Linguistic Re-reading of the Literary Text. An Alternative Understanding of Local Bilingualism in the Context of Globalization - Acta Universitatis Sapientiae

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica, 15, 2 (2023) 123–134

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/ausp-2023-0020

Abstract. In this paper, I present a possible interdisciplinary, predominantly linguistic reading of the literary text, taking as a starting point the work of Andrei Dósa entitled Multă forţă şi un dram de gingăşie [Lots of Power and a Touch of Gentleness], published in 2021 by Polirom Publishing House. This way of re-reading allows us to go beyond the basic narrative structure of the text and focus on the underlying meanings constituted by the language used in the shaping of local colour. In the contextualization of the narrative thread, in the case of this novel, translanguaging strategies appear, which are analysed in relation to the evolution of the main character and the constitution of his own identity in relation to the Other. The specificity of the artistic processing of the spoken language, the way in which the complementary activation of languages becomes a tool for characterization, and the creation of local colour can provide stable reading references even for texts written in other languages. In this case, the activation of lexemes, phraseological units, culturemes, quotations from Hungarian (predominantly) and English in the literary text written in Romanian support the presentation of the steps of the individual’s self-definition in finding the local specificity under the imprint of globalization. The present study explores the significance of the secondary semantics of bilingual situations in the architecture of literary texts in general and, at the same time, provides a possible way of re-reading the text by following the processes of individualization of the literary transfiguration of bi- or multilingual existence in the case of a contemporary novel.

Keywords: reading from a linguistic perspective, bilingualism, biculturalism, translanguaging