Literary Diglossia, Biculturalism and Cosmopolitanism in Literature

Abstract

In areas where two written languages are used, each may be limited to its set of functions or literary genres. Some writers, by becoming masters of two languages and cultures succeed in overcoming both the pitfalls of cosmopolitan authors writing only in their second or acquired language and the difficulties of unilingual authors writing in or about a culture which is not their own. The latter and their cosmopolitan literature, once considered an oddity, have now become commonplace in Western Europe, North America and other areas of massive immigration. The literature produced in such contexts is sometimes characterized by special traits such as semantic shift, over-generalization, code-switching, avoidance strategies, interference and uncertainty. In balance, however, if we examine the production of bilingual and bicultural literature in our century, we could say that, far from impoverishing the literatures to which they contribute, they are more likely to enrich them.