Autonomy abroad: metaphors of Mündigkeit in language learner narrative

Abstract

This paper forms part of a wider research project which examines how the Kantian concept of ‘Mündigkeit’ or ‘maturity’ may be represented in subjective accounts of language learning, known as ‘language learner narratives’. It is shown that the metaphors used in these texts frequently do not so much represent congenial relations of hospitality between native and non-native speakers as unequal power relations, in which the non-native speaker feels ‘imprisoned’ or ‘infantilised’. The paper also considers some of the other metaphors common to such texts, which may represent universal conceptualisations of language learning experiences.

Dieser Artikel ist Teil eines größeren Forschungsprojekts, das die Darstellung von einem umdefinierten Begriff kantianischer ‘Mündigkeit’ in subjektiven Erzählungen über Sprachlernerfahrungen, die als Sprachlernererzählungen bezeichnet werden, untersucht. Es wird gezeigt, daß die Metaphern, die in diesen Texten verwendet werden, eher ungleiche Machtsverhältnisse, in denen sich der Nichtmuttersprachler ‘gefangen’ oder ‘infantilisiert’ fühlt, als angenehme Beziehungen von Gastfreundschaft, darstellen. Der Artikel berücksichtigt auch andere Metaphern, die diese Texte gemeinsam haben, die möglicherweise universelle Konzeptualisierungen von Sprachlernerfahrungen darstellen.

Keywords:

• Mündigkeit
• metaphor
• multilingualism
• cross-cultural autobiography
• language learning
• intercultural narrative
• language learner narrative

Notes

1. An answer to the question: what is enlightenment?

2. Who uses his own reason and speaks for himself.

3. Who addresses himself through his writings to the public as such.

4. When a child turns 12, he has reached the age of majority and is subject to the law. This is from the online edition of the Deutsches Rechtswörterbuch (German dictionary of legal terms) available at: http://www.rzuser.uni-heidelberg.de/~cd2/drw/e/mu/ndig/mundig.htm. This text dates from around 1400. The DRW has taken the sample from Die Magedeburger Fragen/hrsg. von J.Fr. Behrend – Berlin: Guttentag, 1865 – L, 300 S.

5. For wisdom opened the silent mouth and makes ready the unripe tongue [...] out of the mouths of the young and the infants, thou hast brought forth praise.

6. I have since noticed that this linguist's point of view is more widespread than I had thought. People rejoice to see French conquering foreigners, but they are not at all convinced that the foreigners might themselves conquer French. They are more often considered as representatives of another culture, ambassadors from elsewhere, than as original creators, authors in their own right.

7. Converse serenely with it.

8. Someone told me of a foreign writer who ended up marrying his French translator. ‘So’, I thought, ‘I am my own wife!’. For a little while, I was quite happy. I didn't feel like I was betraying myself or my languages by using two of them.

9. Reprinted by permission of the Publisher. From ed. Karen Ogulnick, Language crossings: negotiating the self in a multicultural world, New York: Teachers College Press. Copyright © 2000 by Teachers College Press, Columbia University.

10. Living abroad, you are a child again, and in the worst sense of the term: infantilised. Reduce to infans, that is, to silence; deprived of speech. Completely stupid and powerless!

11. From Lost in translation by Eva Hoffman, published by William Heinemann. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.

12. In another passage (p. 53) Watson objects to the French word ‘l'oiseau’ (bird) on the basis that ‘[i]t is a word that cannot be pronounced without simpering, a word whose use should be restricted to children under five’. Reprinted from The philosopher's demise: learning French by Richard Watson, by permission of the University of Missouri Press. Copyright ©1995 by the Curators of the University of Missouri.

13. Copyright Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Mutterzunge © Rotbuch Verlag, Berlin, 2006 (1990). I learnt the script poorly because I always spoke to Ibni Abdullah, who was in my body, in other words: ‘You soul of my soul, no one resembles you, I sacrifice myself to your steps. Your gaze fell upon me, I sacrifice myself to your gaze. Bedraggled, hair loose, I want to whimper away, with one look you have bound my tongue to your hair. I am the slave of your countenance’.

14. ‘In the foreign language words have no childhood’.

15. Huston (1999). © Actes Sud, 2004.

16. In some senses, I never lived in Lille. I cultivated my absence. I was surprised when people spoke to me, just as a member of the audience would be surprised if he was spoken to in the middle of a performance by one of the actors. I wasn't part of the troupe.