Abstract
Heinrich Heine, who moved to Paris and wrote some work in French, called Paris the capital “de tout le monde civilisé.” Thousands of writers who have flocked to Paris, and Samuel Beckett, E.M. Cioran, Gao Xingjian, Nancy Huston, Milan Kundera, André Makine, Rainer Maria Rilke, and August Strindberg are among the many who switched to writing in French rather than their native language. However, although Paris was a moveable feast for Ernest Hemingway and hundreds of other Americans, most remained obdurately monolingual; Hemingway, James Baldwin, E.E. Cummings, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Chester Himes, David Sedaris, Gertrude Stein, and Richard Wright continued writing in English. Even the Paris Review, founded in 1953 by a group of expatriate Americans, published exclusively in English. Nevertheless, a few anomalous Americans in Paris wrote at least a little in French. They include Benjamin Franklin, Stuart Merrill, Francis Vielé-Griffin, Henry Ward Church, T.S. Eliot, Natalie Clifford Barney, Julien Green, Eugène Jolas, Harry Mathews, and Jonathan Littell. Every translingual is translingual in his or her own way. But none of the American translinguals in Paris has attained Barney’s stated goal of being the French Joseph Conrad.
Presenters
Steven G. KellmanProfessor of Comparative Literature and Jack and Laura Richmond Endowed Faculty Fellow in American Literature, University of Texas at San Antonio, Texas, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
KEYWORDS
Literary Translingualism, Paris, American
