Plurilinguisme textuel, mondialité, minorité (preprint)

Didier COSTE

In the regime of literary reading, the perception of textual unity usually depends, among other things, on the linguistic homogeneity that supposedly allows a literary text to be assigned to a specific language and culture, or even to a nation and a historical period. Textual plurilingualism is therefore often denied or repressed by strategies of simulation or dissimulation. When it is effective on the surface of the text, it can aim at or result in an effect of all-encompassing world-making or a synecdoche of what a total Weltliteratur might be. However, beyond such solicitations, either because an experimental multilingualism fails to reach another status than that of a singular object, or because a combination of elements attributable to a restricted community dominates, textual plurilingualism risks a minorization which, instead of globalizing the literary act, would universalize the most particular by making it exemplary.