écrivain, un vrai (Petersen 2013a) is perhaps her most successful work to date. This novel was reviewed in several national newspapers and literary magazines, including Le Monde des livres, where Stéphanie Dupays praised the way in which it “dénonce l’aliénation de l’individu dans un monde où la transparence et l’immédiateté menacent chaque jour l’écriture d’obsolescence” (Dupays 2013). The novel is set in New York and tells the tale of a writer who wins a major literary prize and who is promptly thrust into the public eye through starring in a reality television series, called as the title of the book, Un écrivain, un vrai. While he is reluctant to participate, Gary is convinced to acquiesce by his wife, who styles herself as his muse but who really pushes him forward ambitiously out of concern for money and success. She sells the reality television series to him as a way of publicizing not only his own writing but as a way of promoting the value of literature in a society that derides it. As this summary suggests, the text critiques aspects of contemporary American society, such as ruthlessness, capitalism and a lack of appreciation for the arts. Due to its setting and its subject matter, English phrases occasionally enter the text, in the form of place names, streets and areas, and a small number of phrases are used within the French language prose. In the episode when Gary wins the literary prize, for example, the text states, “les invités prirent la direction du Grand Ballroom, the most beautiful room in New York, disait Truman Capote” (12). In this instance, the English, a quotation, appears in italics to separate it from the rest of the prose. Elsewhere a city scene is described thus: “une multitude de panneaux proposaient chemises et cravates, descendez à gauche, suivez la flèche, we buy gold and diamonds and watches” (130). The English and French phrases therefore do not mingle and the English appears as a way of adding local color rather than as an attempt to produce a multilingual text. Kellman argues that “translingualism would seem to incline writers toward metalingual awareness, manifested in ostentatious verbal play and in reflexive constructions that lay bare the devices of their art. Nevertheless, some translingual writers are largely indifferent to the linguistic medium they happen to be using” (14). It would not be fair to suggest that Petersen is indifferent to her linguistic medium, as is demonstrated by her international locations and the use of other languages within them. Yet nor does she engage in the “ostentatious verbal play” of Kellman’s phrase. While Petersen’s settings are multinational then, her writing is not overtly multilingual.

Moreover, Petersen’s native Danish is not present in her writing, even in what is probably her most autobiographical work. Petersen’s epistolary text Instinct primaire was published in 2013. This work appeared in a series published by NiL, titled “Les Affranchis,” a word play that signifies both “stamped” and “liberated/emancipated.” The preface to each text explains:

Quand tout a été dit sans qu’il soit possible de tourner la page, écrire à l’autre devient la seule issue. Mais passer à l’acte est risqué. Ainsi, après avoir rédigé sa Lettre au père, Kafka avait préféré la ranger dans un tiroir.

Écrire une lettre, une seule, c’est s’offrir le point final, s’affranchir d’une vieille histoire.

La collection ‘Les Affranchis fait donc cette demande à ses auteurs: Écrivez la lettre que vous n’avez jamais écrite.’ (Petersen 2013, 3)

On this basis, the press has published short epistolary texts from a number of celebrated and newer authors, including Annie Ernaux’s letter to the sister who died before she was born, L’Autre fille, and Anne Goscinny’s Le Bruit des clefs, written to her father Raymond, the author of Le Petit Nicolas, who died when she was nine years old. These texts are linked to real life events and are presumably therefore closer to the autobiographical genre. In Petersen’s case, Instinct primaire is a letter written by a narrator to her former partner, whom she jilted at the altar. Since he does not respond to her messages or phone calls, she subsequently writes this letter to him to explain her reasons for not wanting to enter into the institution of marriage or to become a mother. The tone is intimate and confessional as the letter writer explains at length her rejection of a model of femininity linked to child-rearing and a marriage contract. I have explored elsewhere the phenomenon of translingual authors who incorporate their original language into their intimate, confessional writing (Edwards 2020). Chantal Spitz writes in French but incorporates her native Tahitian into her life writing, for example (Spitz 2003). Kim Thúy similarly writes in French but peppers her life writing with her native Vietnamese (Thúy 2013). Petersen’s presumably autobiographical text does not correspond to such a model; as opposed to her native Danish, the only language that interrupts her prose is English, which, as is the case with Un écrivain, un vrai, appears infrequently within it.

Nevertheless, this monolingual approach is very standard in French writing. Despite the recent prevalence of writers who break the monolingual paradigm within their self-reflexive texts, the tradition of translingual writers who write autobiographically exclusively in French is well established. Alain Ausoni has studied the autobiographies of translingual writers and finds that the discovery of another language is a pivotal moment in their self-narrative but that their native language does not always enter their texts. In Mémoires d’outre-langue: L’écriture translingue de soi (2018), Ausoni examines life writing by translingual writers such as André Makine (Russian), Hector Bianchotti (Argentinian), Vassilis Alexakis (Greek), Anglophone Canadian Nancy Huston and Agota Kristof (Hungarian). While some write in their native language as well as in their adopted French, their life writing, just like Petersen’s, is monolingual and in their language of adoption. As Axel Gasquet and Modesta Suárez summarize, “malgré leur exotisme, les écrivains translingues sont des exceptions qui viennent confirmer la règle de l’unilinguisme” (2007, 39). Of course, such multilingual writing is difficult to publish and disseminate from the perspective of the publishing industry.

While Petersen’s native Danish does not enter her French language writing, it is interesting to note that English regularly does. This occurs primarily because her work is very contemporary and represents aspects of American culture. As might have become apparent in the discussion above, Petersen’s work observes contemporary society closely, depicting current debates, pointing to inequalities, and sounding a cautionary note about certain mores, tropes and directions. Un écrivain, un vrai depicts the pitfalls of mediatized identities and the risks to literary and artistic culture in contemporary society, and L’Instinct primaire is a meditation on the place of women in twenty-first century society, on approaches to femininity and on the ways in which both women and men collude to entrench gender inequality. La Vengeance des perroquets (Petersen 2022) is a thriller that depicts the world of artificial intelligence, and Paradigma (Petersen 2019) represents the inequality of the social class system by imagining a revolt by the disadvantaged on the day of the Oscars ceremony. Moreover, several of Petersen’s works are set, either partially or completely, in the USA, either in Los Angeles or in New York. As she has commented in an interview, she resists the notion of being limited by geographic boundaries in both her life and her writing, stating that “France is my country. But I need fresh air as well, so I go for walks elsewhere. This is important for writing. I like the idea of nomadic writing, of writing that is composed during trips and that is nourished by life, by all the problems of today” (Rice 2021, 144). The ways in which Petersen incorporates English into her critique is varied. In Paradigma, for example, English interrupts the French narrative through three main narrative techniques. First, isolated words are used to pepper the text, such as when a character exclaims “Motherfucker” in reported speech (Petersen 2019, 179), thereby highlighting the contemporary subject matter and the non-standard way in which it is approached. Second, words or expressions in English are incorporated into the French sentences and highlighted through italics, such as when the narrator comments “le lendemain, les gangs et les veterans activent leur reseau de communication, un reseau old way qui transforme tout support, mur, porte, poteau, arbre et parfois des pigeons voyageurs, en messagerie” (178). In this instance, the English expression adds local flavour and specificity and emphasizes the differences between newer and older means of communication, which is the focus of the text’s critique. Third, there are blocks of English set apart from the French text. This occurs either in chapter titles, such as “I have a dream” (9), “They’re talkin’ bout a revolution” (147) and “The Night Before” (278) or in quotations, which are numerous throughout this text. The chapters frequently conclude with a quotation by a well-known contemporary or historical thinker. These often appear in their original French, such as quotations from Joël de Rosnay (118) and Balzac (172). The quotations from Nietzsche (277) and Paul Feyerabend (146) are translated from their original German to appear in French. Thomas Kuhn’s (113) and Jeremy Rifkin’s (261) original English words are translated into French but then there are several quotations from Malcolm X that are presented in the original English. None of these are translated, despite the fact that they are often lengthy, such as:

There comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression. There comes a time when people get tired of being plunged across the abyss of humiliation where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair. There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an Alpine November. So in the midst of their tiredness these people decided to rise up and protest against injustice. (169)

This passage is not only long but also contains vocabulary that may impede comprehension to the non-English speaker, such as “nagging despair” or “piercing chill.” Nevertheless, Petersen quotes the original English and, by deciding not to provide a translation, summary or footnote explanation, refuses to atone for the monolingual reader. Such a narrative technique is striking and demonstrates the author’s commitment to multilingual writing, regardless of the absence of her own native tongue in her prose.

Moreover, as Kellman suggests, translingual writers often exhibit a heightened linguistic awareness, whether they incorporate other languages into their writing or not. In Petersen’s writing, this is certainly the case. This awareness is not only demonstrated by the inclusion of English in her French-language prose and the multifaceted techniques she uses to achieve this; it is also evidenced in her discussion of language, which recurs in her work. In La Vengeance des perroquets, for example, she broaches the topics of artificial intelligence and digital communications, critiquing developments such as robotization and their impact upon relationships. This text is partially set in Silicon Valley, for which Petersen spares no ire. The narrator writes specifically about languages in this context:

Je ne parle pas la langue de la Valley. Les mathématiques et les codes sont des langues étrangères que j’ai peu d’espoir de maîtriser. Ou que je ne désire pas maîtriser. Je les trouve jolies. Coder est une langue, ni plus ni moins, c’est ce que je me dis quand ça va mal et que je me sens insuffisante, faute de connaissance. […] C’est comme le latin mais plus obscur. […] Pourtant ces langues manquent de légèreté. Utiliser une telle langue c’est comme écrire en prison, il y a peu d’ouverture. Sans limites, elle manque de spontanéité si la question n’était que poétique, la langue aurait perdu son aura depuis longtemps. Néanmoins c’est une langue utile et pragmatique avec laquelle on peut tout créer et éventuellement, par extension et par accumulation, tout contrôler. (Petersen 2022, 74)

This interpretation of coding as a language emphasizes its meaning-making potential as well as its foreignness. The narrator points to the positive elements of this language, such as its attractiveness and its utility, as well as to its risks. The comparison between the digital language of coding and poetic language is particularly interesting, and suggests that the latter does not have the ability to control, as does the former. This discussion of language typifies Petersen’s work in its provocative questioning of the contemporary, especially our means of communication and its impact upon relationships. Although not multilingual then, her highly contemporary writing demonstrates a heightened awareness of language and its function, limits and risks in current society.

As is perhaps apparent from her attention to language and communication in contemporary society, writing itself is also a recurrent theme in Petersen’s work. In many of her texts, characters criticize current writing practices, both on the part of writers and the ways in which they write, and on the part of readers and the way in which they consume literature and art. This is rendered very clearly in Un ecrivain, un vrai, in which the prize-winning author’s wife is presented as a crude caricature who is so concerned with financial gain that she encourages him to debase his art through reality television. Predictably, the television show goes badly, since viewers are disappointed by the mundanity of the author’s daily life, by his disgruntled attitude towards the viewing public and by his refusal to engage in the producers’ ruses, such as faking an extra-marital affair. Criticism comes from a fellow writer, the character named Alain Mabanckou, a well-known friend of Petersen’s, who comments to the main protagonist:

Jamais je ne t’aurais laissé participer à une téléréalité. Tu fais des conneries, toi, un grand écrivain. Et tu viens de recevoir un prix prestigieux. Alain l’engueula sévèrement. Et nos rêves de folie littéraire, de tout ce qu'on s’est promis d’apporter au monde. Qu’en fais-tu de ça ? Hein ? Et notre rébellion ? Notre bataille ? La guérilla ? Et l’avenir que nous devons inventer ? Pourquoi ? Il donnait des coups sur la table de sa main. Comment veux-tu qu’on te prenne au sérieux ? (Petersen 2013a, 67)

Petersen thus upholds a certain idea of literature and of art, one that should be celebrated for its expertise and not debased for the purposes of mass consumption. She reinforces this resistance to popular, marketable and fashionable writing through her stringent criticism of autofiction. This is most obvious in Instinct primaire, in which the narrator asserts that “l’autofiction a quasiment balayé toute autre approche de la littérature et a en même temps changé notre rapport au réel […] Entre Harlequin et l’autofiction, je me demande bien où j’irais pour me poser des questions sur le monde” (Petersen 2013b, 96). As discussed above, this text appeared in a series of (at least partially) autobiographical texts, so the fact that these lines are spoken by its first-person narrator suggests a direct critique of the genre, exactly as the author practices a more literary version of it. Petersen’s critique of contemporary writing, its popularity and its mediatization may offer some explanation of her resistance to draw attention to her translingualism. As Rainier Grutman has pointed out, translingual and multilingual writing are undeniably popular in contemporary publishing (Grutman 1997, 38). Petersen, by contrast, appears to intend her writing to be disruptive in its contemporary content, but not on a popular formal or linguistic one.

The final facet of Petersen’s translingualism that deserves discussion is not, in fact, her writing. As we have seen, Petersen’s writing is not generally multilingual, and her writing does not insist upon the translingual situation of its author. But its publishers do. It is interesting to note that on the cover of all of Petersen’s books, her publishers assert her foreignness. Actes Sud, for example, mentions her nationality first: “Native du Danemark, Pia Petersen […] se partage entre Paris et Marseille” (Petersen 2004; 2008) or “Native du Danemark, Pia Petersen vit aujourd’hui dans le sud de la France” (Petersen 2007). Similarly, Éditions la branche describes her thus: “née à Copenhague, Pia Petersen s’installe en France afin d’écrire en français. Elle y fait des rencontres, des petits boulots, des études de philo, monte une librairie puis, en 2000, se lance enfin dans l’écriture” (Petersen 2012). Both of the main publishing houses with whom she has worked—both of whom are known for publishing authors from beyond the Hexagon—are clearly marketing her as an exotic other. This choice to situate her according to her nation and language of origin is presumably a well-researched marketing tool. Perhaps the presses intend to evidence Petersen’s linguistic and literary talent by underscoring her translingualism, or to entice readers with a promise of reading about French society from the perspective of an outsider, or simply to draw attention to her distinction from other writers of contemporary social critique. Petersen herself, by contrast, wryly comments that “j’en ai assez d’être vue comme la Danoise qui écrit en français, du coup, personne ne parle vraiment de mes livres” (quoted in Steinmetz 2022).

Overall, then, Petersen’s work could be described as disruptive on many levels, since she engages in pervasive social critique, she takes aim at contemporary society and its many layers of social injustice, and she defends an approach to literature as an art form that should be respected and valued, not debased by market forces, consumption or popular appeal. Her work is also disruptive on a formal level, since although much of her work is lyrical and poetic, she also incorporates slang words and informal language. The English language is not a pervasive but is a regular disruption in her work. Moreover, the phrases in English are not incorporated into the French prose in a standardized way, such as by using italics or providing a translation or glossary, thus preventing any stable point of entry into the text. These disruptive elements may not be as linguistically diverse as authors who incorporate their native language or sustained passages of a second or third language into their translingual writing, such as Spitz or Thúy. But nor should we expect a translingual author to adopt such a practice, since the facile association between one nation and one language has long been debunked. Nevertheless, Petersen’s uniquely disruptive practice reveals an attention to language, communication and experimentation that is surely rooted in a translingual imagination.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Natalie Edwards

Natalie Edwards is Professor of Literature in French at the University of Bristol. She specialises in contemporary literature, particularly in transnational and migrant literature, multilingual writing and women’s writing. She has published three monographs on these areas, the most recent of which is Multilingual Life Writing by French and Francophone Women: Transnational Selves (Routledge 2020). She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Notes

1 I refer here to the influence of the Académie Française and other public policies that have contributed to the standardisation of the French language, which is not to deny the variations in the language in many parts of the French-speaking world.

2 See, for example, the work of Olga Anokhina (2012), Alain Ausoni (2018), Rainier Grutman (1997), Robert Jouanny (2000) and Eva Karpinski (2012).

3 See, for example, Michelle Woods’ “Elsewhere: Translingual Kundera” (2016).