Poetics in Translation: Language Difference and Multiplicity in Twenty-First-Century Artists' Books

Abstract

This thesis reads a selection from the growing corpus of contemporary artists’ books that curate multilingual practices to undermine the political and cultural strategies of the monolingual paradigm. Through the staging of linguistic opacity and non-comprehension, books by Christian Hawkey and Uljana Wolf, Erín Moure, and Caroline Bergvall succeed to inhabit possible gaps and openings to translingual textual subjects and readerships under the hegemony of otherwise nativist tendencies and neoliberal cultural politics that commodify and aestheticize language difference. Putting postcolonialist and poststructuralist theories into conversation with recent theorizations of diffraction, queer historiography, and the tidalectic, my analyses of the case studies redefine the material genre of the book as non-monolingual space of becoming. The poetic practices of the selected books allow readers, writers, and scholars of the twenty-first century to inhabit a shifting space between languages, histories, and theories, paving the way for a study of literature and culture that fits the demands of the humanities in a postmonolingual age.