IGCS Colloquium: David Martyn

The realization that monolingualism is not the norm but the exception—or, more radically, that “there is no such thing as a monolingual text” (Till Dembeck)—has posed new opportunities, but also new challenges for the study of literary multilingualism. Scholars now read purportedly monolingual texts through the lens of multilingualism, but at the risk of broadening the concept of multilingualism to the point that it becomes meaningless. This paper looks for a way out of this impasse by reading in tandem two texts at opposite ends of the spectrum of “German” literature: Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest (1895), an acknowledged masterpiece of German Realism, and Israeli author Tomer Gardi’s 2016 Broken German, written deliberately from start to finish in grammatically faulty German. I show how both texts exceed the confines of the language in which they appear to be written, each in its own way. Neither mono- nor multilingual, they exemplify a third term: a long recognized but hitherto unnamed property I propose to call, drawing on a neologism first introduced by Robert Stockhammer, their metalanguality. The paper explores the usefulness of this concept for scholars of what is commonly referred to as literary multilingualism.