Beyond the mother tongue: language as cultural capital in Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

ABSTRACT

The paper investigates multilingual aesthetics in Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007). It argues that the novel refuses and undermines the family romance of the mother tongue by grounding its experimental form and language in Western poststructuralist theory. Yet, the text fictionalises the encounter with the other language as a love story, a fatal romance of conquest and profound metamorphosis thus revealing the complex status of English as cultural capital. As it exhibits multilingual strategies, the book also displays an elite cosmopolitism based on European literary canonical works that reinforces rather than discards monolingual ides of language and literature.

Cet article propose une analyse de l’esthétique multilingue du roman de Xiaolu Guo A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007). On s’attache à montrer que le roman refuse le mythe de la langue maternelle à travers la reprise intertextuelle et l’emploi de théories poststructuralistes du langage. Cependant, en représentant la rencontre avec l’autre langue comme une histoire d’amour et de reconquête fatale, le roman rétablit le statut de la langue anglaise comme langue dominante et porteuse de capital culturel. Il s’agit, alors, d’examiner la façon dont, malgré sa forme expérimentale et multilingue, le roman reconduit une version élitiste et monolingue de la littérature et du cosmopolitisme.

KEYWORDS:

• Multilingualism
• literary canon
• modernism
• migration
• capital cultural

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Lea Sinoimeri

Lea Sinoimeri is a Lecturer in English (PRAG) at the Department of Foreign Languages (UFR EILA) of the Université de Paris. Her research interests lie in Irish Studies, particularly in Irish literature of the twentieth and twenty-first century; in comparative literature; and in intercultural and intermedial studies. She has published several articles on Irish modernism, notably on the work of Samuel Beckett, with a focus on multilingualism, liminality and aurality. Her recent research draws together her interest in literary and intercultural studies analysing the relationships between language, memory and migration in contemporary literature in English.