The 'Translating Subject': Tracing the History of a North American Feminist Literary Avant-garde

Abstract

This work examines women's relationships to language through the work of Canadian and American innovative women writers who write in, out of and through multiple non-English languages as a way of challenging English linguistic dominance and the patriarchal and imperial power structures upheld therein. The theoretical thrust of "The Translating Subject" is to explore the politics of multilingualism as an aesthetic strategy. Multilingualism, a notable strategy in women's writing of the last thirty years, permits the post-colonial writer to resist discursive colonization, as well as express bi-cultural identity through bilingual writing and what Evelyn Nien-ming Ch'ien calls "weird English." The three women about whom I write, Erin Mouré, Nicole Brossard and Kathy Acker, do not use multilingualism to express bi-cultural identity, but rather write in multiple non-English languages as part of a feminist knowledge project that challenges the dominance of English as a lingua franca and in so doing creates estrangement from western humanistic philosophical systems. While each writer’s works have received much critical recognition, to date their use of multiple non-English languages across their corpuses remains one of the most striking yet under-theorized aspects of their writings.